mei-drops

View from Twin Peaks Can't believe it's almost the end of another year. I'll do a more thorough review once the year closes; for now I'll just write about what's happened since I last posted: Highlights: Over Thanksgiving, traveled to Seattle and Vancouver with my "twin" Sarah, in order to activate my H-1B status and also to visit friends Right, I got my H-1B visa :O PTL! ... and also, wow cannot believe this is happening. Visited the Slees (and their new pup Trooper) in the Seattle area, and my old UBC IVCF friends in Vancouver! It is always heartwarming to reunite with old friends :) I enjoyed spending time/getting to know Sarah better, and finding out more things that make us pretty much the same person lol (Bioinformatics, Google, Toronto, interests in language/east Asian culture/art/music/etc.) Successful launch of my team's new product YAY PTL Hosted my former coworkers from Pivotal Labs for a day trip out to Point Lobos. That w...

(I actually wrote this two Sundays ago.. but still wanted to share it haha :D) I just came back from an evening of food, whiskey-tasting, jjajangmyeon, card games, wedding favour prep, and chromecasting Final Fantasy songs and cutscenes onto a wide-screen TV. Yes, we even re-watched the Tidus laugh scene: Throughout much of the night my friends and I ended up nerding out about FF. I didn't know there were people in my fellowship who enjoyed the FF games as much as I did! It's like that C.S. Lewis quote, the one where friendship "is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What? You, too? I thought I was the only one.'" It was like finding out that your (not-so-new) friends had grown up in the same hometown as you all along. It was wonderful :')

View from the ferry en route to Angel Island Some family friends from my home church back in 'sauga came to the Googs today for a visit! :D It was really wonderful catching up with them, enjoying fun sights/food/coffee together, and hearing about home! +1 for Tagalog practice; I'm so rusty nowadays xD Our first home group of the schoolyear took place last night, and it was very refreshing. It's my first time being in (and helping lead) a mixed life stage group, and already I can tell that I'm going to enjoy it haha. Our group is diverse in terms of life stage (from new grad to young parent), Christian walks, and personalities. We will be studying the book of Acts this year. Praying for growth in our walks and in our relationships! My co-leaders (K2 and Ve, who are also the hosts) are pretty much the best people on earth, and I get to receive wisdom from them and build deeper friendships with them :') Our group gets to eat dinner with their baby girl, who ...

Life is slipping by one day at a time. Each day is brimming with new things, and it is hard to pin down the moments before they escape memory. Here's an attempt to write them down before they go away. ・At the end of this month my three housemates and I are all parting ways (two getting married; the third found a different place). It was pretty devastating news to me at first, actually—I wasn't expecting the third housemate to leave so suddenly, and it put me in a tight spot. But God provides; He always does, so I'm not sure why I was so surprised haha. Very soon after I started looking for a new home, He provided one, in the same city and with another little Christian community! I'll be moving into it in a little over a week :O Praying for a smooth move! ・As for work... I am gradually losing motivation :( CS has never been a passion for me, so I find it difficult to maintain interest in my work. Thankfully deadlines have been moved a bit, so there's a bit more b...

I just came back from a 5-day-long (!) trip to Vancouver. Trips to Vancouver (after university) have always been very refreshing to the soul. The combination of good nostalgic memories, beautiful scenery, delicious food, and wonderful friends fattens my heart and warms it up to prepare it for the next portion of life. ^__^ My last day in Vancouver, I started thinking about why I liked the city so much, and what my life would have looked like if I had lived there instead of in California. I realized that what really made Vancouver such a special place to me was the community  I experienced there. In the first community house I lived in (Winter 2012), all 9 of us—from different backgrounds and cultures—would cook together, do groceries together, commute together, and most importantly pray together. We shared more than just our food—we shared our money, living space and lives. After I left, they continued to live in intentional Christian community in an even bigger house (~15 peo...

Dang I really need to blog more haha. It's been more than a month since the last post! Life has been pretty busy lately! I've flown back to Toronto twice in the past month (AL's wedding, and Russell's convocation), and then flying out again next week for JC's bachelorette in Vancouver. The days in between are filled with work (still really stressful, but ameliorated a bit by conversations with my mentor and other friends and fam), church (co-leading women's group Bible studies w/ LT almost every week, as well as driving interns around), and random get-togethers. I'm learning to surrender my plans to God (Proverbs 16, which we covered in women's group tonight), to be a better steward of my skills at work, to cherish family, to be sensitive to how other people are doing/take an interest in others' interests (Philippians 2:1-11). It turns out this last one is really, really  hard for me! Pride is one of my biggest weaknesses, and when coupled with f...

Oops, long time no update :P What's happened in the last two months: I went to Japan for the first time! :D More photos and stories at my Japan tumblr . This was a dream come true for me in many ways: Got to practice Japanese and be part of everyday Japanese life—a language and culture that I've been interested in/studying since I was 11. I only have two (2) items in my bucket list: to see cherry blossoms in Japan, and to see cherry blossoms in Japan at night. Check and check!! :D Last year Jorge randomly put out the idea of a Japan trip to our Anime WhatsApp group... and it actually came true! Getting to travel with some close friends who enjoy the same things is one of the very best gifts on earth. :) Got to visit a missionary and his team in Ishinomaki, and observe God's work through Christian churches in Japan. Felt like I was in an anime LOL (definitely the dream for 11-year-old Rosanne). Japanese food. My favourite cuisine in the world *__* On the first wee...

I'd like to start blogging about the small things in life :) A tidbit from today: my cousin JR was in town for a wedding, so I had lunch with him and our aunt's family. After lunch we all ended up just sitting in our aunt's kitchen and chatting about life. Towards the end of the afternoon, when the rest of our relatives had floated away towards their bedrooms, for some reason JR and I started talking about faith and family. In retrospect, it was an awfully good conversation, in which we talked about the role of faith in (dating/marriage) relationships, the strange bonds between the cousins and siblings in our family, and how to show God's love to our parents. tl;dr—I have a cousin with whom I can share my walk with Christ??! THIS IS AWESOME!!!

The topic for small group this week was prayer, and as part of the preparation, my co-leader and I shared with each other passages, quotes and sermons we had seen about prayer. I couldn't help but bring up Sunder Krishnan's sermon from Urbana '09—it's one of the very few things I internalized from that conference. Even over six (!) years later, it's still pretty mind-blowing to realize that we can pray about some pretty radical things, if only we realize how much more powerful and creative and effective God is. Pray to the God of creation, the God of sovereignty, the God of revelation, the God of history.

Yesterday a bunch of small business owners from the Philippines (winners of a local SMB competition) came to visit Google. I had a pretty exciting conversation with one of them, that went like this: Me: Hi, are you one of the small business owners? Owner: Yes, I own a cupcake shop... [inside my head]  Hmm I only know one cupcake shop in Manila, and it's in... Owner: ... It's in Serendra ; have you been there? [inside my head]  OMG it is there. What if... it's that same place I visited in 2010, but never got to buy from because it was expensive, but found so cool because cosplayers used it for their photos ??? Me: Yes, I've been to Serendra! Owner: The shop is called Cupcakes by Sonja. Me: OH MY GOSH Me: OH MY GOSH ARE YOU SONJA Owner: Yes!!! (and later on) Me: I feel so honoured to meet the owner of my favourite cupcake place in Manila!! Owner: And I'm honoured to meet an actual Googler!! LOLOL Apparently they had already expanded to five branches...

I took my Cantonese heritage for granted when I was growing up. Nobody in my generation in the Philippines spoke or was Cantonese, so it never occurred to me to pay attention to this language or culture. Heck, I wasn't even aware  that some words my family used everyday were Cantonese ( lun tsun  [clumsy],  gong goh  [commercial]; the list goes on). I thought they were just Tagalog, since that's what my Cantonese mother usually spoke to us (aside from English and Hokkien). That's how low my level of awareness was. It wasn't until university that my appreciation for this culture really grew. When up to 75% of the people in your fellowship—with whom you studied, ate, hung out, and lived day to day—spoke Cantonese or was born in Hong Kong, learning some of the culture and language was inevitable. Before long, I was also telling people to fai di and cooking the same food as they were. I wanted so much to relate to these new-found friends, so I tried my best to understa...

Almost a year ago, I posted a funny excerpt from my 4B journal . That brought back some good memories :) (although at the time, things did not feel pleasant at all!) Recently, I stumbled upon an even older, and even better, treat: an online journal I had kept during my co-op term in Singapore! Back then, Google Docs was not a thing, so I had actually typed up the journal entries in Google Notebook . The notes got imported into Docs when Notebook shut down in 2012. I had completely, utterly forgotten about this online journal because I had also kept a physical journal then. I only found it again the other day when I searched up "rice" in my Drive LOL (I was looking for a recipe for 油飯). Such a good surprise. :) Here are some of the more random/candid excerpts. * Friday, 10 June 2011 Random thought: How come a lot of CCF upper-years I know start their work reports AFTER their work term ends? :/ * Wednesday, 15 June 2011 Yesterday, after group meeting: Colleague:...

Two friends recently posted reading lists for 2016, so I decided to join in on the fun (and finally cross these books off of my ever-growing list). In no order whatsoever: Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones) Divergent (Veronica Roth) The Space Trilogy (C.S. Lewis) Life Together (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) Celebration of Discipline (Richard Foster) Invitation to Lead (Paul Tokunaga) The Neverending Story (Michael Ende) Pearl in the Sand (Tessa Afshar) The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien) Magonia (Maria Dahvana Headley) The Fault in Our Stars (John Green) The rest of the Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe The Last Battle るろうに剣心、巻之十五：巨人対超人 (和月伸宏) (Rurouni Kenshin, volume 15 by Watsuki Nobuhiro) I think the majority of these are easy reads, so... this list should be much easier to finish than my drawing series haha. Any other book recommendations are most welcome! :)

How was your 2015? 2015 went by so fast that it felt insignificant. If anything, the things that stood out this past year were the negative things. Indeed, 2015 was like a matrix full of negative numbers whose determinant looked to be 0: nothing of value. I would very much like to end it there, and to focus on the parts of the year that brought me challenges and hurt. I suppose that comes from the selfish, prideful part of me—the part that wants to be pitied but also admired. There's also that part that wants to affirm that the world is not all rainbows and unicorns, and that talking about positive things is a form of denial. Yet by God's grace and great intervention, I talked to a brother in Christ this past week who exhibited a different attitude: even though something sad had happened to him recently, his main takeaway was not how painful it had been. Instead, his main takeaway was thankfulness . I was so surprised and impressed by this behaviour. Is it okay to be than...