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Liza and I have settled on a date and venue: Friday 27th May 2011 at Endicott Estate in Boston.

We chose that date because it’s the Memorial Day long weekend – Monday 30th May is a big public holiday, and many people also take Friday off (particularly people who think our wedding is sufficiently important to take a day off

The tentative plan is to have the bridal bargain and tea ceremony in the morning, either at Peter and Becca’s house (that’s Liza’s brother and sister in law, who also live in Boston), or at a nearby arboretum or some other nice outdoor space if the weather looks good (yes, I know the outdoor idea does not follow tradition!). This will be a family-only affair. The ceremony and reception at Endicott will be in the evening and be about 110-130 people.

We also tentatively plan to have a dinner/ reception in Sydney in late 2011/early 2012, so don’t worry if you can’t make it to Boston.

More details to follow later, but save the date!

It’s May in Boston, which is great! Liza has nearly finished exams and the weather is warmer, so we have started to ride our speedy road bikes on the weekend. Yesterday we went on a nice 80km ride. In mid-June we’re going to ride ~120km to Cape Cod, on the way to her annual family vacation on Naushon Island.

I also occasionally rollerblade to work! It’s fun, but more work than biking. Fortunately I haven’t suffered the embarrassment of tripping in front of the office building … yet.

On another topic, here are some random photos from home. First, morning coffee and homemade bread. We make coffee in the morning by grinding beans and using this metal French press. We used to have glass French presses but they kept breaking. We froth using a handheld battery powered frothing device that looks like a small eggbeater.

Another one – I like to try to make the foam as high as possible:

Here Liza studies with her morning coffee:

Our Sunday night dinner. We usually cook a lot on Sunday night so that we don’t have to cook much during the week when we don’t have time. Left to right: pan roasted leeks and purple potatoes; roast chicken (organic freshly killed from Freshly Killed) on a bed of root vegetables; curry eggplant and carrots; homemade beer bread; an baked chicken and pineapple with soy / ginger / garlic et al marinade.

Finally, Liza likes to move around and study in different places, and we have a little table that allows her to do this:

OK, so this is not nearly as significant as a new baby, but I just came across these really funny Intel commercials:

I first came across these through SpikedMath. Enjoy!

Hi everyone, thank you all for your kind words of congratulations on the arrival of Baby Kaela.

I sent out a family/friends email to announce Kaela’s arrival and I apologise if I did not have your email address at the time.   My email was as follows:

“Dear family and friends,

Baby Kaela decided that she wanted to meet her parents early and, with mum’s encouragement, announced herself to the world at 10.22pm on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 (a whole 8 weeks early).  Baby Kaela weighed in at 3.77 pounds and 45 cm long.

Mum is doing well.  Baby Kaela is a little small, but is also doing very well and acquitting herself well for her size.   Dad is very proud of mum and the little one, but in a little bit of a daze given that he went straight from the office to the birthing room with 15 minutes to spare before he met baby Kaela.

Please feel free to come and visit us when you have some free time.  Please call Shane (0417216758) or reply to this email for more details.

Shane, Hester and Kaela”

Being the proud new father than I am, I cannot resist the call for photos.  Attached is a photo I took of Kaela about 2 hours ago.

Baby girl arrived  last night, ~ 1 1/2 month early, catching everyone by surprise (There seems to be a lot of early arrivals these days!!)

I had given Shane a Chinese name we had chosen for Kaela, not sure they are going to use it, therefore , I am temporary withholding it.

I am unable to post the baby’s photo on the net, may be someone else, such as uncle Wu Kai, or Liang etc who receive the e-mail from Shane can do so.

Whew, what a crazy few weeks… I think I have worked about 6 60 hour weeks in a row since the Lake Morey trip. Fortunately things are slowing down a little this weekend…

So, inspired by our recent ice skating trip (and remembering how Wei rollerbladed as a kid in Sydney), I’ve suddenly become interested in learning to rollerblading. A few weeks ago I bought a pair of rollerblades. Here they are next to my ice hockey skates and Wei’s speed skates.

I’m practicing my rollerblading on weekends on the footpath/cyclepath next to Charles River. I’m slowly getting more confident and managed about 15 km today. The next stage is to improve balance, learn a few more advanced stopping and turning techniques.

Liza is already an expert rollerblader. In the summer she sometimes goes skating at night with the advanced group of the Inline Club of Boston. In a few weeks when the weather gets warmer, the beginner’s group will have Sunday morning group skates, and I will enjoy trying that out.

And there’s a Skate Boston event in July that Liza and I will attend – Wei, wanna come again at that time??

Here are some videos made by a Singaporean skating club, showing a few basic and advanced techniques:

And here’s something I’ll never do, but is amazing to watch: rollerblading racing (including the extreme downhill discipline… crazy.)

Some more crazy stuff from the inline skating world championships

Finally, check out this fantastic Chinese inline skating video – a little like figure skating on skates. Human creativity truly knows no bounds.

Wei is visiting this week! (He saw Yong, Yvonne, Heng and Emma in London a couple of weeks ago.) All three of us – Wei, Liza, and I – love ice skating, so we planned a little skating vacation. Since the Northeast US and Canada are so cold in the winter, the surface of small lakes and canals freeze over so that you can skate on them – it’s an incredible experience to skate freely on such a huge surface after going around and around on a small artificial rink all the time. The ice has to be at least 30 cm thick to be safe for skating. The authorities test the thickness regularly to ensure that the thickness is sufficient.

We skated in 2 places: (1) Lake Morey, in the US state of Vermont (about 3 hours south of the Canadian border and 3 hours north of Boston), which is about 6 km circumference, and (2) Rideau Canal, an incredible 8 km long canal running through the middle of Ottawa (the capital of Canada – about 9 hours’ drive from Boston). Both freeze over naturally, but the authorities do sweep / slighly flood the surface to make it smoother for skating.

When we were at Rideau last weekend, only about 3km out of 8km were open for skating due to a few days of warm weather in January, but it was still fantastic. IT was also COLD – as cold as -20 C at night, and windchill made it feel close to -30 C, which is why we dressed like Michelin men ninjas while skating.

Here are some random videos from my camera:

And I’ve added a few photos on Facebook. Wei has also added a few videos and photos on Facebook – let us know if you can’t see it.

Wei and I also skied for a day at Killington (also in Vermont), one of the largest ski resorts in the Northeast US. However, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to skiing in the Alps or Whistler, which at least Heng has done (probably Yong and Yvonne too?)

In other news, Liza’s brother Pete and sister-in-law Becca had a baby boy in early December, Alexander. I’ve put a few photos of Liza, Alex and I in the gallery, but I can’t insert them into the post because I see a “broken link” image in the ZP insert photo popup dialog box. Yong – any ideas?

Let’s keep up the posts! It seems like the younger generation has been far more active than the older generation in recent months. Let’s see the oldies post a few things about taxi driving, or Emma’s visit to Australia!

Hi guys. Okay, a quick one. Just thought I would just post up a quick one about Project 365. Yong has had a Project 365 blog for a while now, and has been doing quite well with it.

So well, in fact, that I am going to start my own…. I find that we have kinda stopped blogging for a while, but I think I may write one up every so often when I go travelling (I guess europe IS kinda exciting, especially with all the travelling). Plus my own blog will mean that Mum and Dad will stop bugging me for not keeping them updated

So, for shorter, daily blogs, I will be having hengsim.wordpress.com (starting later today). Until next time!

OK, that’s talking myself up, but I’m living like a bachelor this month with Yvonne and Emma in Oz.

It’s been a whirlwind since Emma was born 4.5 months ago (actually it was hectic before then) and I’ve just been able to have a breather this month to get a few things happening.

Like Liang and Liza, we recently moved to a new place. Where we are now is closer to work which means we get to spend more time with Emma; It takes me less than 15min walking door to door. Only downside is that it is further from the city which makes weekend outings a little more of a hassle. For more read here.

I’ve also just started a 365 project where I take a photo a day for a year. This has been something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now (due to pressures from a friend), and have taken the opportunity to start one while I’m by myself. I should’ve really started this for Emma, but got a little sidetracked and didn’t end up doing it.  I’ll make sure I start doing this when I see her next as the progress with Emma will be more interesting then mine!

My theme for this time round is based around myself, however, looking at various sites online though, I think I might change my approach if I decide to pursue the project for a second year.

Last but not least, I hope this sparks another lot of updates on the sim-family site now that it’s back up.

Hmm, I think Liza and I are becoming domesticated (merely a month after moving in together!) It’s Saturday night and here we are, enjoying a quiet night at home. She’s studying a little and I am blogging.

So tonight we attempted to make Chinese steamed fish. To begin, I bought went to the fish shop across the road from our apartment this afternoon. I asked the fishmonger what would be a nice fish to steam Chinese style, and she asked whether I wanted one with a “heavy” or “light” taste. I chose the latter, and she recommended an ocean perch (aka “redfish”). They scaled it and gutted it on the spot for me.

Then I called Dad to check the ingredients of the sauce: finely chopped garlic, shallots and ginger, mixed with a bit of vegetable oil and nuked for 2-3 minutes. Meanwhile I steamed the fish for 8 minutes. When that was done, I drained the excess water from the fish, poured the sauce on top, added soy sauce to the sauce mixing bowl to collect the remaining oil, and poured that mixture over the fish too, as per Dad’s careful instructions.

The result:

Mmm, pretty good, and so FRESH. The sauce was particularly tasty. I might try other types of fish next time, since this one didn’t have that much flavour.

In other news, I bought myself a road bike (this time with gears) – a Specialized Allez Sport 2009. I was proud of myself for getting this one for a ~30% discount. I also got clipless pedals and shoes (so that you can put power in the pedals pulling up as well as pushing down), and some spandex cycling shorts and shirt.

Liza already has a nice road bike (as well as her fixie… we each have two bikes now), and we are trying to ride as much as possible before winter arrives. It’s amazing how far and fast you can go effortlessly with a nice bike (and spandex, of course). Two weekends ago we did a 100km ride with a couple of other friends, stopping in the middle for lunch. Last weekend and this weekend we’ve done ~65km afternoon rides out of the city to check out the beautiful autumn leaves. Here are some photos of this sexy machine.

Of course, kudos go to Wei for training for the Oxfam Trailwalker – a 100km fundraising walk in November! Wei, are you going to blog about your training?

(By the way, I’ve stopped skydiving because I don’t feel like spending the money on it any more, and because I felt guilty about its carbon footprint.)

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Some random Sunday photos of the apartment. Liza studying in the bedroom (she sometimes prefers the low stool over her desk in the right photo) and reading the Sunday paper in the living room (we started a weekend subscription to the New York Times). Then two photos from our study / bike room. We are careful about our hot bikes to the point where we lock them together even indoors.

View from the bedroom window.

We are at the corner of Lambert and Cambridge St. You can see a few of the shops we have conveniently located around us – the pub (Pug’s), the fishmonger where we bought the perch above, and a liquor store – woohoo! We also have a huge supermarket conveniently located 3 minutes’ walk away (down Lambert St) and an ice rink (5 minutes’ walk). Across the road from the fish market (not in photo) is a butcher named Fresh Killed Poultry.

The right photo is the first photo I’ve tried to stitch together using Canon’s Photostitch  software (came free with my camera) and it seems to work very well.