Saturday, February 28, 2009

Fire can strike anytime

Dear all,

Lately, a lot of people has laughed at me because I purchase a bundle of fire prevention devices. I bought a smoke alarm detector, a small fire extinguisher and three anti-smoke masks (one for baby).

A lot of people asked: "Why on earth would you do that?"

The reason is simple:

Smoke detector:
It's a device that detects the presence of Carbon Monoxide (or CO) in the air. CO is odorless and from what I was told, it is deadly because unlike Oxygen, once it attaches to the red cells of your blood, it won't go away from it in your lungs where it's suppose to. Afterward, it slowly lead to death by suffocation, your entire body is lacking of Oxygen and you die. It's a very very effective way to suicide and it is a commonly used in HK. Also, it will beep very loudly so that it wakes us up when we are asleep. When a fire starts during the night, it is more deadly because people hardly wake up because of bad smell, you can ask somebody to put some poo in front of your face during the night, you should not notice it until you wake up :). From archives, we can see people that have been wake up because of pain, the fire started to burn their face. People asleep did not smelled that their house was burning, but they felt the pain of being burned at their face.
So, I give it a thought and bought one. It was quite cheap only 300HKD (30EUR or 30USD, I am too lazy to look for the correct exchange rate). It can just be placed anywhere in a room on a shelf for example (CO is lighter than air, so it goes up).

For the fire extinguisher, it's easy to understand, we took one that can be used on any type of fire, a powder one. Notice, never use a water fire extinguisher on electric component, or a CO2 fire extinguisher in a closed area... so, powder is the best when you want to cover everything. It's small, quite cheap (400 HKD) and can save your home.

Lastly, the anti-smoke masks... :) This are the one that have my friends make fun of me. A lot of people die from suffocation during a fire, these are to give you a 20 min gap to go through corridors engulf by smoke and try to exit from your place. It filters the air for 20 minutes and cleans it from bad elements like CO. When faced with a fire, it is sometimes better to leave the place than staying in there and calling for help at a window with fire behind... Ok, some may argue that I could burn in the staircase, but hey... At least I would have tried to escape and won't be afraid of inhaling too much CO.Last thing, it is small, folded and portable. When folded, it takes similar size as a A5 100 pages notebook, so, keeping three of them is not a big deal.

The fire extinguisher is replaceable every five years if I don't use it, same for the masks if only they have been used.

So, to me, it's a one time cost and very cheap life insurance.

I pray that you will think about it and get yourself prepared :) you never know when fire strikes!

About our Postnatal helper hunt

Dear All,

Last week, some of you might have seen that we found one, but after an intense thinking, we decided to go and find another one.

In fact, the first sounds to be professional, but she did not look so, long nails etc... for somebody who take care after babies, that was not a good impression. Also, we had a lengthy conversation (at least she did talked a lot), and after some deeper analysis, we were led by her, we were kind of trap into the "can't say no". She is a very nice person, although she seems to brag a lot about herself, about how she loves her job, how she would do anything with perfection, how she cares about her customers, etc..etc...

Anyway, we accepted at first, but we were not given any peace in our hearts. So, we decided to move on and continue our hunt.

Peace of mind is very important and we were recalled by a sister. We called her and that was the first question she asked: "Do you have peace in your heart?" and we knew that we were just lying to ourselves, somehow convincing our minds not to look for other alternative as we run up of patience to find one. But we were all wrong, if we really let this matter down to God, the one that will took care of His baby will present herself/himself, somehow like the nanny found us.

So, Yukyin already met another one (candidate B) on last Tuesday and we'll meet another one (candidate C) coming Tuesday, hope we found someone suitable for the job.

If you have 2 minutes of your time, please pray for us.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Some pieces of news

Dear All,

Just want to share a useful tip, if you are looking for baby stuff... go to Jusco (local Japanese oriented stuff store), they are doing 20% off on baby stuff and you can get 5% off afterward with the Jcard. We save a lot of money this way.

Our baby is dancing disco in Yukyin's tummy! So we finally start to have some sort of communication with him/her. Please pray for his/her health. :)

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Nanny Found!

Dear All,

God could not answer our prayers better, the nanny we found lives next door, she is mother of two and have some free time looking over our baby when he/she will born.

Actually, we just started to pray actively for this matter. One day, I met the Mr. Neighbor when I left for work and asked him if he knows anybody that would babysit living around. He answered that somebody living in the 11th floor kept his girl when she was young, but he does not know if it’s still the case.

Few days later (today), her wife push the doorbell and asked Yukyin if she would trust her and presented herself as a plausible nanny! Yukyin was more than happy. In fact, on the first day she met her when we moved in, the idea of having her keeping our future child went through her mind and now, it’s what actually will take place! :)

God really prepared us this place, he prepared my work to be close, he prepared the nanny, he prepared everything in our lives, we are very thankful for all he has done to us.

Dear reader, I pray that God bless more than what you could hope.

Praises to the Lord for His continuous work.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Facing inequality in the current world

Lately, I have been asked what, as a christian, I think of the fact that a minority is dominating the majority of human kind.

All begins with my reaction to the Total's group decision on how to share its nearly 14 Billion Euros benefit. From "Le Grand Journal" (meaning the Grand Newspaper), it will be spread like this: 60% for the investors, 38% for the shareholders and 2% for the employees, if the group were listening to the French government that urges company to give 1/3 of their benefit to the employee because of the current financial crisis, each employee would receive 50,000€.

First, from my calculations, 2% represents an average of 3000€ per employee, which is not bad... At least, I would be very happy to receive that much money.

My friends were quite surprised that I was not shocked by the news.

As a guy living in Hong Kong, you can see unfair society everywhere. For a foreigner, we are quite shocked when we see people picking up pieces of card board in the street for a living ot not (I was shocked when I learnt that some of the grannies doing that where quite wealthy). There are a lot of wealthy people and a lot of not wealthy people. The fact that Hong Kong is such a small place make you see both type of people very easily. Inequality is everywhere in this city. It's not a complain but it's a fact. And my mind got used to it.

In fact, for a Christian, equality does not exist in Earth, God is the only one who is truly fair and one day, later or sooner, He will judge this world. To every one, Christian or not, we have been given things to be responsible of and at the end, we will be accounted for what we have done with. He gifted all of us with wealth, leadership (politic, CEO, etc), intellectual gift, etc... But at the end, all of us will be accounted for how we used it in our life.

Complains from employees suffering domination from their employer are heard by God like it is stated here:

Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.

James 5:4


As sin entered the world, people are greedy and they want more and more wealth at the expenses of people less wealthy.

9People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. 10For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

1Tim 6:9-10


But does it means that, as a Christian, we should just sit there and see what will happening next? Nope, and I do believe that what we are called to do is to help the needy as much as we are given to do, and we will be given all what we need.

17 He who is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward him for what he has done.

Proverbs 19:17


That's my opinion on how Christian should live through the inequality of the current world.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Looking for help

Just a quick message in the middle of our preparations for baby... we are looking for a postnatal helper, just for a month, I know there are plenty of them in Hong Kong, but finding one good is quite hard. Anyway, help me pray for that if you remember us.

Also, we need to find a nanny (? not sure of the spelling) who lives close by so that we can leave the baby at hers when Yukyin is working.

That's it....

Yeah yeah yeah, I don't give a lot of news... I need to go out and shoot... also, the DIY softbox has been change to a collapsible beauty dish. Working on the concept...

Monday, February 9, 2009

Deadline for our poll!

Due to some modification of our doc's appointment, our baby's gender will be known later. I will thus modify the deadline for the current poll.

Suffering... becoming Blessing

Dear all,
Today I want to share a piece of Yukyin's thoughts about suffering:

"Concerning suffering, there are three types of person in the world:
-the people that suffer before feeling any pain.
-the ones that feel suffer as they feel pain.
-and the ones that does not suffer, but do feel pain.
I spent 3 months in a physical state of pain: bloating, vomiting, morning sickness, back pain, bed confined for weeks, insomnia, feeling itchy all over the body all around the clock, etc...

I was focused on my suffering and thus, I started to stray away from God. I don't read His Holy words, I don't pray. I was feeling pain and I suffered a lot.

Since two weeks, I have changed my way of thinking about my pregnancy, I started to realize that pregnancy would only last a few months in my whole life. So instead of being sad, I should start "enjoying" the limited time pregnancy's experience. In fact, it's a blessing from God that I can experience the pregnancy's suffering part and I really enjoy living this uneasiness with His presence in my heart.

It's not because I went past the first difficult trimester that I can change my way of thinking easily. In fact, I do feel a bit better but, my back pain is increasing, I still scratch myself everywhere when I am feeling itchy. My values are different, God is in my life, I have His Love, I thrust in Him and I do know that this is His Blessing. This is really meaningful to me.

In the meantime, I want to thank my husband who supports me everyday. He is the most precious in my heart.

Yukyin"


Thanks my sweetheart.

When living a Faith in God, our values changes, I don't mean that we see every painful occasion as a joyful experience, but, because we have His love, we can more deeply feel His works when we are suffering. He has plans for our life, for each one of us, that's why any painful moment can become a blessing.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Getting ready for DIY soft box

Similar days are aligning up in my life, nothing really changes, doing households, working at office, I got a new flash (Nikon SB-900 for those who want to know) for my camera but I don't really have the time to play with it. I am going to build a soft box for it to take picture at home. Hope it works.

So, just a post to announce that I am on a soft box DIY project.

I will go for a rectangular one but don't have the size yet but, I am going to aim at 1.5m wide.