January 2025- BingoRama

It’s been a busy January to start off 2025 – which started in Texas and involved a bit of New Year’s Bingo and a lot of Torchy’s Tacos.

It is slowly becoming a New Year’s tradition for us to do New Year’s Bingo instead of New Year’s resolutions, mostly due to the fact we immediately forsake the resolutions as soon as February rolls around, but the Bingo kept us entertained all year round last year. We had done a lot more things than we realized, and the race to see who won was more exciting than winning (though none of us won but Jesus was super close. He just had “Go viral” left and he would’ve Bingo’ed).

Anyways, life goes fast, and suddenly we are back in the Bay and no longer playing bingo and maybe for that reason, that is why I had “Write Monthly Newsletters” on my Bingo card and why I now have this random website. Here’s to 2025 – documenting the life that is going by really fast.

Now I promise I won’t talk all about Bingo, but it is still in the forefront of my mind, and there are some projects that I am currently working towards that have been interesting.

Cheese Bread

First, I have been on a fermentation binge that has resulted in very good cheese bread and a very scared Jesus. I got a great sourdough starter from Connor and have successfully made some cheesy sourdough. It did really make a great difference to have the correct size Dutch oven to make the bread in. Kombucha, however, a different story. Starter tea came from my co-worker, and slowly a giant vat of pre-kombucha sat on my bar cart and everyday Jesus insisted, “I’m not partaking in your kombucha adventures”. It was going pretty good until second fermentation and Jesus realized that the caps were bowing, and it seemed like rather than making kombucha, I was making a biological bomb, now stashed in our cabinet next to all our rice and flour. So, in the end, Jesus did partake in kombucha adventures, though mostly to intervene and make sure that a yeasty, moldy mess didn’t happen.

I’d also like to note I made yogurt, and though most the friendos were very impressed, none wanted to partake too much of that either for fear of stomach issues.

Normal Lid on the left, Leila’s Biological Explosive on the right

Second Bingo square I tried to tackle is that I have been noticing my teeth slightly running away from my face more often than not recently. Also, Jesus chipped his teeth last year and now I have a lot of fear that I too will chip the two front teeth. Solution – stop procrastinating Invisalign and actually fix the situation. (Fun fact – dentist have taken this opportunity with my teeth running away from my face to tell me HORROR stories of how their patients have chipped their teeth. Please stop, I am already terrified enough, thanks). This involved some pictures with spoons in my mouth because in the modern era, apparently consultations are now all on Zoom, so I did get a great moment of Jesus taking pictures of me with spoons in my mouth trying to get as much teeth in the shot as possible at midnight, and my dad walking out of his room asking if this is some new TikTok trend or not.

Maybe I am just so detested that even my teeth don’t want to be here anymore

Anyways, I’m not quite checking that off the list yet, mostly because even though I dropped a pretty penny, my installation is technically not until mid-February, so there is plenty of time to bail still.

We also made it out to Tahoe just in time for Jim’s birthday and got to spend a nice weekend with the doggos, Jim and Sona. We also didn’t eat it in the snow like last year – which slowly makes me think that Jesus might like snowboarding someday, eventually. We have this whole Tahoe thing down to a science now, packing and deciding that we are going within the week.

With all the aerial stuff going on, there wasn’t quite enough time to sit down with the girls and come up with a cohesive “2025 list”, but I officially bowed out of preforming at mid-year for now and passing on another group act. All that time has lent itself nicely to slowly working on smoothing some simple movements and making anything I do in the air more cohesive. It’s been more relaxing up in the air as of late, which in retrospect makes a lot of sense when you’re just practicing for practicing sake and not trying to stress about the next big thing (Performances and not dropping people kind of thing). My friend Angel also started teaching hammock at the studio, so I took my first ever hammock class and I liked it enough that I’ll probably be back.

It’s also getting very close to Chinese New Year. I can always tell because my mom starts asking absurd things like “Are you working on Chinese New Year” (Yes, of course), “Why are your friends not coming over on Tuesday?” (Because we all work), and “Did you clean yet” (Nonstop, and it’s driving everyone crazy). But, it’s also becoming tradition that Jesus and I sit down and rip our hair out to make cute CNY postcards. It’s the equivalent of the “Merry Christmas!” cards you get from everyone, but a lot more confusion and disagreement because neither Jesus and I are vector design artists – we just pretend to be (and sometimes, we are very bad at it). I’ll save Chinese New Year for next month, provided that I keep blogging, and I’ll leave you with the final design of this year’s postcard.

Hopefully, fingers crossed, there will be a February post and then the rest of the months, and I can do something easier than “Go Viral” to win bingo this year.

-Leila

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