lee.ourand.me: Posts

📝 Post December 14, 2025

Weeknotes 63

I don’t know what’s in the air, but whatever it is is running roughshod over my Kirkland brand “Aller-Flo” allergy relief spray. Brutal headaches every day. One of these days, I’m going to have to move to the desert or something.
As promised, the sequel snow day arrived. And once again, it looks like we get another serving of snow tomorrow.
Paid our first insurance premium at our new 6x higher rate for the same plan we’ve had for a year. Which is weird, because I remember—just after the election—being assured a certain political party had shown no interest in messing with the ACA. Huh!
We watched the first four S5 Stranger Things episodes. So far so good. But that final little reveal seems teed up for some grade A silliness coming forth in the remaining episodes. I kind of hope they embrace it, and go for a full-on Dark Matter style ridiculous ending
Been having to break out the bike pump and top up one of the tires on the car every couple days. Think we ran over a nail (though I haven’t seen the evidence after a few casual inspections). After the last tire repair we had done, the tire completely warped and had to be replaced after just a couple months. So I’ve been hesitant to get this one “fixed”. But after this week’s many sub-zero temperature days, and having to go out and repeatedly re-inflate the thing, I’ve finally caved and made an appointment. I’m hoping we have better luck with the patch job this time.

📝 Post December 07, 2025

Weeknotes 62

We finished watching The Beast Inside Me. Was a fun show. The end was a little too predictable and it felt rushed.
I finished the first volume of my A Course in Contemporary Chinese textbooks / workbooks! I began volume 2, which starts out with giving & receiving directions—something I’m horrifically bad at in English. Send me all the good vibes.
First snow of the year, and looks like we’ll quickly be getting the sequel tomorrow.
Knocked out a few Advent of Code puzzles. After nearly a year of almost no programming practice, I can say: this old man’s still got it!
Gym’d a few times… Fine. Dandy.
I ponied up the cash for the iOS version of Anki. After using all the various free versions for the past few months, figured it would be nice to toss a little money their way. Plus, the iOS version—unlike the web version—supports text-to-speech. So I’ve been able to stop creating ad-hoc audio files on my mac. Tiny achievements!
Speaking of, I crossed the 1,000 “note” milestone in Anki. So, ballpark, that means I can read, speak, understand around 1,000 Chinese words now. That still places me squarely in “childlike” territory. So we’ve got a ways to go.

📝 Post November 30, 2025

Weeknotes 61

And another month in the books.
Rigged up a way to watch TV using my digital antenna over the internet while at my parents’ house for Thanksgiving football purposes. Like clockwork, my home internet turned to garbage as soon as we wanted to watch, and there was much buffering.
Back to the gym routine after much excuse-production.
The Anki flashcard review session, since adding audio and “again”ing myself for not using the right tones, has grown into a beast. My review on Tuesday was almost 2 hours. So I’ve paused learning new words for a bit while we get this back under control. Today’s review looks like it’ll be around 35 minutes, so we’re approaching reasonable again.

📝 Post November 23, 2025

Weeknotes 60

Did a big grocery shopping day at the various Richmond Asian markets. Cynthia acquired… let’s say an upsettingly fragrant amount of stinky tofu. Our house has smelled farty much of the week. For one reason or another.
While shoppin’, I eyed this curious beverage from the mean streets of Taiwan: Turns out, milk peanut soup can be surprisingly refreshing! I did accidentally spill a tiny bit on my hand, and a couple hours later noticed a small rash there. Very strange, considering my innards seemed to handle it just fine. A peanuty mystery.
Got our Prius inspected. I’d been avoiding this since the catalytic converter incident, so it was about 2 years overdue. But she passed inspection, and we’ve got two legal cars for the first time ever.
Continuing on the vehicular responsibility trend: I cleaned, lubed, and adjusted the chain on the NX500. Also took out a little slack in the clutch cable. Good as new.
In Mandarinland, I’ve noticed my tone game is really lacking. I think it’s partly because my Anki flashcards have no audio. I have no frame of reference for when I’m, in my head, pronouncing things badly. So I’m attempting to rectify this. I first installed the “Meijia (Premium)” Apple accessibility Taiwanese Mandarin voice. Then, in Anki, installed the AwesomeTTS plugin, and had it add audio to the new aptly-named “Audio” field of all my notes. It seems like it did a rather excellent job so far. Studying my cards now makes it clear just how brutally I’m butchering most of the things I’m saying. Hoping this helps.

📝 Post November 16, 2025

Weeknotes 59

Acquired some wintery-themed teas, and have been brewin’ and sippin’ those nonstop this week. Mint is the best of the bunch.
Got the Bolt inspected for the first time since its acquisition. Easy-peasy pass. One maintenance-free year down. Although, the thing has randomly started prompting me for a password for something, and I can’t figure out it wants from me or why it started doing this. Let me know if you have any clues here…
這個星期我學了一個新字：火雞 (I learned a new word this week: turkey. But literally translated, it’s “fire chicken”, and I think that’s… well it’s at least a little bit funny)
Feels like I’ve made a lot of Chinese-listening progress this past week. I can now listen to the Taiwanese Peppa Pig and understand about ~70% of what’s being said. Last month, that felt like a pipe dream. Since I started tracking a couple weeks ago, I’m at ~15 hours of listening “comprehensible input”. Probably another 15 of reading short stories. This is not counting the several “free” hours of listening to Cyn make fart jokes and calling the cat cute.
Pickleball’d again. Again, mostly got my butt kicked. Went 2 - 3 against Ta.
Went to watch Jess run in the half-marathon yesterday. The spot we arbitrarily picked to stop and cheer just so happened to be right in front of a friend’s house (had no idea they lived there). Small town, this Richmond place.
Went on a little motorcycle ride with the ol’ man again. Did our now usual route in New Kent. But this time with the added anxiety of dealing with 40mph cross-winds.

📝 Post November 09, 2025

Weeknotes 58

NY pulled through on makin’ me proud and VA pulled through on not fumbling the ball completely. Nice job, everyone.
Learned about a sneaky little IRS rule that, if you sell a single share in a mutual fund that’s set to use “Avg Cost” basis method, you permanently lock every share you own into that basis method… forever. Sure would’ve been nice to get some kind of warning about that before dooming myself. Between ACA income requirements and maintaining liquid living expenses, it already felt a bit like threading a needle with limited wiggle room. Now we’ve got significantly less wiggle room still. I’m sure there’s a sensible reason for this rule. But it sure feels real dumb right now.
Speaking of the ACA… Our health insurance premiums for 2026 are set to go up 6x what they are here in 2025. Neat system we’ve got, here.
First time pickleballin’ in a while. Was a tad rusty, but managed to win a couple games. The weather was nice enough to ride the motorcycle out to the courts. The ride home was a bit less pleasant on the hands. My summer gloves will need to be swapped out for something a little more substantial soon.
Cooked up an eggplant parm feast to celebrate our 5-years-of-togetherness anniversary. Cheated on my teetotaling and had a little prosecco too.
Met up with Ta at Hill Café and sipped a NA beer outside, enjoying the weather, the scenery, and the company.
Listened to about 4 hours of LazyChinese podcasts in total this week. I can now understand about everything in the “beginner” level episodes, and 70% of the “lower intermediate” ones. Also been reading a bunch of graded readers at “lower intermediate” level. It feels kinda cool being able to read entire (very short) short stories without pinyin/zhuyin aids on, and not having to look anything up. Tiny milestone on a journey with an impossibly long way yet to go.

📝 Post November 02, 2025

Weeknotes 57

Happy November
Dialed up the Chinese study time to about 4 hours every day this week. I added a couple things to my routine to help my listening skills and expand my vocab a bit more quickly. So I’ve been listening to a bunch of Mandarin podcasts and reading a bunch of Mandarin short stories. Also added this zhuyin wordle game to the daily repertoire.
Went to the Halloween Parade with some buds. One of the perks of living in Richmond is living among so many incredibly talented artsy folks that make these silly events really special. A few of us popped into a tapas bar afterwards, and got some very Halloweeny patatas bravas and some drinkies.
Rode out to Charlottesville on the motorcycle along with Jess. Kind of failed in my attempt to plot a fun route out there, but the leaf peeping and the weather was 10/10.
Election week… Make me proud, NYC. And make me… lukewarm, VA. Let’s go!

📝 Post October 26, 2025

Weeknotes 56

Started the week off with a Hot Pot fiesta with one of Cyn’s new buds.
Been on a teetotaling kick for a bit, and have supplanted my usual beer-drinking with NA beers. It would appear there’s a bit of a trend in this regard, as there’s suddenly a ton of shockingly decent non-alcoholic beer options around. Favorite of the week was Brooklyn Brewery’s Special Effects Grapefruit IPA. It is a tasty beverage.
Went to a friend’s little Halloween get-together where we carved some pumpkins, feasted some s’mores, and watched Together. T’was a wonderfully spooky evening.
Jess and I ran the cap trail 10-miler. We weren’t exactly breaking any speed records, but it was a preeeetty nice time. Weather was perfect. Scenery’s lovely most’ve the way, even if the route itself is pretty boring (2 out-and-backs). Probably will do it again next year.
Took on the task of learning zhuyin (aka Bopomofo) this week. It’s the Taiwanese phonetic system comparable to pinyin, but without using roman characters. In theory, this’ll help remove the pronunciation familiarity I have with pinyin, and help me speak actual Chinese sounds instead of the English-approximations I’ve been using. ㄨㄛㄏㄨㄟㄩㄥㄅㄆㄇㄈ! (I can use bopomofo)

📝 Post October 19, 2025

Weeknotes 55

Since I’m wrapping up Volume 1 of the A Course in Contemporary Chinese, I submitted my order for books 2 through 6, and NTNU emailed me back suggesting I don’t buy them because of tariff complications. So that’s neat.
Played around with Godot for the first time in a few years. Just built the two tutorial games: the 2D and 3D ones. Since my last brief tinkering in Godot, they’ve added optional static typing to GDScript. Since most of the stdlib is typed, it provides some really excellent error messages right in the editor. Makes for a pretty pleasant experience.
Volunteered pickin’ up trash in the neighborhood. Altogether, our group of 6 picked up ~45lbs of trash. Most hilarious single piece of trash I found was a bag of 5 perfectly-normal looking hard-boiled eggs. Frank Reynolds’s head would explode. Perfect condition!
Did some two-wheeled Fall-time adventure days.
Went to the Bellwether Garage, and saw Miracle Time, Isaac Friend, and Theocles play. It was my first time seeing a show there. All three artists were excellent. And the blocked-off street / garage setup was unique. I even got to peep some excellent vintage motorcycles they’d wheeled out to make room for the bands.
Had Cyn list my Flair 58 espresso machine on Facebook Marketplace to avoid dealing with eBay again. Sold it almost immediately to a super-nice dude who is a legit espresso nerd, and seemed excited about putting it to use. Lesson learned. eBay: yuh dead to me.

📝 Post October 12, 2025

Weeknotes 54

Met up with my dad for a nice motorcycle ride on Monday. He found some really fun twisty roads about an hour outside of Richmond. After ripping around a bit, we stopped and got some Mexican food before parting ways.
Have been upping my running mileage in preparation for the Cap Trail 10M run. Ran 8.5 miles on Thursday and got the ol’ runners high feeling for the first time in a long time.
Began another motorcycle ride with Jess and dad yesterday, but it started downpouring on us as soon as we got to the fun roads. So just aborted mission, and headed home.
All my Chinese vocabulary words from my level 1 textbook have at least been reviewed once in Anki. I’m about 2/3 of the way through reading the actual material / doing the exercises in the workbooks, so started the order process for books 2 through 5. Unclear how the always-changing tariff nonsense will impact things this time.
Good read of the week was Mike Monteiro’s How to eat with others. Some choice snippets:

While I appreciate having friends with different points-of-view, or even different politics […] I will not be friends with people who want my daughter dead. I will not be friends with people who want, or even tolerate, my neighbors being kidnapped. I will not be friends with people who believe some of us are somehow entitled to more rights than others. And I will not be friends with people who believe if we keep our heads down, as others around us suffer, we’ll save ourselves.

Personally, if I’m having a gathering in my home I want my friends to feel welcome. Not just by me, but by everyone else there. And I need my friends to know that me, my guests, and my house are a safe place. Not just for this particular event, but always.

Think of it this way: if you invite someone from a marginalized community into your home and they ask if there’s going to be someone there that wants them dead, or doesn’t feel like they’re entitled to full personhood, and you tell them that you’re having a separate party for those folks the next night, how do you think that person would feel? You can’t claim to care about someone while also caring for the people who would bring them harm. You really don’t care about your friend in that situation. You’ve made a decision that speaks more to your standing in the social order than their safety. And that’s fucked up.

A timely reminder for Thanksgiving. I’m thankful I don’t have to deal with much of this mess with what remains of my own family.

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