On Wednesday morning, I drove onto toll lane on I-405 Southbound as usual. While approaching Downtown Bellevue, I heard the traffic reporter at Spirit 105.3 warning a huge backup from 44th street down to 8th street in Bellevue. With a couple of seconds calculating on my mind, I decided to get out of the freeway from the Exit of 6th street. Going through the street of west side of I-405, I eventually took a turn to get over the freeway to its eastside and drove onto Lake Hill Connectors through which I had never driven before. The road was fairly open and the view was pretty.
Not having a chance to log onto Navigation on my cell phone, I followed my intuition to get onto 148th street to get over I-90 to reach Highland Drive. The neighborhood was quiet and beautiful, I remember Buchan Home developed a housing project in this area back in early 2000. During those years, I was very interested in luxury houses.
Driving through ups and downs, I eventually got back to the main road and crossed over I-405 to downtown Renton, then arrived at the parking lots in longacre. It took me one hour and a half on the road, which was not very bad given the huge backup.
Coming back home to have dinner, I posted a photo in our chat group with my classmates at CUMT. They were wondering why I had two dishes of Tofu. I explained that one was a dried Tofu, another was a mix of tofu and seafood, my mother bought them at Ranch 99 Chinese Super Market.
After the dinner, I slept for several hours until 10:00pm, then read that one of my classmates took a year of graduate study of economics years ago. That triggered my interests to share my academic ambitions in 90s when I planned to tackle a PhD. My classmate mentioned his tutor was a Chinese professor who wrote several books of modern finance. From the Chinese names he posted, I guessed the books talked about Volatility and Derivatives. It sounded the contents of the books focused on stock markets instead of modern economic theories. This is why PhD in Economic is often combined with PhD in Finance because the latter can motivate the candidates financially, though I don't think this adds much value academically. Financial modelings are the applications of mathematical economic theories.
One of my dorm buddies felt that it might be too old for me to keep talking academic studies by teasing me with a story in a famous Chinese novel written by a well respected author 350 years ago. That story depicted a person trying to get an educational reward in those years probably equivalent to a high school diploma nowadays. At age of 50, he passed the exam and got the title. He became crazy and kept screaming "I got it, I got it!". I actually just looked at my bookshelf and found the book I bought and read at the age of 15 in 1981. This illustration in that book was for the above-mentioned story:
These are the cover and back of this novel and the price was RMB 1.35 back in 1981, at today's exchange rate, it was only 20 cents.
I explained to my dorm buddy that it is very crucial to obtain new knowledge in US because this country is knowledge based. Many processes of professional jobs are built on the knowledge students learn in college. Of course, economics research is my personal interest. Definitely, getting more academic credentials is not relevant at all for my career development at the age of 50, I am actually waiting for the time of retirement to come sooner than later. However, keep obtaining new knowledge and applying old one are still significant.
I didn't have chance to go to gym on Wednesday night again after Tuesday. Though I said I would go as soon as they opened at 5 the following morning, I couldn't go eventually because I wouldn't get up until 7:00 am.
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