Ski trip!

Went with the Singaporean association at Stanford to Lake Tahoe this weekend to ski. Was quite fun, Saturday had really fantastic weather, and from the mountain you can see the lake and on the other side you can see the plains of Nevada surrounded by mountains. Great stuff. :) Sunday morning we awoke to find it snowing, and it didn't stop snowing the entire day. Apparently the snow was from a storm that came from the Gulf of Alaska... I cut short my skiing time 'cos the weather made skiing kinda unpleasant. The drive back was amazingly terrible - first they had chain control through the mountains, so there was stop-and-go traffic that backed up so far that we were probably in the traffic for 3 hours, maybe even more. Then just as we were about to pass chain control into the mountains, they stopped the traffic completely - apparently some car had taken a spin on the mountain. So for at least an hour, we sat in traffic not moving at all. Meanwhile the snow was coming down really heavily outside and with really strong winds. I must say it was kind of exciting to drive through the mountain during the storm though.

So we set off from Tahoe at 2:30pm, and what should have been a 4-5 hour drive became a 10 hour journey (including a 1 hr stop for dinner). Skipped my morning classes this morning to sleep, was really tired last night when I went to bed. Didn't get a good rest both nights that we were at Tahoe either. So, skiing was fun. But I was exhausted when I got back... and I'm actually still kinda tired now. Econ 52 midterm this week. Sigh. :/

Random post

It's been stormy today. Wind and rain, fallen tree branches etc. The main storm was supposedly yesterday - apparently it came out in Singapore papers. Winds of up to 70mph on the Golden Gate Bridge, gusts of wind topping over 100mph in Los Gatos (somewhere not tooooo far from Stanford) but somehow Stanford wasn't too bad. Which is good. But also makes me feel a bit like I'm missing out on the excitement. Apparently the wind was so strong at San Rafael that it blew over two to three 18-wheelers onto their sides on the San Rafael Bridge, somewhere over in the East Bay. I guess we're blessed that Stanford was spared the power outages and dangerous winds. Would've been exciting though. :P

Check it out on the news:
"Fiercest Storm in 5 Years Hits Bay Area"

Below (rather randomly) is an excerpt from today's entry into my (spiritual) diary that I've started keeping just before I came back to Stanford in Sep last year (that's 2007, for those who haven't yet adjusted to the idea of 'this' year being 2008):

Trust God. That’s different from trusting that things will turn out well. Sometimes we think that trusting that other people will take care of things is equivalent to trusting God, but that’s trusting other people. Yes, God is bigger, but somehow the whole idea of “God = everything beyond our control” isn’t entirely accurate. ‘Cos other people are beyond our control. And God gives them free will to make the decisions they want to make regardless of whether they’re the same choices He would like them to make. And somehow, despite that, it’s also true that God is bigger than other people – sometimes it seems like I can trust Him to work through or around others, and sometimes it seems like I can’t. That bit doesn’t seem too important right now – I guess God’s main point to me is trust Him. Not a blanket trust that things will always go well, but trust Him. Specifically Him.