annie’s orange moo heaven

For some reason, I get both July 3rd and July 4th as company holidays this year…yippee! Tomorrow I shall sleep in while people like the round kid have to actually do work…ha ha!

Last weekend we went out for Jon’s birthday and had a great time hanging out and dancing until the club kicked us out at 2am. The round kid used the occasion as motivation to get a long overdue haircut.

Does nobody but me think that he has enormous teeth?

For the 4th, we’re heading up for our yearly tradition of swimming at the round kid’s parents’ house and then swinging by the high school for a picnic and to catch the fireworks show. On Sunday, the round kid is taking me to the Wild Animal Park for a nice day away together, something we haven’t managed to fit in over the past few weeks. Nothing like lions and tigers and bears to help two newlyweds reconnect!

Speaking of newlyweds, tomorrow is Kathy & Caleb’s 4th wedding anniversary! Goodness, has it already been four years? Time flies pretty fast, but these two still act like they got married yesterday, all lovesick and crazy about each other…not a bad way to be married The round kid and I always comment on how perfect K&C are together…happy anniversary you two!

I’m not sure if it’s the camera angle of the height of her shoes, but Kathy’s not actually that tall…I think normally she comes up to Caleb’s armpit! She’s very very small…but feisty!

I work in the engineering department of a company that manufactures structural connectors, little metal parts that connect all the bits of wood together in a building. As a result, I know quite a bit about construction in general, which sometimes leads people to believe that I might know how to do simple things like home repair. Those people would be very foolish because I actually know nothing practical when it comes to do-it-yourself home improvement! It was only when the round kid and I bought our house a little over a year ago that I even owned a complete set of tools! Actually, Steve bought me a very nice tool set when we were in college, but I think my dad might have made more use of them that I ever did. The round kid has been pioneering all of our home improvement efforts so far such as ripping out old (and hideous) shelving, repairing our ailing sprinkler system, and figuring out the water heater while I have done things like crack the toilet bowl by hitting it with a hammer (whoops).

Yesterday, though, I found the handyman within!

The round kid has been staying late at work because of an upcoming deadline so I get a bit lonely in the early evenings. He tries to come home earlier to work from home, but doesn’t really get much done because it’s hard for him to concentrate with us crazy people and gatos swarming around his computer desk, which is set up in our family room, the busiest area of the house. On the phone yesterday, he was telling how he would need to stay late at work again, to which I asked him if I moved his computer station to our recently-vacated empty room, could he come home early and work form home? He said yes! His one requirement is that he be hooked up directly to our cable modem, which I thought would be no problem since when we first moved in I had the cable guy wire up all of the rooms for cable…should be as simple as screwing into the cable outlet! When I got home and popped into the spare room, however, there was no nice cable outlet in the room but rather the bluntly cut end of a coaxial cable sticking out of the wall…dammit! No cable in that room! I called up my cable company in a panic to see if they could send someone out to repair it, but the earliest they could send someone out was the next day and it would be a $50 charge. Umm, I don’t think so! After a quick Google search for coaxial cable repair yielded these great instructions, I ran out to my neighborhood Ace Hardware store for some wire strippers and end connectors (and some free popcorn, I love Ace Hardware). Back at home, I stripped that coaxial cable, screwed on the new end, and had the cable modem running in about five minutes! I felt very proud of myself and I think the round kid was impressed once he got home and saw his new office.

In all the excitement, I forgot to take pictures to document the before and after so this will be one of those super wordy entries that Vince some people tend to glaze over. Here’s one picture for you though, I found a style of diamond earrings that I like and now I just need to find somewhere to buy them!

It’s only Wednesday, and I’ve already gone shopping three times this week! Not that this is so abnormal for me, but I think I’ve been buying more things that I usually do…some of it is final sale stuff that I can’t actually return! Gasp! I think it might be partly due to the fact that for the past couple weeks I’ve been preoccupied with some things going on right now, and really what better way to deal with stuff than shopping?

Here’s a sample of this week’s shopping goodness:

Mossimo Ruffled Hem Skirt from Target: $12.99 - I am actually wearing this to work today and I love it. It’s super soft and comfortable with a cute swing to it. Perfect summertime skirt that’s also work appropriate! Actually, quite a bit of my work wardrobe is from Target, you just can’t beat their selection and prices, not to mention the fact that after buying clothes, I was also able to get Ziploc bags, face scrub, and cereal all in the same trip!

GapBody Loveshack Lotion & Body Spray - I’ve had my eye on this scent for a while, but couldn’t justify paying $12.50 for a bottle of lotion. Happily, today it turns out Gap had it as 25% off two items…plus I had another 20% off coupon for a grand total of $20 for the two. Now I can smell lovely for less!

I’m always on the hunt for work clothes that aren’t too boring, so I popped into Banana Republic to see what they had on sale. I ended up picking us this sweater but in a light blue/gray color. The best part about it was it was only $13! Such a steal, I love a good deal. I also picked up a super cute orange t-shirt dress that I can’t find online anywhere…it must be a new item. You’ll have to wait for a picture of that!

Whenever I hit up the Brea Mall, which is about 5 minutes from where I work, I always have to go J. Crew because it has the largest sale/clearance section in all of California! That’s what the sales associate told me at least, but I believe them because half of the store is the sale section, not the puny two or three racks that some other stores have. As a bonus, this J. Crew also does an additional 25-50% off their sale prices…it’s like heaven for me. I picked up the Lisa dress in preparation for the hot hot summer days I’m sure are going to be ahead. At $45, it wasn’t a huge bargain, but I think it’s a nice basic dress that I can wear again and again. I actually bought it in navy and not the bright strawberry color you see here. I really wanted the strawberry one, but alas, they only had it in size XL.

Phew, I think that’s it for now. My next mission is to find a pair of cute & comfortable shoes that I can wear to work…preferably slip-ons that don’t require socks (they make my feet hot!). My absolute favorite pair of shoes have sadly been worn to pieces and I can’t get a new pair because they were discontinued back in 2005. Ah, BC Footwear Mania, how I love you!

This past Saturday was the start of summer, and man was it a scorcher! I went to go see the Dodgers take on the Indians at Dodger Stadium on Sunday and I think I got fried to a crisp sitting in my unshaded seat. One of the unfortunate side effects of the unbearable heat was that it made me not very hungry, a bummer considering I was sitting in the All-You-Can-Eat Pavilion! I managed to eat two Dodger dogs, two bottles of water, and two small diet Cokes…hardly my money’s worth! Sadly, the Dodgers also ended up losing 2-7, so it wasn’t the best of games. After the game, the round kid and his parents picked me up and we headed over to see his cousins who just had a baby about a month ago…a baby named Zoey! I don’t like to post pictures of other people’s kids since I’m not always sure who read my little orange heaven, so here’s a picture of my big fat Zoe instead:

After visiting, we came back to the round kid’s parent’s house for a belated birthday dinner for brother-in-law Vince…steamed crab and lobster! It was delicious, but unfortunately no pictures. It’s definitely inspired the round kid and I to try to make our own crab at home sometime. On Sunday, the round kid, Judy, & I had brunch at Mi Piaci, one of our favorite places in Old Town Pasadena. I had the Route 66 Omelet which we all agreed was the best omelet we’d ever had. I highly recommend it! After stuffing our bellies, we went to go stuff Judy into some more wedding dresses over at Marylinn’s Bridals. The sales girl there was a little creepy and dress selection not so great, so it was a bit of a bust, but it was fun just rifling through all of the racks and racks of dresses. Judy, don’t worry, you shall find your dress!

Sunday night we finally made it home and guess who was waiting for us but little Ninjah! I didn’t mention it earlier, but Ninjah managed to fracture her foot during Charlie’s birthday bash last week and has been wearing a cast since then. She’s recovering nicely though and is getting rapidly bigger…her ears no longer drop down but stand straight up!

It was actually really hard to get a picture of her…she was so excited to see us that mostly she just looked like this:

Can you believe that June is almost over? July is shaping up to be an exciting month, my best friends from college are coming to visit for a whole weekend, I’m going up to the Bay Area for work, and the round kid has a dentist appointment. Really, this much fun should be illegal.

Wow, it’s already Thursday and no weekend recap from me? What has the world come to? Actually, the whole week has been full of meetings and phone calls at work so I actually had no time for blogging. Such a sad state of affairs, I know. The past weekend was full of Father’s Day goodness with me and the round kid driving down to San Diego on Saturday to party with the Tran clan and then swinging back up north on Sunday to brunch with the Kao gang. Family and good food, what more can you ask for?

On Saturday, the lovely Judy came by to meet Ninjah and to hit up some wedding salons to look for wedding dresses. Here she is with her new best friend:

And here’s just a sampling of all the wedding dress goodness that we got to see her try on!

I have to say it made me all nostalgic about my own wedding dress search…so many pretty dresses! Judy ended up finding one that she looked drop-dead gorgeous in, but we’re going again this weekend to keep her options open. I really could just endlessly visit bridal salons, all of the lace and beading and tulle just makes me all excited and tingly inside! After all that dress fun with Judy, the round kid and I headed down to San Diego to officially celebrate Charlie’s birthday with some barbecue and ice cream cake.

I just bought this piece of cat furniture from Costco for the gatos to disguise their indoor litter box a little bit.

There was some Engrish on the box that Bonnie and I thought was pretty funny. Mahogary!

In other news, I was the featured speaker last night at a construction industry meeting. I gave an hour long spiel on my company and about designing structures and at one point I was thinking to myself, how funny it is that all these people are actually paying attention and listening to me! I still get stage fright every time I have to get up to speak (I think it’s been that way since the very first Speech & Debate tournament I competed in as a freshman in high school), but as soon as I get going I can just keep going on and on and on (as evidenced by the fact that I thought my talk last night was going to be half an hour but I ended up going for over an hour..tee hee). Sometimes I wonder if the nervous feeling will ever go away, but I think it just means that I’m excited to be doing what I’m doing, which can’t be a bad thing. The only bad part about going to speak at these events is usually the food…how many chicken with vegetable meals can one eat?! This Saturday is another work function for me, but a fun one. I’m going to see my very first Dodger game and I’m sitting in the Pavilion area which has unlimited hot dogs, popcorn, soda, nachos, and peanuts. It’s like all my favorite foods in the whole world, I can’t wait to chow down!

It’s no secret that of all my brothers, the Charlie is my favorite. How can you resist this face?

He’s turning two dozen years old today…yippee! I think as far as brothers go, Kathy, Bonnie, & I lucked out. I mean this one fixes computers, sets up blogging websites, thanks us in his films, send us obscure but highly amusing YouTube videos, and is just all around quite entertaining. On top of that, he also did the videography and slideshow for our wedding…what a nice boy. And a cute one to boot!

So this entry is dedicated to the best Charlie out there…we love you!

This first weekend of June was quite an eventful one! Saturday was the Mud Run at Camp Pendleton, which always proves to be an exciting affair (you may remember that last year, it’s where M&M got engaged!). The excitement this year was more of a painful sort for me, however, as I managed to trip at the very beginning of the race and landed face first on the dirt trail. Lucky for me, Misa was there to stop people from trampling me over and to pick me up. She’s my savior! I ended up with a pretty badly skinned knee…but it didn’t stop me from running the race! I stopped for some first aid from a Marine, who proceeded to put alcohol directly on my wound (perhaps more painful that the actual skinning of the knee), and went on my merry way. You can click here for a picture of my knee…it’s not pretty!

After the race, we all just pretty much pooped out and napped for the rest of the day. The probably with napping during the day, though, is that you are then wide awake for the whole night! Lucky for us, Jer & April happened to be in town this weekend and we met up with them, Jon, & Cindy for some late night boba and shaved ice at Guppy Teahouse in Cerritos. We ordered a large version of the mixed fruit shaved ice and it was enormous. It was just this mountain of shaved ice and fruit…fantastic!

On Sunday, Misa & I set out to try to create these adorable cupcake bites that I had come across on bakerella.com. We discovered, however, that they were much more difficult to make than we had initially thought! After several hours, this is what we ended up with:

Looking at the picture, that’s a regular-sized m&m on top to give you a sense of scale. They would probably just over the size of a quarter in diameter. Overall, they look very cute, but a huge pain to make! It was fun to make a huge mess of the kitchen and to break out a bunch of our wedding gifts to mix and chop and bake, but I don’t think we’ll be doing any more baking adventures any time soon!

I got so caught up in baking the whole afternoon, that I ended up missing the round kid’s basketball league game this week…which means that I missed his team’s very first VICTORY! HOORAY! His team the Fobcats (cleverly named by David) were on a bit of a losing streak (they were 0-3 for this season so far after finishing last season 0-10), so I think it made this victory quite fulfilling for them. I heard that the screams from the crowd when the game ended were quite deafening…good job guys! Dave was saying that I can’t come to any more of their games since my missing the game seems to be a part of their victory formula…but I think I’ll still sneak into the next game anyways. I want to be a part of the screaming crowd! I’ve got my eye on jersey #21.

Last night the round kid went on a long run around Irvine, getting ready for the Mud Run on Saturday. I lent him my iPod Nano, so he was happily running along when a bug went SPLAT right on his eyeball. Not on his forehead or even in the corner of his eye, but right on his contact lens. The bug was so obliterated that he actually had to yank the contact out of his eye and when I saw him afterwards, he had bug guts all around his eye area. Totally disgusting! But maybe it means that he was running super duper fast? Perhaps we should invest in a pair of safety running goggles for him

We’ve been playing our favorite board game Ticket to Ride for a while now and have just recently launched a house TTR tournament between me, the round kid, the Bons, and Edwin. Whoever wins the most games by Labor Day gets dinner…and GLORY! I totally crushed Sean last night with my destination cards…which doesn’t mean much to anyone who hasn’t played the game, but just let me tell you it was highly satisfying. The round kid was already celebrating his victory when I came up from behind and just beat him down. It just wasn’t his night!

On a totally unrelated note, here’s a funny video of Zoe. We were getting ready in the morning when we heard some sad faraway meowing. Turns out, someone managed to get stuck in the cabinet. Silly gato.

And since we’re talking about funny videos, here’s a HILARIOUS one that Charlie sent me of a contestant on The Price is Right. This one really is worth watching!

San Diego, 1998

I first met Jeremy when he arrived here from Illinois in the 4th grade, with knee-high socks, big glasses with lenses as thick as mine, and a big smile. After going to different middle schools, we met up again at a speech and debate meeting freshmen year of high school and have been great friends ever since. Except for Vince, who is currently traveling the world and taking beautiful pictures, Jeremy is my oldest elementary school friend (Yasmin gets third place, having met her in 5th grade math class!), panning for gold with me and Dan White in Mrs. Novak’s class, vying for smartest-Asian-kid position…but I think I beat him out for that. He beat me out for the 5th grade class treasurer position though, which is good considering he works the more financial job position now That picture above is when he, Yasmin, and I went to go see Miss Saigon right after our senior year of high school. Jerm always reminds me of the great high school times I had, and I’m actually really excited for our 10 year high school reunion that’s coming up! So, even though I know he doesn’t read blogs (how can you not read blogs?!), this one’s for you, Jerm! Happy Birthday!

Jerm attacking me and creating the classic Annie-bug-eyed look, Coronado 1999.

This morning my manager walked by my office and said he liked my hair and asked me when I got it cut. I told him I got it cut a month ago and started laughing at him. He has been out of the office a bit over the last month, but I always thought he noticed it but didn’t bother to mention anything. Turns out, he’s just not very observant to these sorts of things. I thought it was pretty funny anyhow.

This past weekend, the round kid and I were working pretty steadily on our final project, which is due tomorrow. We’ve been taking an introduction to marketing class over at UCI Extension, which I think I must’ve mentioned in an earlier entry. The final project is put together a marketing plan for a company, real or hypothetical, and we’re doing ours on Dunkin’ Donuts, the love of my coffee life. Much internet trolling on the subject has unearthed the fact that Dunkin’ Donuts, while tasty and delicious, does not treat its franchisees very well and has soured the round kid on the company a bit. So sad, but good to know!

On Sunday, we headed up to Alhambra for the round kid’s basketball league game and then to dinner at Cafe Spot on Valley Blvd. Dave ordered the Hong Kong-style pancake which came out looking like a sheet of big bubble wrap and turned out to be deliciously warm and sweet, reminiscent of these coconut pancakes that my aunts make. I’d go back just for a sheet of those!

Ninjah, the puppy is continuing to be a cute force to be reckoned with at the house. Once she completes her first round of shots this Friday and gets a dose of flea medication, we can start taking her out to places. Having her at the house has been fun…but a lot of work!