(wow, my third post of the day -- rare for me)

My parents and sister have used TracFone prepaid wireless phones for years, so I thought I'd give them a try to fill my cell phone needs while in America. We'll be here for six weeks, and then from time to time in years to come.

There are three cost components to using TracFone: you must buy a phone, buy service time, and buy minutes. The latter two are combined into minutes that expire some months or years after you buy them.

Last weekend, while [...]

"Yuck Hwe", that is.

Today we ate dinner at one of our favorite Bay-Area restaurants, the decidedly low key (one step above "hole in the wall") Secret Garden Korean restaurant in Santa Clara. Although we hadn't been there in years, the waitress recognized us and immediately guessed correctly that we wanted to order Yuck Hwe (also written in other ways, such as "yukhoe" -- our menu had "Yuck Hwe" -- but in any case, pronounced similar to "YOU-kay").

Yuck hew is raw marinated beef served very cold, with a raw egg on top, and julienned [...]

Can anyone recommend a good preschool near Cupertino, CA (ZIP: 95014) that's open now and has availability through to the end of next month? The phone book is full of them, so we've started checking around, but by the time we get through them the summer will be over.

Besides the basics of clean, safe, caring, blah blah blah, it's important to us that the environment be predominantly Amerian English, since Anthony's English development is one of the reasons we're here. If most of the teachers and kids have thick accents with improper grammar, it wouldn't be the [...]
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I want to give a big "thumbs up" to Pro Window & Carpet Cleaning of Mountain View, California (1-888-470-6623). A real-estate agent friend who uses them to give the houses he lists a thorough cleaning recommended them to clean my long-vacant house (full of dust and spiders and cooties).

I met the foreman at my place at 8:00 this morning, and he gave an estimate for cleaning all the floors, counter and furniture surfaces, wiping down the doors and baseboards and moldings, cleaning air vents, and a full workup of the bathrooms and the fridge. For all but [...]

Yesterday was another day of travel, as we moved from Ohio to California.

Due to jet lag, I got about three hours of sleep and awoke at 3am. Fumie didn't do much better. Anthony awoke at 7am just as we were starting to drift back to sleep. Oh well, it looks to be a loooooong day ahead.

In the end, we arrived without too much trouble, but it was somewhat of an ordeal at times.

We called the hotel's front desk for luggage assistance (we had a lot) at 11am, but it was a busy time and they [...]
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