Tập truyện ngụ ngôn của Lê Luynh viết cho thiếu nhi với những chủ đề vây quanh đời sống. Mỗi câu chuyện được tác giả gửi gấm vào một bài học nho nhỏ trong cuộc sống hoặc trong cách đối xử với nhau. Phần minh họa của Nga Phan làm cho những câu chuyện dễ thương thêm sắc màu. Sau mỗi truyện tác giả cho thêm ba câu hỏi để phụ huynh cùng thảo luận với con. Sẽ thử đọc với mấy thằng con xem tụi nó có hiểu gì không.

As a voracious reader, I often ran into an issue called “too many books and too little time.” To help me figure out which book I should delve in first, I would read the first few paragraphs or pages. With Michelle Zauner’s memoir, she pulled me in right from her first sentence: “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” Whether writing about her favorite Korean food or her complicated relationship with her Korean mother, Zauner’s prose is just impeccable. The story of her mother battling with fatal pancreatic cancer is heartbreaking. The pain and the suffering reminded me of my own mother who lost her life to Covid-19. I cried and salivated reading Crying in H Mart. It’s a beautiful, soulful memoir.

After hitting the CPU limit on the shared server at HostPapa, I knew I needed to make the move for the long run. I am so glad that Thủy Nguyễn, a long-time reader of this blog, recommended DigitalOcean. I hesitated at first because DigitalOcean is a cloud-hosting service and I do not have much experience with cloud servers. Fortunately DigitalOcean has tons of tutorials to help me make the move. From setting up the LAMP stack to virtual hosts to SSH keys to Let’s Encrypt, I was able to follow along. I had to destroy several deployments and started over. I hadn’t worked with the command line in a while and it was like rediscovering an old love.

I created two Droplets: one exclusively for this blog and one for my static sites including Vietnamese Typography and Donnytruong.com. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect Vietnamese Typography is the cause for the CPU shortage. The site hosts tons of web-font files. I was thinking of limiting the number of fonts being served on the site, but it would ruin the purpose of the book. I wanted to showcase as many Vietnamese typefaces as possible. Now that the web book is on the cloud, I hope the traffic won’t blow up my budget.

Migrating this blog was a huge challenge. Transferring the database over was time consuming. I tried SQL dump, but it didn’t work too well. I finally just use the export and import tools provided by WordPress. I can’t believe it worked great. I still have a handful of things to take care, but I need to get some sleep. I hope to get back to regular blogging schedule soon.

Our summer vacation has swiftly come to an end. I enjoyed rollerblading on the street, jumping the waves with the kids on the beach, swimming in the pool, eating tons of food and ice cream, drinking a few bottles of beer, and spending some quiet moments with my lovely lady late at night. I was having a great time until an account manager at HostPapa contacted me to let me know that my website was hitting with CPU and I/O faults. He recommended that I upgrade my plan to Business Pro.

I stressed myself out over such a minute issue. I should have just made the upgrade to get it done and over with, but I worried much more than money. What if I lose my digital presence? I put years of work into this blog and now my work is depending on this hosting company.

After reading my previous post, a reader wrote to me recommending DigitalOcean, a cloud-based hosting solution. I spent some time playing around with it. I deployed its one-click LAMP stack, but there is so much work to do after the server is up and running. I need to spend more time with it.

To fix the immediate issue, I did some optimizations on my end. The CPU and I/O are not spiking up anymore. I can’t help but wonder what if I lose my entire blog one day. Will I be OK without it? It has been part of my life for such a long time. Will I be able to move on? All these thoughts put me under stress, but my lady had made me feel better. I am very grateful for her. I think I will be OK as long as I still have my family.

From 2003 to 2019, all of my websites were share-hosted by Lunarpages for eight bucks a month. I was happy with its service for 16 years. I even recommended my clients to host with them. In 2019, HostPapa acquired Lunarpages and I was concerned.

An acquisition is never good for the customer, but I stayed on. I just don’t have the time and the resources to research and to migrate my sites. Because I am running multiple sites, which was fine with Lunarpages, I am paying $15 a month.

The new business plan was already double what I paid before, but they are constantly trying to up-sale me to the business pro plan for $25 a month. That’s more than what I am willing to pay for my personal sites. I might need to start looking for a new home for my digital properties if HostPapa keeps trying to rope me into their higher plans.

Yesterday a big wave knocked my glasses out of me. It took a split second and my whole world has become blurrier. We’re vacationing in South Carolina and I didn’t bring a spare pair of glasses with me. I took my vision aid for granted. I depended too much on my glasses. Now I am trying to navigate my world without it.

For the most part, I am doing fine. I woke up early in the morning, made myself a cup of iced coffee, and went rollerblading on the street. I almost ran into a truck for being careless. After a mile of skating, I went back to the vacation house, ate breakfast, and took the kids to the beach. The water was warm and the weather was beautiful. The kids loved jumping and surfing the big waves. We then headed back to the rental property and jumped into a small swimming pool. The kids enjoyed the pool just as much as the beach.

Everyone gathered back into the vacation house for lunch. After a full meal, everyone rested or took a nap. I took my kids to the skate park, which was half an hour from the rental property. Driving was a bit of a challenge without my glasses, but I just needed to be more cautious. The skate park had low ramps; therefore, it was nice to skate without too much risk. Once we were back to the rental property, the kids wanted to swim in the pool until dinnertime. We ate together. The adults chatted while the kids watched TV. All three of our families agreed on no iPads or digital devices for the kids. It worked out well. They played together more rather than each kid on his own device.

This is our last summer vacation. Next week the kids will go back to school and I’ll go back to the office for the first time since the pandemic. The challenging time is still not over. I am still concerned about the surge of the Delta variant.

Mướp đắng còn có tên gọi là khổ qua. Thời thơ ấu tôi rất ghét vị đắng của nó. Mỗi lần mẹ nấu canh khổ qua dồn thịt, tôi chỉ gỡ thịt ăn còn trả lại phần mướp đắng cho mẹ. Tôi không thể hiểu nổi tại sao mẹ lại thích ăn canh khổ qua đắng nghét mà mẹ cũng chẳng bao giờ giải thích cho tôi nghe lý do mẹ thích ăn mướp đắng. Tôi chỉ nghĩ đơn giản là mẹ hy sinh ăn phần đắng để cho tôi ăn phần ngon ngọt của thịt.

Thế mà càng lớn tôi càng thích ăn khổ qua. Càng đắng tôi càng thích nên tôi kết luận rằng phải có khổ qua trong cuộc sống mới thấm thía được vị đắng của nó. Có lần hai mẹ con nằm tâm sự, tôi hỏi về cuộc đời của mẹ. Mẹ trả lời, “Cuộc đời là bể khổ. Khổ từ lúc lọt lòng mẹ”. Tưởng như mẹ đùa nhưng xem xét lại cuộc đời của mẹ lúc nào cũng khổ. Từ nhỏ mẹ chịu khổ để giúp đỡ cha mẹ và chị em. Lớn lên mẹ chịu khổ vì phải sống trong chiến tranh. Lúc lấy chồng thì khổ vì chồng. Đến lúc có con thì khổ vì con và tôi đã từng đem đến những khổ đau cho mẹ.

Vì cả cuộc đời mẹ luôn phải đối diện với cái khổ nên mẹ rất dũng cảm và sẵn sàng cam chịu mọi khổ đau. Có một lần còn nhỏ tôi ngắm mẹ làm cua. Không may mẹ bị cua kẹp. Máu chảy từ ngón tay nhưng mẹ ngồi lặng yên để nó kẹp cho đến lúc nó buông tha. Tôi ngồi nhìn mẹ mà xót xa. Vài năm trước, tôi đưa mẹ đi bác sĩ chân để gọt da dư trên ngón chân cái của mẹ. Mẹ đau điếng cả người nhưng vẫn ngồi yên còn tôi thì xin phép rời phòng tìm nhà vệ sinh để mửa. Khác với mẹ, tôi chịu đau rất dở và nhìn thấy cảnh mổ xẻ tôi chịu không nổi. Khi mẹ bị nhiễm dịch Covid ở giai đoạn cuối, tôi quyết định đặt mẹ lên ventilator vì tôi biết được sức chịu đựng của mẹ. Vì muốn cứu mẹ, tôi đã một lần nữa khiến cho mẹ thêm đau khổ.

Giờ đây mẹ đã rời bỏ cõi tạm và đã được thoát khỏi kiếp khổ nhưng tôi vẫn luôn nhớ đến mẹ. Mỗi lần ăn khổ qua là mỗi lần nếm được vị đắng trong nỗi khổ của mẹ. Mùa hè năm nay mẹ vợ có trồng hai cây khổ qua trong khu vườn nhà tôi. Giờ đây tôi ăn mọi thứ với khổ qua như thịt ba chỉ xào mắm tôm hoặc bún riêu. Trưa hôm qua, còn dư nước lèo bún riêu nên tôi nấu mì gói và cho vào khổ qua. Vừa ăn tôi vừa nhớ đến mẹ.

Ai đã từng đọc qua những tác phẩm của Nguyễn Nhật Ánh sẽ không cảm thấy ngạc nhiên về cách viết và đặc biệt là cách kể chuyện của ông. Con chim xanh biếc bay về cũng không ngoại lệ. Đây là tiểu thuyết tình cảm của những nhân vật mới ra trường đại học. Họ vẫn còn ngây thơ và yêu đời. Tuy là truyện yêu đương nhưng nó vẫn nhẹ nhàng và hồn nhiên như những tác phẩm khác của ông. Tôi phục cách viết giản dị và thoải mái của ông. Ông chứng minh cách dùng từ ngữ không cần phải cao siêu mà vẫn thu hút được người đọc.

Since I will be on vacation next week, I took my ice skating test for Freestyle 1 ahead of schedule. I thought I would have done well since I nailed all the required techniques and I had been practicing frequently. To my surprise, I passed with the minimum scores. My coach wanted me to practice more before taking Freestyle 2.

My posture was terrible. My arms weren’t coordinating with my legs when I did backward edges. I jumped too early on the waltz jump. I didn’t lift my leg far enough for the spiral. My half-flip was decent. My spin was good even though I practiced it the least. I didn’t like spinning because I would get dizzy after 2 spins.

After the test result, I am not sure if I should go to the next level. I want to focus on my posture like my sons, Đạo and Xuân, who are taking private lessons and their coach scrutinized their every move. They are relearning from the beginning. After six weeks, Đạo only passed forward crossovers. He still needs to work on his backward crossovers. I don’t know if I want to go that far back in order to learn proper posture. I don’t skate to be a professional. I just want to have fun.

Should I sign up for Freestyle 2 or should I learn on my own using Coach Julia’s YouTube instructions? I am exhausted. I am taking a much needed break to clear my mind. I will spend my vacation thinking things through.

Đạo and I hit the skate park in the morning. We had been rollerblading two to three times a week. Đạo is a good skater, but he is very cautious. He stuck with the low, straight ramps. I encouraged him to try the higher, curved pipes, but he declined. Of course, I didn’t force him to do anything he didn’t feel comfortable doing. I took some risks and pushed myself a bit. I fell several times in the past; therefore, I am being careful as well.

After our rollerblading session, we had a brief conversation. I complimented him for saying no to my challenge. He didn’t take the bait and he wasn’t being pressured into doing something that he didn’t want to. I wanted him to apply that concept to his life. He will start seventh grade in two weeks.

Just thinking back to my seventh and eight grades gives me a chill. I had such a rough time; therefore, I do not want him to go through what I went through. I was bullied for being the only Asian kid in class. I was laughed at for not speaking much English. I kept it all to myself because I didn’t know who to turn to. I didn’t tell my mom because I didn’t want her to worry and she couldn’t do anything for me anyway.

I advised Đạo to come to me or his mother if he experienced bullying in school. I reminded him to just walk away from situations where he wouldn’t feel safe or comfortable. I stressed the importance of not being pressured into smoking, taking drugs, drinking alcohol, or doing illegal activities. He understood my advice and I hope he will remember my words when he has to deal with peer pressures.