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July 12, 2020 11:55 AM

End of Vacation

It's Sunday, which means we're nearing the end of my vacation. I visited family, but overall it was a pretty chill week, and more like a staycation than a vacation. I think it was a successful week, though! I managed to do a decent amount of things.

• Ate lobster AND crab legs
• Finished stitching my cross stitch
• Started playing Rakuen
• Made some updates to this site
• Had a family get-together
• Made Pad Thai with my mom and sister
• Played board games
• Read a bunch of articles on personal development
• Started reading Awaken the Giant Within
• Exercised
• Did a 6 mile hike and found some geocaches along the way
• Watched Hamilton
• Did a ropes course
• Celebrated a birthday
• Bought a new journal
• Reorganized my apartment a little

And plenty of other things that I just don't feel like mentioning.

July 6, 2020 7:36 PM

15 years in the making

When I was about 12 years old (okay, I don't really remember how old I was since it was so long ago) I received a cross stitch kit from my aunt (at least I think that's who gave it to me) for my birthday (once again, maybe it wasn't my birthday. maybe it was Christmas, who knows). But anyway, it was a long time ago, and I had never done cross stitch before. Turns out 12 year old self did not have the attention capacity to do a cross stitch. This was also a kind of complicated cross stitch. Definitely not a my-first-cross-stitch cross stitch. It said WELCOME with a bunch of flowers around it. I think I got the WELCOME part done at 12 years old.

    X X X  XXX  X    XX   XX    X X   XXX
    X X X  X    X   X    X  X  X X X  X
    X X X  XXX  X   X    X  X  X X X  XXX
    X X X  X    X   X    X  X  X X X  X
     X X   XXX  XXX  XX   XX   X X X  XXX
     A very very simplistic picture of what I was
     able to do at 12 years old. The actual cross
     stitch has more crosses than this.

At some point, I got bored, and the cross stitch kit sat in storage. Years later I would take it out and add more cross stitches to it. But I still didn't get very far. I did this again years later. And again. I probably had 4 or 5 attempts to actually finish the dumb thing. But I always got bored. So bored. My eyes would glaze over the crosses and I couldn't focus...

Until now! Because staying at home this much means I now have time to finish all the things that I've started years ago. And this cross stitch is the oldest of those things, so I was determined to get this done. And somehow, I've finally been able to get into the right mindset. And it's done. I FINALLY FINISHED MY CROSS STITCH.

15 years in the making.

Next up, cleaning it, ironing it, mounting it, framing it, and putting it on a nice spot on my wall.

July 5, 2020 9:39 AM

Vacation

I'm on vacation! I've been super super busy at work lately, so I'm taking a much needed break before work gets even busier than before. It's fourth of July weekend, which means seafood is on sale. I had lobster two days ago and crab legs yesterday, so I am all shellfished out.

 --------------------- ----------------------------------.
|` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------'
|` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------'
|` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------'
|` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------'
|` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------'
|`   `   `   `   `   `|----------------------------------'
'--------------------------------------------------------'
'--------------------------------------------------------'
'--------------------------------------------------------'
'--------------------------------------------------------'
'--------------------------------------------------------'
'--------------------------------------------------------'
`--------------------------------------------------------'
    I made an ascii art flag! The dimensions might be off,
    but I have the right number of stars and stripes! Also,
    this was a pain in the butt to color.

During this vacation, I'm just trying to relax and work on some fun little projects. I'm very close to finishing a cross stitch I started over 15 years ago (!!) and I've even gone back to editing some code for my Teochew website. So hey, you might be seeing an update sometime soon.

January 5, 2019 7:01 PM

Happy New Year!

It's been a while since my last post because I get lazy around the holidays. But it's a new year now! New Years is one of my favorite holidays because of resolutions. I looked back at my old resolutions that I've made and I realized that I make way too many of them and they're all the same. So I'm trying to focus a little more this year and tackle the one important goal that always eludes me:

Go to sleep early

Of course, there are other things I want to do this year but I think instead of trying to do so many things, I'm going to make my other goal really generic:

Do something productive every day

I'm going to try and actually keep track of my productivity by keeping a journal. I kind of want to try bullet journaling but it seems like way too much work. And hopefully, I'll get back to my food challenge! I have lots of food related ideas so stay tuned.

October 14, 2018 11:36 AM

Mid Year Resolutions: Part 4

What? I'm still making more resolutions? Well, I'm still writing blog posts about new resolutions. I've really had these in my head for a while. Anyway, this should be the last "Mid Year Resolution" post I make.

Learn Mandarin

Hey! I'm supposed to be learning Teochew, not Mandarin! Well it turns out that knowing Mandarin makes it a lot easier to learn Teochew. The nice thing about trying to learn Mandarin is that there are SO many resources available so I don't have to put nearly as much effort into this. Right now I'm trying to do just a little bit of duolingo every day. Once I get past that, I'll move onto another Chinese learning app. It's kind of nice because it allows me to see what characters are the same between Mandarin and Teochew, and what characters are different.

Keep learning Teochew and improving my Teochew app

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about this. I feel like I have so many things I want to accomplish, but this is really at the heart of it all. I still have so many big ideas for how to improve the app while learning things about programming along the way. Right now I'm trying to add ten new words each week. If I have time to make other enhancements to the app, I'll do that too.