As is readily apparent, no more blogging. Facebook’s pretty much got that covered now. But I thought it was still worthwhile to go back and clean up 10+ years worth of posts so they look all pretty and decent. For posterity. And hoo-boy was that laborious. Also, mildly irritating…reading the shorthand I used to use back then. On the eve of my 40th bday though, it was fun reading up on all the things we did back in the day.
Here’s a photo to round out this post. Well, I guess it’s not random…it’s the new, possibly permanent header. Cheers!
good bye movable type, hello word press. i think i secretly regretted staying with mt the last time i upgraded (thanks to spammers). so now i decided that since i was porting my journal to the root domain, it was a good time to make the jump to word press as well. and i have to say…yea, so much easier to use. i should’ve switched years ago. hey weird…none of my posts have their date listed anywhere. is that on purpose?
2013 hasn’t exactly been a dull year, though judging by this journal, you’d be hard pressed to guess that. but as it were, free time seems to actually be a bit hard to come by these days. and when there is free time, i actually forget i even have a blog to post to. maybe i should repin my blog to chrome again. regardless, here’s some fun and noteworthy entries to add to this journal.
VENICE/DUBLIN/BALLYFIN our friends iris and brendan were getting married in ireland this year, so q and i made some plans around the trip in july. q actually flew out first to travel about europe, and we then met up in venice to see the biennale. i hadn’t actually been to venice since my first time back in college in 1999. some 14 years ago…holy crap. they were still using the lire the last time i visited. now on the euro, things weren’t as cheap as i seem to remember.
our first day there we took a trip out to the island of burano. we strolled the streets and canals lined with pastel-colored buildings, and then had dinner next to a vineyard at venissa. the other days were filled with various venice roamings, and then the biennale itself the day we were to fly out to ireland. we were then in dublin for 3 days, took a trip to the giant’s causeway, hit the bushmills distillery, saw old friends, and then headed to the actual wedding venue for the final leg of the trip. the wedding venue was at the manor estate, ballyfin, which to say was bloody fancy would be an understatement. we were living at downton abbey, wayne manor, the xavier school, or whatever analogy you’d like to make to signify the level of fancy it was exuding…which was to say, considerable.
HONG KONG AND THENSOME which leads us to the most recent “noteworthy” entry. my girlfriend q takes trips to hong kong most summers to see her friends and family. our ireland trip drained my accounts a bit, so i declined to accompany her this year. or so i told her anyway. in reality, i decided to do a bit of covert planning. while she was planning her trip, i was actually getting in touch with her friends behind her back, for a number of reasons. i contacted two of her closest friends in hong kong to get in touch with her family for me, her friend in london for possible ring sizes, another friend in hong kong that she was taking a side trip with, and numerous other friends for various advice and whatnot. yea, it’s what it sounds like. i did most of my research and sleuthing while at work, away from her prying eyes. this included information on diamonds, engagement rings, the various classifications of diamonds (dear god, every guy should be warned, and then schooled about diamonds sometime in their lifetime), as well other various diamond-related subject matter. suffice to say i became somewhat knowledgeable about diamonds in a relatively short amount of time.
after some prodding to get q to finally book her tickets to hk, i booked my flight and hotel literally the day after in secret, and then i asked her friend she was taking a side trip with to make sure that the trip (to thailand as it were) was to occur hopefully the weekend i arrive in hong kong. after q flew off to hong kong, and as my trip soon came up, i had already 1. made plans for dim sum with her parents the day after i arrive, 2. had high tea plans with her friends for “consultation” the day after that, and 3. procured a ring.
some notes i thought i’d mention when trying to keep anything a secret. one, web browsers note everything you search for, and will “tailor” ads accordingly. therefore if you’d like for engagement ring ads to NOT show up in those ads, might i suggest browsing in private windows and/or clearing your cache daily. also, best not to keep facebook nor gmail logged on your home computer where they could be easily seen by said girlfriend. yea, that was funny. thank god for logmein and my overly paranoid state. and lastly, chatting with said girlfriend while keeping up the appearance of being in the states while you’re actually in asia and in the same time zone as her is as easy as turning off all location settings on your tablet and phone.
i land in hong kong literally the same day q flies out to thailand. i thought there’d be one of those moments in the airport where i’d have to sneak around with a hat and shades, but thankfully my flight flew in 6 hours after hers left. the dim sum the next morning with her parents went fairly well, and they were of course ecstatic, as well as receptive to our sneaky plans to surprise her. the surprise plans were further refined with her friends the next day until everything was finalized. her friend v suggested a restaurant (zhe jiang heen as it were…i thought i’d note that for posterity), went ahead and made reservations, and then sent the information to everyone involved. so the next day i wandered about hong kong a bit while i could until i had to retreat back to my hotel (to avoid any possibility of running into her when she got back in the afternoon). come dinnertime, i meet up with her two friends again and we make our way to the restaurant in wan chai, messaging her family the entire way there. they had a room booked (so empty seats wouldn’t be suspicious) and q was sitting with her back facing the entry. so moment of truth. as her family collectively raised their camera phones (at her confused face), i strolled into the room and laid a bouquet of roses next to her, greeted her, gave a highly abbreviated speech to her dumbfounded face, and popped out the ring. for the record, she did say yes (after a number of minutes trying to process the situation).
as for the rest of the trip, we spent it eating and drinking with friends. light breakfast and/or dim sum, afternoon tea, dinner, and then drinks at night…rinse, repeat. oh and no photos, because we were a bit preoccupied.
i used to write these posts with the explicit intention of keeping a record of my day-to-day..but since i rely on facebook for that, doing that here seems a bit superfluous. so err…what to write here? i guess detailed accounts of my day-to-day i suppose. i attended a friends wedding this past weekend. it was the first wedding i’d been to in almost two years. this one happened to be a fairly casual affair. i think they spent more time taking photos with friends than on the actual ceremony itself. like the asian equivalent of my scottish friends wedding, where they spent half an hour on the ceremony, and 12 on drinking and partying.
what else? right, q and i caught gotterdammerung at the met last thursday. five and a half hours of german opera…epic. the set was pretty awesome, but with no dragons, the opera itself was a bit of a letdown. for me anyway. no dragons=deal breaker.
we’re still in the midst of planning our upcoming ireland trip in july. i think that’ll be the next interesting thing to talk about. because until then, it’ll just be alot of eating, drinking, and doing stuff with the gf. which to anyone else except us, sounds bleh. i say this as someone who used to roll their eyes whenever friends could only ever lead into their stories of what they did over the weekend with “my girlfriend and i…“
it’s been almost a year since i last posted. i never intended to let the blog die…just marinate for a bit. so what’s happened in the past year? hmm, innumerable things really. still happy and steady with my girlfriend (almost a year now too). we took a trip to hong kong and taiwan last summer to visit our respective families (some would say a wee early in our relationship, but meh…it’s not like we could’ve AVOIDED them). saw more shows, took more trips, ate fancier food…etc. work-wise i’m surprisingly still at the same studio. so this will be the first job i’ve stayed at for three years since, well…my first job out of college. hmm…what else? it’s hard to recollect the every minutiae now that facebook fills that role externally from my brain. my life could probably be told in a series of photo uploads on my facebook timeline. my life is apparently soft lit.
upcoming events for this year (in the case this is the last post for the year…giggle) include a wedding trip to ireland (with mini-side trips to venice and dusseldorf) and possibly another vacation to japan. it’d be a mini-reunion trip from my ’08 japan crew…word, fun times.
…and i’m wondering where the first quarter of the year went. i’m currently bored at work, waiting for a model to be passed to us…so i thought i’d post something. i remember way back when i had alot more time at work (read: we did very little) that i’d post 3-5 times a day…everyday. those are definitely distant memories.
life’s been interesting of late. spring seems to have sprung out of nowhere, so in turn my social life’s been resuscitated. caught 21 jump street this past weekend (high-laaarious), korean bbq last night, family recipe (twice) a few weeks ago, and a trip to rai rai ken somewhere in there too. i’m looking at the things i had jotted down in my calendar to recollect places i’ve eaten at, but i seem to have a predilection for leaving odd notes of what i did. such as “fucking work balls” and “jewel“. i have no idea what “jewel” means.
a few of us took a road trip up to cornell two weekends ago for the opening reception of milstein hall…the new architecture studio designed by oma. i heard rem koolhaas was there friday night (we didn’t get to ithaca until after midnight), but apparently he was a pill. saturday was filled with interesting lectures and events, and we got to see people we hadn’t seen since graduating. which was ten years ago. that thought still needs time to process. maybe when i get home, i’ll tack on a photo i took up top.
btw, even as i’m writing this, i can feel the years of journal neglect adversely affecting my ability to write a cohesive post. crap.
one last bit before getting back to work. at the prodding of a friend, i may actually proceed with asking someone on a date. the first non-match related even. this should be interesting, and is probably worth an annotation in my journal.
