Before I begin, I want to wish everyone good health, continued safety, and peace as we move into 2021. 2020 has been quite challenging for the world (with 2021 having a rough start), so I’m hoping that we can return to some semblance of normalcy moving forward this year.

Arc I started as lecahierdekev and now Arc II will continue as kevinnissimo. I started kevinnissimo around Fall 2019 because I reflected on what I wanted to work on moving into the new decade. During my time with lecahierdekev I wanted to cover a lot of topics since it was my first website. It was exciting to dive into writing handouts for English writing and grammar, ethics, and mathematics. However for kevinnissimo, I am going to primarily focus on topics related to the health sciences and biostatistics as well as hobbies outside of work. I plan to take a more focused approach to this site after experimenting with lecahierdekev.

In terms of the blog entries, I’m going to continue with the spirit of my past entries. I always loved taking pictures and videos to accompany my posts. (1) It helps jog my memory when I’m writing the draft of my entries and (2) they bring in a lot of inspiration as I relive moments as I write.

I’m sure all of you already know where this is headed 🙂 I was going through the pictures on my phone, and I came across a few dessert pictures on a night outing with my friend back in November 2019. When I had first met my friend earlier that year, we instantly connected over a discussion about food. Ever since that time we continued to have our dinners and impromptu outings to catch up and talk about life. We would sometimes surprise each other when one of us would choose a restaurant and get each other hyped up on the way there. For this evening, she first took me to Ribalta in Union Square. We were so hungry that evening that we ate our food before taking pictures. The food was absolutely amazing.

We shared a bottle of wine and ordered pizza (the Margherita), fried calamari with shrimp, and the truffle gnocchi. Throughout dinner we spent a bit of time bouncing thoughts with each other (one of those things where I asked her, “Am I reading too much into what _____ texted me?” haha). She has such a warm and open attitude that I can tell her whatever is on my mind. We continued with our banter and jokes which always ended up with huge smiles on our faces.

After dinner, she took me to Patisserie Fouet for dessert. Luckily, we remembered to snap pictures this time!

After our heavy dinner, we settled for the 70% chocolate cake and caramel cheesecake. She wanted me to try another dessert that she really liked the first time she came here, but it wasn’t available the night we were there. We both had tea to accompany our desserts (we might have been up all night had we ordered coffee). She got Earl Grey while I got Chamomile.

It was a nice, quiet evening. We shared some more lighthearted stories as we settled into our cozy spot inside the café. There were a lot of events happening in my life during that time and with the holidays coming up, we didn’t know what to expect for the new year. I discussed my thoughts on starting a family in the future and personal endeavors I wanted to pursue regarding research. I also provided her with my two cents when she shared her own thoughts and plans. This reciprocity is a major thing I value in relationships (be it a friend, family member, or significant other). It’s a great feeling when you have close people in your life who you know will be there to be supportive and keep you grounded.

Books

I was organizing my reading list on Goodreads because I thought it would be a lot easier to have everything grouped up together there. However, I realized that I should have been writing the reviews after I had finished each book! So what I’ve been doing now is rereading the books which I had completed. It has actually been refreshing since it brought back a lot of memories from when I had first read them. I started with Alexa Land’s The Rest of Forever which I had originally finished in 2018 since I really enjoyed the story overall (who doesn’t love a heartwarming romance novel?). I completed rereading the book and wrote up a review on Goodreads.

The story is cute and full of heartwarming moments but that’s what makes it so fun to read! This reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend prior to the holidays. We both talked about watching cheesy holiday movies on the Hallmark Channel and getting engrossed in them.

I don’t think I’ll write a review for every book that I have read, but I’m going to do them for ones that stood out. I’m still deciding which one I will write up next.

Blog and Redesign

I aggregated my past blog entries into a Word document and will slowly add them to the archived blog section of my site. Some of them have videos and other formatting considerations which I will reorganize as I transfer them here onto kevinnissimo. Rereading these past entries brought back a lot of memories, and I’m happy to share them with all of you. They will be labeled with (Arc I) for reference purposes.

I’m enjoying the redesign of this site similar to when I had first worked on lecahierdekev back in 2012. It allows me to be creative and experiment on new styles. If you followed lecahierdekev since the beginning, you saw all of the changes that the site went through. It was sometimes a challenge to decide on the next theme to incorporate while keeping the essence of the site.

I took a look at this site on mobile and really liked how the layout came out. Right now I’m figuring out which pages to include in the menu bar. One of the major things I need to migrate are the handouts and presentations which I kept on different websites such as Weebly and Prezi. Indeed, it’s a work in progress!

Shows

I completed Hotel del Luna this past November! After a year of starting the first few episodes, I finally marathoned Episodes 11-16 while eating my dinner. It was nice to see the backgrounds of the hotel employees get fleshed out and understand what they had gone through in their original lives. The story arc with the killer felt a bit rushed, but it did have moments of intensity which were paced out well.

My friend who keeps up with a lot of dramas also recommended Crash Landing on You on Netflix. My other friend (from the dessert section above) highly recommended Schitt’s Creek so that’s on my to watch list. I generally don’t watch a lot of television, but when I find something that captures my attention, I go all out. 😉

I can’t count how many times I watched Home Alone 1 and 2 this past holiday. There were so many interesting movies on the Freeform Channel and both Home Alones would show up back to back on certain days. It was fun to just have it on the background while I cooked or took care of other things since the soundtrack is fantastic.

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Writing this entry and redesigning everything brought back so many warm feelings whenever I outlined topics for my blog entries years ago. I’m really happy to get back into the groove of writing. It was exciting to organize the outline for this entry and choose the dessert pictures accordingly. It’s not only with blogging or working on the site, but also doing new things like writing mini book reviews.

Definitely looking forward to getting kevinnissimo up and running!