After a lot of fast-paced traveling over the last five months, I was craving some time to slow down and be productive with all my backlogs before starting the next adventure. Ayu is going through yoga teacher training this month, so this was a perfect chance for me to go back to Chiang Mai; it's familiar and very livable, it's cheap even for Thailand, it has coworking spaces, and the weather this time of year is absolutely perfect. Jeans and a t-shirt for days. It's really no surprise that Chiang Mai is perpetually at the top of Nomad List.
Since I spent all my time catching up on tasks and staring at a computer screen, I didn't really do anything very interesting or photo-worthy, so this post will be short and boring. Really this is a glorified diary entry so I can remember what I did this month.
Accomplished:
Since I spent all my time catching up on tasks and staring at a computer screen, I didn't really do anything very interesting or photo-worthy, so this post will be short and boring. Really this is a glorified diary entry so I can remember what I did this month.
Accomplished:
- Lots of HTML and CSS updates to my blog to make it more attractive and mobile-friendly
- Added links to relevant photo albums to my old blog posts to make them more useful
- Caught up on blogging (I was 2+ months behind)
- Caught up on photo and video editing
- Extended my visa for Thailand and got a 30-day tourist visa for India
- Researched India and made a few bookings for the upcoming trip
- Performed some maintenance and made content updates to Bebee's website
- Updated Bebee's cookbook with nearly 20 new recipes and some other minor updates (lots of transcribing, writing, editing, photo editing, graphic design, emailing, and e-commerce work)
- Hacked together some VBScript to scrape metadata from music websites and store it in my music library, partially for the usefulness of the data and partially as a programming exercise for myself
- Promptly purged VBScript from my brain
- Submitted photos and text to my friend at Citylife for inclusion in an article in next month's issue
- Furnished my best travel advice to three friends who are planning Southeast Asia trips this year
- Built a sabbatical map that links the places I've been to with the relevant blog posts (see below)
- Read a JavaScript book Becca left for me and started clearing out some mental cobwebs
- Had a few days of software development time and added five new gadgets to the blog
- Made routine doctor and dentist visits
- Took 8 hours of massage courses
Reading list:
- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
- Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond (which resulted in a blog post)
- South India & Kerala by Lonely Planet
As mentioned above, here's the interactive map of my sabbatical. It's also permanently linked from my blog in the "Sabbatical Map" gadget on the right side of the page.
