The default food I end up eating on work trips is salads: they tend to be relatively healthy, not too expensive, and they don’t make a mess. They also don’t take too much time to eat. When I’m in Boston or other major cities, I usually look for a Sweetgreen because I know what to expect, and I know that the ingredients will always be fresh. When I’m in cities I am less familiar like Orlando, I will just default to a nearby salad spot or the hotel restaurant. Today, I had a grilled shrimp pumpkin seed salad for lunch, and it was massive and filling.

Work travel can invite the temptation to eat poorly, to eat less fresh fruits and vegetables, and to eat quick fast food that is usually greasy, fried, and just bad for you. Salads can help balance this out (assuming you don’t pick a salad with fried chicken or “popcorn shrimp”).

I edited and uploaded my 14th video to my YouTube channel tonight. This one was about my 5-minute Instant Pot Indian chicken curry, and after spending the last three videos working on travel in Newfoundland & Labrador, I realized that this one was far less fun, with less things to be creative about. Granted, the areas where cooking videos can get creative are when you are speeding up long tasks, slowing down others, etc., but with the Instant Pot-themed video, there really aren’t that many opportunities to do that. So even though I was satisfied with what I’d created in the end, I was feeling lukewarm about it and not very excited.

This is probably just the ebbs and flows of video editing different content. You’ll love some, like others, and hate the remaining. It’s just a work in progress to see what works and what doesn’t.

Tonight, we went with some friends to the annual New York City Food Film Fest, a festival where while you watch films about food, you also get served the food that you see on the big screen. While I liked some of the short films more than others, I will say that you certainly get what you pay for, as there is certainly no shortage of food or drink (alcoholic and not!). Without even realizing it, I feel like I’d only had a few small bites (it’s all small bites, for that matter), and immediately started getting much fuller much faster than I had anticipated. Some of the food was inevitably cold, which was a bit frustrating, but other food, such as the ribs, were actually decent at room-temperature. It’s hard to make good food at scale that is also hot.

While I enjoyed the experience, I’ll be honest and say that I am probably not in a rush to go back. We subsequently found out that a number of these films were on YouTube, and a few of them were quite passable to me.

I’ve always wondered about all the different chicken seasonings that exist out there, and one of the ones I’ve always been intrigued about, yet a little bit intimidated by, was jerk chicken. It seems weird that I would be intimidated by this given that my Indian and Middle Eastern spice collection would very likely cover a lot of spices needed for jerk chicken, but I’d always shied away from it. A colleague actually made her family’s version of jerk chicken for culture day yesterday, and she told me how simple her spice blend was — only about 6-8 ingredients, plus some fresh peppers, and that was it. Other than the specific chili pepper she mentioned, I pretty much had all of the spices already. Now, I need to add this to my list of things to make (and potentially film and add to my food channel, and call her out!).

For culture day, we either had to dress up in our culture’s dress, and/or bring in food that is from our culture. I brought in Vietnamese coconut cassava cake to share. Well, that almost never happened because last night when I was pre-heating the oven, I made a massive mistake and forgot to take out one plastic container that had fallen to the back of the oven, and a lot of plastic started burning and leaking.

Yes, I’m very Asian. I use my oven to store things, whether it’s baking pans, skillets, and even spare glass and plastic containers I use for storage. I’m usually very diligent about removing things from the oven, but this time, this single plastic container fell out of my roasting pan, and I totally missed it until I started smelling the burning smell. I was successfully able to remove the dripped plastic after it dried on the oven racks, but was unable to get it off in the undersides of the oven that I could not reach. So I asked for the handyman to come take care of it today. I hope they don’t hate me and think I’m really that careless. This has never happened before!

It’s been spirit week in our office this week, with a different theme every day. Monday was pajamas day, Tuesday was Hippie Day, today is celebrity day, tomorrow is culture day, and Friday is sports day. Today, I dressed up as Julia Child. Okay, that’s hard to do because she’s about a foot taller than me, is white, and also looks absolutely nothing like me, but I put on a collared button-up shirt as she normally wears under an apron, a strand of pearls (she usually wore a choker/pearl necklace in her cooking shows), and also brought a large wooden spoon to add to my apron pocket, also indicating I am a cook.

I never participated in Spirit Week in high school, but as an adult, it seems more fun for some reason, and I’ve taken more ownership over it. Plus, it’s just fun to see people dress up in ways they normally do not at work.

Sometimes, I forget what it is like to work at a company headquarters where there is constantly a buzz, people coming in and out, constant new things happening. Being in a remote office usually means things are a bit quieter, conference rooms are easier to book, and we have more quiet periods to actually get things done. So it’s been a bit different this week to see so many visitors come in other offices. It’s as though the office as a new life to it in some way. Then, after the visitor rush is gone, we go back to the same quietness as is now normal for us.

It also means I need to use the phone booths more so I can get actual work done.

After seeing how good it felt to wake up early for my 8am Swerve cycling class on Monday, I’ve decided that I need to stop being lazy and wake up earlier. I used to do this all the time from age 27 through 30; I don’t know how my laziness took over me again. I would wake up at 5:50-6am every weekday from Monday through Thursday to make it in time to my gym near Herald Square for an hour-long workout class, followed by another half hour of working out solo. Some days, I even woke up at 5:30 to make it in time for my 6:30am Bikram yoga classes. That took some massive grit on my end.

I only managed to make it down for the gym at 7:40 this morning. My goal is to continue my 7am workouts again. Let’s see how I fare, especially with these dark mornings and shorter days becoming a thing with autumn settling in and winter around the corner.

While walking the streets of New York and taking the subway here and there to see as many sites for Open House New York this weekend, we went into and transited through a few subway stations that had notable subway art in the form of mosaics and tilings on the walls. Along the yellow lines at Prince Street, if you look at the walls, you can see details of silhouettes of different people, some carrying shopping bags, purses, pushing baby strollers, even hauling Christmas trees. At 8th street along the yellow lines, you also see many multicolored mosaic art, from flowers to faces, and it’s clear that a lot of thought and creativity went into these designs. The only sad thing is that given the daily hustle and bustle of New Yorkers, so few of us actually stop to truly appreciate all this notable art, self included. I usually notice them in the evenings when I’m on my way to and from meeting a friend for dinner or drinks, or on the weekends when I’m less in a rush. There’s actually a free walking tour you can do of the subway art that is still on my list of touristy things I’d like to eventually do one day. Too bad Chris doesn’t want to come with me because he doesn’t want to hang out with a bunch of tourists.