Christmas Decorations

Merry Christmas! Happy Boxing Day!!!!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas holiday with your friends and family and a fabulous start to 2011!

If you knew me in Toronto, you would probably know that I try to decorate my home for Christmas every year, and first year in Uni was definitely the year where I spent a lot of time with my housemate decorating! :)

Well this year, I didn't decorate my house in HK for Christmas, it's just not something we do in HK, and it really does make us forget about Christmas. However, at work we decided very late to do a little bit of decoration, get a tree and keep things simple. In the end I did keep it simple, but I think it was the simplicity that made the decorations so stunning! Unfortunately the photos I took will never do it justice, however, I hope they will offer you some ideas for next year's Christmas..... .

I got some fabric for a christmas dinner that I was doing for church, and so picked up some red fabric for the office. I then tied the doors with fabric like they were christmas presents.

Merry Christmas!

What decorating tips do you have to share?

Some not so recent photos

Over the summer, I took a beginner's photography course and here are

some photos from our practice sessions. Learned

some basic techniques, but I think I will only be able to really use my camera when I am traveling and have time to really get to know what all the buttons and functions are. :)

My cousin joined me as well, but he was sleeping through most of the classes.

One of the first things we learned that we thought was kind of cool, was that you can take photos and twist the lens to zoom at the same time, so that you can see the streaks focusing on the subject of the photo.

I have to admit the photo on the here is by chance only, as it's quite difficult to get a clear shot of the subject because when I try to twist very fast (as fast as the shutter clicks) then the photo usually ends up blurry cuz my hand holding the camera moves too.... hahaha....

Another thing we did was something known as "light painting" and in HK I think it's pretty popular, as I've seen some friends do it. But the thing is that we had a super dark room, whereas it's usually quite difficult to find such a dark room at home, well my room is not dark at all....

So you have to find a pitch black room, then set your shutter speed to 6s, so that it stays open for 6 seconds, and your aperture ..... hmmmm I've forgotten the exact.... hahaha... but just test it out..... and you have to hold your camera VERY STILL if you don't have a tripod, so just tuck our elbows into your side and hold still....

The person "painting" will use a flashlight, and turn it on and point it into the lens of the camera and draw whatever he wants, and the photo will come out as below. It's quite fun! (my prof used a huge light rod so that's why the lines came out thicker.)

Running for Unicef

I did it!

On Sunday, 28 Nov, 2010 I ran my first 10km run for charity. All proceeds go to Unicef and educating children about AIDS and HIV.

As you may know, I've been training, and done three 10km runs during my training, plus all the other kms that I did added up together.

My family who ran with me:

from left - 1st and 4th - ran 21km

from left 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th - ran 10km

It definitely felt really great to finish the run, although I knew I could do it, but with many factors that are different to the conditions in which I trained (on the day it was in the early morning, there was the sun, there was a slight slope, there were thousands of other people in front of me - stampede!) so I thought that I wouldn't make my goal of finishing the 10km within 70 minutes.

I was feeling quite tired by the last 3km, and just ran through the finish line without looking at the clock. But from my watch, I think I finished within my 70minutes.

Today I checked online for the results, because each runner had a timer chip on their shoe and it will accurately time your run. Guess how long I took????? 1:00:39!!!! I'm so happy with that!

Now my goal is to find another run to join and keep on training. I hope more people will join me for the next one!

left: RANDSTAD at Unicef Charity Run 2010