Weekly Haul (113)

I bought a couple of books this month, and my Kickstarter finally came in!

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

Season One by Mouse Book Club

Love Poems by Pablo Neruda

The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane

Service Series by Mouse Book Club

Cover Lover 52

It's been a long while since I've done one of these lol. I haven't been on Tumblr as often either, so I haven't uploaded a Tumblr Pics post in so long lol. I haven't stepped into a bookstore in a while as well, but I already haven't recognized most of the new book covers. -__-"

(Every day I stray further and further from book fandom...)

New coworkers, Sleepovers, Presentations, Dinners, & Valentine's Week

February has always been a short month, but I feel like it flew by really fast this year! I didn't do much this month, but it still passed by really quickly lol.

February first was Ebony's, our new intern on our team, first day at work. Since I was assigned as her start buddy, I basically spent the whole day with her teaching her about our intern program and how to navigate our intranet. We had three new contractors starting the next week, so Anita and I were in charge of onboarding them as well, so it was a long couple of days where we didn't get much work done and did a lot of talking. As a result, I was super introverted that weekend lol.

The next Wednesday, we received notice that most of the interns were going to give a short presentation to some super important people in our company: the senior VP of our division and our GEO president. The presentations were split up with some of us presenting to Thys, our senior VP, in the morning and some presenting to Diana, our GEO president, after lunch. My friends, the interns on our floor, were all presenting to Thys in the morning, but because we were all busy with different projects, we didn't start working on our presentations until near the end of Friday.

We actually worked on the presentation until after five when Shelle came over to pick us up since Dom and Archana were coming over for a sleepover. We made these plans a few weeks before when Sonali was still in India, so we kind of didn't invite her to come over when she came back that week. Partially because we kind of forgot about it and partially because we didn't want her to come... Shelle's coworker, Melanie, also came over to hangout for a bit before going home.

We gave everyone a tour of the house before going to Mod Pizza for dinner. When we came back, we just hung around the kitchen table talking for hours instead of watching Venom and playing Overcooked like we originally planned lol. We didn't actually play Overcooked until midnight, and then we only played for 30 minutes lol. The next morning, we made pancakes and loafed around for a bit until we left to drop Dom and Archana off. All in all, a fun weekend! :)

Then we got to work on Monday, and Dom and Sonali were freaking out about their presentations since they weren't done, and we had to turn them in the next day. I basically finished mine, but I had one or two slides that I needed to finish up, so I wasn't worried. I ended up helping them with their presentations the next day since the deadline got extended to end of day.

That Monday night, we had dinner with Joan, who we haven't seen in a while. She was hilarious as usual and telling us about working the remote life now that her company has gone to 90% of its employees working remotely.

Then Thursday, Valentine's Day, we had our presentations. I was super nervous about it, so I only got a few hours of sleep that night since I always develop insomnia the night before presentations. -__-" As a result, I was kind of in a daze the whole morning until after I gave my presentation lol. CJ, Thys' personal assistant that we're on good terms with (we play HQ with her in the office all of the time lol), found out that we were all nervous and put in a good word for us, telling Thys that we were nervous and to ask us good questions lol. She's so sweet. We ended up giving her a box of chocolates (that we were planning on giving to Dom as part of Valentine's Week. Will explain soon.) as our thanks.

I honestly don't remember much of my presentation. I only had an hour to practice it since I was too lazy to do it the night before. I just remember ending my presentation thanking Thys and HR for giving us this opportunity to intern with the company for a year and making it the most nerve-wrecking Valentine's day I've ever had lol. I also remember acting more casual than formal during the presentation since I've met both Thys and Tijen (who I wasn't expecting to be there; she's my manager's boss!) and almost everyone in the audience before.

I noticed that Dom was absent during my presentation, which was worrying since she was supposed to present after me. I later found out that she was outside the room freaking out about her presentation lol. Then she came in and was freaking amazing during her presentation. Most people speed up when they're nervous. Dom was the exact opposite. She was calm, composed, and talked normally at an even pitch and tone. It was awesome.

Archana's presentation was after Dom's, and she was great at it too. She was professional and to the point, and it showed that she wasn't very nervous either. This is probably because she had already given a presentation earlier that morning on a similar topic lol.

Then we had lunch with the other interns and I got to meet Diana towards the end. I had originally planned on staying to watch the other interns' presentations, but I was just mentally and emotionally exhausted lol. We met back up on our floor to talk about how our presentations went and be relieved that it was finally over when Tijen and Anita stopped by to tell us that we all did great. Tijen said that she and Thys just had lunch together, and they were both impressed and surprised by all of the big projects we worked on. :D

I also found out from Archana that there was a thing called Valentine's Week a few weeks ago. Apparently, it's super popular in India, which is why most people I know in the US had never heard of it before. It's basically a whole week of Valentine's Day where you give your significant other a gift every day.

Archana said that Dom was really hung up about Valentine's Day because she's never celebrated it with anyone before. None of her relationships lasted long enough to get to Valentine's Day. So Archana suggested that we surprise Dom with Valentine's Week, but changed up some of the days' meanings lol. Instead of proposing to her, we'd give her a love letter. Instead of promising her, we'd give her pictures of all three of us. Instead of kissing her, we'd give her Hershey kisses lol. Then we split up the tasks and surprised her every day. She loved it lol.

For her love letter, I found a cute card on Amazon that Archana and I wrote in. The pictures took a bit of work. When they came over for the sleepover, we used Shelle's Polaroid to take a lot of pics. Shelle took three pics of us to give us all individual copies, but I pretended to act greedy and saved the rest of the pics for myself lol. I had taken some pics on my phone as well, so I used my Sprocket to print out some pics of us as well and gave Dom and Archana the pics in a cute Sanrio envelop that Shelle had held onto for the past decade from our cousin lol. It came with cute stationary, so I wrote a love letter to Archana and thank you note to Dom since I had already written a love letter to her earlier that week lol.

I had written so many love letters that week that I completely forgot to write one for David when he came up to visit that weekend. -__-" I was kind of pissed at him anyway, so it kind of worked out well? Lol. I got over it not long afterwards. He only stayed for a night since he had a morning shift the next morning.

That weekend, Shelle, Kyle, and I went home to help our parents itemize their taxes, which we do every year. David was working the whole time, so we didn't see him at all that weekend.

The rest of the month passed by pretty uneventfully. I was mainly busy with work since my manager asked me to help fix up this deck she was working on with Christian for an upcoming event that is actually happening today.

Books I Want to Read This Month

Even though I didn't read two books off of this list like I hoped to last month, I at least read one book, so I'm happy!

1. Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In a Dungeon? vol. 10 by Fujino Omori & Suzuhito Yasuda
2. Dengeki Daisy vol. 1 by Kyousuke Motomi
3. Kenka Bancho Otome vol. 1 by Chie Shimada
4. Yona of the Dawn vol. 1 by Mizuho Kusanagi
5. The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
6. In Real Life by Cory Doctorow & Jen Wang
7. 101 Corporate Haiku by William Warriner 
8. Unfollowing You by Komal Kapoor
9. I Am Her Tribe by Danielle Doby
10. Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
11. On Love by Alain de Botton
12. The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
13. The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic
14. The Consumption of Magic by T.J. Klune
15. Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan

February in Retrospect

I finally finished The Sun and Her Flowers! I've also spent the past week staying up way to late reading this Chinese light novel series called The Legendary Master's Wife. I can't find out how many volumes it is since everyone only keeps track of the chapters. I just know that I'm close to chapter 300 already lol.

I watched a lot of great stuff this month too!

I read:

• The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur
• The Legendary Master's Wife vol. 1 by Yin Ya
• The Legendary Master's Wife vol. 2 by Yin Ya

I watched:

• Love O2O (2016)
• Sirius the Jaeger (2018)
• Ken Jeong: You Complete Me, Ho (2019)
• The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (2018)

EDIT: Finally found out how many volumes are in the series and which chapters belong to which volume! Just had to make an account to see lol.