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There is a common saying of, “Old habits die hard.” I think about this quote sometimes when I’m sitting at my local big box coffee shop. I go to the same coffee shop at least twice a week. Sometimes, I go there to escape the confines of my house, & to get away from my everyday chores & away from all the people in the house. I just want to be alone for a while. Other times, I go to the coffee shop in order to motivate myself to write more of my blog. I like the feeling of being unrecognized, & I really enjoy the hustle & bustle. If I haven’t told you before, I am a people watcher. Jian says I blatantly stare/gawk sometimes in public places, but I believe in wanting to be fully aware of my surroundings (in case something bad might happen). I DO NOT stare uncomfortably at people. Merely observe.
Ok, let’s get back on the original topic. Every time I go to my local big box coffee shop, I sit at the same seat (or next to it if it’s already being occupied). I rotate my purchases between the same three coffee drinks & the same three food items. I have a certain way that I always prepare my coffee drinks at the condiments cart. I only take no more than two napkins (It annoys me when people grab a handful of napkins just for one cup of coffee or for one small pastry. It’s so wasteful!) Then, there is a specific way I like to set up my seating arrangement. I like to sit at the counter at the back end of the coffee shop. It feels quiet & a little secluded, even though it’s right next to the restroom. The counter is just the right height for my short frame, & the stools are great for my short legs. My feet can actually comfortably reach the foot bar on the stool. I place my food & drink on the right side of the counter, my tablet sits directly in the middle, & my smartphone is always placed on the counter’s left side.
My most commonly ordered drink at this coffee shop is a dark roasted coffee. I usually order a kids menu size & ask the barista to put it in a small (one-size up) cup. I like to have lots of room in my cup so I can load up my coffee with a lot of cream. (Sometimes Jian will say that I drown my coffee in cream. That is a slight exaggeration.) It’s also fifty cents cheaper to order my coffee this way than to just order a small cup with lots of room for cream. This is my little coffee shop trick to save some money here & there. Food-wise, I tend to order the easy stuff like croissants & danishes. I don’t really like to order the breakfast sandwiches; they’re too greasy & they sell out often anyway. Sometimes, when I’m feeling extravagant, I will get a pre-packaged fruit & cheese box.
After all that is said & done I will find my spot, sit down, & immerse myself in my tablet for a couple of hours with the music flowing from my MP3 player. It really was a shame that my BOSE noise-cancelling headphones crapped out on me. Mechanically, the headphones work perfectly well. It’s the fabric & the padding of the headphones that are tearing, coming out, & giving me trouble. These headphones are the really, really expensive kind, & one would expect them to have a little more durability in the wear-and-tear department, but that just was not the case here. Well, at least I didn’t have to pay for these headphones myself. They were a free company gift.
I recently (approximately 2months ago) got myself a better pair of Audio Technica noise-cancelling earbuds. I have been using them for about two months already, & I am loving these earbuds more than the headphones.
Ok, I am trying to find a way to tie off this blog post, but can’t think of anything witty or clever, so I’m just going to stop writing. Cheers.
Today’s songof the day:
As a child, I was never very fond of stuffed animals (a.k.a. plushes). I was always led to believe that they attract loads of dust, germs, & bacteria, which will lead to further chaos in my battle against allergies. My mom severely disliked a cluttered bedroom, & always thought those furry little critters made the room look messy & cluttered.
Therefore, throughout my childhood, I only kept one stuffed animal as my furry little sleeping companion. It was a caramel-orange colored kitten with light brown stripes, soft ears & paw pads, & a fluffy white tummy. That was one of my most treasured possessions as a child, not only because of it’s infinite cuteness & cuddliness, but also because my beloved grandmother gave it to me as a gift. I still have that same stuffed animal to this very day. It is wrapped in tissue paper, boxed, & carefully stored away in our home’s storage closet. I hope to keep this treasured stuffed animal for many years (perhaps even generations) to come.
This brings me to current times. As you can clearly see from the name of my blog, I am a huge lover of both rabbits & foxes. I’m not quite sure how I came to love both animals together, especially since foxes have a penchant for hunting rabbits. My earliest memory is from my youth, when my oldest brother had a pet rabbit. It was a dark chocolate brown color & was quite a mischievous little one. My brother’s rabbit was incredibly adorable & relatively well-behaved with a slight naughty streak. Since then, I fell in love with rabbits.
As for foxes, I fell in love with them after reading my all-time favorite Japanese comic book series (a.k.a. manga) called XXX Holic. This comic book series made various spiritual & mythical references to foxes, & that just ensnared me straight away. I just fell head over heels in love with the spiritual nature of foxes as well as their beauty.
Combining my two loves together, I created the title Rabbits & Foxes. It began a couple of years ago with my feeble & half-assed attempt at creating a free website on Wix. Why? A part of me was reminiscing about the late 1990s when everyone was jumping on the Yahoo! GeoCities bandwagon & making their own fan pages. (I remember those good ol’ days, when you could slap a bunch of JPEGs on a colorful background with rainbow-colored text & call it a fan page.) Another part of me was actually trying to make my own personal stamp on the World Wide Web. I was overly ambitious, & strapped on britches that were way to big for my petite size.
It was well after that failed attempt in which I created this blog. I was following Jian on a business trip to Shanghai, China & had nothing to do except stay in our hotel room on a day full of severe lightning storm warnings. So, I made up my mind to start a photo journal of my two week trip. I promised myself from that point on that I would diligently stick to this blog. Being the weirdo that I am, I came up with the idea of collecting trinkets & other useless things to go along with my rabbit & fox theme.
My first pieces to my small collection were these two felt figurines that I bought online. I haven’t given them a name yet. So far I just call them Rabbit and Fox. I am very picky regarding the things I collect, so my “collection” is pretty sparse at this moment. I recently acquired these two new additions to my themed collection.
Irving
Gaspard
best friends
The rabbit plush takes a bit of explaining. It starts with my niece. She has a larger version of this exact stuffed animal that she sleeps with every single night. She plays with this stuffed animal daily, & it has become one of her most prized & treasured toys. I frequently like to tease my niece (all in fun, of course) & hide this stuffed animal behind my back, which makes her hyper-excited & chase me around the house to get it back. For fun, I got this smaller version of her favorite stuffed toy, which she named Bun Bun, just to match with her & to show her that I got my own stuffed rabbit. She was over-the-moon when she saw my toy. She told me that now I have to get all the other small sized plushes of all of her other stuffed toys to match her. I named my stuffed rabbit Irving, but my niece calls it Bun Bun (to match her toy’s name).
I got the fox a few days ago as a little Christmas present to myself. My niece immediately took a liking to it, especially because it makes a rattling sound. (Yes, I bought myself an infant’s plush from the baby section at the toy shop.) There was a larger stuffed animal version of this fox, but I decided to stay with the small size trend. I love this fox because it doesn’t look to overly cartoonish or babyish. It’s just the right amount of cute. I also named this fox Gaspard. As you can tell already, I like naming all of my inanimate objects. I don’t think this is weird at all contrary to whatever Jian might say. I think it’s rather fun & unique. I’d much rather say, “Can you bring Richard over here?”, instead of saying “Can you bring me my iPad?”. Or I’d rather say, “Can you get Stephan for me?”, instead of saying “Can you get me my phone charger?” Doesn’t that just sound more interesting? I think so. I’m so happy I have new mascots for my blog! Let’s all welcome Irving & Gaspard!! Cheers!
Today’s song of the day:
The other day I was eating lunch at one of my favorite cafés, & I was pleasantly surprised by what I witnessed. There were two high school girls sharing their sandwiches with each other (it was a National holiday, so no school for kids). What surprised me was one of the girls said to the other girl, “Let’s put our phones away, so we can have an actual conversation.” That truly shocked me, that there are kids in the Millenial generation willing to put down their smartphones & talk face-to-face with another human being.
Today, I’m back at my local big box coffee shop, writing this blog. I have a difficult time writing at home; mostly, I don’t feel any motivation whatsoever when I’m at home to write anything. I come out to my neighborhood coffee shop, buy an adequate cup of coffee & a less-than-filling pastry, plug in a pair of headphones I confiscated from Jian into my iPod, & begin my mediocre blog writing. Usually I would say that the heavy foot traffic, loud noise, & warm atmosphere coupled with my iPod’s music is what gets my creative juices flowing, but I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. My house is rarely quiet, mostly cold & drafty, but I’ve got a great portable radiator heater to keep me toasty, & I’ve got an immensely larger music playlist on my home computer compared to my small iPod. Somehow, amongst all this outside raucous, I feel most at peace, quiet, isolated (but not alone), & happy to escape for an hour or two.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
I am so excited for this year’s rainy weather. I am not even going to bother with seasons. I can’t even tell what season we’re in over here on the West Coast. We had no rain at all during last year’s winter, hardly three or four frosty days, then got slammed right into spring, which quickly evolved into summer. Summer was impossibly long this year. What is especially true for the area I live in is that we hardly have any sweltering hot days during our summer months. Real summer weather arrives later for my area. We get approximately two weeks of true Indian Summer between September and October. Then, autumn falls down on us like a ton of bricks. The thick marine layer & fog blankets my area quickly throughout the day & turns into windy, chilly nights.
Over the past few weeks, my area has experienced a few rain showers, & one thunder storm, which caused one of my neighbors (two streets down from mine) to have their backyard tree get struck by lightning. The tree got hit by lightning & split in half with one half hitting their roofline. I remember that day clearly because it was raining heavily in the morning, then a thundercloud clapped so loudly that it rattled all of the windows in my house & shook our house a bit. The sound was so loud that I freaked out & hastily ducked under my bed sheets (not that hiding under blankets would’ve done any good). Jian ran out in his pajamas to check on the rest of the house. I’ve never seen him rush out of the room faster. Later that night, we heard about our neighbors & their lightning struck tree on the evening news. The whole experience was both frightening AND exciting at the same time.
I can’t wait to experience more rain storms with thunder & lightning again. I enjoy watching lightning when it rains. The sound of thunder initially startle me, but I enjoy it once I get used to the sound. I also enjoy going out in the rain. I like being in the car when it’s raining, although I do not like driving in the rain. Driving in the rain, especially by myself, practically terrifies me. I don’t mind if it’s Jian driving though. He has nearly impeccable driving skills (& manners)…especially when it’s raining. I can’t say that I enjoy the frizzy hair part of going out in the rain. My hair gets frizzy the second it encounters anything humid or wet, & I don’t just look like a wet Saint Bernard, I look like a rag doll that’s been dragged through a briar patch by my hair. No amount of hair product, hair brushing, or hair styling can pull my hair out of its frizzy, sloppy, rat’s nest. That’s the only part I cannot stand about rainy weather, but I bet that’s how many ladies feel as well.
It’s a sunny day today. It’s by no means a warm day; the temperatures have been steadily dropping recently, & I hope the weather gets even colder as the days go by. I’m supposed to be going to Disneyland again this Thanksgiving with my nephew & niece. We all go as a family to Disneyland every year as a Thanksgiving tradition, per my older brother’s insistence. Every time we go, it’s always hot. It’s almost December! How can it be hot in December?!?! That’s so not cool (no pun intended). Well, I’m off to enjoy the bright sunshine…and bask in the chilly air with my comfy scarf. Cheers.
Today’s song of the day:
Rabbits & Foxes 
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