— Misc —

April in Review

May 1, 2023

Welcome back to another monthly round-up! I’m finding that I’m excited to write these posts because it’s nice to look back and take stock of the month.

By the way, as I was going through the published posts, I realised that there are 1670 of them on the blog! That’s pretty insane but also makes sense given that I imported many old posts over when I moved to this domain/wordpress as my CMS. The sensible thing is to go through and archive some but I am a sentimalist and probably won’t get rid of any!

What I read in April

There were a few times in April where I felt I wasn’t reading much, so I was quite surprised when I counted the books I read and counted 16!!! That’s as much as last month and it means I read about one book every two days which is honestly really good for me given that I always feel busy and tired and hence like I never read as much as I want. But now that I’m looking back at the month, I did have a really long weekend (like today) which gave me a bit more time to read.

Highlights of my reading month include:

  • Reading both She Deserves Better and rereading The Great Sex Rescue – These probably won’t appeal to most people, but as someone who has been following the ChurchToo movement, I find these books to be helpful in discerning what teaching is un-Christian. Also, I teach teenagers so She Deserves Better was particularly relevant for me.
  • I dipped my toes into retellings of the Greek Myths, but with slightly mixed results. I wasn’t a fan of Stone Blind (in fact, the more I talked about it the more disappointed I felt) but I loved Circe! I also tried Song of Achilles, which I know many people loved (some even loved SoA but not Circe) but I found it too melodramatic and I DNFed the book. I might try it one more time because it’s a book club read, though!
  • In honour of the fact that the World Chess Championships ended yesterday (with Ding Liren winning the title – he had a really wild ride to being champion), I have to mention Ivory Vikings. I’ve just finished the book so not yet written the review, but it’s about the Lewis chess pieces.
  • And remember those books I mentioned last month? I’ve started reading them! So far, I finished Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes and Jambusters – both very interesting books about women in as they lived their lives in the 1950s and during the war.

April Teas

Tea-wise, things were pretty quiet. I have established that one “Lupicia Quick Tea Review” post every two weeks is optimal because it gives me the latitude to skip a few days if I’m not up to drinking a new tea! I also managed to review a new tea for once – Mixiang Hongcha – and with a long weekend/another public holiday coming up, I’m hoping to revisit a raw puer I’ve been storing!

I’ve also been working on a post about milk tea and colonialism, inspired by my research into the history of milk tea in Singapore. It’s going very slowly but I will definitely get it out sometime this month.

Off the Blog

It has been a pretty busy month for me, though now that I’ve settled down to write this, I find that my head is rather empty (probably because we celebrated my nephew’s full month today as it’s a public holiday)! Last month, I met up with my JC classmates (last met many of them over a decade ago!) and the future EDHEC MBA students. That was pretty fun and I hope that I’ll be able to meet them again this year.

For the last week or so, I’ve suddenly become very enamoured with this app called “Xiaohongshu”. If you google for it in English, you’ll find it described as China’s answer to Instagram, or a mix of Instagram, Pinterest, and shopping (or something like that). Personally, I downloaded it because I bought a mamianqun (one of the traditional Chinese skirts) and was looking for information on how to style it. I quickly found out that:

  1. The algorithm is scarily accurate
  2. Unlike TikTok, Xiaohongshu uses a mix of videos and images so I can skip all the videos (sound autoplays for videos which I’m not a fan of)
  3. It literally refreshes every time you open the app based on what you like in the previous section

And since the whole app is in Chinese, I haven’t actually been reading that much (I should, though, to practice my Chinese) and it’s just relaxing looking at the photos.

That’s about it for my April. Please send me encouragement to finish the milk tea & colonialism post – it’s a big subject but I do want to explore it but I’m also scared I won’t do it justice (or that I’ve always just missed out on a paper somewhere).

How did your April go?

7 thoughts on “April in Review”

  1. That’s a ridiculously high amount of blog post. Shows how passionate you are about blogging. And that you’ve been going at it for a very long time. When did you start blogging, if you don’t mind me asking?

    Sounds like you’re writing a paper on milk tea & colonialism rather than a blog post. That’s quite impressive. I hope you can take your time with it, so you can truly feel like you’re doing it justice. And above all else: just have fun writing it.

    I had a really busy month because of work. So I didn’t have much time left for writing anything unfortunately. But I did manage to read quite a few books. And I’ve even started rereading the Baccano series, which is one of my favorites. So I don’t want to complain too much.

    1. Ohhhh that’s a good question! I know I started in secondary school (that’s like… perhaps 15 years ago?!) but I didn’t port that blog over so I’ll never know the exact date.

      And thank you for the encouraging words! I don’t think the final post will be too long (I’m aiming for about 1.5k words else I think people might just skim it) but above all, I hope it will be interesting!

      I totally understand the feeling about work getting in the way of writing! Did you try Camp NaNoWriMo last month? I’ve occasionally found that to be helpful. And it’s good to reread, I need to do that more myself!

      1. Wow, that’s a very long time indeed, Eustacia. Hope you still have some of those early blog posts somewhere? That would be a sweet little memory for you to treasure and revisit on occasion.

        I’ll be sure to read it 🙂

        Never tried it. Mostly because I’m a very slow writer. And I know from experience that if I set the bar too high for myself, I’ll realize pretty quickly that I won’t be able to make it in time and I’ll just give up. I know that I need to set a very achievable goal for myself. So that it will feel even better when I not only reach that goal, but hopefully and most likely also surpass it.

        Did you write all your books through NaNoWriMo?

        1. I see I see! Great that you know your writing style – I think I’m still figuring mine out haha. I wrote the first draft of my first book through NaNoWriMo but then it took a longer time to have an editor go through it (I actually had a form a developmental edit because I wanted to learn how to improve my writing so that took longer).

    1. I feel like I should go through my old posts and get rid of those that don’t contribute, but I don’t think I’d be able to hit delete :p

What do you think?