Wanderlust Wendy

What I’ve Been Up To

Last updated: November 2020

This Now page was inspired by a Tim Ferris podcast interview with Derek Sivers, who began the nownownow.com project. Think long-form version of social media status updates. Rather than ephemeral, this now page requires a bit more intention and thought to maintain. The purpose of my now page is to share current projects to both keep myself accountable, and update collaborators and readers.

2020 Theme: Be Intentional

After a year of being uncomfortable in 2019, I set out to live a tad more intentionally in 2020. I picked up Bullet Journaling in earnest and reminding myself to reflect often. I’ve also resumed cooking and taking that hobby to a new level. Turns out, that hobby would do me a lot of good in the current climate where we are all spending a lot of time indoors.

New Life Move

After a year in Saigon, we made another big life move. Given the continued precarious nature of COVID-19, we decided to move to Taiwan to be closer to my parents. This meant wrapping up all our jobs and any Saigon-related projects and planned for another new chapter in Taiwan. We arrived at the end of October and going through the mandatory two-week quarantine. The next project will be to find a new apartment and navigating how life works in this city, 23 years later.

Becoming an Active Investor

I’ve taken a more active role in investing lately and learning a lot. I’m combining short-term strategies through my success from Invest with Teri, along with long-term investment frameworks via options trading from the Come-Up Series. I’ve been working in finance and dabbled in investments since college, yet this is the most I’ve learned about active strategies. Very exciting!

Catching Up on Travel Posts from Vietnam

I’ve mostly caught up with travel guides from our one-year of around-the-world travel. Now, I need to write up guides from the trips we’ve taken within Vietnam. We were fortunate to travel to several destinations over the summer. While the rest of the world battled with COVID-19, we took advantage of Vietnam’s great control over the virus and traveled internally.

Curating Travel Guides

I had an idea to curate travel blog posts to solve an annoyance I encounter during travel planning – the need to open up 20 tabs of travel posts, only to find 3 that are useful. The rest is filled with pop-ups and ads flying everywhere, attacking my senses. It’s horribly frustrating and time-consuming. So, to solve my own problem, I’ve been adding other useful posts related to my own content, and I had created a guide for Taiwan, Vietnam, and Thailand to beta-test.

Curation is incredibly time-consuming, but I am prioritizing this goal to put out a few more country guides each month. Please let me know if there is a particular country that you’d like me to prioritize!

What I’m Reading

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London