The Household COO

I received this tale of a remarkable love story through email and decided that I just had to post about it.  We all know, since I came out of the closet, that I’m such a sucker for these stories.  However, this is a change from the usual Hollywood romance scene - it is the real McCoy.  I hope it serves as a source of inspiration in a society that is now too quick to file for a divorce and discredit the whole sanctity of marriage. 

An incredible love story has come out of China recently and managed to touch the world.

It is a story of a man and an older woman who ran off to live and love each other in peace for over half a century.

The 70-year-old Chinese man who hand-carved over 6,000 stairs up a mountain for his 80-year-old wife has passed away in the cave which has been the couple’s home for the last 50 years.

Over 50 years ago, Liu Guojiang a 19 year-old boy, fell in love with a 29 year-old widowed mother named Xu Chaoqin.

In a twist worthy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, friends and relatives criticized the relationship because of the age difference and the fact that Xu already had children.

At that time, it was unacceptable and immoral for a young man to love an older woman.. To avoid the market gossip and the scorn of their communities, the couple decided to elope and lived in a cave in Jiangjin County in Southern ChongQing Municipality.

In the beginning, life was harsh as hey had nothing, no electricity or even food. They had to eat grass and roots they found in the mountain, and Liu made a kerosene lamp that they used to light up their lives.

Xu felt that she had tied Liu down and repeatedly asked him, ‘Are you regretful? Liu always replied, ‘As long as we are industrious, life will improve.’

In the second year of living in the mountain, Liu began and continued for over 50 years, to hand-carve the steps so that his wife could get down the mountain easily.

Half a century later in 2001, a group of adventurers were exploring the forest and were surprised to find the elderly couple and the over 6,000 hand-carved steps. Liu MingSheng, one of their seven children said, ‘My parents loved each other so much, they have lived in seclusion for over 50 years and never been apart a single day. He hand carved more than 6,000 steps over the years for my mother’s convenience, although she doesn’t go down the mountain that much.’

The couple had lived in peace for over 50 years until last week. Liu, now 72 years, returned from his daily farm work and collapsed. Xu sat and prayed with her husband as he passed away in her arms. So in love with Xu, was Liu, that no one was able to release the grip he had on his wife’s hand even after he had passed away.

‘You promised me you’ll take care of me, you’ll always be with me until the day I died, now you left before me, how am I going to live without you?’

Xu spent days softly repeating this sentence and touching her husband’s black coffin with tears rolling down her cheeks.

In 2006, their story became one of the top 10 love stories from China, collected by the Chinese Women Weekly. The local government has decided to preserve the love ladder and the place they lived as a museum, so this love story can live forever.

Here’s the link to the news story.

When I was down under for a holiday a couple of years back, my SIL recommended this ice creamery called “Cold Rock“.  The concept is basically this:

1. Pick your ice cream flavour
2. Pick your “mix ins” (from a range of chocolate, cookies, and lollies)

Then watch as they blend your “mix ins” into your ice cream scoop over a cold plate (yup, it’s exactly like a hot plate but it’s cold) to create one seriously cool ice cream.

It’s a pretty neat concept. 

Recently, I discovered that the Cold Rock concept that come to Malaysia.  It’s here at Baskin Robbins, Pavillion branch.  Actually I saw it probably about a week before at some other ice cream store but I can’t seem to recall where (that’s the problem with losing your memory after having a baby).  I think it was at The Curve but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t one of the regular ice cream brands.

The original concept of mixing sweets into ice cream began in the US with a company called Cold Stone Creamery whose history dates back to 1988.  Cold Rock only appeared in Australia some 8 years later in 1996, however, Cold Rock appears to be hitting international waters because I’ve discovered they now have a store in Holland Village, Singapore.

I’ve only tasted Cold Rock once, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  As for whether the Cold Rock copy-cats here are as good - well, I still have the pleasure of sampling them to find out so watch this space…

I read about a contest being held over at John Chow’s Blog that’s sponsored by Market Leverage and I couldn’t resist entering it.  As far as contests go, it doesn’t get easier than this.  If you want to enter, just head on over to John’s blog and leave a comment.  If you want a better chance of winning, write a blog entry about the contest and link it to John’s post and Market Leverage and you’ll get five entries. 

It works great for me since I’ve never really liked entering those “create-a-slogan” type contests.  Not that I’ll even pretend to have a creative bone in my body, anyway.

Anyway, if you enter, this is what you will win (thanks John - borrowed the picture from your blog):

In case you can’t tell from the picture what the prizes are, this is what you can win:

• Flip video camera
• $200 Market Leverage Amex Rewards card
• USB drive that is also a pen
• iPod Nano.

And it’s all going to come inside a Nike bag…  sweet.

After writing so much about the Law of Attraction, now would be a pretty good time for it to start working for me.

I thought I should record the details of this recipe that I made off the top of my head.  It worked out a lot better than the one I copied from a recipe off the internet, too…  Just had to mention that since I’m so proud of myself.

When we go for a Chinese meal, one of the dishes I love to eat is Spinach soup with century egg.  Of course, I don’t eat the century egg - I just like the flavour of the soup and the spinach.  So naturally when I saw a recipe for Chicken Spinach Soup on the internet, I just had to try it out.  Regrettably, it was rather bland and the chicken was tasteless and dry.

So here’s the recipe I used today (just in case I ever have trouble reproducing it again):

Ingredients:

• 1 Chicken Thigh, sliced (although I’m sure you could use more - this was all I defrosted from the freezer before I even thought about what I was going to make for dinner)
• Concentrated Chicken Stock
• Cornflour
• 1 large bundle of Spinach, washed and chopped into manageable portions
• Chinese Cooking Wine

Method:

Marinate chicken pieces with 1 Tbsp of concentrated chicken stock and cornflour.  Fill half a pot with water and bring to the boil.  Add 1 Tbsp of concentrated chicken stock.  Add chicken pieces.  Add Spinach.  Taste for flavour (add salt if necessary).  Add 1 Tbsp of Chinese Cooking Wine.  You can also add a dash of pepper if you like.

And that’s it.  Now wasn’t that easy?

You would have thought that after the problems I had with my domain migration I would have deferred any technical work, especially unnecessary work, until I was back into the blogging groove, but no, I just had to get my fingers dirty and start dvelving eyebrows deep in blog code I barely understand.  Yup, I decided to change my blog design…

The Internet Home Businesses Blog had barely been back online for more than a day when I started tinkering with the design after getting it about as good as it gets.  Of course the problem with getting a new blog design is that you can’t just fit any old blog design that picks your fancy to your blog.  With all the funky additions, you have to find a design that you not only like but one that will accommodate all the little tweaks you built into your old blog layout.

That took me the better part of the weekend to get done - well, I have never claimed to be a technically inclined person.  And despite all the frustration, time wasting and hair pulling I did, I have to say I’m quite pleased with the end results. 

Feel free to visit me and tell me what you think - or at least humour me since I put so much effort into it.

In an effort to do some housekeeping with my websites and hosting accounts, I decided to transfer the domain for one of my websites so that all my domains would be hosted by one company.  Nice, neat, and easier for me to manage.  Or so I thought.

How hard could it be to transfer a domain, I thought?  People do it all the time, I’m sure.  Even IT idiots like me.

Well, it was obviously more complicated than I realised because after I had transfered the domain name, my site no longer worked.  So I checked up the help section.

Ah… that’s because I didn’t upload my website files to the new host!  So I did just that.  But it still didn’t work.

When I couldn’t find any more information form the help section, I sent a ticket to the helpdesk.

I had to assign my new domain either as an “addon” or “parked” domain.  As far as I understand, the gist of it is that an “addon” domain looks unique like it is completely separate from your main domain (if you already have one with the host), whereas a “parked” domain looks a part of your main domain (kind of like a subdomain, I think).  Don’t quote me on this - this is just how I think it works based on the explanations that they offered in the help section.

So I assigned my transfered domain as an “addon” domain, but it still didn’t work.

This time I got impatient, so I contacted the live helpline.  Let’s just say they weren’t very helpful - at least the guy I got stuck with wasn’t.  Maybe it was because I forgot to tell him I didn’t know anything about transfering domains?  I would have thought that was self-explanatory from the fact that I was telling him I didn’t know what was wrong with my website?

Here’s the gist of our online conversation:

Me: I get an error page when I try to load my website
Helpline: You need to check your files
Me: Which files?  What am I looking for?
Helpline: Config file
Me: I’ve found it.  Now what am I supposed to do with it?

It was like trying to pry the information out of him!

In the end, I got nothing achieved.  All I can say is, “Thank God for IT friends!”  ST who helped me realise that my problem was a database issue and that the scope of it might be beyond me, and MT who transfered my databases for me. 

Now we’re pretty much back online with a few minor issues to sort out.

I read about this on JohnChow.com and just had to try it out for myself…

The figure sounds pretty sweet, but personally, I think a lot of the questions are pretty dubious.  According to John, the creator of the site reckons the algorithms he’s programmed into this one is “pretty accurate”.  I reckon it’s a load of BS - but a fun way to waste a bit of time anyway…

17,350,662

How much money will you be worth?

Go try it out for yourself.  You can sort of guess which answers to put to give yourself a higher score, though.

Ever wanted to know how you would rank in a beauty contest?  Then you should try this out: http://www.lookoftheyear.com

Look of the Year allows anyone to enter.  Just submit your best photos and if you get selected, you can win $10.  It’s also the place where you can be spotted by modelling agencies for a potential career as a model.  Forget trying to fight your way into and through America’s Top Model, just submit your photos to Look of the Year and let the modelling agencies find you.

If you’re not that young, or if a modelling career isn’t for you, well, it’s always nice to know that you look beautiful.

I spent the better part of the last couple of nights upgrading my wordpress platform.  Thank God for Fantastico, otherwise it would have taken me twice as long to get everything done.  It certainly didn’t help that on one of those nights, the internet connection was as flaky as the communications connections in the Bermuda Triangle.

Now that I’m “up-to-date”, there is one thing I don’t really like about the new wordpress platform.  For one, I don’t like the fact that I can no longer upload photos directly from my computer.  Now I have no choice but to use flickr or some other photo program. Although flickr is great if I want to post lots of photos, it’s a little annoying to use when I only want to post a couple of pictures.

As for the rest of the new features?  Well, it’s taking a bit of getting used to the new layout but otherwise, I don’t really see any real benefit from having upgraded, except for the fact that I can update my plugins with the click of a button instead of having to manually download the revised editions, unzipping the files and uploading them to my server.  Then again, I didn’t really find myself disadvantaged with the old plugin editions.

If anything, I think I was happier with the old version and I would switch back if it were a simple matter of clicking a button.  Unfortunately, undoing the changes would require even more time so I guess I’ll just have to make do with the way things are.

I love sprawling lawns…

Waterfronts…

And hedges…