Year in Review: 2024
Pictured above: This year’s Christmas card!
Hello family and friends!
Welcome to the Huang family’s little corner of the internet. Admittedly, Alex and I (mostly Alex) are not the best at keeping up with our circles, so I (Stephanie) decided to make a personal website to share pictures, videos, and anecdotes with family and friends. It also just gives me an excuse to show you unsolicited pictures of my cats.
Overall, this has been a year of transition with the biggest being our shift back to a long-distance relationship. For those of you who don’t know, Alex and I started out long-distance with the majority of our dating life living hundreds of miles away from each other (according to Google, just about 1,500 miles away from each other, plus or minus 50 miles depending on the mode of transportation). It wasn’t until a year before Alex and I got married that we finally moved to neighboring states, and a couple of months after that, when we actually moved in together at the start of Alex’s residency.
In any case, the reason for this transition is, predictably, for Alex’s career. This year, he took a break from residency and started his research years at Boston Children’s Hospital. Alex is working on treating diseases that babies have during pregnancy before the kids are born by injecting treatments into amniotic fluid. Hopefully it becomes a way to cure fetal diseases before kids are even born. According to Alex, it’s a nice break from the stress of residency, but he’s working hard on learning how to be a scientist now. I like to joke that I see him more now that we live in separate states than I ever did while living together when Alex was busy in residency because he now makes a point to drive down to me about twice a month to spend the weekend with me and our cats.
Pictured above: Alex in Boston with his fellow research fellows.
As for me, I decided to stay behind in New York in order to avoid re-taking the bar exam (I’m in this annoying period of my career where I haven’t been practicing law long enough to be admitted by motion and my bar score had just expired for Massachusetts). Though I miss Alex (sometimes lol), I’m glad I chose to pursue my own path instead of following Alex around; it’s easy for me to get swept up by Alex’s dreams and career goals and neglect my own because I think the work Alex does is incredibly important and he has expressed such passion for the work he does. But this time I reminded myself that the work I do is also important and that I don’t always need to give up my dreams or my desires in order to foster Alex’s.
That being said, I chose to stay at my current job as a staff attorney for a community guardianship program in New York. I’m not nearly as passionate about my work as an attorney as Alex is about being a surgeon (it’s a very high bar—the man is obsessed with his career), but I find my work interesting, socially responsible and a good fit for me at the present moment. The more exciting development for me is that I’ve discovered a love for crafting, specifically, soap and candle making. After years of watching Royalty Soaps on Youtube, I decided to take the plunge and make my own batch of soaps and candles, and it has been the most fun I’ve had in a long while. However, there is only so much soap one human can use, so you heard it here first…I’m opening up my own online shop in the new year (hopefully)!
Miao Market (the name of my small business—it’s the phonetic spelling of “meow” in Chinese lol) has been such a fun passion project. From developing the logo to creating custom 3D soap molds to formulating soap recipes that pass Alex’s bubble test (Alex only likes soaps that make a lot of bubbles) and all the little details in packaging, etc etc…every aspect of creating this business from the ground up has been fun and exciting and a great creative outlet from my standard 9-5 job. In any case, if you’d like to follow along my journey, you can follow Miao Market on Instagram @miaomarket. I swear I’ll get around to posting more things than just my business card (which I’m also proud of because my second love after my cats is stationary…you read that right…the rankings of my heart are as follows: 1. cats, 2. stationary, 3. maybe Alex?).
Pictured above: Just some snippets of my Miao Market journey.
Another great development from staying in New York was connecting with one of my cousins, Emily, who lives on the first floor of the apartment building at which I now reside. Though she is quite a few years younger than I am, I feel like we are kindred spirits. Since moving to Corona in July, we have had many adventures, including attending her master’s degree graduation, hiking what was supposed to be Breakneck Ridge but wasn’t (Alex was misguided), going to a flower arrangement class, and eating lots of food. During one such food adventure in which Emily ate her first oyster, I learned that you can choose from west and east coast oysters. Alex would only order the east coast variety because “it probably tastes better since it didn’t have to travel as far,” so I guess we’ll never know the difference between the two.
Pictured above: hangouts with my cousin Emily!
Anyway, that’s the gist of what Alex and I have been up to generally. Now for more specifics of what we’ve been doing throughout 2024:
If you haven’t already noticed on our Christmas card, I went blonde (much to the chagrin of my mother and sister)! It actually started out a millennial greige color, but all the toner washed out, so now I’m just your average brassy blonde.
Alex also went through a short-lived hair transformation in which he claims he accidentally got a perm. Long story short, Alex went to a Chinese hairdresser in Flushing, who only spoke Mandarin. Alex, who does not really speak or understand Mandarin, was shown a picture of a man with nice hair and the hairdresser said that he could make Alex look like this so Alex said ok. Eventually, Alex realized he was getting a perm when the hairdresser brought out the rollers.
Pictured above: Stephanie going blonde and Alex going curly
We went to a lot of weddings (four to be exact) in many different places, including two in New Jersey, one in Pennsylvania, and another South Korea. The wedding in South Korea was especially special to us because it was Alex’s brother, Kevin, who got married, so we welcomed our new sister-in-law, Christy, into the family! I don’t want to be the first to share somebody else’s wedding pics, so you’ll just have to make do with some personal shots of Alex and I in our various wedding outfits.
Pictured above: assorted wedding pics from assorted weddings.
Speaking of Korea, I also dragged Alex to a nearly seven hour photoshoot in Seoul lol. Alex questioned why I felt the need to wear a wedding dress for the third time in my life, to which I responded that I will always look for an excuse to wear a wedding dress. We didn’t get the edited final photos yet (those are supposed to come in January), but I do have the unedited shots. So imagine the below photos, but photoshopped into oblivion.
Pictured above: unedited pictures from the Korea photoshoot.
We also made a special trip out to Changsha, China after the wedding in South Korea to visit Alex’s grandma. The last time Alex visited his grandma was in 2017 before the craziness of med school/residency started and it was my very first time meeting her and other family members in person! During this trip, we learned that Alex actually understands and can speak a lot more Chinese than we realized…specifically, he has a much greater understanding of the Hunan dialect than “proper, textbook Mandarin.” I guess we need to find a Hunan hairdresser for Alex so that we can avoid the aforementioned accidental perm.
Pictured above: Alex’s family in Changsha, China
We’ve also been busy organizing and throwing parties. In February, I hosted a galentine’s cake decorating activity at Kitsby with a bunch of friends I met organically or through Bumble BFF. In May, I also successfully threw Alex a surprise “Farewell My 20s and Alex” party as a way to celebrate this new decade for us and also serve as a going away party for Alex. It’s still funny to me that I managed to pull it all off. I was ordering things to the apartment all month and he never noticed the growing pile of packages in our second bedroom (which was plentiful). I even managed to break into his phone to grab a bunch of his friends’ contact information, which is one of my proudest feats because Alex is addicted to his phone and it’s rarely out of his hands.
Pictured above: Galentine’s day cake decorating and Farewell my 20s and Alex parties
Since Alex has a lot more freedom with his time nowadays, we are able to eat meals together, hang out with friends, and go on dates. My favorite date this year was going to Scattered Kind, a tufting studio in LIC, where we made our own bunny rugs. We even managed to go to Anime NYC for the very first time and I got a lot of goodies.
Now for cat news…
My cousin, Emily, has her own cat rescue called Cats Unbound Rescue (IG: @catsunboundrescue). Through it, I fostered two black and white cats, whom we found on the streets of Corona. I had personally found Kuma outside the bodega down the street from my apartment while coming back home from work. Kuma will be going to my mother once she settles down at her new house in Lancaster, PA, assuming I’ll be able to part with this sweet boy. The second cat, Otter, was found by Emily while walking back from the mall. Otter was recently adopted by our dear friends Mark and Jess. Since Mark is from Hawaii, he decided to rename him Pohaku or Haku for short, which means black lava rock.
One final and very sad development, our family cat, Sophie, passed away in June at age 11 of cancer. I had found Sophie on the bottom floor of my walk-up apartment in Houston, Texas. The vet approximated her age to be five years old, and you could really tell she had been out on the streets for a very long time because her paws were so calloused. I always called her my “doll” or my “stuffed animal” because she basically just sat on my bed for hours without moving. It wasn’t until I brought her to our family home in Monroe that Sophie’s personality really blossomed—once I opened up the carrier, Sophie started running around the house like she owned the place, and promptly disowned me as her human. From then on, she became my mother’s best friend and her forever home was the house in Monroe.
I applaud you if you’re reading this sentence because it means you actually read this whole post, which is more attention than I’d be able to spare.
Wishing you all the happiest holiday season and good luck in the new year!
Love,
Stephanie and Alex
P.S. Here are some unsolicited cat photos from this year to round off this post.
