FEB 2026 S M T W T F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 -
-
Back to Work
A little reluctant, but I went back to work on Wed. (Feb. 1st) as promised after an extended LNY holiday. Didn’t get a lot done at the studio other than wrapping up the 100 Blessings postcard fai-chuns project and cleaning up the messy art area. Also had a long lunch on Fri. with a friend and his colleague, they treated me and my colleague for the start of year lunch (開年飯) which was cancelled last year due to a severe COVID wave.
My plan for the extended LNY holiday was to work on a rather ambitious website project that’s related to Chinese calligraphy. Made good progress, but still need a little work before I can demo it to friends. Will give myself one more week to work on this project before moving on to other projects in the queue. Add oil! 💪🏻
Website Updates
Have been working hard from home during this LNY holidays. Except for an evening run on Tue., calligraphy class on Thur. and a fellowship gathering on Sat. evening, I stayed home to work on some websites.
I first had to cleanup and organize the MBP I bought during my summer vacation in Canada. When that’s done, I had to set up the MAMP environment for local website development. Luckily, I didn’t run into any major hurdles and it took relatively short time for me to familiarize myself with web development once again.
Finished backing up and updating all of my websites, they include:
Still have one website that I have been wanting to design for a very long time, but doubt that I can finish it in the remaining LNY holidays. Will try and see! 💪🏻
LNY 2023 🐇
Worked till around 11pm on Friday before closing the studio for an extended LNY holidays. Managed to finish the annual 100 Blessings (百福) art project at home the next day on LNY’s eve. Feel relieved and satisfied to have taken up this challenge and completed it in just a little over a week!
My rewards started coming in one by one as my friends started receiving the postcard fai-chuns and happily shared photos of them together with their LNY decorations. I believe there’s still value in physical objects crafted by hand and delivered slowly via mail. It beats receiving hundreds of stickers via WhatsApp in my opinion.
The 100 Blessings art project exhausted much of my energy this past week. Worked late in the studio on most nights in order to squeeze time to meet and catch-up with a couple old friends for dinner on Tue. Also managed to see the much acclaimed First Slam Dunk with fellowship friends on Wed. evening, it did not disappoint.
It’s a little disappointing, however, that I couldn’t squeeze enough time to do cleanup at home and get a much needed haircut before the holidays. I can honestly say that I’ve already done my best to use the scarce time I had before the early LNY holidays, any minor work left unfinished will have to wait till I finish with a long overdue project over this extended LNY holidays!
100 Blessings (百福)
CNY will be very early this year. With the scarce time, I was debating whether to do the 100 Blessings (百福} art project again this year. I had many positive feedbacks from friends receiving the hand drawn postcard fai-chuns last year, some even framed it like precious artworks. And when I was visiting friends in Canada in the summer, some still had it prominently displayed in their homes! With this flattering encouragement from friends, I decided to accept the challenge and take on this tedious yet rewarding art project again this year!
Collaborated with the same paper artist again this year. Her workshop’s rent was raised considerably by the landlord at the start of the year, so I accepted her request to raise the price of the handmade paper. I immediately got to work after picking up the paper from her on Wed. Worked till late at night in the studio from Wed. to Sat. Finished drawing about half of the 100 postcards and had the first batch of greetings sent off to friends in Canada and US. I think I should have enough time this week to finish the remaining postcards before closing the studio for CNY holidays.
Besides the postcards, I also managed to finish writing the fai-chuns for my parents and my sister this afternoon, it’s an annual exercise for my family since I started learning Chinese calligraphy in 2016. CNY seems like the only time of the year when learning Chinese calligraphy seems useful.
Time will be extra scarce this week, hopefully I can still find time to do some cleanup at home and get a haircut before CNY holiday starts. Add oil! 💪🏻
Deep Work
After the government finally abandoned the useless vaccine pass restrictions near the end of 2022, I began using the public library system again. Just when I was in the process of making new year resolutions and planning my work for the new year, I borrowed and read a very useful book that was added to my reading list a long time ago.
The book reminded me of how wasteful I had been in using my time on “shallow work” instead of dedicating more time and effort on “deep work” that’s more difficult but at the same time potentially more meaningful and rewarding. I think I’ll achieve new heights of my stagnant career this year if I can follow some of the suggestions in the book such as working deeply, embrace boredom, quit social networks, drain shallow works, etc. Interestingly enough, I’ve already started to act on some of the suggestions before reading the book, this includes limiting my time spent on social networks and mindless web surfing and isolating myself at home in long stretches of time to work on projects. Will see if I can make breakthroughs in my work this year as I try to adopt this new approach of working more deeply.
May God guide me and bless my work this year, let me use the gift He has given me to serve others, as faithful steward of His grace in various forms. 🙏🏻
