Spend the weekend at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. My cousin Ping had a relatively small wedding of maybe 60-70 people - mostly family. Seeing uncles, aunts & cousins year after year - watching people grow up, grow older, grandparents passing away, kids getting married, kids having kids ... this weekend was a meaningful one for our family. A festive and light-hearted affair - done with a distinctive Chu family style and flair - oh it can't be duplicated, and I think it may give the Portokalos family a run for the money ... but yeah, very nice. I'll hafta let Heather & Ian & Derrick read this page sometime. Hehe, that'd be weird. Oh, we took some goofy pics, so I'll post them later. Finished the Everest story. Its a gripping non-fiction story - the author writes well. I found some quotable (?), thought-provoking passages that I'd like to post ...

"In the midst of all the postmortem ratiocination, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that climbing mountains will never be a safe, predictable, rule-bound enterprise. This is an activity that idealizes risk-taking; the sport's most celebrated figures have always been those who stick their necks out the farthest and manage to get away with it. Climbers, as a species, are simply not distinguished by an excess of prudence. And that holds especially true for Everest climbers: when presented with a chance to reach the planet's highest summit, history shows, people are surprisingly quick to abandon good judgment. ...

(several pages later ... )

Nevertheless, it had taken Herrod seventeen hours to climb from the South Col to the summit. Although there was little wind, clonds now enveloped the upper mountain, and darkness was fast approaching. Completely alone on the root of the world, extremely fatigued, he must have been out of [bottled] oxygen, or nearly out. "That he was up there that late, with nobody else around, was crazy," says his former teammate, Andy de Klerk. "It's absolutely boggling." Herrod had been up on the South Col from the evening of May 9 through May 12. He'd felt the ferocity of that storm, heard the desperate radio calls for help, seen Beck Weathers crippled with horrible frostbite. Early on during his ascent of May 25, Herrod climbed right past the corpse of Scott Fischer, and several hours later at the South Summit he would have had to step over Rob Hall's lifeless legs. Apparently, the bodies made little impression on Herrod, however, for despite his lagging pace and the lateness of the hour he pressed onward to the top. There was no further radio transmission from Herrod after his 5:15 call from the summit. "We sat waiting for him at Camp Four with the radio on," O'Dowd explained in an interview published in the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian. "We were terribly tired and eventually fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning at about 5:00 a.m. and he hadn't radioed, I realised we had lost him." Bruce Herrod is now presumed dead, the twelfth casualty of the season.

For myself ... these passages carried the biggest thrust in the book. I've never climbed a mountain, but the adventurous, conquering spirit by which these people are motivated - I think this is a common streak of the hero in the veins of humanity - echoed in stories such as David's mighty men, Homer's Odyssey, the knights of lore, movies of this century, as well as in true adventures - countless explorers who foray into the unknown, seeking the edge of the world or to see what's on the other side of this great expanse. A common thirst for adventure and triumph for dreaming boys and men alike. Hehe, and this is pretty funny to me- but the antithesis of this- is mom calling in the boy for dinner from an afternoon of make-believe conquest - put the dream on hold Joey, its dinner time. The voice of caution and safety (the female voice?) that says, "don't do it! it's too risky!" And at some point in life - there's a time to silence the voice, and just go for it - balls out living, as my friends call it. Because if that never happens, maybe a boy has effectively been castrated by fear and caution - fear of pain, fear of the unknown. He'll never know anything about himself - what he's capable of, what his limits are. ... but at what point does that become just ludicrousness? At what point does it become sheer folly and stupidity? At what point does it cross from bravery and courage into madness and irrationality? And perhaps that's why Everest is an intriguing proposition. It's there, and it offers to expose that fine line in a person's choices and character. When maybe true determination and resolve is reflected not in the cojones to push forth no matter what the cost, but in the painfully prudent decision to turn around a mere 300 ft. from the top of the earth - tens of thousands of dollars sunk, years of training, weeks of acclimitization, countless nights of dreaming, the sheer physical toll of spending days at 26,000+ ft., what a PRICE! - and THE goal, THE conquest is a mere stone's throw away ... and to turn around? Maybe the real heroism doesn't always involve getting the glory - but unless one gets placed in that situation in the first place, there'll never be a chance to find out. Hmm. Michael Jordan says "I can accept failure, but I can't accept not trying." Maybe just as much as there's a lesson to be learned about taking risks, there's an equally valuable lesson to be learned about failing. But we never get a chance to learn the second lesson unless we learn the first lesson, first.