apparently i don’t have it in me to upkeep this blog, because months have gone by. the funny thing is that i ‘write’ in my head and just assume that it shows up here. so for any people still clicking to this space, here are some updates on my life…i guess it’s a random collection of reflections.

TRUCKIN’

i am a reading machine. basically after a conscious effort to increase the amount of reading i’m doing, i’m finally back up to my junior high days where i just inhale books. it’s a great feeling!

power yoga. i missed it this week due to the cold (lame excuse, i know…) but kristine teaching on campus has made me more loyal and a stronger person. her class is challenging, and i always feel incredibly centered leaving the room.

work work. most reunions, i’ve been doing a 40-45 hour workweek, which i find normal and just about right. i’m happy with how much time it’s taking out of my life and find my job fulfilling. it’ll be six years on january 3rd that i’ve been at stanford - crazy, huh?

THINGS I’VE LEARNED

my family thinks that i’m far too loud when i watch football. i guess i’m a big fan! texas has had a season of mistakes and it’s been disappointing, but i’m still loyal. what a pleasant surprise that i’ve been able to cheer for stanford!

homemade granola is awesome. we’ve been in cali for more than 5 years, but i’ve finally come to see the joy of granola, yogurt and bananas for breakfast. it’s so easy to make and tasty too!

when given time and space to work on a project, i can really make it amazing. i chaired a workhappy committee at SAA this summer and it went very well, so i’m proud of the final product and happy to get the chance to work with colleagues all over the building.

leith is cool. well, i already knew that, but every day i’m affirmed that we are an amazing partnership that works. our relationship is incredibly rewarding and i’m happy to have a steady partner-in-crime.

AROUND THE CORNER

so i have 8 days left of work and then i’m off to taiwan with leith and my mom. i’ve been planning tons of fun activities, and i’m really looking forward to visiting taiwan again. it’s been so many years and who knows what i should expect?

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wow a lot of happened in august and it feels like a total whirlwind. sorry blog - i owe you some photos from my family’s visit to minnesota and then for vancouver, where we’re headed this week!

minnesota was a lot of fun and great to be in the place where leith grew up on and off. i saw all kinds of cute pictures and finally got to meet his family out there. ruth and todd were amazing hosts and they really took care of us. it was so sunny and warm - i haven’t worn flip flops 5 days in a row probably since college! my favorite parts were getting to know his grandma (we’ve e-mailed before), seeing leith play with his cousins and having a day to hang out with ruth and todd.

the weekends have been filled with friends and fun activities and i’m loving it. again, california continues to feel like home and i have such a good foundation here. it’s good to be this happy with life.

with my busy personal and professional life, one of the big changes i’ve tried to make is to use my google tasks a lot more - i think i’m making headway here. the funniest thing i did was to make a to do list to make a to do list. leith and i have been talking for months (maybe years?) since we’ve been in menlo park to re-institute our "one day list" with travel aspirations and other fun things. i cranked it out this week and it’s up in our dining room. i’m pretty impressed so far with how i’m checking off these kinds of things.

i approach my work life in a much more organized fashion and not as much falls of the plate. at home, i forget to start on crafts, haven’t done the wedding album and a host of other things, so i want to focus on those, too. at a work retreat we did this 2 truths and a wish exercise and it reminded me how i need to carve out time to focus on creative projects, since i love to do that kind of stuff. sometimes we just get stuck in our routines…

so we have 5 days in vancouver and i’m looking forward to it. it’s a bit rainy at the beginning of the week, but we like to hike in the rain. i’ve got a lot of stuff planned for us and it looks like it’ll be a blast.

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so my mom and sister’s visit was a ton of fun. is she really 30? i have trouble believing it… kayaking was exhausting and better than expected, the goats were oh so cute and when our family gets together, it’s always good. i love to make my family exercise, too. muhahaha!

work is going well and i feel like i’m on top of my tasks, which is awesome. chairing the workhappy committee feels productive and like a direct investment of my time here at SAA. it’s been review season and i always like looking over the last year - accomplishments and challenges. in general, life is always better in perspective and when we take a breather to look at the big picture. my big picture is that i feel i’ve done a ton of great stuff and continue to grow within the organization. i love the work itself - alumni education’s definitely my field of interest!

tomorrow we’re off to minnesota and i’ll finally get to meet leith’s family there. i read a moon guide in advance. the closest i’ve been to the state is a connecting flight through st. paul. i learned about the prairieland, the mall of america, how arts-centric it is and also about all the large paul bunyan statues there are. it’ll be nice to connect with his cousins and family, so we’ll have about 4 days of fun there. also on the horizon is our trip to vancouver, which i’ll be planning shortly. can’t wait on that one either!

in other news, i had a doctor’s appointment this week and my blood pressure is not only normal, but kind of excellent. i attribute this wholly to the regular yoga and how it’s continued to remind me to breath deeply and constantly. what a big win and it feels nice to be on top of my health.

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so i’m pretty excited that next week my mom and sister will be here. and it’s kind of strange that my LITTLE sister is turning 30. oh, how the time flies. we’ve got lots of eating, hiking, kayaking and touring planned, so i really can’t wait for the fun to begin.

spirits are more up this week. for one, keith actually reads my blog (i wasn’t sure that anyone but my mom read it…) and responded that he’s planning away.

also, check out the numerous strides i’ve taken to preserve my sanity since our last check-in, much with the help of leith:

canceled the new york work trip
got a haircut
the car has been washed
switched clothes from winter to summer
oil change and smog check today
painted toenails
canceled renter’s insurance
booked a trip to vancouver with leith over labor day

pretty impressive, right? i also feel a bit more caught up at work, which is a good sign. between now and mid-september, i have 3 stints of short time-off for trips, so being on top of things is imperative. in addition to all the to-dos, i went through and scheduled lunches with a ton of people that cheer me up over the next couple of weeks. sometimes all the busy work keeps me at my desk and i had been on a good schedule of regularly lunching with friends outside of my department at least twice a week, so i feel like i’m there again.

i’d love to actually start tackling my wedding scrapbook, doing some paper cutting (which i’ve declared to be my new hobby, even though i haven’t started) and focus on more fun stuff. i don’t consider those to be things that stress me out, but instead as projects on the horizon.

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so i’ve been reflecting over the past month now that keith is about to head home. i wonder about the worth of my past 30 days. maybe being around leith for so many years has me thinking about issues in terms of inputs and outputs - my brain usually doesn’t work that way, but this time in this perfect storm of a month, that’s where my mind is. while keith’s been here, i would say it’s been a huge time commitment and sacrifice for us both. in addition to just plain food and life costs, which are not such a big deal, i consider from my perspective the number of vacation days i’ve taken of of work, the time put into figuring out the food situation, rushing home to cook or have quality time, and the biggest time sink - the tens of hours spent researching colleges, organizing tours and figuring out how to help him figure out the college situation. it hasn’t been easy with travel for work and the intense amount of stuff on my plate.

not to say he isn’t great to have around. keith helps around the house a lot and is good company overall. if it was a normal summer and he was just hanging out, i would actually say the summer has been pretty good for all of us. the thing is that leith and i have approached the summer as an investment, and as a result, have poured an inordinate amount of energy and attention around him. we want keith to succeed, get into a good school and be happy with the direction of his life. i think he wants some of those things to, but the type of work ethic and gratitude he possesses is very different, and he lacks the type of independence we were both raised with - coming up in families struggling to stay afloat and save for a better life. it’s hard to tell how much of an impact the last month has had for him through his reactions since he doesn’t communicate that much about it.

probably the best thing for me is to say that the month is over and i hope he actually tries to be self-motivated for the rest of the summer. is he still going to study, try to read more, work on vocabulary and get organized about all the upcoming deadlines and tests? or will he slip back into relaxed teenager mode and spend the summer hanging out with friends? i think for my sanity, i’ve decided i can’t keep tabs on it beyond this visit. all i can do is revise essays when requested and let him do the work. i can’t make him do anything that needs to happen. i can’t emotionally invest in continuing to follow up on whether or not he refers to any of the resources we’ve pulled together. i just have too much of my own things going on in work and life that are already overwhelming and it’ll make me crazy. all i can do is look back on the past few weeks and if i consider this time and sacrifice a gift to leith, then i know as my partner, i have his gratitude and respect and that’s all i need.

this post is truly a journal. sorry to get so introspective, but with all that’s going on, i have to take care of myself. i’m a bit bummed that there’s no fun vacation planned up ahead. you haters might say that we were just in hawaii, but fun as that was, a wedding in undeniably work. keith was work, new york was literally work, minnesota will be a family trip, my mom and sister will be a staycation and december means taiwan. 31 is the year of growing up and only taking family trips and i’ve been pretty spoiled with getting to actually take at least 1-2 fun trips a year with leith.

i’m making strides in the work arena. i just let go of a trip to new york in august. i think it would be fun, but also another busy thing up ahead to schedule around. plus, i’m chairing the WorkHappy task force. it sounds like more work, but i seriously do consider it an important investment in making my career happiness better. reunions seems to be right around the corner, which means working on my favorite thing - classes without quizzes. so i have that stuff together and i’m making both of my yoga classes this week - i just need to pull together the rest of my life.

if in the next week or so i can carve out time for a haircut, car wash and oil change and looking ahead get my tv and smartphone life figured out (don’t have the smart phone yet!) then i’ll start to feel on top of things.

ok, i’m signing off so i can actually make my 7am yoga and i feel much better after the brain dump. thanks blog!

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as with every year, june has been a flurry of activity. commencement at stanford has come and gone. it was a tough time in a way, because my event wasn’t flawless, but i’m over it and learned some things to implement next year.

the biggest change for us in june is that we have a roommate. keith’s been staying with us and will be here for a month. he eats a lot of food, helps around the apartment and is a convenient third person for board games. it’s been an interesting visit. we’re not around him throughout the year, so we see him "grow" so infrequently. or at least i do, since leith keeps in pretty close contact throughout the year. the wedding wasn’t great quality time, since he was caught up in drama and texting hardly in hawaii with us. these couple weeks, it’s been nice to reacquaint ourselves and get to know each other again. as opposed to stanford camps or moving camp, he’s focused on SATs and thinking about colleges.

i took off last friday and we explored UC davis. it made me want to go back to school! not for a masters, but just reminded me of the joy of being an undergrad and that whole time in my life. today keith’s at UC berkeley with mike and next week we hit the road to tour some southern california schools. the whole thing is a huge endeavor - organizing tours around limited university schedules and figuring out where to find all of this information. it’s been sad to see the california budget cuts through visitor tour furlough schedules and some cal states not being able to offer tours at all in the summertime!

late saturday, i head off to new york for the ivy plus alumni relations conference at columbia. i missed last year’s, so i look forward to going again. it’s always a great experience and i’ve been able to squeeze in a couple meetings with friends by taking a red eye flight in. i can’t wait!

otherwise summer is full of barbecues, a lot of new babies from friends, the world cup (since when did leith become a soccer fan??) and great time with friends. my summer resolution is to attend as many of my yoga classes as i can. it helps that kristine is teaching one of them - that’s incentive enough, but also my 7am friday class always renews my spirit.

that’s it for now - i’ll report back on how the conference and los angeles is for us!

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i have trouble believing this is the last week of may. perhaps the quick way that time flies these days means that i’m truly getting older.

the word of the week is portmanteau - look it up.

buried is the best way to describe my work life right now. i continue to put in hours and can’t seem to catch up, so it’s pretty scary. i’m still preserving my weekends, so go me. i think i just have too many projects, and i’m definitely putting in a lot more hours than those around me. currently i’m juggling a lot of reunion projects, reunion pricing which is a BEAST, a couple 2011 events and of course, commencement. it’s a full load.

when i was conducting interviews a couple weeks ago, 2 people said things that really made me jealous. when asked about their favorite part of their last job, the answer was about the joy of working on a highly performing team. i do work with some high performers, but having a team that’s present when i’m present and putting in work when i’m putting in work, would be a whole different animal. i think the lack of energy i feel around me starts to suck the morale right out of me.

my day started off a bit exciting in a bad way. leith and i got into a small bike crash with each other. while changing gears, his bike came to a quick halt, causing me to fly into him a bit. my shin bent part of his gears, making his bike immovable and my leg bruised. it’s not terrible, but he did have to carry his bike about a mile and a half and i’m a bit limpy. strangely, i could only feel my leg, but now i have kind of general body aches. i guess bike accidents aren’t so different from car accidents in that way. getting in an accident is an easy excuse to get out of a meeting, if nothing else.

i got my craft knife this past sunday, so hopefully this weekend i can carve out time to think about using it. i have a couple books from the library - one on paper crafts and another on mexican flags, so we’ll see what i can come up with. i need to have a creative outlet beyond agricola, i think. of course, the wedding scrapbook is looming in the back of my mind, too, but i haven’t physically printed out the photos yet. perhaps that is more of a summer project. i can’t believe i thought i would finish that by the end of april!

last night i started reading/looking through african air. i found out about it in the stanford magazine. this alum flies above african landscapes in a motorized paraglider (i know, i never heard of them either!) to get these truly amazing photographs of the land. i’m just loving slowly going through the pictures - it really puts life into perspective.

it’s tuesday of the week, so more fun to come. yesterday, we saw deborah rhode give a great talk on the beauty bias in hiring from a legal perspective, which was awesome. And tomorrow we see Common perform and give a lecture. it doesn’t get better than that in a week!

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i have to stop blogging in my head and actually get something online every so often. a few highlights from the last couple of weeks:

we ate hong kong style western food. basically it’s either fusion HK-american food or what HK thinks american food is, resulting in a very bizarre lunch. each entree came with this kind of seafood egg drop soup and garlic toast. then some ridiculously huge portion of spaghetti bolognese with a pork chop and rice hidden under sauce or some other strange concoction. the food was cheap and it was worth it just for the experience.

it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but i feel fairly stressed at work lately, caught up on most of my projects but sadly far behind on others, making me feel stressed. coupled with that is the fact that i’m adamantly protecting my weekends (except when i have to work events), so that’s not allowing me to catch up on everything. the result is that my blood pressure is in the completely normal range for the last two weeks. it doesn’t make sense to me, but i’ll take it!

we’ve been to a ton of great talks lately. most recently, jonathan bloom talked about food waste, which was fascinating. he’s spent a lot of time with food recovery groups, chatted with dumpster divers and more. it’s a fascinating subject and completely depressing. his estimate is that america could fill a rose bowl with wasted food per day. our focus on perfect food means that produce assistants cull fruits with blemishes and they go right in the garbage, sell by dates are deceiving and in general, huge portion size ends up leading to garbage. i did learn about a lot of cool things, too, like the scroungers at reed college - students without meal plans that depend on leftover plate food to eat and gleaners that clear farmers’ land when they don’t harvest due to poor price points. i definitely think the whole subject is worth more awareness on society as a whole.

sunday was fun to catch up with christy and nasun. we saw a short on a man with the largest record collection, that he unfortunately can’t sell. and typeface, this great film about the hamilton wood type press, its struggles, and the people who love letterpress (me included). it reminded me of the shop class is soulcraft book i was recently reading about how these days no one knows how to make anything with their hands…sad. i still need to find my own craft niche so i can participate more than just consume.

so that’s it from my little corner, other than lots of board games and spending time with friends. hope all is well with you!

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this is my status update because i’ve pretty much been playing agricola constantly…and then fitting in things like work and eating in between. ha! it’s dangerous for leith and me to have a two player game with tons of pieces since it stays out on the dining room table for a week at a time.

i think a sign of getting older is that time seems to be flying by these days. it’s unbelievable that it’s May and even this month seems to be whooshing on by.

i’m still doing a ton of reading and i have about 10 books out from the library to prove it. our close by downtown library is closed for renovations over the next year, so we’re now biking to the main branch, which means a nice 7 mile bike ride every now and then. additionally, leith and i are taking some time this week to enter the sunlight design for america competition. he’s focused on web design and i’m concentrating on forms, so we’ll see how we do. either way, it’s a nice creative outlet.

i also checked out a book on paper cutting, so if i can carve out some time and look for a good exacto, i’ll be working on some cards and more as a fun activity. our friends chris and kimberly recently had some baby shower events and i do really like the craftsy side of me - i just need the will and projects to exercise it a bit more often. perhaps if i find a niche, i can produce my own etsy store one day!

otherwise, my plans are summer forward. i’m still trying to consider something fun for leith and me, maybe some kind of extended weekend trip. our definite plans include keith staying with us, along with planned activities around college admissions, and my mom and sister here in late july - i’m already elbow deep in those plans! today’s a momentary cloudy day, but i’m looking forward to some sun for the rest of the week.

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well, i’m glad i got married so i can have a good excuse for not putting up a blog in 2 months, otherwise i can’t think of a good reason! if anyone is still reading this website, i’m pretty impressed. so if you didn’t get our card, it’s because we don’t have your address anymore and you probably don’t check this website anyways. but you can check out our supercool wedding website for pictures and all kinds of fun stuff. the whole week was great and the day itself better than expected. i really had an amazing time and the ceremony felt special. most importantly, the whole time in hawaii just felt like us, which is what we were going for.

since we’ve been back, work has picked up quite a bit. i’m trying to find a balance of getting all my stuff done and trying not to work too many hours, which is a challenge. i had the chance to visit my dad in san diego before a stanford LA event, which was a good time. we’ve been catching up with friends, heading to as many friday dinners as possible and playing lots of agricola. the game is so fun and seeing it play out with five people was completely different. i love board games, free fun!

i’ve also been racing against the library constantly. we had been extending holds like crazy and so i’m always trying to catch up and turn in books on time. i guess it keeps me on my feet and reading, but quite a few of these books have been non-fiction, so i don’t pick them up as often.

right now the international film festival is going on in the city. i wish i hadn’t been sick last week or i would have caught a lot more films. i think the only way to really enjoy them is to take a couple weekdays off and watch several in a day. we went to a late night showing friday of ‘cargo’ which is the first swiss sci-fi to come out. it was actually great and not too scary, as i thought it might be. i love film festivals because you see plot concepts that are not so mainstream and overdone. plus, you actually come across new and talented actors/actresses instead of the same old faces.

don’t worry, it won’t be so long until my next update and i’ll put up some pictures from our recent hike at monte bello tonight. happy monday!

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