Down the Rabbit Hole

On a fine Sunday afternoon when the weather was warm, we drove to Cupertino to visit one of the places I have always wanted to visit since I bought my first iPod: the Apple headquarters. Little did I know that the headquarters I wanted to see (the Apple Campus) has now been replaced by Apple Park (aka Apple Campus 2). Nevertheless, I wanted to see how the minimalist aesthetic of Apple products translates to the company headquarters.  What I saw did not disappoint. It actually wowed me. I was surprised that the campus was found in a suburban neighbourhood. It felt so peaceful to be there on a weekend. I'm sure the pace is more rapid on weekdays, with people rushing to work, but assuming that people living in the adjacent neighbourhood are Apple employees, the commute (or the walk) won't be too bad. I learned that visitors are not allowed on the campus but are welcome to tour the Apple Park Visitor Centre. The garden surrounding the visitor centre is lined with olive trees and n...

  I had an exam in the City in mid-March and brought my meal-prepped lunch. So I hopped into a lift that brought me to Salesforce Park (for the first time). It is a garden 70 feet above ground, suspended over three or four city blocks in the East Cut neighbourhood. It is a sight for sore eyes after being on the BART and walking on San Francisco's concrete trails under the shadow of the tall buildings of the Financial District. Salesforce Park reopened in July 2019, a few months after I finished studying in the City . In fact, the construction site for the Transbay Transit Centre (on which the park is found) was under construction while I was a student at UC Berkeley's SF campus. And that is why I didn't get a chance to see it earlier. Walking along the paved path in Salesforce Park reminded me of my visit to Singapore's Flower Dome . The park is rich in greenery, with the path lined with plants and grass-covered hillocks. Since it was (literally) the last day of winter,...

Donan has recently become fascinated with dinosaurs. He has been asking many questions about the differences among various groups of dinosaurs, what they ate, and where they lived. Because of this interest, I thought it would be an excellent idea for him to see the dinosaur exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences.  When we reached the front door, an enormous dinosaur appeared and freaked us out. Donan didn't want to see the rest of the exhibit anymore.  In contrast, I didn't see the same fear and worry when Donan and I went to the animal exhibit in the Blackhawk Museum. He was enthralled by the dinosaur skull and paused to see the videos of ankylosaurs. 

Alcatraz Island is one of the more difficult National Parks to visit.  Tickets to the island sell out fast, especially on weekends (a very popular tourist destination) The only way to get there from Embarcadero is by boat (15-min trip) The road on the island is uneven and difficult to walk on because of the terrain (wear super comfortable shoes) After watching Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery's The Rock, I always wanted to visit Alcatraz. Val and I took a  cruise  around the island once; we didn't land there, though. This is why I was excited when I snagged a day tour slot when I was in San Francisco. Finally, after years of finding an opportune time!  The highlight of the island tour was the audio-guided tour of the federal penitentiary, which used to be a maximum-security prison (and is famous because of it). Before it became a federal penitentiary, however, Alcatraz Island was home to a military fortress designated to protect the West Coast from foreign invaders (d...

Solano County's Health and Social Services (H&SS) has a committee preparing for the Public Health Day sometime in May. I attended the first of its meetings, and I found the committee organisers to be very friendly. It did help that they prepared a check-in activity to make everyone at ease: "loteria". When they first mentioned it, I thought we would play the lotto. However, I learned that Loteria is similar to Bingo. We were each given one card with several drawings and Spanish words. We were also given a handful of beans. One had to put one bean to each drawing on the card to win the game. Players would place the beans on their cards as the game master mentioned the word or showed the photo he/she had drawn from a deck of photo cards.   My Spanish is limited to numbers and a few objects... I am not able to string words into a sentence just yet. And so, I heavily relied on the photos that the game master showed to the group. It was a fun activity, albeit short (about ...

I came across Dr Cielito Habito's opinion piece entitled "Dumb and Dumber?" in the Philippine Daily Inquirer while browsing LinkedIn posts. This article highlighted the Philippines' poor performance in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test measuring selected students' math, reading, and science performance. Because I now work in the public health space, the last portion of this article resonated with me: poor performance attributed to weak cognitive and learning capacity is brought about by malnutrition. The author then mentioned that children's academic performance is closely linked with agriculture (e.g., farm productivity). Dr Habito's article resonates with Solano County's Public Health Leadership meeting agenda before Christmas. During that meeting, I learned (a bit more) about how public health is not just about diseases (being a microbiologist, my focus is disease diagnosis). It also covers maternal and child w...

"The time has come", the Walrus said, "to talk of many things: of shoes and ships, of sealing wax,  of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings..." – Lewis Carroll  I bought the Diono Radian 3QXT and the Clek Foonf many months ago because I preferred that Donan stay rear-facing for as long as possible (or at least beyond his second birthday). After all, this is the safest seat orientation for him as an infant and a toddler. One of his teachers commended me for keeping Donan's seat rear-facing as long as we had. I told her this might be the last week of it because Donan had figured out how to unbuckle the chest clip to look forward.  That same weekend, I worked on reversing the orientation of his car seats (one is in my car, and the other is in Daddy's car). I had entirely forgotten how heavy his seats were! They are both heavyweights! Anyway, uninstalling them was more challenging than I had expected. The anti-rebound ...