May 19, 2005
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Well, yesterday started out as a pretty good day for me. Unfortunately I found out later in the day that Mixygirl, Toro, and Greedy's grandfather had just passed away. Obviously I offer them my condolences. Fortunately Grandpa Wu lived a pretty extraordinary life. With only an elementary school education, he started a company in Taiwan called Uni-President. It started out just making flour for noodles, but over the years has become a multinational food conglomerate on par with such companies as Nestle foods. Not only was he a very succesful businessman, he was very well known in Taiwan for his philanthropy and even held a televised award show every year honoring people who sacrifice in order to take care of their elderly parents.
Earlier in the day, after a meeting at Torrance Memorial I headed back to UCLA Center for Health Sciences to say hi to old friends on the way to the bookstore. This is a picture my residency hospital, and on the right is the difficult to find ER entrance.
After walking by the ambulance loading zone, I headed to the ER. Fortunately I got to say hi to a lot of familiar faces. Due to the shortage of nurses in our country, staff can turn over quite frequently, so it was good to see some left that were my friends. The pic on the right is of the trauma room, where I saw many people have their lives saved, or in other cases die despite maximum treatment.
Across the street, they are building a new hospital. The old one needs to be torn down due to structural instability from the Northridge earthquake. Unforunately as you can see, they named it after a Republican (at least its not Dubya). The new hospital is going to be state of the art. It was designed by I.M. Pei. Unfortunately when the plans were being drawn up for the new building it was economically wise to build a hospital with less beds to keep staffing costs low. Unfortunately the big problem in today's hospital world is not having enough beds. They will attempt to respond to this problem by building a bigger UCLA-Santa Monica hospital, and having some of the patients hospitalized there instead.
To end on a lighter note, on the left is a picture of Mixygirl and my Mom on our belated Mother's Day dinner. For dessert, Mixy made an incredible grand marnier souffle with chocolate caramel sauce. She did a great job despite being tipsy after drinking too much sake at dinner. On the right are Swiss Army shoulder bags. Toro alluded to the fact that I carry one of these suckers wherever I go. They are indeed the perfect man-purse. However the one I've been using for the past few years has been getting frayed. I've looked everywhere and could only find red and purple colored replacements (BARF!!!). Fortunatley at UCLA bookstore I stumbled upon the perfect next generation replacement.
Comments (8)
Cool post. Amazing story on Grandpa Wu. Why didn't you just get a new Victorinox messenger bag off E-bay?
Did you say that Kapono peed on your bag? Or was that a different bag?
I try to limit my ebay purchases because I think it's always chancy. Sometimes, you want to make sure you are getting what you paid for. If it's a healthy discount I may go to ebay. It it's a huge discount, then I'm really suspicious.
Your bag is readily available at ebags.com for $39.99 -- 33% off. In black, brown and a nasty green color.
http://www.ebags.com/victorinox_swiss_army/lugano/product_detail/index.cfm?modelid=20163
I think the company actually started out making animal feed actually (for chickens, shrimp, pigs, etc).
I can't believe that there are still buildings around from the Northridge quake that are unstable. Oh wait, we still have the non-earthquake-proof Bay Bridge here from the Loma Prieta quake.
Tinky Winky carries around a purple bag, and we all know what that means.
Are you referring to the Teletubby?
Kapono peed on my other bag, the skater birdhouse backpack. I also replaced that with a Dakine backpack and a UCLA backpack.
The noodle flour anecdote, I got from the website.
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