Ultimate Coffee Date: January 2026

Happy New Year + welcome to the very first Ultimate Coffee Date of 2026! I already had to fix the dates in this post twice, haha. 

I don’t usually make resolutions for the new year (I’m more of a 101 in 1001-er), but I do have some goals for this year that may manifest itself into a separate post!)

Ultimate Coffee Date: January 2026

This doesn’t include December’s stats, but I think I’m at a score of 39 now! I need to get back to learning Hawai’ian too…

I’ve been meaning to try to learn watercolor painting, but I keep watching videos but not actually painting. Hopefully that’ll change this year! I also haven’t cooked in an embarrassingly long time, so maybe there’ll be some cooking videos I’ll be watching this year too… (More than likely though, what I plan to do is to dig into my rather extensive cookbook collection, haha.)

My friend has generously been letting me bum off his Spotify Premium account for the past 11 years, but since Spotify unfortunately decided to be on the wrong side of history and run recruitment ads for ICE, these are excerpts of my last Spotify Wrapped. 

I definitely went a longggg way down memory lane that day, haha.

If we were having coffee/tea today, I’d tell you that…the last 2 weeks have been roughhhhh. I’m not sure if I ever mentioned here that I stepped into the role of Assistant Chief of Family Medicine a little over a year ago (rather unwillingly, but let’s not get into that, haha).

…Long story short, I’m now in charge of the vacation schedule and felt bad vetoing people’s vacations so I let way too many people out. It’s usually pretty skeleton-crew-y around the holidays but it was even more so, and since this was kinda my doing, I felt bad for everyone left behind, so I’ve been adding almost all the patients requesting same-day visits (for the 8-9 physicians we have out) to my schedule + going through all the absent physicians’ inboxes to clear as many messages as I can.

A bunch of tasty Thai desserts from a local eatery we recently found! :]

My practice buddy (who covers for me when I’m out) sent me a really nice message (“Awesome fearless leader — thank you for taking so many offer ups + I’m grateful for your leadership!”) + my accountability buddies (we round each other up at 7pm to make sure we leave clinic at a semi-reasonable hour) also checked into make sure I wasn’t burning myself out. Twas super sweet of them! :]

It’s also a-okay because at the end of this month, I’ll be peacing out to Thailand for 2 weeks, so it’ll all be worth it! We’ll be spending 1 week on a liveaboard and another week just exploring (I’m hoping to do some more surfing!) Having only ever dived in Monterey, which is beautiful when visibility is there, but only 50.4°F/10.2°C, and Australia in the wintertime (~64°F/18°C), I’m pretty excited about getting to dive in warm water for the first time ever!!

See past ultimate coffee dates here!

(Link-up with Coco @ Running with Perseverance & Deborah @ Confessions of a Mother Runner! Also linking up with My First 5K and More, Running With Attitude, Run Laugh Eat Pie, and Runs with Pugs for Fit Five Friday.)

• Are you learning any languages? (If you’re on Duolingo, lemme know if you wanna be friends!)
• What’s your favorite genre of music?
• I moved the My Month Is Booked linkup to the last Monday of each month!
• I also put together my 2025 reading wrap-up! :] I’m hoping to write here >2x/month this year, but we’ll see whether this actually ends up happening…