My top 5 events of 2009

Continued from a previous post...

5. Winston's wedding - I had the honor of being the best man at Winston's wedding in the Bay Area... congrats to Winston and Shanying!
4. Birthday dinner with families - My 32nd birthday was pretty special, as my parents and Priscila's extended family (mom and dad, who were visiting from Brazil, sister, brother-in-law, nephew from Milwaukee, and brother, sister-in-law, and other nephew visiting from Florida) met at the best Chinese restaurant in Milwaukee. The families got along like they'd been friends for life.
3. Sabbatical road trip - Subject of another entire blog! A 2-week road trip to the east coast, following the Brewers to Pittsburgh and Washington DC (where they lost a lot of games and fell out of the pennant race). I ended up going through Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and New York City before coming home.
2. Three month leave of absence - From August through November, I took a leave of absence from work. It was a great experience (see #3) and really left me refreshed and rested!

And of course, the #1 thing that happened to me in 2009 was meeting Priscila. She's gorgeous, charming, spunky, and definitely the best thing that happened to me. She's of Chinese decent, but born and raised in Brazil... so she's also very diverse and interesting! I'm looking forward to many more "top 10" events in the future with her.

2009 - Top 10 List

As tradition, I like to do a top 10 list of happenings in the past year. Things really started kicking off in 2007, where I graduated with my MBA after 6 years and got my first promotion. In 2008, I saw my sister get married in St. Thomas and Milwaukee and also took a wonderful trip to Hawaii. I somehow had to keep up with it in 2009, and I would hafta say I definitely have! So here it goes, the top 10 happenings of 2009:

10. MacBook Pro - I finally took the plunge and went to back to an Apple computer, my first since the Apple IIe I got in first grade!
9. SF visit - In February I flew out to the Bay area to visit Winston and his fiance at the time. They took me to Berkeley and SF Chinatown. Lotsa eating!
8. Stock Market - With the economy tanking in 2008, I made a point to learn from previous downturns and put money into the market. The batch of stocks I picked returned over 60% in 2009!
7. New Years trip to Orlando - I spent the final seconds of 2009 at EPCOT center in Disney World with someone special (see #1). We almost didn't make it as 12 hours is a long time to spend at EPCOT...
6. Stupidfest, eh? - Our annual former roommates trip in 2009 was to Toronto and Buffalo. Great buffalo wings at Anchor bar, and Toronto had great food too.

Stay tuned, top 5 coming up!

Blogger and Twitter and Facebook, oh my

I had lunch with Tom this week and he reminded me that I had not posted to my personal blog in a long time... He was, of course, absolutely right. Part of the reason was I had tried to branch off and start separate blogs of topics that were more focused... including Forever Cheesehead (about Wisconsin sports), Wok this Way (about Asian American life), and Dale's Sabbatical (about my sabbatical). I always struggle about how much personal info to put in these blogs... whether I want this to be a blog for my friends and family, or if I wanted the general public to read it. It's really nice to have one for friends and family because I can go back and see what's been up. But it'd be nice to have a public blog to see if what I'm saying rings true with the rest of the world, and to do the marketing work necessary to see if it can spread. 

Then of course there's Twitter and Facebook. And of course you can link every combination of Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. For the people who use Blogger, I feel like it's really hard to upload pictures. I don't have it quite figured out yet, but I think I may have a personal blog and a separate public blog. I've been checking out Wordpress, and it has a feature where you can have different settings for your blogs. You can even set some of your postings personal and require a password. But until I figure that out, I guess I'll just post here!

If anyone has any advice, please feel free to chime in!