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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I spent the last few months on the Xaml team designing and implementing the system-wide modern drag and drop API. It was the only major feature so far I got to design from scratch, go through the painful API review board meetings, write code, fix bugs, and now publish an article about it on MSDN. Of course, I didn't do any of these alone and owe huge thanks to my coworkers, especially Alain, because without him, I doubt this article would ever be born. The writing process reminds me of being in college. I had to write several papers and a 20-page final research paper in my 400-level music courses. I remember thinking to myself why I didn't take more humanity courses that require lots of writing because I was having so much fun. After graduating, it was about the time when people slowly stopped blogging, and started updating statuses on Facebook and Twitter. I just never wrote anything substantial anymore. Writing this article makes me want to go back to writing. Maybe no one else but me will ever read it, but I hope when I am old, I can come back to this and laugh at myself for being ridiculous or stupid. That's why I created this blog. Hope this time I will keep writing.

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