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After baking brownies successfully, I got encouraged enough to try baking biscotti. The Italians traditionally like to pair it with wine, and since my fiance, John, is a big wine drinker, I thought “hey, why not bake something he can drink wine with?”

So I found this recipe online and tried baking it the first time five days ago. I did exactly everything the recipe calls for, but the dough was dry and it was difficult to form a log. The end result tasted fine, but it was a little too dry and too hard. As I read the reviews for this recipe, I found out that other people also had the same problem. Luckily I only made a little for a tester.

Last night, I gave it another try, with some modifications. I cut down on flour, added milk to the mixture so it wouldn’t be so dry, and I also cut down the baking time a bit. Oh the whole house smelled SO GOOD!

This time around the biscotti are crisp, but not dry or hard, and they look better as well. Yay! I consider the second run a success!

Now they are sitting in an airtight container, ready to go to Las Vegas with me to see John later on today.

For no reason really, I’ve been feeling very low, for almost a week now.

I feel fat, I feel ugly, I feel dumb, I feel uneducated, I feel unaccomplished, I feel tired, I feel old, I feel empty, I feel useless, I feel isolated spiritually yet I don’t want to do anything about it. I know I am non of the above unpleasant words but I just feel that way. I’ve been really quiet, to an extent where people at work asked me what’s the matter. I just shrugged as I told them “I don’t know what’s wrong”.

Like a reluctant pebble being pushed on shore, I just want to lay there quietly, invisible among millions of other reluctant pebbles.

I really don’t know what’s wrong, but I hope I’ll get out of it soon.

A year ago, I made up my mind to REALLY get back to painting. At that time I had just completed my term as a beauty queen and was freed from a lot of obligations, and I decided that it was absolutely time to end my 5-year hiatus as an artist.

But, it wasn’t easy to paint again after 5 years of not painting anything. My hand was stiff as I hesitated to make a mark on a blank canvas. I felt I needed some kind of structure to get myself started again, therefore I enrolled myself in a nighttime painting class at the nearby Fullerton College.

It was this week a year ago that I picked up the paint brush again for the first time. And tonight, I can’t be more proud to say that I’ve kept up with it, that I’ve completed several very satisfactory works, that I am still pushing myself to take nighttime painting class after long hours of work, and that I am still absolutely determined to keep on painting, and painting, and painting.

At the end of last year I secretely set a goal that I want to complete 12 real good paintings this year, and make a calendar of my paintings to give to close family and friends. Although, I am currently behind on that goal, I am still proud to say that in the past 12 months, I’ve regained my confidence as an artist, I’ve been in one art show, and the Fullerton College arts department liked one of my paintings so much that they borrowed it to hang in the school’s theatre lobby for a whole year, and I’ve framed a few paintings for my parents to keep. And most exciting of all is that after a pretty prestigious selection process, one of my paintings was chosen to be published by City of Los Angeles!

For the upcoming months I’ll continue to work on my painting calendar goal, in addition to “trying” to be in one more art show before my wedding.

Wish me luck!

A year ago today, he asked me if I would consider being in a serious relationship with him. A year later, we are planning our wedding!!!

John is this man that I’ve always dreamed of meeting someday, but I never know this kind of man actually exists. He came to my life in a gentle, subtle, sweet, low-key kind of way. Despite all his impressive achievements, he is a very humble, soft-spoken person, and compare to all the guys who pursued me before, he was among the least aggressive, but most sincere, and most caring. Flowers and gifts and elaborate dates don’t matter, but a sincere heart is what counts.

It has been a blissfully happy year, and the best thing about it all is that the more I spend time with him, the more I learned that he is all that I’ve always wanted, plus more. Now that we’ve been together for a year, I still get that girlish joy sometimes when I look at him. Oh my gosh, how can I be this lucky? To actually meet the man of my dreams, and to be engaged to him? To be planning a future with him?

Happy 1-Year Anniversary, John! As I write this, I have happy tears circling in my eyes. I don’t know if I can ever find enough words to thank you for all that you’ve done for me since we met, or show you how much I love you, but thank you, thank you, and thank you, for accepting everything about me, for caring for me so much, and for loving me the way I’ve always wanted to be loved. Although I know I can’t possibly be as perfect as you, I hope in the past 12 months I’ve been your good friend/supporter/girlfriend/fiancee as well.

I love you with all my heart.

John’s back! John’s back from his 6-days, off-the-trail, backpacking hiking and camping quest in Yosemite National Park! As I wrote in a previous post, John went to Yosemite National Park with his colleagues to collect some samples from remote lakes above elevation 10,000 feet that don’t even show up on maps. It was tremendous amout of hardcore hiking while carrying all camping gear, work equipments, plus food and clothes and everything else on their backs! And my dear John made it!

He came back happy and sound, and he got a lot darker than before the trip. He also brought back with him interesting stories, such as a curious baby bear that checked them out from only about twenty feet away, catching tadpoles, seeing deers, golden frogs, and wild flowers, plus bear stealing their food at night and eating everything, including tiny seasoning packages for instant noddles …

He also showed me at least two hundred beautiful pictures of Yosemite backcountry side and made me very envious…

Anyways, to celebrate his heroic return, I took him out on a dinner date to Flemings Steakhouse & Wine Bar over the weekend. We had a lovely time over delicious prime rib, red wine, and absolutely heavenly desert. Their chocolate lavaflow cake is absolutely divine!

Can’t you tell I am very happily engaged? I really adore John, and admire him many things about him.

He’s my hero!

In the evening of August 11th, 2008,

Something historical happened…

I baked for the first time!!!

The lucky choice of sweet was…

Brownie!!!

My house was filled with the delightful aroma,

and it turned out really, really well!

I cut out four pieces to serve with milk.

I had one piece, while the other three went to my brother’s tummy.

He gave me two tumbs up!

Hehe, I am so proud of myself!

While John is on a heroic adventure to Yosemite National Park, I met up with Pamela and Amanda, and I am so proud of myself!

Why? Well, all of my friends know that I am always busy, and hard to get a hold of a lot of times. Initially, people would invite me to their gatherings, but now they know to either ask me to mark my calendar months in advance, or just wait till I have time to call them up. It’s not lack of sincerity on my part as I do value my friends, but with how my life is currently, too many things, mainly obligations from non-profits that I am involved with, always pop up to take my time away.

This weekend I was determined to see some long-time-no-see friends, so I arranged lunch with Pamela and Amanda. I haven’t seen them in a year!!! We had a nice, four-hour long chat over yummy Taiwanese cusine followed by an afternoon tea session. I prefer to meet with my friends in a small group, or one on one, because it’s a lot easier to focus on each person that way. It felt so good to catch up with them two lovely ladies, to hear about their newest happiness, and to share mine with them.

I must keep this up despite my other obligations. The next group of friends I want to meet up with are — my graduate school friends.

My dear John is on a 6-day off-the-trail backpacking hiking/camping trip in Yosemite National Park right now. He’s there with his colleagues to collect water plus other samples from some remote lakes for research purposes. These lakes don’t even show up on maps! His colleagues go there several times a year, but this is the first time John is on such a mission. It isn’t his research project, but he volunteered to go, and is getting paid to go, for the adventure.

Six-days of off-the-trial hiking and camping in remote parts of Yosemite National Park, how cool is that?

But look at the arial map from above (click on image for a bigger resolution). The yellow spots with white labels are the lakes they need to get to. Just look at how far those sites are from the nearest roads, how far the lakes are from each other, and look at the steep climb too!!! All lakes are at over elevation 10,000 ft, and they are mountains in between the lakes!!!

They need to pack eveything with them, including tent, sleeping bag, dry food, clothes, flash light, walking sticks, first-aid kit, sun block, filter for water… plus others things I am sure. They each must pack light, but still that results in about 30 pounds of things to carry while climbing off-the-trail uphill to get to those remote lakes.

Heroic, isin’t it? I can’t wait to hear all about it after he returns!

I am so happy that he will have such an unique experience. I really wish to have some experience like that too, but on the other hand, I know if I were to go on such a quest, I would probably return in a stretcher. Nevertheless, hearing John talk about the trip makes me want to go camping and hiking somewhere too. Anywhere would be fine really! I just want to be out there in nature, alone with John, in front of camp fire, listening to crickets, and talk out night away under the stars.

It has been a week since John and I had our fabulous wedding/engagement photo shoot, but I waited so long to write about it because … there were so much excitement that I don’t know where to start! 

For a non-Taiwanese, or non-Asian in general, it’s probably a little difficult to grasp the idea of wedding photo shoot months prior to the actual wedding. But as I mentioned in my previous post, wedding photo shoot is a big deal in the contemporary Taiwanese wedding culture (since 1980s), and since, as Taiwanese-Americans, we have the privilege to pick and choose from wedding cultures of Taiwan and U.S., we decided that we’ll do a glamorous wedding photo shoot because it’s memorable experience, plus a great deal of fun! Plus, I am engaged to a super handsome guy, so why shy away from documenting our good looks with some professional photos? Haha.

There are numerous wedding photo studios out there providing same kind of uncreative service. They use same kind of photo taking techniques, same kind of backgrounds, same kind of lighting, and ask their customers to pose the same way. The only difference in works coming out of these studios is that … the models are different, the rest stay the same. That ISN’T the kind of album I want. I want ours to be unique, personalized, and I want it to tell our story. Therefore, I was really happy when John agrees that hiring Julia and Tony for the job. They own a very small business (website written in Mandarin as they are based in Taiwan), but their product is always very impressive. I noticed them online years ago and have always liked their work. But, to get an unique photo album, we needed to do extra work so everything’s personalized. We had to pick out locations for the shoot, plan out an itinerary for both days of the shoot, obtained photo permits, visit the sites, and take time off work.

But it was all worth it! We had a fabulous experience over 2 full days of shoot! Our two-day photo shoot was filled with excitement in every turn, so much so that for days, I couldn’t decide how to write about it because there was simply too much to say. But after much consideration, I decided that such memorable experience much be written down in detail, so here it goes.

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