Winter Solstice

Bo dang-zhuei, ai soh-ee!
("To roll rice-flour-balls when its not winter solstice" - minnanese proverb)

The shortest day is past; no longer now fast falls the eventide.
The days fly by, and it is time now.
Time for rest, time to reflect.
Grow, dig deep
Abide.

The world seems to go by,
forgetting you exist, you
sit by the side
and watch it fade

Tensions, tremor,
fleeting evanescences
moments, transcience
philosophical waxings and mathematical exactness
I grow, yet defined; He flows, and He abides.
I tarry some, yet I am arriving
He is, ever present, emanating.

Cushions and Closure!

Well a quick follow up on the sofa-saga, after 3 weeks of it sitting idle outside my apartment, wondering if
- to sell it off and hunt for another sofa that'll fit the door (that also means figuring out the transportation), or if
- somehow the door could expand (I even considered removing the door! but , no, it'd still be 3 cm short), or if
- the sofa could somehow shrink to fit!

After two weeks of wishful thinking hoping some people would buy it off, I decided to study the internal structure of the monster couch. In order to do that, I had to remove a panel of upholstery - this involved a saturday afternoon of quiet meditation: a rather therapeutic, repetitive, coaxing and removal of about 250 half inch industrial staples, the sort shot from an air gun, embedded with such force it sits squarely deep inside the wood. Therapeutic indeed!

Anyhow, I discovered one of the beams was redundant, i.e. not structurally critical, and if I could somehow remove that, it probably would fit the bill, so to speak. However the beam was embedded in a sort of "traffic junction" of about 4 other beams coming in from other directions - a definite no-no to disturb. A slightly out of the box brain wave hit me (read: mad, out-of-my-mind, hit-in-the-head, doodle-in-the-oodle): if I could surgically remove that plank (i.e. extricate without disturbing the structure), it might just work!

Borrowing a micro saw from the lab (it has an absurbly thin and narrow blade with a height about 2mm max) I slowly spent the next half hour liberating the beam, detaching it at 3 critical (but structurally non-critical) locations. The saw, btw, has this fascinating attachment head that allows you rotate the blade and cut acrobatically in 360 degrees! Designed for craftwork I think. Anyhoo, the rest is history - the couch made it through the door without a squeak, the beam was replaced with connecting braces (I'm proud to announce that as a result, the sofa is probably stronger than it was before!), the upholstery duly tacked back (with vengeance!) and, voila! the miscreant sits happily in my room - of course that refers to the furniture, not the dilettante on it.