Hey everyone. It’s been 8 months since my last blog post (which wasn’t really even a full post), yikes! It’s late at night on a Saturday and I just had caffeine so I’m not falling asleep for a while longer, so here’s a random post about what I’ve been up to this past half year and more.

New Years

On New Year’s Eve I went to the Seattle Center Space Needle fireworks. I got some nice pictures, but there were way too many people. Probably won’t go again for a long time.

For the rest of early January I was preoccuped with buying a home, which I closed on at the end of the month.

I took a day trip to Leavenworth with a friend around this time, the town itself was not too exciting but the snow scenes were really pretty. A week after that, I attended the Microsoft Spring Festival event. For a variety of reasons, I don’t think I had too great of a time there.

• First, it was in Overlake which is super far for me. The taxi to go there and back was more than the ticket.
• Second, the activities were fun, but lots of families were there and it just made me miss my family and especially my sisters a lot.
• Third, they ran out of dinner food before the night show started, so I had nothing in my stomach except a cup of bubble tea for over 10 hours.
• Fourth, during the night show performances there was a gaggle of girls to my right that kept TALKING. NONSTOP. I’m understanding of kids being hard to keep quiet, but you are adults. I do not need to be hearing about what type of boy you like or gossip about your boyfriends while the show is going on.
• Fifth, I was feeling a bit down at the time due to ████████.

So all in all, it wasn’t an ideal experience I would go back to. I went home late, grabbed some pizza from the shop below my apartment, texted my sisters to tell them how much I missed them, then ate.

At the end of the month, I flew home to Texas to spend the Chinese New Year with my family, and spent about two weeks there. After that, we all took a trip to Reno, Nevada to see a concert by The Wynners (溫拿), a Cantonese pop band.

Moving In, Spring

After that, I returned to Seattle and spent the first week back feverishly moving things out of my apartment into my home, settings things up, buying furniture, etc. My mom came with me to help me with this and I’m infinitely grateful for that, because the word “feverish” was a literal description: I got sick during this time and still had to make multiple back-and-forth trips to move everything over.

After that, my other good college friend moved to New York, leaving me all alone here in Seattle :(

Finally, things got settled in at the new home and spring came around. I spent a week in March visiting Mexico City with two of my university music club friends, which was definitely a fun and educational experience. It was my first time leaving the US to go somewhere that was not Canada :P

At the end of March, I attended my second Sakura-con. Unlike last year, I didn’t go to as many events, and spent most of my time in the arcade and the vendor/artist halls.

In April, I attended the second annual Touhoufest. It was really fun, and I had a separate forum post about the event you can find here.

In May, I flew to New York for a business trip (half planning), and met up with some old friends there. I didn’t do too much around the city, but was able to walk around the touristy spots and take some photos.

Summer

This whole time, my mom was still crashing at my place. It was really fun to be able to have her around and spend time together on the weekends. We tried lots of restaurants, went shopping quite a few times, and saw a live theater show at the Green Lake theater (Unrivaled by Rosie Narasaki).

For July 4th week, my dad and one of my sisters flew to Seattle to visit me, and we did lots of fun touristy stuff as well. On one day, I actually ran into a high school friend, also vacationing in Seattle, that I hadn’t seen for nearly 8 years!

At the end of July, I took a day trip to Tacoma, a next large-ish city to the south of Seattle. It’s a pretty quiet place, but the Museum of Glass and Chinese Reconciliation Park were highlights of the trip.

In early August, I and my sisters celebrated the 18th birthday of my little dolphin Willie and the start of our dolphin obsession:

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Some people might find this childish or immature, but to me it’s a symbol of my childhood and our sibling love. Part of maturing as an adult is to stop caring what people think about what you like!

After this, every subsequent week of August had something fun going on:

• One of my friends that I’ve known since high school (middle school even maybe?) got married. Being the first marriage I’ve attended, it was exciting to see what it was like.
• The week after, I took the Amtrak Cascades train to Portland for a weekend trip. I hit a few of the popular touristy spots and I loved doing it all without a car and without having to worry about parking (quite a bit of walking though, sorry W. :P). Portland in general feels much more homogenous than Seattle, but the people are so friendly compared to in Seattle! The highlight of the trip had to be Lan Su Chinese Garden, it was so pretty and peaceful I almost cried. Chances are high I will visit Portland again JUST to go to this garden.
• The week after was PAX West, another convention in Seattle. I didn’t go, but the event also brought The 8-Bit Big Band to town, a jazz band that specializes in video game music. Their level of performance is incredibly high and the concert was a blast to hear.
• The Friday before the concert, the Lynnwood Link Light Rail 1 Line extension also opened, and Sound Transit held celebrations at all of the new stations. Over the past couple years, I’ve started to pay attention a lot more to public transit, urbanism, and how to rid ourselves of car dependency, so this was wildly fun to participate in. I’ll likely post specifically about this in the future, so stay tuned.

After a very busy August, September was much more quiet. The Seattle Chinese Orchestra, which I’m a member of, was preparing in earnest for their concert at the end of the month (today actually!), so the only exciting thing happening each week was our weekly rehearsal.

I was actually a bit concerned about the quality of our preparation leading up to this, but the final two weeks of rehearsal things sort of came together and our run-through at the concert was probably our best, which is always what you want to see as a performer. I always loved the atmosphere on performance days, going back to middle school band and orchestra, so I looked forward to the concert for the entire week at work.

I also was looking forward to concert day because I invited two of my section-mates to dinner and karaoke afterwards, which was really really fun and I hope the start of a new friend group <3.

Progress on 2024 Goals

Let’s paste my goals from last year’s post and see how I’ve been doing, lol.

I hope work goes normally, that I get Meets Expectations, and don’t get fired😝

Accomplished.

I hope to start exercising. No lofty goals, I just want my upper body and arms to be a bit fuller. These two years I’ve been asked “Are you a high schooler?” too many times, I can’t take it anymore 😅. Obviously, a six-pack would be great too (lol).

I did start going to the gym in May. I’ve been focusing on strength on my upper body, and have noticed some results. Still being called a high schooler though (literally TODAY one of our dizi section-mates asked me if I had graduated yet………… 我吐了).

I hope to buy a home.

Accomplished.

I hope to go to China with my family.

Not gonna happen this year, but with very high likelihood will happen next year.

I hope I keep my flute skills at the same level, and my dizi skills continue to leap forward (I wanna perform a solo, even if it’s a simple piece)

Haven’t performed a solo anywhere, but I think I’m happy with how much progress I’ve made after a year or so of learning dizi.

I hope to proactively communicate with and maintain my friendships; I hope I can reconnect with old friends.

Always the difficult one for me. I don’t think I’ve done a good job of this, but I’m hoping this year to revive my “write letters to important friends for Christmas” tradition that I used to do in high school and college, and making sure to include good friends from high school and college I haven’t contacted in a while.

I hope I can bravely share my purest, most authentic, and best self with the person I like, and use this hope to continue improving myself.

This goal is funny because it got blown up literally in the first month of the year, RIP. It was kinda embarrassing but also a good learning experience, and probably something I can laugh about with this person in ten-years.

I hope to continue having an optimistic and happy outlook on life.

I think this has been the case! Every so often I have bouts of brief melancholy about aging, adult life, and friendships, but I think I manage to maintain an optimistic and relatively carefree life doing what I want to do.

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This post ended up really long so I’m not sure if I’ll do another big year-end post. It’ll probably just be a short Thanksgiving list this time around, plus the aforementioned Christmas cards.

See you in the next one!