but the year ended in a more sour note, with both this never-ending crisis and sickness affecting our families in a cruel way. as for 2012, i only wish to have the strength to make this a good year, no matter what life throws at us.

i was thinking about this yesterday, while watching the pyrotechnic pitched battle taking place in front of the brandenburg tor. we were a bit far to see the actual city fireworks, but the display that surrounded us was equally dramatic and much more nerve-wracking. here’s what it looked like, straight from the boy’s phone (starts a bit before midnight):

happy new year!

german classes, christmas markets and mittens warmed up by cups of glühwein, lunch concerts at the philarmonie, baking, christmas parties, daytrips outside berlin… it feels good to be busy, always on the run, but right now i wish life would slow down a little bit, just enough for me to process it all.

amit gupta, the founder of photojojo (with who postcrossing had a long lasting partnership) found out some weeks ago that he had acute leukemia. it’s a very serious condition, and he needs a bone marrow transplant. problem is, amit is south asian, and south asians are severely under-represented in the bone marrow pool. he has little time left to find a donor.

so, i want to ask you to get tested. if you’re in germany, register here and get a free kit. if you’re in portugal, read this or visit your local hospital (might be faster). if you’re in the netherlands, go here. people in other places, please see this post. registering only takes a couple of minutes, and even if you’re not south asian, or amit’s match, you might help save some kid’s life.

i will send a thank you postcard to any person who does get tested. do it and then leave a comment below – or better yet, share it with your friends! but please do it fast, because time is running out for amit, and others out there!

ps – if you need further incentive to stop stalling, seth godin is offering a $10k reward to the donor that matches amit.

mine did too, to a certain extent, but never fully. and then about 3 weeks ago, after a trip to ikea, it came back full force and with a vengeance. i could barely walk or turn in bed, and even loaded on painkillers, it was excruciating. so we got some heat patches, and took a trip home, almost directly to the emergency room.

an x-ray and an mri later, and my doctor told me i have a spinal disc herniation. basically, the cushion between my vertebras has been abused and is being forced out of its place and into my spinal canal, pressing on the sciatic nerve. this is what makes my leg hurt. it looks like this:

the treatment? well, after a week of rest, a cocktail of drugs and a shot of corticosteroids, i am almost as good as new, pain-wise. the doctor says this won’t ever go away, i’ll just have to learn how to live with it, which includes not doing heavy lifting or sitting for long periods, and strengthening the lower back. so i’m taking up light swimming this summer, doing some back exercises and just generally taking it easy. if you spend a lot of time sitting down, you should too!

it never gets old! :)

all in all though, i liked the idea of having this big list with a set deadline – it didn’t shape my future, but it did focus me on certain goals. the second list took me a lot more time to draft, as i’ve struggled to remain more practical and make sure all the items are all “doable”. i really want to do better this time.

so, 101 fresh things for the next 1001 days:

• Do the HSK intermediate
• Make a pinhole & take some photos with it
• Take calligraphy/handwriting lessons
• Draw a font
• Read 50 new books (half of which in portuguese)
• Write 750 words for a month
• Spend a week offline
• Reach my goal weight
• Be ok in snowboarding
• Write 20 letters
• Write/draw a small guide to Ljubljana/Slovenia
• Research about Slovenia/Balkans history
• Identify 10 different trees
• Taste 30 different fruits
• Taste 20 different cheeses
• Try a autocaravan holiday
• Visit a volcano
• Fly on a glider
• Learn how to scuba dive
• Visit a mail sorting facility
• Draw and get a tattoo
• Visit a theme park
• Volunteer
• Do a photobook of our time in Slovenia
• Try 25 different teas
• Do a medical checkup
• Go to the dentist
• Draw a comic strip
• Write 20 lists
• Find 150 geocaches
• Apply to the green card lottery november 2010
• Visit 20 Unesco sites: historic areas of istanbul, october 2010
• Fly a kite
• Visit 15 different museums
• Do 5 videos
• Go to 20 concerts
• Watch a sport event live
• Climb 10 Slovenian mountains: tromeja, ratitovec
• Hot air balloon ride
• Go rafting/canoeing
• Roadtrip in the EU: slovenia-austria-germany-netherlands, september 2010
• Be halfway through our house goal fund
• Move again
• Do 20 surprises: bday parcel
• Find out what I want to do related with stationery
• Sponsor an artist on Kickstart
• Make ice cream from scratch
• Buy some Christmas lights to decorate
• Do a secret art project in the city
• Go see an opera
• Go see a ballet
• Sell something on etsy and use the money to buy something there
• Go an entire month without eating out
• Go an entire month without using a car (not even friend’s cars)
• View all of Star Wars movies october 2010
• Donate five dollars to wikipedia for each goal failed
• Track the progress of every item on the blog
• Fill my recipes notebook with recipes
• Get a Fuji Instax and start documenting our life
• Feel a baby kick inside a friend’s belly
• Try to eat local for a week
• Start laser hair removal
• Take a cooking class
• Use all the yarn I have
• Design and print a postcard
• Write something for a newspaper
• Review 25 pieces of stationery
• Lose the jumping habit
• Try 20 different sodas
• Go karting
• Blog at least 3 times a week for 3 months
• Put 200 meals on Foodspotting
• Go see the sea organ in Zadar
• Make 5 surprise breakfasts
• Drastically reduce the amount of coffee I drink
• Ride a ferris wheel
• Carve a rubber stamp
• Try sledding
• Create an herb garden
• Redesign meiadeleite.com
• Host 10 people through Couchsurfing
• Write a letter to someone once a week for 10 weeks
• Learn to cook 10 new soups: mushroom soup
• Design a tshirt
• Fill a notebook with notes from books/articles
• Straighten up the SS details + get EU health card
• Get the surgery done
• Do NaNowriMo (for the blog) once
• Learn how to do sushi
• Fix hanzillion and plan half a year of posts
• Cook pad thai
• Organize a tea swap
• Track our calories for a month
• Pick a holiday and go overboard on the celebrations
• Make a cute bento box
• Shoot only in black and white for a month
• Ride a scooter
• Buy a Dr. Seuss book
• Try 10 different types of film
• Buy something on a flea market
• Try currywurst in Berlin

some of the things i’ve already completed while the list was still a draft, like watching the whole set of star wars movie (pfeeew!), but i’ve only started the official countdown a few days ago, so the new deadline is set for jul 30, 2013. wish me luck! :)

ps – if you’re thinking of doing one, head over to dayzeroproject.com for inspiration from other people’s lists!

“it’s my party
and i’ll cry if i want to
cry if i want to
cry if i want to
you would cry too
if it happened to you!”

this song has been stuck in my head the whole day. it’s the same thing year after year: i only remember it on my birthday! :)

this sounds strange, but i’ve actually been telling people i’m 28 for a whole year already… my brain somehow didn’t get used to 27, and skipped ahead. i didn’t mind. 28 sounded better than 27, the way even numbers always seem to. very chinese, now that i think about it!

anyway, to do something different today, we drove to murska sobota and had gibanica, slovenia’s national cake, disguised as a birthday cake. it’s quite heavy, but i enjoy the mixture of flavours:

and as you can see, i got a drawing tablet from paulo as a bday present, and put it to good use already! :)

:)

this time around, i’m running our of time to complete my list of101 things in1001 days. may 2010 sounded really far away three years ago, so my dream list included lots of traveling which ended up not happening according to the plans (other places were visited instead), and there are some things that made sense at the time and which now don’t (getting a piano, for instance). i’m focusing on the rest of the items right now, and i want to do as many as i can till then. to start, today we subscribed the economist and i crossed another item off the list. feels good. :)

i’ll be adding other items to my 2010 to-do list. this year, i want to explore slovenia to the last page of our lonely planet book and beyond, i want to go hiking and snowboarding on its mountains. and i want to use the holga more, and start new projects. and…

what about you? any plans or lists? :)