I’m pretty sure that when people first meet me now and have any real interaction with me, they will find out fairly quickly that my two major loves are 1) food and 2) travel. For me, food is part of the excitement of travel because when you go to new places, there will inevitably be food that you can have more readily than in your home.

So it warmed my heart this week when our friends who lived in Switzerland for six months last year told us that they were having a raclette grill shipped to their apartment, and they wanted to christian it with us over brunch. They figured that of all their friends, we’d be able to appreciate it best given our love of food and travel, and the fact that we’ve been to Switzerland before and have enjoyed raclette.

I love sticky cheeses. I love Switzerland. And I love friends who love a variety of food. It was a delicious meal.

Tonight, I went to a happy hour hosted by my company to bid farewell to one of our colleagues, who has left the company to travel to Bali for a month, and then will be joining her boyfriend in his small marketing company. It’s always sad to see colleagues leave who you like, and though I didn’t have much time to get to know her, she’ll be missed a lot. She was one of only five women in our office of about 27, and she’s also very outspoken about human and women’s rights.

Since she has left, the company needs a new ambassador to lead volunteer efforts for our Impact Weeks throughout the year, so our philanthropic leader reached out to me to ask if I’d be willing to fill her spot. I accepted and figured this would be a good way to get to know more people in our small office, and also establish myself more as a leader in general. It’s a great thing to be part of an organization that actively encourages volunteerism, even if it’s during regular work hours. It’s not just about us; it’s about the world and everyone else who has less than us.

After months enduring the new homeowner’s life, from picking what shade of grey-eggshell to paint the house to what type of wood to redo the floors in, my couple friend in Long Island City has finally finished and deemed the apartment worthy of a visit, and how flattering to find out that Chris and I are the first friends (after their visiting friend from California) to see the apartment. For the last four months, they’ve spent almost every weekend working on shopping and picking out furniture, building furniture, overseeing construction, and figuring out how to lay out their apartment, and it’s basically been like a full-time job on top of having an actual full-time job. The idea of being a homeowner just based on what they shared with us today makes my head spin. These are all the little benefits of renting and not owning; someone else has to deal with these issues and not me.

And on my end, because I knew I would see them soon, I wanted to get them a housewarming gift, but I had no idea what their home style was and was worried if I picked out something decorative that would’t go with their current look. I toiled over multiple ideas and finally settled on a set of Portuguese ceramic bowls, with the look of cracked glass inside them. These are the kinds of things I’d like, and they look very sophisticated. Plus, they’re dishwasher safe and are a faded blue color, so they’d go with lots of things. Who doesn’t need bowls to eat out of? I got a gift receipt just in case, but I told them that in the event they didn’t like them, I’d just take them for myself and get them another gift. 🙂 But they ended up really liking them and keeping them.

“These make our kitchen seem more adult like!” My friend exclaimed.

During a meeting with my manager today, we were discussing some potential road blocks I may encounter since my ramp period has ended. A number of customers probably won’t want to talk to me and will ignore my emails, so he told me not to take it personally and to try my best.

“One of the reasons we hired you (other than being smart) is that you have a very friendly, positive demeanor,” he said smiling (or smirking?). “You’re the kind of person who customers want to meet and want to talk to, so make sure you show your winning smile and make them want to engage with you!”

Considering I was raised by two glass-half-empty parents, it’s actually a bit comical that I come across this way to new people I meet, especially at prospective jobs. Or, maybe I just have everyone fooled?

If there’s one thing I respect above anything else in an Asian household, it’s that shoes always, always go off as soon as you enter the house. Nothing is dirtier than trampling all over someone’s house with your outside shoes on. It’s absolutely disgusting. Without even knowing it, we all step on the filthiest things: sidewalks that have had dog poop and urine covered in them and simply wiped off; endless spit, insects, cigarette buds and ashes, gasoline and dirt from the streets. Many studies on dirt, grime, and germs over the last couple years have shown that the bottoms of our shoes have even had traces of e. coli. No one wants e. coli, even the non-Asians. Even Martha Stewart advocated for a shoes-off household, and we all know how much I love and respect Martha Stewart. Crafting for a living would be my dream.

This apartment that we’re moving into is supposed to be fully cleaned before we move in; even the windows are getting a washing, both on the inside and out. I pressed the leasing agent about how clean it would be. All I could think about were all the disgusting feet that have walked through this apartment for viewings and how dirty the bottoms of their shoes were. I want all the counters sanitized and the floors swept and mopped… because if I move in and feel any bit of grime under my feet, I will probably abandon all the packed boxes and luggage and just start mopping. Really.

Today at a dim sum palace in Brooklyn Chinatown, it was like the typical Chinese restaurant situation where you see disparate groups of people all seated at the same round table with a Lazy Susan: an Asian woman with her brown husband, a Chinese couple with their four-year-old who won’t sit still unless he has his iPad in front of him with a handful of Pepperidge Farm goldfish, and two older Asian female friends with a random eight-year-old girl who refuses to eat or speak. Except in this case, we were all technically the same party. My aunt always insists on inviting random Jehovah’s Witness Chinese friends to our family meals. It’s like her thing. She always treats them, and she probably never gets treated back, and she really doesn’t care; her generosity seriously knows no bounds. My cousin and his wife didn’t acknowledge or even say hi to the random Chinese friend my aunt met in China who joined us for lunch. The eight-year-old girl stared into space and didn’t touch any of the food that her mom’s friend, who took her to this restaurant, put on her dish, and Chris and I happily ordered away and got all our favorite dim sum dishes, and then some.

That’s a day in the life of the extended Wong family meal. Fun, fun, fun.

We’re about 90 percent of the way there to finalizing a lease on a new apartment. It’s been a long search with lots of really terrible places, but this new place we will be moving into, if nothing catastrophic happens, will be the first home that Chris and I will have picked out together and decorate together. It will really be our own home.

We were thinking about what we’ll miss most about our current apartment, where he’s lived for seven years, and I for over five years. He said he’ll miss the shower pressure from the shower head the most… not that our new shower head won’t be as good, but it will just be new, whereas the other was familiar.

I think that’s what I’ll miss the most — the familiarity, the oddities of this apartment I can expect, like the fact that there’s a working chimney we never use as a chimney, but instead use the fireplace as an area to store our wine and liquor. There’s the big mirror in the lounge room that I’ve always enjoyed for partially vain reasons, but also because it makes our small, cozy living room space seem much bigger and more open than it actually is. I will miss the exposed brick in this apartment, and even those odd cut out windows in the living room and bedroom where you can see the light from the other room when you look up. It’s always comforting to have a routine where things are familiar, and I will miss that. But then at this new place, I will find a new routine, and that inevitably will become a new comfort.

Tonight, I went to my mentoring organization’s end-of-year appreciation event for some drinks, appetizers, and mingling with the program coordinators. While it was enjoyable and in a lively venue, what I didn’t expect to happen was to run into a former colleague who had left my last company just over a year ago. She was one of the very few people I spoke to and liked — at least, for decent small talk in the kitchen. And since it’s been over a year, she really let it rip when it came to how screwed up things were from an organizational standpoint, not to mention how the technology didn’t even work (and barely existed), and lastly, the level of overt sexism that was rampant there.

It’s really amazing when you’re colleagues and you have no idea that this person you speak with every week has all the same opinions that you do, and you learn them all much later. But the world keeps turning, and the sexism and delusional thinking continues.

In addition to the madness of looking for a new apartment in a place as infuriating and fast paced as Manhattan, the other frustrating thing that awaits shortly after we choose our new place is… what furniture are we going to put into it? For the most part, we’ve decided that the majority of our furniture in our current apartment will not come with us, not because we don’t like it, but more because it was bought specifically for the shape and quirks of this apartment, so if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to sell at least some of it to the next tenant who moves in here.

I visited my friend’s new apartment yesterday, and he showed me the new dresser that he got from West Elm that I thought was nice; he told me it was a good deal. I’ve never seriously looked at furniture there, so tonight, I decided to take a look at their website to see what we could potentially buy for the new place this summer. And again, I had the same shock I had back in 2008 when my then roommate and I went furniture shopping; things are THIS expensive, really? The night stand tables that I liked cost… $299 each?! How is this even possible?!

Maybe I will end up spending time on Craigslist this summer, too, in an effort to save money and get cheaper things and at the same time drive myself even crazier.