Posted on 28 September 2009 @ 15:25 in News, Stress Busters
Bifengxia Panda Base has announced its latest panda births for this year. Guo Guo gave birth to twin girls on Sunday, 27 September 2009. The cubs, weighing 168.8g and 146.1g, were born at 5:35 p.m. and 11:12 p.m. – yes, a difference of almost six hours.
If her name looks familiar, Guo Guo was the first to give birth after the May 12 earthquake in 2008 – on 6 July 2008 to a pair of twins since named Ping Ping and An An (which together, Ping An, means “safety”).
I have been posting panda birth updates over on Facebook, and now here is what may be the full list of births for 2009. I’m hoping this is NOT the full list, as there have not been much news from Chengdu. Hopefully, Chengdu will make a full announcement of their new cubs soon.
27 May
Ling Hui
Chiangmai Zoo, Thailand
Single cub, female, 235g
Name: Lin Bing
7 July
Hua Mei
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, female, 200g, 12:53 p.m.
7 July
Gong Zhu
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, male, 200g, 1:08 p.m.
15 July
Bai Xue
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, male, 150g
16 July
Xi Mei
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, male, 200g, 11:19 a.m.
19 July
Li Li
Chengdu Panda Centre, China
Twins, both females, 122g and 100g
22 July (solar eclipse!)
Na Na
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Twins, both boys, 96.2g and 130g, 4:53 a.m. and 5:08 a.m.
23 July
You You
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub (from frozen sperm – a first), weight undetermined, male, 7:41 a.m.
24 July
Hai Zhi
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, weight undetermined, male, 5:51 p.m.
5 August
Bai Yun
San Diego Zoo, USA
Single cub, male, weight undetermined, 4:58 a.m. PST
7 August
Tien Tien
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Twins, weight undetermined, male, 11:27 a.m., and female, 11:37 a.m.
15 August
ZhiZhu
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, male, 148.6g
19 August
Lousheng
Shaanxi Rare Wild Animals Rescue and Breeding Research Centre, NW China
Twins – male, 162g, 8:40 a.m., and female, 131g, 8:58 a.m.
20 August
Le Sheng
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, female, 213.8g, 5:03 a.m.
23 August
Yalaoda
Chengdu Research Base, China
Single cub, female, weight unknown
26 August
Ying Ying
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, female, 158.5g, 3:34 a.m.
4 September
Zhu Zhu
Shaanxi Rare Wild Animals Rescue and Breeding Research Centre, NW China
Single cub, sex undetermined, 206g, 7:12 a.m.
12 September
Ye Ye
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Single cub, male, 161g
27 September
Guo Guo
Bifengxia Panda Base, China
Twins, female, 168.8g and 146.1g, 5:35 p.m. and 11:12 p.m.
|
Posted on 21 September 2009 @ 16:21 in Writing
I think I’ve finally figured out what Twitter is all about. Yes, I know, I’m slow …
It’s a microblogging platform.
Huh?
Put another way, it’s a mini version of this WordPress blog that I call Chet’s Chatter.
It’s mini because it only allows 140 characters. It’s a mini version because it lets me share things that interest and intrigue me. Yes *pointing to banner* same reason for my Chet’s Chatter blog, except I don’t have to write a long post when I find something interesting – or rather, I don’t feel obligated to write a long post about it. Usually, it’s a link I want to share, which I accompany with a few words about why it interests me.
I also share sayings and quotes that I find interesting. Like this one:
Why write? “To excavate the past because it has been forgotten.” (Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing)
And this one:
“I don’t say I’m going to work, I say I’m going to write.” – Isabel Allende loves the Writing Process http://tinyurl.com/l4rqgh
Of course, I still tweet relatively personal stuff about my health and my giant panda passion.
Oh, that funny looking link after the Allende quote? It’s a short URL created for long links that might exceed the allowed 140 characters. My favourite URL shortening site is this one – TinyURL.
If you haven’t signed up for a Twitter account yet, maybe it’s time you did.
Come to think of it, Twitter may be the reason why I am posting less on Chet’s Chatter these days. Need to find a balance between the two …
|
Posted on 15 September 2009 @ 23:35 in Friends, General, Stress Busters
Let’s see … I have 296 names on my Facebook contact list. Many of them are people I’ve never met, people I would not know if we were to meet in real life unless we identify ourselves, but because of some shared interest, we are online friends.
Such shared interests include giant pandas, the singer-songwriter Janis Ian, and gadgets. Yet, when I posted a request yesterday evening, and personally sent the same request via the Facebook message system to almost 200 names on my contact list, the response has been very positive. I am overwhelmed and the phrase “the kindness of strangers” comes to mind.
The request is giant panda related. Suzanne Braden, director of Pandas International, has been shortlisted for the Animal Planet Hero of the Year 2009 award. Voting began yesterday and will continue for the next two weeks, ending on 27 September. Just to be shortlisted is an honour in itself; to win would, to use a cliche, be icing on the cake.
The award includes a US$10,000 donation to the animal welfare organisation of the winner’s choice. If she wins, Suzanne will donate it to the precious giant pandas that Pandas International, the organisation she founded back in 1999, has supported all these years.
For some reason, the contest actually allows multiple votes per person but this is limited to one vote per email address per day. I have voted three times so far, including, for some reason, twice yesterday evening and just once this evening. There was a thank you page after my vote this evening which included the following statement:
Please note that your vote is only counted once per day. Any other votes will not be included in the final tally. If you’ve already voted today, please come back in 24 hours to cast another vote.
The voting is one of three criteria to be considered by the judges and carries 25% towards the final score; the other two criteria are level of accomplishments and impact of the Nominee’s actions (40%), and inspirational value that the Nominee’s actions have had on others (35%).
Suzanne Braden’s nomination has further highlighted the plight of the giant pandas, especially in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake on 12 May 2008. To have been nominated is an honour in itself; winning the award will bring much needed funds that will go towards the on-going conservation efforts as well as the urgent replanting of bamboo destroyed in the 2008 earthquake.
If you would like to help Pandas International continue its on-going support of the giant pandas, please vote for Suzanne Braden here.
The giant pandas say Xie Xie Ni (thank you)!
|
Posted on 7 September 2009 @ 13:58 in Family, Memories
It recently occurred to me that my mother might’ve been a scrapbooker, maybe even one of the first in Malaysia. Except in those days (the 50s and 60s), it wasn’t known as scrapbooking, at least not in this part of the world, and there weren’t all the fancy scrapbook albums, accessories and supplies. Instead, there were just photo albums.
My sister, brother and I each have our own baby albums. These are simple books with black pages, hard board covers with designs, and photo corners used to hold the photos in place. The photo corners in my baby album are plastic and still in good condition, while the ones in my brother’s album are paper, some of them fraying. I think my sister’s album has paper photo corners, too, but I don’t have it on hand to check; she took hers with her after she married.
My brother’s baby album
Mine was a bit more ornate; but it was also four years later
Further back than my sister’s baby album, there is also my parents’ wedding photo album. Even further back than that are photo albums commemorating the 25th anniversary of the family’s Chinese medicine shop, as well as the opening of the family’s second Chinese medicine shop. In addition to photographs, the anniversary albums also had newspaper clippings of congratulatory messages advertised by business associates. Many of the photo corners in these albums have lost their adhesiveness so flipping through the pages is often an exercise in caution not to let a photo slip from its original page.
Some of the congratulatory messages in the
shop’s 25th anniversary “scrapbook”
All our albums also feature identical family portraits taken every year on, or around, our parents’ wedding anniversary. The portraits were taken at professional photo studios, but not during regular business hours. Since both our parents worked and couldn’t take time off for the sessions, we had to do it after business hours. Good thing the various photo studios were owned by my father’s good friends who agreed to do the photography in the evenings. Every year, we would put on our best clothes (chosen by mother in our younger days) and troop into the studio for the portraits. Each annual set would feature one of the whole family, a second of our parents, and a third of just us kids. The early portraits were full-length shots; these changed to half-body shots beginning from the year my sister and brother decided they didn’t want to wear shoes and asked that the slippers not be shown in the photos.
In addition to our baby albums, we also have other photo albums through our growing years. The designs of each successive album give an indication of the changing tastes and times. From the simple books of black pages and photo corners, we moved on to fancier self-adhesive albums with stiffer board-like sticky pages, each overlaid with a film cover the same size as the page. To mount the photos, the film is lifted off the page, the photos put in place and the film repositioned over them. The film can be lifted off again and again; unfortunately, over the years, the sticky pages lost the self-adhesiveness so that the photos are no longer held firmly in place.
From these self-adhesive photo albums, we moved onto photo albums with pockets. Those were the last complete albums that required time spent selecting photos to include in each album. Latter albums were throwaway albums that came back with photos sent for developing, each sufficient to display either 24 or 36 pictures, depending on the size of the film roll used. Once the photos went into such albums, they stayed there, and the albums accumulated into stacks over time, the intention to sort and refile them into bigger, more permanent albums, diminishing with each passing year.
And then, there were no more albums. At least not for me, as I’ve moved on to taking digital photographs which do not require physical albums to file them.
And now, in my mother’s footsteps, I am ready to become a scrapbooker. A digital scrapbooker.
For a long time, I thought scrapbooking was a forward looking hobby, good for storing memories for future generations. In fact, that was what my mother did for us, store our baby and childhood memories for us to look back in later years. That’s what a lot of current scrapbooking examples show, too (including my friend Karenika’s excellent site). But recently, I realised scrapbooking can be used to look back, too; it’s a form of memoir. And I have lots of old family photos to organise into scrapbooks; all the various photo albums mentioned earlier are with me, and I’m sort of the family historian.
However, I don’t really like physical scrapbooking – the physical pages and the pictures will deteriorate over time, and there can only be one copy which will be difficult to share with the rest of the family (my sister, brother, as well as our cousins). So what’s the alternative?
Digital scrapbooking. It will be paperless (I will be doing my part in not killing trees for my hobby), and will help to preserve old photographs. It will also be easy to share, especially online – once a scrapbook is ready and uploaded online, I just need to send an email to family members with email access.
In my own way, I have dabbled with digital scrapbooking, but in a very simple, almost primitive way. During my early website days, I’d created a mini site celebrating the family’s Chinese medicine shop, and scanned the two anniversary photo albums to put on that site. A few years later, I discovered software to create online photo galleries and have set up an online photo site which is home to various photo albums, including one for old family photos that I put up for my cousins after an older cousin passed on last year.
All these efforts to date are just digital photo albums, the way my mother’s “scrapbooks” of our baby photos are just photo albums, but they have been leading me to this moment. Mother is no longer able to further her skills to make actual scrapbooks, but I will take over and plan to learn digital scrapbooking skills to help me create digital memories of our family history for our future generations.
Now, where to begin?
|
