2020 COVID-19

We can't go out in the year of COVID. So we explore the virtual world of Oculus! The virtual eality by Oculus is state of the art.

While Arthur really likes to have turkey in Thanksgiving, we all agree that it's better to have a chicken instead. The leftover turkey is just not very tasty.

One reason that I like to work in the company is that I can have expresso / latte whenever I want. To truly make working from home as effective / satisfying as workin in office, I finally bought a latte machine. I hesitate to buy one earlier because the machine is quite expensive ($700+) and I have one functioning regular "Americano" machine. Anyway, I bought one and I wish I have bought it in March. It is a nice machine and the quality of coffee is as good as those in coffee shops, at least to me. Also, we have two coffee addictives and one chocolate-milk lover. This machine can do all.

Arthur wants to have pets for years. This year, thanks to the pandemic, we have time and have a good reason to finally get him a fish tank with 8 black skirt tetra and 9 cardinal tetra. Tetra fish needs to be in a group of 6 or more. It depends on the species but 6 is generally an absolute minimum. Our fish tank is only 29 galan which can support "29 inches" of fish. One black skirt adult is ~2 inch and one caridnal is about 1 inch. So this is the most we can get. We started with 6 black skirts because black skirts are relatively low maintenance. Four weeks later, we added 2 more black skirts and 8 cardinals. This is way too aggressive and we lost 5 tetra fish in 4 days. Learning it in a hard way, we added bacteria, changed water more often (daily) for a couple of weeks, and then slowly increases the time between water change. We monitored the water quality daily. And finally, we get a stabilized tank and only need to change water biweekly. The fish are healty. We added a ...

Kind of unexpected, our garden looks better during pandemic. Or, it has always been this great just I didn't have time to pay attention to it. Here are the photos of some of the plants: The sun flower is a big surprise to all of us. It was one of Arthur's science project last year and we all forgot about it. It blooms right on time, a few days before Mother's day While we were all pessimistic about the Pomegranate tree, it blooms the first time since we planted it 2  years ago.  Here is another picture of the Pomegranate tree. In fact, there are at least four flower buds this year.

Arthur's classes start at 8, just like normal school. To make him feel as normal as possible, I try to get up before 7:30 or even 7. Arthur usually wakes up at 6. After making sure Arthur is on schedule, I sit by the dining table, with a cup of coffee and starts my work. In this picture, my breakfast was a slice of banana bread. This is actually the 3rd banana bread May made since the WFH begins, because we had too many bananas -- at one point, we had ~40 bananas.