about me
i get chills looking back at these photos from one of our first mauerpark karaokes, 10 years ago. photos from “before the plague”, back when it was ok to sit brushing shoulders with a stranger, passing bottles along the row. this reality seems so far away, so distant now.
– fuchsia dunlop gave a talk about gong bao chicken, telling the story of the dish and its permutations in different provinces, and i’ve been thinking about it for a few days. the next time we visit asia, i want to do a better job of learning about dishes and trying new things — there’s so much to discover!
– the daffodils are popping off the ground and blooming! been spending a bit more time in the garden lately, just 15mins or so per day, weeding and pruning, getting some vitamin D and getting stuff ready for planting. it’s unlikely we’ll go anywhere before the end of the year, so maybe it’s time to grow stuff again.
– the boy turned 40, and we spent the day stuffing ourselves with nice food, birdwatching and solving a murder mystery.
– looking back at miguel araújo’s 2020 new year’s concert in porto, and being almost hypnotized by the crowds and by the energy of it all, wondering when scenes like this will be possible again.
– we finished watching good omens, and i enjoyed it a lot. the story is nice, but the 2 main characters make the show.
walking around ljubljana 10 years ago, looking for signs of spring.
february was rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. many missed days, but also some good stuff.
chatting with friends far away, system updates gone wrong (but saved by backups!), new birds, zoom overload, chinese new year, perseverance on mars, chinese classes, food experiments… and mr. rogers, making us see the good in the world once more. :)
– my mom got the first dose of the vaccine, and this was the best news of the week year so far! knowing that people we love are safe is just the best. <3 it might take a while yet, but i can’t wait to hug her again.
– wore my it’s never aliens tshirt for the first time, and it was brilliant.
– in an effort to make the drudgery of replying to emails more palatable, i’ve made my peanut butter consumption dependent on number of emails replied, at the rate of 1 peanut butter teaspoon per 10 emails. it’s been a good strategy, not just to curb my consumption of the stuff (which is like crack to me), but also to make me amazingly productive all week (email-wise at least), even stocking up on extra spoons for the weekend! productivity gurus should just hire me as a consultant. :D
– was getting kind of tired of seeing my own white hairs in video calls, so decided to paint my hair at home with a kit from the supermarket. cheaper, and not a total disaster as I had feared!
– had to study this video for chinese class this week, about what used to be called “leftover women”. pressure by parents to marry off their children in china is still as high as i remember it 10 years ago, though the kids seem to be alright.
– new yarn for my first ever sweater arrived!
– and on a sad note, my godmother passed away this week. she was in her early 60s, recently retired after being a nurse and caring for others all her life. she was single, well-traveled and awe-inspiring to me as a kid — i admired her talents in different crafts, but also her fierce independence. early last year, she started complaining of headaches, but postponed getting checked due to the lockdown until they became unbearable… and a tumour in her brain was discovered. months of painful treatments ensued but to no avail, as is often the case — just a slow, excruciating decline into death. a stark and painful reminder of the overall unfairness of life, and of how much we keep living on borrowed time, postponing things to a “later” that might never come.
as someone once said, “there’s only one age: alive.”