Kat Kuan

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Yoga with Adriene: 30-Day At-Home Yoga Challenge

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I highly recommend Yoga with Adriene! Her channel on YouTube has 6M subscribers (wowza) and that’s because she has so many great yoga videos!

I first heard about her through my friend Jodie last January (2019) when Adriene was doing her 30-day yoga series to start off the year. I did a couple days and then fell off the bandwagon.

This year (2020), she is releasing a new 30-day yoga series to start the year. I started a little late, but I’ve been doing it every day for almost a week since.

Her voice is so soothing, and she incorporates pausing to reflect and look inwards throughout the practice. She has a gentle approach and encourages you to do the best you can, even just showing up is enough.

Her sessions are about 20 – 40 mins long. Great for busy people! I find that doing it in the morning is the best and calmest time for me to enjoy it. I leave feeling refreshed and feeling good in my body – that I treated it well that day!

Try it out for yourself here:

30-Day Yoga Journey Playlist

If you only have time for one video, try Day 2 – Intend.

She also has a dog Benji, who lies down in the background or walks in and out of the shot lol. Cute!

Cheers to a happy and healthy new year, everyone!

Meatball Mondays at Bucca di Beppo

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I love a good deal, so when I was driving in downtown Palo Alto one night, I saw a sign outside Bucca di Beppo (the Italian restaurant), which caught my eye.

Bucca di Beppo in downtown Palo Alto

It said Meatball Mondays – 50% off spaghetti and meatballs!! I made a mental note. A couple weeks later, when Vince and I were hungry on a Monday night with no dinner prepped, I said, “HEY! It’s Monday! Let’s go to Bucca di Beppo for Meatball Monday!” He loves Italian food, so he was down.

We drove there, parked in the downtown Palo Alto Ramona Street garage, and saw this tasty meatball truck parked there too. Made us even more excited to head to dinner.

Apparently they have a Sunday night special too!
Unique decor inside.. how to describe it…cozy?
I never understand the photos on the walls..

If you’ve never been to Bucca di Beppo, the restaurant is family-style Italian food. You can order the typical salad, pizza, pasta, appetizers, etc.. from the menu, but all portions come in family sizes – small (feeding 3 people) or large (feeding 5 people). No portions are individual sized.

Ok so we ordered the spaghetti and meatballs! You would think we would’ve ordered the small size, per the recommended portion sizing. However, Vince adamantly wanted the large family size – which is for 5 people!! and we are 2 people!!! Sigh. Why?! But we did so anyways.

Free bread and butter!! Yes please! I’ll happily fill up on that.
Hungrily waiting for our food.
Eyeing the empty table next to us where they left meatballs! So tempting.

Finally our LARGE family size of spaghetti and meatballs came! And boy, was it large.

Here’s his hand next to it for comparison.

After I had about 2 servings onto my small plate, I was already full. By the way, I couldn’t even eat a whole meatball. They’re ENORMOUS!!! Maybe it was because I was still chomping on the free bread through dinner. I can’t help myself.

P.S. to Bucca di Beppo if you’re reading this, Vince’s chef commentary is that the dish should come with 5 meatballs if the dish is meant to serve 5 people. Otherwise people would have to split meatballs…

My can’t-eat-anymore face
Can’t believe he’s still going…

Okay he finally gave up. This is how much was left. He did an admirable job.

Leftovers for many days to come…

Alright, that’s a wrap on our experience at Bucca di Beppo for Meatball Mondays! Next time, we need to bring a larger group. Plus I would probably like to order some other dishes next time. Eating plain spaghetti and meatballs can get a tad boring. Definitely add a generous sprinkling of red pepper flakes to add flavor. I think I actually prefer spaghetti with bolognese sauce instead of spaghetti and meatballs – spreads out the meat to pasta ratio better. 🙂

Okay if you try this out, let me know how it goes! Happy eating!

No more meatballs for us for awhile.

Slowing Down to Speed Up

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I used to have a tendency to live life a million miles a minute. If there was a blank spot in my calendar, where I wasn’t physically meeting someone, I would fill it up with something else. I didn’t account for driving to/from places, and I didn’t account for being tired from going to an event or driving somewhere farther away. So I would pile in many things into my schedule for a single day, and when that day came, as I was rushing from place to place, I would get so tired and wonder why I agreed to all of those things in the first place.

For awhile now, I’ve been working on slowing down my life. Although my mind is very curious and wants to try and experience all these great things, it’s hard for my body to keep up. I realize that scheduling so many things into my calendar wasn’t giving me time to rest or even sit down and breathe. And I needed that alone time to process what just happened or to think about what I wanted to do next.

Having such a full schedule also robs us of the chance for spontaneity in life. On one hand, having a full day of plans already booked is great and time-efficient, but on the other hand, there’s something wonderfully glorious about a blank day with nothing on the calendar. I love those types of days because they are full of possibilities and full of surprises and joy.

I’m not saying that we should just slow down to a sloth’s pace and be couch potatoes for life. I just believe that slowing down to rest helps us get back out there and do our work at a much faster pace. By recharging (before we burn out), we can re-energize and be productive, and then go back to resting – like a sinusoidal curve.

When we slow down, we become more intentional with our time. We may realize that certain things cause us stress or anxiety, so we can adjust or remove those things from our schedule. Then we can have more energy for things that we want to focus on – for that particular time in our life. And the things we want to focus on will also change over time like a sinusoidal curve. There are seasons of life where we focus more heavily on career, then we focus more on health, then family/friends, then back to career, etc..

So in a world where “being busy” can sometimes be a status symbol, I am rejecting that notion. To me, not being busy is a luxury. We don’t need to fill up all our time with activities. We don’t have to be 100% productive all the time. We don’t have to do everything we’ve ever wanted to try in this immediate moment. Instead of cramming 10 things into 1 day, we could aim to do 3 things slowly and but enjoy them in the process.

What speed are you operating at these days?

It is a mistake to think that moving fast is the same as actually going somewhere.”

Steve Goodier

Related articles:
A Time for Everything
Measuring Our Success
Less is More

A Trick to Fall Asleep on those Sleepless Nights

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I’m usually working on the computer until late at night, so by the time I try to go to sleep, my mind is unfortunately still pretty alert and buzzing with thoughts, ideas, and worries. I know, it’s a bad habit.

For those nights I keep tossing and turning, wondering about more and more things, I end up turning to my phone to use this app to go to sleep.

It’s the 10% Happier app – a meditation app. I literally only use it for this 1 meditation! It’s the “Melt Into Sleep” meditation. It was a free app and the meditation is free to listen to as well.

Note: For new users, not sure if the experience is the same. My boyfriend downloaded the app, but this particular meditation was locked without the premium subscription.

10 percent happier app10 percent happier app melt into sleep meditation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For this meditation there are different time durations available – you can pick from 10 min, 15 min, options etc.. I usually select 20 minutes.

10 percent happier app melt into sleep timer10 percent happier app melt into sleep

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For some reason, once it starts playing, my other thoughts start to quiet and I just focus on the guy’s voice – even if there are periods of silence. I suppose it just gives me something to focus on.

For the most part, I usually fall asleep before the end of the meditation. There are cases that I do actually hear the end of the meditation – “Sleep well.” But I’m usually in a drowsy state that I doze off soon after that.

You can find the 10% Happier app here: Google Play Store & App Store

The creator Dan Harris from ABC News also has a 10% Happier podcast that explores the topic of meditation further with guest interviews.

What tips do you use to fall asleep?