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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as opposed to being stressed, with less than 2 weeks until my wedding, it’s good to know that instead of feeling stressed, i have that nervous excitement right before i go on a trip. pretty good, huh?

it’s been quite a week. it started with a trip out to ithaca, new york to visit cornell university. the campus is beautiful. i stayed in the statler hotel, which is actually one of the schools at cornell, run by students a lot. the place was really nice and i got to enjoy it more than i expected, due to a snowstorm. the students there seem focused and smart, studying on the plane and my tour guide exuded joy for the institution.

i saw the same energy from the alumni affairs staff that invited me to join them for their advancement. i gave a talk on alumni education at stanford while out there, and sat in on their training sessions as well, which was a truly great experience. i love the idea of an organization re-focusing every six months to build the team, reiterate strategy, and gain some professional development. i was pretty jealous, actually.

this was my first experience in the snow. i’m glad i bought those boots, because i needed them. it was beautiful and shocking all at the same time. shocking, because people still operate. as long as roads are plowed, people drive, they run, they go to class - i’m used to living in a place where everything would shut down.

i had a couple cool moments around art as well. i did a tour of the johnson museum on campus and they had a few excellent exhibitions that i got to enjoy, as well as a broad view of campus. my other experience was surprisingly in the airport. if you ever fly through detroit, there’s a light tunnel between terminals A and C and despite my run through, it was awesome. the lights change and get set to music. on the way out it was dramatic and scary. on the way back, it was a lighter tune with bright colors. i wish more public spaces were so playful.

that’s it for now, i’m going to see which zipline we’re going to take for the honeymoon!

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this is actually more of a preparation week for me. at work, i’m going to map out the next few months of milestones and work since so many faculty invitations go out in the spring for fall events. also, since i’ll be out almost 3 weeks between my trip to cornell and the wedding, i need to plan for my absence.

but next week is the week of new things, since i’ll be in the snow for the first time, giving a talk and ending the week with snow boarding or skiing in tahoe. cross your fingers for no wedding injuries or bruises…

i love that we just came off of a long weekend. we played tons of puerto rico, saw friends and did a small bit of wedding planning. most of my monday was actually working on the 2,000 piece puzzle of van gogh’s starry night that has taken over my life. maybe i got 50 pieces this weekend? do the math and you can figure out how long it’ll be before i can eat on the dining room table again. my neck actually hurts from craning it over the table for hours on end. crazy, huh?

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if i had made the resolution to blog more, i’d already be on track! maybe i should have so i can feel accomplished…

this past week has been okay. i’ve been pretty steady at doing at least one wedding planning related task each day. i find it’s not too stressful and good at making me think about the fun times awaiting me in hawaii. looking back on the whole process, i don’t really understand why people send wedding invitations. it’s fun because they look great and it made me energized about organizing the week, but in the long run, almost no one turns them in without prodding. in fact, i can confidently say i probably only received 3 of them unsolicited. i also find it funny that people who aren’t coming, won’t just RSVP no - is this out of guilt or some other thing? i’m not offended, i’m just trying to get some counts! i guess now you know about the stressful part of event planning. :)

work has been yucky. that’s really the best way to describe it because i’ve had some serious conflicts with a couple of co-workers. plus, as usual i have a lot on my plate, but what takes up 50% of my time here is prodding co-workers for information they owe me. i get that with faculty since they are immensely busy and are completely volunteering their time. it really eats away at me when i have to re-send e-mail after e-mail to co-workers to obtain information. that’s when i have to focus on my deep breathing and that congolese dance class to keep me sane!

leith and i had the chance to see dallas black dance theatre on friday. it’s been years since i’ve seen them perform and it was amazing. in particular, there was this awesome african dance (choreographed in 1932) with a solo male dancer mimicking an ostrich. it was a beautiful piece with a lot of strength and simplicity.

the weekend was spent locked up in our apartment otherwise, which was a nice break. i did some finances, planning and our taxes. plus, i got some good friend time in with kevin, visiting from austin and FINALLY caught up with kristine after her visit to japan. conversation really brings life back to earth and shows you what’s important (aka, not work!)

so february marches on…i’m hoping for some sunnier weather these days.

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