Tax

Got the tax payment voucher today. Need to pay more than one month salary for tax next year!!!!! My goodness!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tulips

I like the tulips. I put it as the banner of my 1% finished blog in WordPress (www.idatse.wordpress.com), and it's so beautiful. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to master WordPress yet, so I put the flowers here as well so that everyone can share the joy.

Have a good summer!

WordPress

I am trying to figure out how to use WordPress, but so far no luck :(

Nice Weekend :)

What a nice weekend! Without the conference and putonghua exam, my weekend is even more fruitful:

1. Packing, cleaning, packing, and cleaning -- throw away some stuff you won't use any more; and pack those you won't use but with good memory in boxes, a preparation for moving again in September
2. Bought a 40G external harddisk -- transfer all those files still in floppy disks there. some files are as old as 1994! let me post some of the things I wrote when I was young here later. (bad thing is I changed the cartiage of my old printer and then it doesn't work now :(
3. Walking on the treadmill in the afternoon -- you can see people swimming in the pool just underneath, which is something I can't see when I go at night. Fun to see all those kids and I should try going in day time more. (let see if my knee can stand another 30-min walk later tonight)
4. Bought five chocolate tarts @ Maxim -- cheap cheap chocolate tarts but rich in chocolate. yummy :) usually they are out of stock when I am back home at night. And the sales ladies at the little store at the Heng Fa Chuen MTR station are always nice and sweet. Unexpectedly good service every time :]
   
5. Not enough? how about sleeping till 11am?

Saturday Night @ Office

That was last Saturday, not this one.

Last week, we were preparing for a conference to be held on 18 and 19 June. So, I was stucked at the office on a Saturday night (not to mention the overnight set up on Sunday!). After two solid weeks of greasy Canteen food (the rather expensive cafeteria downstair from office is really called Canteen), I decided to made a change. I bought fruits for supper on my way back to office from my Putonghua class. Here're what we had -- assorted fruits and those in the bags were muffins and ham and cheese sandwich. We had three people in the office that night, and we were almost full after the fruits!

Slow down, please

I have been running around the office for the last couple of weeks, and have some difficulty of slowing myself down. So you can predict what will happen -- my knee produces those "knock knock" sounds again. Not as painful as before, but you know it's not good to produce those "knock knock" sounds. You can feel that the bones are "crunching" each other, which makes me feel even more scared.

Have to exercise some self-control and slow myself down.

Sunblock

I seldom use sunblock (cause I try to avoid going under the sun :) But as I am getting older and older, I consider using them and bought those for the face and for the body. Then, you know what happen -- it rains and rains and rains and rains and rains......I hardly find a day that these sunblock thing can be used!

Time to sleep. Sweet dream :>

Go Oilers Go!

Stanley Cup Final opens on 5 June.
Can anyone update me on the final from time to time?

五月的陽光

現在我彷似在等待，等，等那一天來；
莫道你心痛不可耐，我心更哀。

若問我想找的所在，找，找我的將來，
為著我心中的希望，生命已擲門外。

看著這如病染的祖國，誰亦要奮起叫嚷！

放下眼前原屬我的一切，五月的陽光在照耀……

Typhoon ChanChu

So typhoon ChanChu has come and is now going away.

It only got to Typhoon Signal #3 today, so everything was running as usual except kindergartens were off today because of the weather :) It also didn't rain as heavy as the Observatory predicted, but it's very windy.

How windy? Well, all the garbage bins on the streets were tied to a lamp post or something strong like the picture on the left. When I had my evening walk tonight, my hair was of course flying in the air, but at some point, I even had to hold my glasses tight or I was afraid it would fly away too.

More Elmo stuffs

Keys with Elmo key-mets :)

Rose & Di & Ed, I still have your dad's house key with my other key chain. Have they changed their lock?





Elmos linked to my mobile. The blue ball is supposed to flash when the phone rings :P I am not quite sure if the battery is still on though.

The Japanese Elmo is of course from Japan. I think it's the only Elmo I have with Japanese costumes.


Last but not least, the "do it yourself Sesame Street chocolate" set from Pheon, with a pack of chocolate, a mold and some wrapping paper! Fantastic! I guess it's similar to those clay thing I made before.


Since there's a typhoon coming, and it's going to rain heavily in the middle of the week, the temperature drops suddently from 30C+ to 20C+ these two days. Nice weather to sleep in and have a walk outside :) Lots of kids running around and lots of people fishing when I went for my walk late afternoon today. I have been walking on a treadmill in the gym in the club house of our estate lately cause it's too hot. So it's very nice to have some fresh air outside today.

How's your Mothers' Day? I had a nice dinner with Mom and we will go out again next Saturday when everyone's in town.

What's going wrong?

It's 11pm at a Sunday night, and I am on the computer working on an English translation of a video script!!!!!

What's going wrong?

I had already spent the whole afternoon working on a set of letters! IT'S SUNDAY!!!!! My original plan was to visit the Arts Museum :(

Anyway, I will go next Sunday instead. That's going to be the "world museums day" next weekend. Hope it's not very hot. The celebration events are outside the Arts Museum and Cultural Centre. Hot, hot, hot!

And I am very tired now :(

Disappearance of Physics Building and V-Wing

Oh, my God! This is what I read from the alumni news.

The main office of the Civil Engg Dept has already been relocated from the C(ivil-)E(lectrical )B(uilding) to the new Markin/CNRL Natural Resources Engineering Facility some times ago, and now the Physics Building and V-Wing are even being demolished.

So sad.

I don't think I had had a lot of classes in the Physics Building, but V-Wing was almost my third home during my years in the U of A. (First being HUB and second being CEB, especially during my grad school year when I had an office there.) There's even one time when I almost dropped all the way down from the top of the stairs at a V-Wing lecture theatre cause I wasn't quite woke up yet.

Those were the days.

BUREAUCRATIC JUSTICE: THE INCARCERATION OF MAINLAND CHINESE WOMEN WORKING IN HONG KONG'S SEX INDUSTRY

I haven't quite read through the following yet, but am glad that someone (all women!) from the legal sector are working on the issue. Hope they don't mind I am copying their work here.

If you are interested, here are the two organizations in HK supporting sex workers:

Ziteng http://www.ziteng.org.hk/
Action for Reach Out http://hkaids.med.cuhk.edu.hk/reachout/

***** *****

SUMMARY FOR THE ROUNDTABLE ON 27 APRIL 2006

(by Dr.Robyn Emerton, Dr. Karen Joe Laidler and Dr. Carole Petersen of the University of Hong Kong)

In the new millennium Hong Kong has witnessed a rapid and dramatic increase in the number of mainland Chinese visitors to the territory, including women who cross the border to engage in sex work. While sex work itself is not a crime in Hong Kong, several related activities, such as soliciting, are prohibited. Moreover, sex work is treated as a form of work for immigration purposes and visitors who engage in work without an employment visa are in breach of their conditions of stay. More than 10,000 mainland Chinese women have been arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced in the past five years, causing Hong Kong's female correctional population to expand beyond capacity.

This paper presents information from interviews conducted in 2004 with 58 mainland Chinese women incarcerated in three correctional institutions in Hong Kong for criminal and/or immigration offences related to sex work. The interviews were arranged with the kind assistance of the Correctional Services Department.

By interviewing an incarcerated population, we were able to access women who had worked in a variety of settings, including women who had worked under third-party management. This group is usually inaccessible to researchers, as the women remain hidden in villas prior to their arrest. Our study showed that the majority of women came voluntarily and were assisted by others who profit from them, both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. Certainly some organized crime involvement exists, but its extent is unclear from the women's accounts.

Most women reported financial considerations as the primary factor influencing their decision to come to Hong Kong. Some were driven by urgent and dire economic circumstances, while others believed that this opportunity could offer higher earning potential than working in factories or the service industry in the mainland. In fact, many of the women were arrested before making a profit, but others reported significant earnings on this or a previous visit (as much as HK$80,000 in one case).

The women's responses to questions about the criminal justice system indicate that cases are processed efficiently, but with limited regard to individual circumstances or to the defendants' understanding of their alleged offences. Describing their experiences in police stations, the majority said they understood the charges for which they had been arrested, but nine were confused, believing they had been charged with “prostitution” rather than immigration charges. Some women were not clear why they had been charged in the circumstances: four of the 19 women charged with soliciting said that the police had initiated the transaction, and five women arrested on the street for soliciting or immigration offences said they were not working when the police stopped them. The majority of women were allowed a telephone call, were provided with an interpreter and generally agreed with the statement, or chose not to read it. Seven women reported, however, that they had signed statements which they were not able to read, either because they were illiterate or because the statement was in English and traditional Chinese. One woman reported that she signed several blank pieces of paper. Finally, the accounts of three respondents raise concern about responses to women who allege that they were deceived and then forced into sex work. Despite informing various officials of their situations, these women's cases were handled in a standardized fashion.

In court, one strategy to expedite cases involves the duty lawyer conducting group interviews, and the magistrate hearing certain cases together. Five of our respondents had experienced such collective treatment. Two of them reported that their individual circumstances were not put before the court, and one said that she believed herself to be innocent, but pleaded guilty because the others in her group had done so. Six women complained that the translation was too fast, and that they did not understand the proceedings. Nearly all of the respondents (N=53) pleaded guilty when they first appeared in court, which clearly contributes to the expedient processing of cases. The remaining five, who initially pleaded not guilty, changed their plea to guilty at their second court appearance, having been advised by other women on remand that pleading not guilty would result in a lengthier trial process than pleading guilty. Our observations of the proceedings in the magistrates' courts between July 2005 and April 2006 confirmed the speed and routine with which these cases are managed. The average time to complete an individual defendant's case was only three minutes.

In this context – the volume of cases, the grouping of cases, routine guilty pleas, the standardization of cases, the tendency to ignore individual circumstances, and normative sentences – the criminal justice system takes on the features of a bureaucratic machine. The consequence of this bureaucratic response – the short-term imprisonment of a large number of women – is expensive and has yet to demonstrate a deterrent or rehabilitative effect. Although the majority of the first-timers said they would not return to Hong Kong for sex work once released, 15 of our respondents had been arrested on one or more previous occasion, which raises questions as to the individual deterrent effect of current practices. Further, current policies have yet to demonstrate a general deterrent effect in discouraging other mainland Chinese women from coming to Hong Kong to engage in sex work. There has been a recent decrease in arrests, which the Secretary for Security attributes to vigorous law enforcement and improved immigration control. However, this decrease may reflect a decrease in the rate of police detection. In any event, a higher prosecution rate has meant that the number of mainland women being incarcerated in Hong Kong has continued to rise.

In light of "one country, two systems", how might the respective governments and authorities begin to better address this issue? Consideration could be given to alternative approaches, such as a "suspended sentence" for first time offenders accompanied by a slower and more individualized judicial process, in which women are clearly advised of the nature of their offence and warned they will receive a much stiffer penalty if they repeat it. Thus far, however, there has been little public debate on alternative strategies for addressing the issue. Some discussion has taken place amongst government officials and the Legislative Council on the regulation of the sex industry generally and on the possibility of creating of red light districts. Such measures might arguably assist the situation of local sex workers, but they would not resolve the thorny issue of how (or whether) to create a space for migrant sex workers. Without changes to Hong Kong immigration law, this group would still be contravening the law simply by working.

Raining, raining, and raining...

It's raining cats and dogs outside, going from the yellow to red rain storm warning signals in just a few hours. So good that I am already home.

It's always like this during the last few weeks -- raining heavily during weekdays but sunny and hot over the weekends. Last year that's the direct opposite.

My knees were going all right this morning. But then it's going worst in the afternoon, around the time the thunder storm warning signal was up! I think the Observatory should hire me to predict the rain.

Lately I am extremely busy in the office and at lesiure as well. So many books to read, got hooked up to cross stitching again (and don't forget the knitted baby sweaters for Christmas!), and busy with memorizing the Putonghua pin-yin...... So many things to do but so little times.

Ida Observatory

If I am trapped in a closed room with no window at all, I can still tell you what's the weather outside.

How?

My knees can tell.

It's like having "rheumatic disease". My knees hurt when the temperature drops suddently, or the humidity goes up. Last week when it got wet and rained a bit, my knees hurt very much and I went to acupuncture again. When it became sunny over the weekend, my knees suddently go better and I could do my evening/morning walk again.

So sad...

Boring...tired (not yet exhausted)...and boring again...

...actually is because I don't want to (or can't go to) sleep at 1am...

How's your Easter?

I had done a lot and I had also done so few during the four-day holiday I longed for.

One the good side, I spent 3.5 hours in the salon to have my new hair do on Good Friday. Now my hair is as straight as ruler, a preparation to keep extra long hair as in school days :P

Also, I went to Ocean Park on Saturday with Mom. The objective of the trip was to see the "jelly fishes" (the guide said they were not "fishes"; they should be called "sea jelly") at the new attraction "Sea Jelly Spectacular", and of course to do some "walking" before it's getting hot! I have been doing quite good on my evening walk thing, except I didn't lost any pounds yet, and it is now become a habit, especially after a full meal.

On the bad side, I was stucked in the office for two afternoons, with my magnetic access card broken that I needed assistance from the security guards everytime going in and out of the lift lobby. To add on that, the bathroom on our floor is also out of service. We (it's "we" cause I was not the only one in the office!) needed to go downstair to use their bathroom.

Also, I am busy with the group project due on 26 April for my corporate communication course. We will meet again tomorrow evening and we have been working on it since the end of last month. The progress is good and I always try to contain myself not to overwhelm others during these meetings. But still, I spent a lot of time "amending" a member's contribution as she couldn't quite express herself using English (no problem when she's writing in Chinese). I have been thinking back and forth about if I should do that, but at the end I couldn't control myself so I did it and it used up quite a lot of my time.

So that's my Easter long weekend. I thought I could do some reading and knitting (I have an idea of knitting sweaters for babies I know that are under five as Christmas presents this year) over the long weekend but then I didn't do any. Too bad.

"Waterfront Park" @ Heng Fa Chuen

Here's where I have my evening walk. It's too cloudy that you can the "sea" on the left.

The 20-pound Mission (Impossible)

I watched a local indie band show couple of weeks ago. Among the audience, I saw quite a number of young, pretty and skinny girls with sleeveless tanks. I think, although I couldn’t be young and pretty, at least I should try to lose some weight for the summer. So, here’s my most important project during recent years – to lose 20 pounds for the upcoming summer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Forget about the number. It’s only a slogan to show my commitment. But I really want to lose some weight to buy clothes more easily :)

So. My number one and most important challenge of this “20-pound Mission” is that – I practically can’t do any exercise due to my knee except swimming, which is something I don’t know how to do and I don’t like to do.

So. What I am going to do focus mostly on diet and “walking exercise”:

On the diet part,

* avoid any oily food, food with source, sweet, pops, junk food, etc. (That almost means I can only have sandwich, sandwich, and sandwich for lunch!)

* don’t eat so full each meal, especially dinner; eat as little as possible during dinner time

* eat more fruit and drink more water

* may be drinking more green tea, which is said to be “fat-burning and cancer-preventive”

On the exercise part,

* walk as much as possible (Walking is the other exercise my doctor recommends, but it only includes walking on “flat” surface. Going uphill, downhill, upstairs and downstairs will all hurt my knees), including

* to buy lunch at Pacific Place, so I can walk around the HK Park

* to walk around 30 minutes after supper along the “waterfront park” under my apartment

* last but not least, those leg strengthening exercise my doctor recommends

So. I had tried almost all of the above today. When I tried to do the 30-minute walk at the “waterfront park”, I saw a lot of my neighours doing after-supper exercise there too. I never know HK people are so healthy.

Let’s count how many days I can stay on this mission impossible.

But another thing I think I need to do first is to buy a reliable scales. The digital one Mom has is “funny”. According to it, in just one day, I already lost 2-kg! But last time, it said I was gaining 1-kg per day for a week, when I didn’t do anything special, or wear heavy clothes!!!!!