Seaside Aquarium

All these years I have lived in Oregon and I never visited our local aquariums. I traversed the world to see the aquariums in Japan and Dubai, but couldn't drive 1.5 hours away to see the ones here. Until now...

Having a kids gets you out in new places, but even though this aquarium was kid-friendly, I was definitely much more into it than she was. First, a seal splashed her because she didn't feed it, and that upset her. Then she was afraid to touch the starfish and sea anemones. And then she got it into her head that she wanted to see a narwhal, but they don't survive in captivity and to my knowledge no aquarium has a narwhal, and certainly not a tiny aquarium in Seaside, Oregon. So the kid was rather unhappy, but I thought this was a wonderfully fun and quirky place. 

The entrance where you feed the seals

What the seals eat

Places to pet starfish and sea cucumbers - my kid was too scared

Deadshot Outfit

Very proud of this outfit I put together to meet my friend for drinks at Deadshot. Finally I got to wear the Niko And skirt I bought in Taipei in 2018 when I was pregnant, and swore I would be able to wear it just as soon as I gave birth. Well, that was four years ago. Paired it with a chocolate-colored Cuyana blouse and Mansur Gavriel bag. 

Top: Cuyana

Skirt: Nika and...

Bag: Mansur Gavriel

Leather gloves: thrifted

Shoes: Target

Sunglasses: Alice + Olivia

Grand Stark Outfit

I have fallen behind on outfit posts. This blog used to just be a record of all the clothing I wore and made, and then it morphed intro a record of travel and life abroad and now I'm not sure what it is. 

I don't get to go out very often, and I dress up even less, but when I do, I try to take pictures and record it here. 

Here is one from last winter that I really love. 

Coat: vintage, from Grandma

Scarf: from my mom

Shoes: thrifted

Pink dress: Target

Bag: Mansur Gavriel

Photo Diary: Omaha, Nebraska

I have been struggling to keep up with the blog entries these days. This has been an issue ever since i started my business, but really an issue once I had my daughter, and the even more of an issue during the pandemic, which halted all travel and left me wondering what was left to write. 

I probably have some general entries on my life which I could post, but each time I sit down to record those I feel uninspired. I want to put my home-bound days behind me. I don't think I would have written any entry all until I decided to write about my recent business trip to Omaha. 

Being on the speaker's circuit has taken me to some interesting parts of the country for conferences, parts that I would have never visited otherwise like Chattanooga, Tennessee and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and now Omaha, Nebraska.

I arrived a day before my meeting and had time to walk around downtown in the evening. I was blessed with good weather: 70 degrees and sunny in the middle of November! These are some photos of things I found interesting from that walk and from throughout the week. 

Cafes of Omaha, Nebraska

I have been struggling to keep up with the blog entries these days. This has been an issue ever since i I had not been looking forward to this business trip to Omaha in all honesty, but when I started to do some research about the city I perked up. There were many wonderful cafes and bars - I didn't even get to all of them. So instead of catching up on entries from the past few years, I prefer to write about places I visited, starting with this business trip to Omaha. Though my hotel only featured a Starbucks and it was very hard to get out and get to some of these cafes, I had a good time sampling the specialty coffee of Omaha. 

Archetype Coffee

A wonderfully spacious cafe in an industrial area just north of downtown. 

CTRL

My favorite cafe in Omaha for it's uniqueness! It is a cereal bar that also serves coffee. I couldn't decide between two drinks so I ordered them both! One is a gorgeous fruity pebbles latte, and the other is an iced Ube-Matcha latte with amazing art. 

Hardy Coffee

Great breakfast burritos and mediocre coffee, but a nice urban ambiance. 

Rally Coffee

Nice Scandinavian vibes from the very popular cafe. 

Lunch date in downtown

 Checked out a cool Japanese restaurant in downtown and used it as an excuse to dress up.

Coat: Thrifted

Pants: Uniqlo

Scarf: Dog ascot from Mexico

Bag: Mansur Gavriel

When the curtain came up: The "End" of the Pandemic

The sign greeting us at our favorite cafe, June 30, 2021

I must have begun writing this post 20 times. Of course the pandemic has not ended - only the restrictions on the pandemic have been listed. 

The “end” of the pandemic is a goalpost that keeps moving back, but after several starts and stops, the end of restrictions is something I can finally document. 

First attempt I want to document was in June 2021. I wrote of it in my diary here:

“On June 30th Oregon opens back up. That means no masks, no social distancing, no capacity limits. It feels incredible. I am so excited. We have sacrificed so much, and like Camus [from The Plague] we are finally emerging from the walled village. It you had told me back in March 2020 that we would not 'open up' again until June 2021, I would have despaired, but now I have survived the 'long winter”'[Game of Thrones reference] and we are on the other end of it. I will travel this year to Mexico with my friends one day. I will go out to bars and clubs again. I will return to this life I love.”

Then on June 30th my family ventured out to our favorite café where we had not been in so long:

“This morning we walked to Good Coffee, not knowing what we would find. The COVID-19 restrictions lifted on June 30th - the official end to quarantine. No masks, no social distancing, no capacity limited. I didn’t know if Good Coffee would be any different, but it was. No one wore a mask inside. The indoor tables were open. Two dudes were sitting there on their laptops. We three sat at favorite table and ate croissants and scones. The bathroom was open, the plexiglass and 6-ft floor markers were gone. It felt like before, only better, because now I will never take it for granted. I will return to all my favorite cafes and restaurants and indulge in drinking lattes from a cup. I will love seeing strangers dressed up on the city streets. I will dress up too. Life, we are back. The pandemic is not over, other countries are still wrestling with high numbers and other states in the US are struggling with the delta variant from India. We don’t know how immune we will be for how long. But I wanted to capture here, for an eternal, the timeline of the end of quarantine in Portland, OR:

March 16, 2020 to June 30, 2021"

Unfortunately it was not to be. Masks came back on July 26, 2021 (my birthday) and then a summer wave of infections came, followed by another in winter. In Portland we didn’t go on lockdown again, but I know some countries did. It would be another 9 months for us before masks came off, in March. 

At the time of this writing, I am on a flight with no masks, though I have two in my carry-on just in case things are different in Europe. But I still face a risk of infection, and presently, if I test positive for COVID-19 I would be unable to enter the US – something I seriously fear. Is this the end? If not, when will it be? When will COVID-19 be something we no longer fear?