I picked up this book because the cover drew my attention. I have this weakness for really cute covers with #1 New York Times Bestseller written on it. I wasn't particularly unhappy or looking to improve my life but it made a good light reading for my flight to Taipei from Seattle.

This book feels a little bit more self-help-y than my liking. And there are a lot of "scientific studies said this; scientific studies that". Not that I care about the correctness of the points made in the book but it reminded me of John Oliver's segment last week about scientific studies being incorrect and useless most of the time.

The Happiness Project did confirm some of my theories about happiness though. For example, "Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." I have become aware of it as I started learning Japanese and guitar, and started reading more. Even though I always get anxious about not having enough time to do everything I want to accomplish (oh, btw, Gretchen Rubin mentioned in the book "if you feel you don't have enough time, stop watching TV"), I feel a sense of accomplishment when I look at the learning streak and the reading challenge progress bar.

What I liked about the book is that it led me to a series of questions I need to ask my self and think more about. I am going to start my own happiness project. And it starts here.

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4/7










4/10

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Been going through lessons in a Spanish guitar etudes book. I actually just played each lesson once and I didn't care if I messed up big time, but I should be embarrassed as a musician because we should strive to produce musical sounds that are appealing to human ears. I thought it'd be a fun exercise to record one every day because then I need to at least try harder.

Below is my first solo recording - I started over more than 10 times because I kept messing up something. This is the best I could come up with because it's getting late and my fingers are getting tired. Definitely far from being perfect.

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This past Monday, we learned some rhythmic variations for accompaniment and the bridge section for the melody. My left fingers haven't developed to play bar chords well (some strings because muffled when that happens) so I am still struggling with the melody. Argh, need to practice more. The recording today actually sounded worse than last time, but it's only because this version is more difficult！

Also, I just realized my right hand position is really bad. Was surprised our teacher hasn't corrected me :( Gotta fix it soon.


Me - melody; Elliot - accompaniment



Elliot's improv went a little too wild.


Elliot - melody; me - accompaniment

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It's been a couple weeks since Curt picked up this piece for Elliot and me. We've been practicing a about an hour each week since. Today, we decided to record our little duet just for fun and realized how bad we are - a lot of noise and timing is off. I decided to make it a thing to record a video every once in a while to show our progress. (We don't have an iPhone stand so the camera was just facing a fruit plate. Will be improved next time.)

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I've completely given up on the idea of traveling to Europe since the airfare almost doubled since I checked last week and I am just not thrilled at the idea of traveling alone. I guess I am on what Lilly called a "stay-cation." Here is what I noticed about myself. When I am on vacation, I become restless. I am afraid I won't have enough time to read all the books I wanted to read, or that I will sleep too much and waste too much time. I end up waking up early every day and become completely uninterested in watching TV (which is good) but I also feel guilty when I actually relax. I am the complete opposite when I'm stressed from work, school or recitals in the past when I would just sit in front of the TV and sleep all day. I guess I need to be stressed enough to actually enjoy sunbathing in Hawaii. I will figure out how I want to relax on my vacation tomorrow, but for now, here are things I want to accomplish -

• Learn to cook every day
• Read ~5 books
• Study and prepare for my new job (to long to type here)
• Run 10 miles a week

Progress check:

I successfully made steamed eggs for the first time today. I read it from a recipe book that the hole for steam to come out needs to be bigger so the eggs don't have holes on it. It came out perfect.

Yesterday, I re-arranged some of my furniture so that I have a "productive corner" and it worked, I studied all night last night and today whenever I am at home. I started taking a Stanford course on Coursera about Startup Engineering. In just two short days, I reviewed and learned a little bit about Node.js, Heroku, AWS, responsive web design, Git, vim, emacs, Linux, and Backbone.js. There is a whole lecture about deployment, DNS, and Custom Domains, which was basically what I was trying to figure out on my own with some help from Heidi last Monday, so, learning, check.

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Elliot signed us up for a potsticker cooking class at Hot Stove Society as my birthday present. I am not a huge fan of potstickers mostly because I don't know how to cook potstickers. I always end up boiling my Ling-Ling dumplings. I think this is the way of him saying "stop ruining the Ling-Ling dumplings for me." The cooking workshop is located inside a nice boutique hotel, so even before I saw the workshop, I already felt super cozy (I love cute boutique hotels!) Once I walked in to the workshop, I was surprised how nice everything looks. (I went into the class not having set any expectation because my mind was preoccupied with thoughts about my last week at Microsoft.) We were instantly greeted with alcoholic drinks and some finger snacks. There were six huge butcher block tables for the students and lots of professional-grade kitchen appliances in the back of the room. The front of the room was the instructor's kitchen and large monitors showing better view of the instructor's chopping block and stoves.


The class started with a demo of making different components of potstickers from scratch. I was told that we probably would only make few things on our own, so my fingers were crossed that I didn't have to actually make potstickers. It just looked incredibly hard even though the instructor managed to make it look effortless. I was even hoping we didn't have to make anything because then I had to stand up from my chair (yes, I am that lazy.) At the end, my wish didn't come true so I had to get off my butt and start making dumpling skins and wrapping the fillings. To my surprise, making dumpling skins was not as dreadful as I thought. I struggled with a few at the beginning but then I improved quite a bit. Then, to my surprise again, it was actually pretty effortless. I was having fun cooking something I thought was impossible to make.


The end result was incredible. The potstickers were SO GOOD. I'd actually pay to eat them at a restaurant. This certainly boosted my confidence in my cooking. Now I want to try all sorts of dishes such as homemade pasta and maybe hand shaved noodles for beef noodle soup which I've always dreaded making. (I just realized rice lovers have it easy. They just go pick the best rice and they're all set.) Definitely a 5-star experience.

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