Due to Covid, this holiday season will be staycation, no travel for me. I would enjoy reading, writing, and attending virtual activities yet I want to do something more and different. I read about Catch a Fire, a platform for skill-based volunteering, a while ago and decided to sign-up. I applied for two projects with …
Category Archives: Beauty
Give a Gift that Lasts a Life Time
I met Heather Beem, founder of Practical Education Network (PEN) at an MIT social innovation event several years ago. I like her/ PEN’s mission to improve learning outcomes by building teacher capacity with locally available materials. We became friends. I reached out to her recently asking if anything I can assist with my voluncation (volunteer …
Sal Mubarak
My roommate usually goes to visit his girlfriend during the weekend. The past weekend is Diwali (11/14), one of the biggest Indian holiday to celebrate light over evil. I was eager to hear how it went. When I got up on Monday and came to the living room, I saw a card with my name …
Patience
I posted the job of book cover design on Upwork and 9+ people responded. One designer offered to do it for $5 in exchange to write him a recommendation afterwards. He calmed he has done many book covers yet new to Upwork so he wants to “fast-track” establishing himself. The cost is tempting and I’m …
Enchanted Halloween
A special Halloween 2020: I achieved the goal to complete “UncoverSpecial” book editing by the end of October – getting ready to publish in November and I enjoyed two first experiences… First Trick ‘o Treat: I came to US as an adult so I never had a candy basket experience. I did my usual after-dinner …
Snow
First snow this winter…Thanks to working from home, I enjoyed watching the beautiful “little white cloud” falling outside the window without having to “dig” my car out to go to work. I remember 2018, a historical freezing winter, my fingers were “hurt” inside 2 gloves and though the heat was on in my car, I …
Not Perfect but Always Get Better
I attended a virtual AI conference and several speakers/ hosts, based on how they spoke, were not native English speakers. One host kept saying ‘you know’, another seemed hesitated to choose word to use, and a panelist spoke on ‘n on in circles… At first, I was irritated then I felt bad for them (they …
Thoughtful and Resourceful
A few weeks ago, we received email invitations from CEO’s executive assistant, Tammy and head of HR for a “social distance” lunch today. It will be great to see everybody after seven months of working from home due to Covid. To keep social distance, we were assigned “time slot” based on last name to get …
What Sells?
My editor got ill recently and apologized that she wouldn’t have the energy to work on the book. She recommended Linda, a freelancer friend. I talked with Linda. She told me she has been focusing on marketing works for a company. She also did editing and ghost-writing for some others. When I asked if she …
Mid-Autumn Festival 2020
Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the top three Chinese festivals. Last year, I celebrated it with 2 friends by a feast of seafood pasta, wine, and Barossa cheese with tomato. We walked around “Little Italy” (North End) to help “digest” afterwards. Then we watched the moon with Boston skyline while sharing the moon cake on …