Saturday, April 12, 2008

video

not sure how long the link will work but you have to see this video. to give a little background, there's been some controversy with this mayor in a nearby suburb. she apparently has also claimed the police roughed her up. my favorite quote: "and they just basically took me to the ground, tussling my arms are bruised, uh, my neck, i have a lump here, um, my knee, uh ... was hurt." ha ha! it's like she had to think about what got injured.

ALMOST as funny as the miss teen south carolina quote during the competition about maps and iraq: "and i believe that our education like such as south africa and the iraq, everywhere like such as ... " ha ha ha!

Sunday, April 06, 2008

what's in a name?

okay, karen's been bugging me to write about my name--how i got it, what it means, etc. well, first of all, my birth name is dae hyun, which means something to the effect of "wise" and "strong" in korean. i think the names are actually of chinese origin, which is a common style of naming but i can't exactly remember which name correlates with which word. anyway, if you say my name in korean (e.g., when my parents would call out to me when i was a kid running amuck in the neighborhood), it sounds a little like tanna. if you say "dae-hyun-na" quickly over and over, you can see how it might get to tanna. the "na" is just an added syllable to the name. so, the neighborhood kids started calling me tanna and now so does karen and everyone else. i actually have "dae hyun aka tanna" on my citizenship certificate. yes, that's the same one where i'm wearing a bugs bunny t-shirt in the picture. i'd like to say i was like 3 years old but i think i was a little older than that.

little did i realize later in life around junior high that tanna was a girl's name. the first similarly spelled name i ran across was actually on an episode of "the price is right" and there was a lady contestant named "tana." heck, it could have actually been spelled the exact same way but all i remember was that it was a lady. she actually made it onto the stage. then i met a lady at our church who was a visiting friend or speaker or something who, you guessed it, carried both x chromosomes. as if that wasn't bad enough, there was even a newscaster here on channel 5 in atlanta not too long ago whose name was tana. she pronounced it tahn-a (like don-a), not tanna like manna. you know, it's okay if there's a tanna running loose here and there but when it's a tv personality, then everybody realizes tanna's a girl's name, not just those select acquaintances. not like they needed a tv personality to figure that out; tanna doesn't exactly sound like a man's name to begin with i guess.

because of the unusual nature of the name, no one could ever tell what i was saying when i introduced myself, particularly in loud settings (e.g., bars and clubs, you know, in college mostly ... in college when i was over 21 that is). i got people calling me tom, tim, tanner, tan, you name it. funny thing is, the guy who sat behind me during junior high and part of high school even pronounced my name wrong all those years. he would pronounce it tahn-a. i found that so odd. here's a toast to you, robert love, wherever you are.

speaking of love, our love-child is getting into all sorts of things these days. she's gotten pretty adept at pulling herself up to a standing position. she can't quite figure out the "cruising" thing yet so once she's up she stays put in one position until she falls down and then goes to a new location. frequently there's a head-bonking episode somewhere in there, usually on the way down while falling so we have to wait for the 10 second breathless pause while she builds up her steam and facial redness until she lets out her wail. i keep telling karen the kid will learn one day but it doesn't seem like she has so far. you know kids, they're so young and naive. concepts like gravity and mass are still foreign to them. she'll be at least 2 before i teach her about gravitational force so i guess i should expect more bonking episodes.

i'm also trying to get kate to feed herself. it's hard to work the remote and feed her at the same time unless she's helping. she can feed a few wheat puff type stuff to herself but she's still getting the hang of it--just look at our floor. she tries to shove her whole hand in or put her palm in first and half the time the puff thingie just falls on the floor. she's getting decent at holding her bottle by herself at times. however, if you leave it to her, usually she'll drink for just a few seconds and then she'll stop and look at the bottle and play with it.

the standing thing has become somewhat of a problem for naptime as well. frequently it takes her some time to get to sleep. she'll just stand on the crib with her hands on top of the rail and sometimes gnaw on it with her 2 lower and budding 2 upper teeth. i expect her one day to have a tin cup to run across the rails like she's in prison or something. we have a few pics of her standing in her crib during what is supposed to be nap/bedtime but they're on the main computer and i'm on my laptop right now so the pics will come later. sorry!

speaking of which, in case you didn't know, karen is back on the blog saddle. she is much better about updating her blog and i'd like to think it's because the pics are on the desktop where she mostly works and not because she's on the internet all the time. ha! i have a link to her blog on the right.

in other big news, i ordered an imac last week. it should be coming in the next couple of days. yes, the lim family has made a big change. don't get me wrong, i will be running the parallel software so i can have windows up at the same time but otherwise, this is definitely a big step for me. the current desktop is 6 years old, ancient in computer years. it has a whopping 40 gb hard drive memory and the new imac will have 500! yes, halfway to a terabyte. way too much info for this blog i guess. it will be nice to have a computer that isn't so slow like the current one.

in other news, karen posted some pics from a recent visit by my bro and fam. there are a few videos we shot while they were there. here's one with kylie and eric singing "jesus loves me."

here's another hilarious video of the two talking about my brother and his hair obsession. yes, my friends, it actually takes my brother more time to settle his hair in the morning than most women. he also used to get very upset when we would try to mess with it growing up. the video gives the kids' perspective on things.

lastly, thanks to kate for the last post on doctor's day. it commemorates the first documented use of anesthesia (ether at the time) in surgery by georgia's own crawford long, back in the late 1800's. he was actually an obstetrician. anyway, it caused a little bit of controversy because he never published the event in a medical journal so others took credit but that's another story. that's it for now, hopefully some pics next time.