First off, I hope you all had a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend and had a chance to give thanks to all the wonderful moms and mom-figures out there! I will be posting my Mother’s Day activities in a few days so stay tuned!
This week, I will be continuing my mentor-streak! I met Stacey and Lisa (and many other amazing mentors) at the UC Berkeley Project: CollegeBound mentorship program when I was in 6th grade. Almost every day after school, one of the mentors would come to Willard Middle School to walk me, Somsak, Yoon-jin (a.k.a. the Power Puff Girls) and a few other students to the UC Berkeley campus, where they helped us with homework, college prep, and even personal counseling when we needed it.
Favorite Memory: Girls’ night at Alice’s apartment, where we made/ ate sushi and watched Princess Mononoke. After we were done with the sushi, we put seaweed on our teeth and pretended that we were missing teeth.
Here’s a recent picture of Stacey, me, Lisa, and Mark (Stacey’s husband- who is ridiculously tall. I stand up to about his belly button. Sorry Mark, if you are sensitive about your height. I’m actually just short… and sensitive about it too, so don’t make fun of me.)
We met up to talk about the possibility of developing a co-housing community. More on co-housing in a minute, but first the food! Mark and Stacey treated us all to a dinner that they ordered from Chilli Padi, a Malaysian restaurant in the Oakland Chinatown area. We had the dry black pepper short-ribs; shrimp chao-fun (char kway teow), basil chicken and roti canai. Everything we’ve tried from Chilli Padi has been delicious! We haven’t been disappointed once with any of the dishes here after three meals. I wish I had taken some close up pictures of the food… But that just means you should go to Chilli Padi and try the food yourself!
After dinner, we talked about co-housing! Since we are all looking into housing options and housing in the Bay Area is ridiculously expensive, Stacey thought of the ingenious idea of developing our own co-housing community! She even put together a presentation for us! Below are snippets from the presentation:
After the presentation, we discussed our “non-negotiables” for our community, addressed some questions, and discussed next steps. On Saturday April 30th, the group went to check out some co-housing communities in the area. I was not able to come since I had classes all day on Saturdays. The plan is to develop the community in about 2 years.
The next step for Jesse and me is to get pre-approved for a loan! We have some big decisions ahead of us! Anyone have any recommendations and/ or advice for us about co-housing, please do chime in!
Just for fun- below is the penguin shrine that Mark and Stacey set up for good luck for the Warriors! Soooo cute!
Building Happiness 