Friday, February 25, 2005

It's been snowing lately:

Friday, February 18, 2005

Weekly pumpkin update:

Saturday, February 12, 2005

So, as I mentioned on the messageboard, it's been so long since I've blogged that I didn't really feel like rehashing what I did while I was in LA (which was almost a month ago). This blog thing works better when you're talking about what's on your mind now, not trying to remember things that happened a while ago. And I feel like I've settled into a routine here... I haven't really had anything on my mind worth writing about for a while. But then Jenny pointed out to me that Allan has actually updated his blog! If he can resume after 8 months, then I can after one.

Let's see... so the first weekend I was back home, I went to Vegas. That was pretty fun, because for once I didn't lose money. Well, I did lose money the first day, but I won it back that night and the next day, mostly in craps (and some blackjack). Craps is fun... you can really win or lose a big chunk of money at once. You have all these chips on the table, and if the dice roll the right way the money keeps on rolling in. Fun... until the dice roll the other way and you lose what you had on the table. In the end I pretty much broke even, even though I was down a couple hundred dollars at one point.

During the week I was pretty much hanging out at home. Visited some friends and had lunch with my Dad and sister and just relaxed. I missed out on seeing a lot of friends since I wasn't home when they came home during Christmas/New Years. Oh well. I still have my motorcycle since Toliver decided not to buy it, so I got to ride that around some more. I've pretty much settled on keeping the bike indefinitely, and continuing to pay the insurance and registration, since it's kinda difficult to sell remotely and plus it's really useful the few days a year that I am there.

Talking about motorcycles reminds me how terrible the traffic was in LA. One day I drove Jenny and her friend from UCLA to the airport and then we drove to my Mom's house... all three of these places are on the west side and really not that far from each other. But that day it took us 3 hours. What a pain.

That weekend was Sean's wedding:

It was a pretty big production, I think around 500 people. Great food (including shark fin soup) and I got to see some good friends. Congratulations to Sean and Emily!

Ok, now I have to take a break from recapping my vacation because I just had a conversation with my old friend Charles and we were reminiscing about elementary school, and it was hilarious. Remember lunch tickets? Cafeteria food? Chalupas, sloppy joes, tater tots? (It's funny because the north campus cafeteria at UMich has pretty much the same stuff.) The interesting thing is a lot of the teachers at our elementary school are still there from 13 years ago. One of the classes was pretty cool... it was 5th grade, and it was our teacher's first year there. We did things like build bridges out of toothpicks, and run our own cookie companies, and most awesomely, went on a field trip on an actual submarine (after reading 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea). I remember the cookie commercial my group (a.k.a. Cookie King) made... we would bite into the cookie, and then stop the camera and put on a Burger King crown and resume the camera so it looked like the crown magically appeared. And there would be someone off camera making a sound effect "da da dun!" It was great. Haha.

In 4th grade, we had an art assignment to draw a self-portrait. Some of the portraits were chosen to be in this big mural that covered the exterior walls of two classrooms near the center of the school. Mine was one of them, so I was painted on the wall of the school. Now, the self-portrait assignment was done in pencil, and the mural was in color, and someone else did the actual mural painting and colored my hair brown and my eyes blue. But it was still me! It was pretty cool being able to drive by that school years later and see my (albeit Caucasian-looking) face on the wall. But sadly, Charles tells me the mural is no longer there.

Anyway, back to my adventures last month in LA. So after the wedding, I met up with Allan and friends in Ontario to go snowboarding in Big Bear. We got up at the ass-crack of dawn (actually significantly before dawn) to start driving out to the cabin, and got there around 8 or 9. We were then tasked with turning on the water to the cabin, which turned out to be much harder than it should have been. First we had to find the water main valve, which was nontrivial because the entire front yard was covered in two feet of hard-packed snow. There was a pole marking where it was supposed to be, but digging out a bunch of snow revealed nothing. Finally we found the access panel a few feet away from the pole after a lot more digging. Lifting the access panel revealed that the actual valve was submerged under another 2 feet of water. Ultimately we had to rig this 5-foot-long tool out of parts we found in the garage in order to turn on the water, and it was 11 before we started snowboarding. The whole episode was right out of one of those adventure games where you have to find random items and combine them in nonsensical ways to accomplish weird tasks. It was really funny.

The actual snowboarding (we went to Snow Summit) was a lot of fun. I definitely felt like I improved. The snow conditions weren't that great; it was packed powder and some of the trails that were in the shade were kinda icy. Also it was really warm, like 50 degrees, which was nice... a lot of people were snowboarding in T-shirts. But I was wearing my heavy jacket with a fleece underneath and it was really hot. The lockers didn't work though so I decided to just grin and bear it... it felt really good to fall down onto the snow. Afterwards we chilled in the cabin and played some old board games (Guess Who? and Life). Life was funny... at the beginning I chose the career path instead of the college path, and wound up being a rock star and having the highest salary. It's kinda funny because you can tell that Life is designed to teach kids things like school is good, family is good, and insurance is good... and here I was making all the "bad" choices and wound up winning.

Anyway, the day after I came home from Big Bear, Jenny and I left LA to start the long road trip to Michigan. Since this entry is already really long, and I don't feel like covering all the people and places we visited right now, I'll save that for later.

Here is a picture of a pumpkin that has been on our balcony since October. (And is still there.)