Pick three words to describe this past year. (please keep them PG. Thanks).
Crappy, sucky, boring
Continue reading “Share Your World – Week of December 28, 2020” →
My Dear 10-year-old Self,
It seems like just yesterday you landed at the terminal of the LAX. I bet you feel like an alien – unable to understand the language and the environment is certainly not what you’ve expected – but I tell you, you’re going to get through this. There are lots of adventures waiting ahead. There are obstacles, too, but I’m telling you, you’re going to get through it.
Continue reading “Letter to Self: 19 Christmases and Counting” →
I love driving especially after I got my new car in 2018. In 2017, that wasn’t the case. I hated my commute back then, hated the fact that I had to everyday sit through miles and miles of crawling traffic listening to the same song playing on the radio, hated the fact that I couldn’t pick my own hours so I didn’t have to endure peak-hour traffic, hated my job period.
That was 2017. I got my current job in 2018 and no longer need to drive to work. I could take public transit for free. It’s why it took me over 2 years to get 10,000 miles on my brand new car.
Now is 2020 and my commute changed again. I no longer need to be in the office 5 days a week. I am now only required to go in one day a week aka Wednesday and because of the pandemic situation, I needed to switch back to driving, which I actually love because it allows me to get out of the house and away from mom.
Instead of 5 things I miss about driving to work, here are 5 things I miss about commuting to work:
Mr. C stares at the sign and sighs. Still gone as it has been for 50 years. He’s stranded in this desolate place as his brain kept wandering back to that fateful night. What went wrong? “I triple-checked that spirit-meter, didn’t I?” He muttered.
Continue reading “Friday Fictioneers: The Stranded Mr. C” →
This week’s Blogging Insights – hosted by Tanya at Salted Caramel – asks:
Continue reading “Blogging Insights # 60 — Blog Organization” →
What is your favorite type of cookie (they’re called biscuits in Europe I believe)?
There are two kinds of cookies I love – the soft, melt-in-your-mouth cookies and the cakey cookies. My favorites are snickerdoodle and my homemade chocolate chip cookies especially if they’re still warm.
Continue reading “Share Your World – Week of December 21, 2020” →
When I think of the holidays at the end of the year, I think of the wonderful and marvelous light displays at local parks. Not only are the lights pretty, it allows me to practice my night photography and bokeh photography on my wide-aperture lens.
Continue reading “Lens-Artists Challenge #128: And Here Comes the Holiday Season” →
I am fairly new to the “Guilty Pleasure” food world since I had just got out of a life-long relationship with diets. For a long while, I didn’t allow myself to be indulged in aesthetically pleasing foods. Instead, I obsessed over nutrition label and would stay away with any foods that either had chemical preservatives, ridiculous amount of sugar, or had an insane amount of “empty” calories where the more I consume, the hungrier I’d get.
Continue reading “My 5 Guilty Pleasure Foods” →
Since coming back from blogging after a long hiatus, I’ve discovered quite a few new blogging challenges. My initial plan when I first decided to come back to the land of blogging was to write mostly original materials and not rely on participating in challenges but can I help it? These are fun, interesting, and helps me to not only get to know my fellow bloggers but helps me discover bloggers with similar interests.
Continue reading “Blogging Insights # 59 — Blogging Personas” →
What news event do you vividly remember hearing about as a child, and where were you?
Continue reading “Share Your World – Week of December 14, 2020” →
There is something about nature that if you manage to catch it in the right moment and under the right light, it’s so beautiful that you will remember it for the rest of your life. I got the chance to witness such wonder this year during the height of autumn on September 20th. I was so glad I brought my best lens along to capture those moments.
If 2020 has gifted me anything good, it would be the abundance of time spent at home and the lack of opportunity to eat out. This really allowed me to explore the diverse world of food over the world-wide-web. I have fallen in love with so many different dishes and foods I had never thought I would like.
Continue reading “5 Foods I Enjoy Because They Are Good For Me” →
Do you enjoy skiing or ice skating or if it’s warm where you are, hiking or enjoying outdoor sports?
In the recent years, I have become somewhat of an avid hiker though I’m still mostly sticking to easy and moderate level hiking trails – the difficulty is based on alltrails.com.
I would love to try snowshoeing in the back-country. I can imagine it’d be fun and different.
I tried skiing a few years ago. It was a painful experience because I haven’t had the calcium accumulation taken out of my leg which had caused a lot of pain walking in the ski boots. I would love to try again though as I’d think it won’t be as painful now as before.
Do you give to charities or homeless that you might encounter, during this time of year, more than you do otherwise?
I donate when I can – usually to either nature conservation agencies or World Wildlife Fund – it doesn’t matter the time of the year. When I have some spare change, I would donate.
What is the most enjoyable activity you engage in during December? Is it a tradition for you and your family?
Office parties and the 12-days of Christmas hosted yearly by my department.
Is it sad to say those are the only things I enjoy about December? Being from China, my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas or any of the year-end holidays and my mom’s always bitter during this time of the year because there’s always problems with one of her two tenants during November or December.
What changes will C-19 bring to your festive celebrations this year?
All the fun holiday activities at work got canceled – year-end company party has moved to virtual, 12 days of Christmas is canceled, and departmental Christmas dinner has become ordering from DoorDash and virtually sharing meals over some unpredictable and limited internet bandwidths.
Did you know Wi-Fi Extenders don’t speed up or slow down internet? It merely boost the router’s signal so all the nooks and crannies in a house get great wi-fi signal.
Try telling that to my mom.
*rolling eyes and shaking head*
It was a long work day yesterday. I worked for almost 10 hours, encountering problem after problem while my head was still on holiday mode even though I didn’t really experienced any holiday spirit this past week.
The moment my mom found out I’m off the clock, she stomped out of her room and yanked the wi-fi extender out of the wall. I didn’t even hear it. All I heard were stomp, stomp, stomp, a dull thud, and a door slam. Next thing I knew, my wi-fi extender was on the floor.
The night before, like almost every night since I bought the extender, she had complained, “Your damn thing is making the internet slow. I can’t even watch my YouTube videos.” Wah wah wah…
Do you know why I had to get this extender in the first place?
Because the wi-fi signal in my room stinks. The connection is dropping unpredictably during work days – on my laptop, on my phone, even Alexa ignores me as the result of a dropped connection.
Is it possible mom’s taking up my bandwidth. On a typical workday, she’s got 4 devices connected to wi-fi, all streaming videos at the same time. My internet usage app says she spends an average of 15 hours a day streaming YouTube.
It’s crazy, right? Yeah, it’s crazy.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck in my room with my laptop and phone listening to downloaded stuff from Audible, anxiously anticipating the next time my wi-fi connection drops while praying it’s not during a call.
Oh yeah, my internet dropped during a very important call last month. I lost 5 minutes of important conversation trying to get back online. That’s 5 minutes during which I could’ve discussed work stuff that’s been on my mind but instead, by the time I got back online, my boss informed me he’s late for another meeting and gotta go.
And she has the guts to call me selfish. I pay all the bills even though she uses a majority of the utilities. You know what she told me last week, she’s not helping me with the bills (not that she has), she’s putting 65% of her paycheck into retirement. This will probably mean I need to work more overtime hours to give my meager paycheck a boost.
2020, what a year, right? So many things happened this year – pandemic, earthquakes, on-and-off mask mandates, wind storms, social gathering restrictions… but even in this weird pandemic universe we’re living in where Mondays and Fridays are just another day, giving thanks is still an everyday-must and a definite-must on Thanksgiving.
Here are my 5 major thanks for 2020:
Last but not least, I want to thank all the readers of this blogs who followed me through the years. Even though I’ve been away for most of 2020, some of my long-time readers would occasionally comment to check up on me. I am thankful for the thoughtfulness and to have a great bunch of friends in this ever changing blogging universe.
So I have recently started writing on paper again. After such a long time of just typing my thoughts out on a Word document, I was surprised that my hands still knew how to hold a pencil or how to write with one.
It was, as people say, just like riding a bicycle, which is a poor analogy as I don’t know how to ride a bicycle – poor hand-eye coordination, blah blah blah…
Anyway, as I said, I began writing with a pencil (just a good old pencil) and it made me wonder why I ever switched to a mechanical pencil. The simple answer would be pencil sorta became outdated in the mid-90’s (around the time I was in elementary school). I guess all the sharpening and lead breakage got on people’s nerves.
My early experience with a mechanical pencil was a frustrating one – NO ONE told me I was supposed to insert the lead from the side with the eraser, not trying to jam the lead through the tiny opening of the lead-clamp (the small metal piece that was supposed to clamp the lead in place. Let’s just say I broke a lot of lead and ended up with black fingers most of the time.
After I learned (finally) to operate a mechanical pencil, I never went back to the pencil (even though I was strangely gifted with a lot of very weird-looking and sparkly pencils) until these last two weeks, which leads me to this post.
What I like about using a good old pencil:
Compare that to a mechanical pencil:
People may ask, “Why not use a pen, like a normal person?”
Well, unless your thoughts are perfectly clear and not jumbled like mine, go ahead with a pen. I am sticking with the pencil so I don’t have to use a whiteout on every other word I write.
This is Another Story