100 things about me

  1. I was born on December 7 around 30 years ago in a little town in southeastern California.
  2. My name means "powerful." Hi-YAH.
  3. My nickname in grade school was Lamb Chop, after the little puppet character.
  4. I speak Mandarin, a little bit of Cantonese and I can understand French if you speak very slowly.
  5. Places overseas I've traveled to: Paris, St. Barthélemy, Mauritius, Phuket, Taiwan, Sydney, Cancun, Toronto, Vancouver, Malacca and various places in Malaysia, various Indonesian islands.
  6. Places I've lived in addition to my hometown: Seattle, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Boston, Baltimore, DC, San Diego.
  7. I lived in Singapore for four years and attended high school there.
  8. I competed in high school varsity track and finished 6th in the 800 meters at the national schools' track and field competition.
  9. My favorite colors are sage, chocolate and aubergine.
  10. I'm 5 feet and 1 inch tall.
  11. I wear size 5 shoes.
  12. I love shoes, especially high-heeled, pointy ones.
  13. My most treasured shoes are my white Manolo Blahnik sandals with pink roses that I wore on my wedding day.
  14. I was engaged in May 2001.
  15. My husband swept me away to Paris and, despite being afraid of heights, proposed marriage to me on bended knee at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
  16. About a month later, I proposed back to him in New York and gave him a Breitling watch.
  17. Our wedding day was in July 2002, and we were married at Hans Fahden Vineyards in Calistoga, CA.
  18. We honeymooned in Mauritius.
  19. I'm married to the most wonderful man in the world. Even though he and I are very different in many ways, we share a lot of the same viewpoints on life.
  20. We are on different sides of the political spectrum though, but for different reasons.
  21. We met when we worked for the same investment bank, in different geographic locations.
  22. We discovered we graduated from the same college the same year and never knew each other.
  23. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Anthropology.
  24. I survived college pretty intact and gained a few close friends in the process.
  25. I was a peer counselor for the college-run eating concerns hotline and outreach group.
  26. Eating concerns/disorders and educating young girls (and boys) properly and appropriately about sexuality were and are my pet causes.
  27. I love food and cooking.
  28. I roast a mean chicken.
  29. The dishes I cook that my husband likes the most are my spaghetti & meatballs, cassoulet, and Chinese five-spiced chicken.
  30. I love chocolate and really enjoy eating it, but I'm not a chocoholic.
  31. My favorite tea is Mariage Frères Marco Polo, with half and half and a couple packets of Splenda.
  32. I don't drink coffee at all; it gives me headaches.
  33. I love drinking hot chocolate -- the real stuff, not the powdery stuff.
  34. My favorite hot chocolates are Mariebelle and Burdick's.
  35. I like baking bread; it's therapeutic.
  36. My favorite bread recipe is a wholegrain, cranberry & pecan bread.
  37. I don't like bread machines.
  38. One of my favorite pastry recipes is French macaroons with caramel buttercream. I worked hard on this recipe after having tasted those at Maison du Chocolat in New York.
  39. My next culinary project is to make chocolate truffles with tempered chocolate shells. Or to figure out the chocolate chip cookie at City Bakery in New York.
  40. As Yankee and citified as I am, I love southern home cooking. Okra, chicken fried steak, buttermilk fried chicken, pecan pie -- the whole shebang.
  41. I actually enjoy going to eat at Cracker Barrel.
  42. My favorite sandwich is a BLT with toasted bread, mayonnaise and thick-cut bacon.
  43. I love the chocolate chip cookies at City Bakery in New York.
  44. I also like cheese -- English farmhouse Red Leicester cheddar and the Spanish manchego-like Zamarano are my favorites.
  45. I'm a middle-of-the-road sushi eater -- I'll eat the raw stuff and I like sashimi, but I'm still a little wary of things like sea urchin and blowfish.
  46. The not-so-ordinary meats I've eaten: buffalo, venison, quail, ostrich, kangaroo, alligator, reindeer, pigeon, rabbit, frog, snails.
  47. The first thing I'm going to do when we get a yard is to plant an herb and vegetable garden.
  48. I love farmers' markets and believe in sustainable, organic, local produce.
  49. I used to want to be a physician and travel the world with Medecins sans Frontières.
  50. I like watching the National Geographic channel show, Doctors Without Borders.
  51. I get seasick, carsick, trainsick and motionsick.
  52. But I fly fine and I love rollercoasters.
  53. I'm allergic to cats, horses, pollen and dust, and I have a mild intolerance for oranges.
  54. My first pregnancy was almost a breeze. I got pregnant right away, and I would get nauseous, but not enough to lose my appetite.
  55. But then I had some bleeding and preterm labor and was put on bedrest with medication from Week 29 to about Week 36.
  56. I went off my meds and went into labor the very next week.
  57. Yes, as trite as it sounds, there is *nothing* like motherhood.
  58. No, I haven't forgotten what childbirth is like.
  59. Yes, I would do it again. But just once more.
  60. I love knitting baby clothes. 
  61. I sometimes miss my single life, but my life now is much more full, and I wouldn't ever want to go back.
  62. I have three younger siblings -- 2 brothers and 1 sister -- and two sisters-in-law.
  63. I have one nephew and one niece, and a nephew and a bun-in-the-oven on the in-law side.
  64. I collect floaty pens.
  65. My favorite floaty pen is one with a Mini Cooper that floats along a mural depicting Hollywood at one end and New York City at the other.
  66. I love Mini Coopers.
  67. I drive a Volvo XC90. I feel like I'm in a tank. 
  68. We used to have a Betta splendens (Siamese fighting) fish named Dorian. He was a good fish.
  69. My favorite dog is the basenji.
  70. I have skydived once, and, despite it sounding cheesy, it was definitely a life-defining moment.
  71. I am an alumna of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.
  72. I enjoy reading US Weekly, but only allow myself to do buy the trashy mag when I am getting on a plane or train.
  73. I am religious about my New Yorker magazine.
  74. I have a secret French vinaigrette recipe that I got from my junior high school French teacher that everyone loves. I've only given it to a handful of people in my life.
  75. My favorite television series of all time is The West Wing.
  76. I got my husband hooked on shows like Notes from the Underbelly and How I Met Your Mother, and now he likes them even more than I do!
  77. My favorite reality TV show is Top Chef. 
  78. My favorite purse, a Fendi Selleria Mamma bag, was the prize I won in a bet with my husband on whether the psychiatrist or the psychologist was the medical doctor. After that, I decided never to bet with actual prizes with my husband, because he loses to me all the time and that would be mean of me.
  79. My purse is always "The Diaper Bag." I carry everything in it, from Band-aids, tissue and Shout wipes to contact lens solution and nail polish.
  80. I love Craig Taylor shirts. Can't get enough of them.
  81. I have a tattoo on my left hip of the Chinese character li which means "strength."
  82. I got the tattoo in New York in the summer between my junior and senior years in college, when I suddenly found myself single and without a boyfriend.
  83. I didn't get my ears pierced until I was 27, when my husband (then fiancé) gave me a pair of diamond earrings on the one-year anniversary of our engagement so that I could wear them on my wedding day.
  84. I like old movies. One of my favorites is "The Women."
  85. My favorite city in the world in New York.
  86. My favorite fiction writer is Lorrie Moore. I like that she's taken risks and experimented with the structure of the story. And she's funny and sad at the same time.
  87. In third grade, for no reason at all, one girl called me ugly and stupid and said, "I hate you." And for some reason, it's stayed with me all these years. That girl is now a dental hygienist, single, and still lives in my hometown. Karma's a bitch, ain't it?
  88. I don't like scary movies. They leave me with nightmares.
  89. I've never seen ET, Risky Business, any of the Indiana Jones movies and I've yet to see Sweet Sixteen, Top Gun or any of the Star Wars movies all the way through. I always end up falling asleep before the end.
  90. I like to have background noise when I'm reading, knitting, cooking, whatever. My husband likes absolute silence.
  91. When I work on a computer, I use the mouse as little as possible. I use keyboard shortcuts for nearly everything.
  92. I can sing the alphabet backwards.
  93. I taught the song to my son. Now he can too.
  94. I only took up knitting again in March 2004, after 17-year hiatus.
  95. My grandmother taught me when I was a teen, only she taught me in Cantonese, so when I went to buy patterns, I couldn't understand them at all because I only knew the Cantonese terms.
  96. I retaught myself with a book.
  97. I've never won a lottery, a door prize, drawing, or anything that has to do with luck of the draw.
  98. I am a consummate worrier and a bit of a fatalist.
  99. I'm also impossibly stubborn.
  100. And fiercely contrarian.