wow.. what a week. i think i'd have been more rested if i'd worked.. well no, that's probably not at all true. i really enjoyed my week off, it was a lot of fun, well once we got past the shopping bit. christmas was way busy, frantic almost, but fun in it's own way. i only got one check and one gift certificate and a lot of really really odd ball presents (really, sheepskin seat cover for a car i won't own for more than a year? spindle of 100 GQ cdr's? cookie cutters? socks!). which was a nice surprise. i did end up using my check to buy a coat though this will from now on be called my parole/convict jacket (that or the community service jacket.. i need a poll!)

other neat things of the day:
the only inflatable church - for those of you who really care about this. i'm not quite sure why it's even a big deal? but then again, i'm ignorant in the way of any (and all) religion.

the condiment museum - and you thought you had too much time? what about these guys.

tomorrow's my birthday, i'll be old!!! *sigh* 22 is so old i tell you (and if you're older than this, don't ask me to explain what you are.. cuz i don't know). we're going up to the city, and hopefully to the exploratorium which i haven't been to in a while. ok, in forever!

Merry Christmas.. Sort of..

so i'm told that i'm really hard to shop for (which i think is kind of silly because i did spend all that time writing out that big long list!), which means that i'm supposedly receiving checks and gift certificates. i suppose i won't officially know until tomorrow, but we'll see.

i haven't had a lot of time recently. so here's the short and skinny on what i have been doing:
friday - go home, go to gym with greg, have dinner, go shopping.
saturday - shopping trip that began at 9am and ended around 7pm. had dim sum with the chinese side of the family around noon. helped art shop and helped cook dinner (tuscan chicken! yum!). wrapped presents and baked sugar cookies.
sunday - up early again, drove to daly city bart, bart-ed into union square area, shopped (and hit almost every single store at least twice, including but not limited to: j crew, fao schwartz, nodstromes, urban outfitters, and many more). bart-ed back to daly city, drove home, drove to sushi maru for dinner (yum!), went to santana row to visit maido (japanese stationary store) to help stephi, char and robin pick out gifts for freesh.

monday - hit lots of grocery stores, buy lots of booze. send greg off. hit lots of stores looking for tenchi muyo dvd (ova of course) for mike's x-mas present for art. no luck. dinner at the pub (the duke of edinburough), baked pies over at uncle craig's in santa clara. home, vegged.

tuesday (today) - got up early, baked cookies (mainly supervising the frosting effort of the kids ages, 7, 11, 24 and 76). came home, did laundry, had lunch, cleaned room (this took many hours), finished laundry, decorated x-mas gifts, dinner, put up garland in front hallway, vacuumed all hallways, made 1 gallon salsa, made place cards (i got glue in my eye. god was that annoying). am now blogging. soon time for bed.

i hope i get good gifts!

i have to say, it never occurred to me to ingest 1 tablespoon of cinnamon or the repurcussions of doing so. but apparently it's bad mojo.

so last night we went to see lord of the rings (we being: robin, char, tim, james, ryan, cowboy-wannabe sean, sean's friend and sean's friend friend and some girl named melanie). it was overall a pretty decent film. not as good as the first one, but definitely a lot more action instead of subtle plots. there were moments were i was even scared (despite having read the books at least 2 times each). the first time legolas came on screen a bunch of people cheered (couldn't tell whether they were all girls or guys were involved too cuz of his awesome fighting moves in the last movie) and when we were leaving the theatre during the credits orlando blooms' name flashed on the screen and there was a definite female cheering. insane. i did get a $50 ticket though for parking on a side street (how lame is that? i circled the parking lot for 45 f***ing minutes!) anyhow, must go more later..

UN Guy: Are you high or just incredibly stupid?
Bush: I assure you I am not high
- from the South Park Episode entitled "Ladder to Heaven"

for clarification, the whole women empowerment books have been dubbed women empowerment novels by freesh and i circa june 2002. this side note is to acknowledge that i've make this observation before.

so i had a nice and relaxing weekend up in davis. aside from when my aunts and grandma called up to check on the status of my shopping for them. uh, i haven't started. i will get it done this week, i really will. or, maybe i'll say i will. oh bother. ;o)

wednesday is lord of the rings. i don't know if i'm going to go yet. i know greg's not going, which is sad (i wanted someone to hide my face in during the helm's deep sequence), but it just wasn't efficient for him to come. i think i'm supposed to go shopping tonight with mike tonight, but i hope we can put it off until tomorrow or something. i don't know, it's getting really hard to fit in everything that needs to be done and something has got to go (like the gym) but then i feel guilty. and then i review that i didn't really eat anything bad, and if i can keep that up, then i don't have to go for so long, but i still feel like a sloth. i don't know how i could have not gone all summer. =P or the rest of my life. it seems the more weight i lose, the fatter i feel. oxymoronic? i know.

so i've noticed that i like reading the classic cinderella/snow white stories that have been mutated (see princess diaries, femme fatale, the boy next door, watermelon, lucy sullivan is getting married etc). when i say mutated, i do mean more like, they've got different pluts, but the end result is mostly the same: girl down on her luck (or gets her luck trodden on.. is trodden, even a word?), girl either gets self empowerment (or as meg cabbot enjoys writing in the princess diaries: self actualization) or girl gets a brilliant stroke of luck and everything is good again.

but to read a book without a happy ending, well, that's just not fun. i mean, we all want a happy ending.
i've been playing those games at the first site in the last log today. lots of fun, but i feel bad for the poor falling chicks. i'm not so good at them. or maybe it's that my mouse at work has horrible tracking. once you go over to the optical side, you can never go back!

ok, so i know i've got too much time on my hands, so i found these sites that you should all visit when you find a high speed internet connection to abuse.

first and foremost: http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/, where you can play lots of fun games. i really like the falling chick game, save them!! also fun is the snowball game. but there are tons of different ones and the music isn't lame.

secondly: www.muffinfilms.com, where you can see a lot of very strange muffin based movies. i liked esque, u.f.m and the muffintree. the rest were all just really weird.

finally: www.vectorpark.com, i forget if i've blogged this before, but it's neat. ok a lot of people who are very short attention spanned or goal oriented might find it boring. but i liked it damnit!!

not a bad week overall. been pretty occupied at work, so no guilt complex. haven't done anymore christmas shopping. little brother finished finals.

i'm trying to make the comments tag work

I ran across a blog (some conservative catholic nuthead) who had a link to this article. it basically describes a bill in georgia that would require a woman to go to court and obtain a death warrent in order to have an abortion. which is just nuts. why should anyone have to justify their reasons? it's not like having an abortion is easy for someone, and this just makes it harder on someone. while this bill is outrageous (at least in my opinion, but i've never really liked authority giving me directions on how to lead my life), it is only for one state, and hopefully women will still be able to travel out of state to have the procedure if they really want to. well, if the bill passes. but it sucks. even scarier is the support for the bill i found online at the news site.

i suppose what really riles me up is the fact that these people think the woman is having the abortion for "convience." like i said, it's not like having an abortion can be easy on a woman, it's probably just as hard as having the child (well, at least from my perspective, but i've neither had an abortion or a baby, so i could just be spouting off crap). and what's the point of having a woman have the child if she's just going to hate it, or think it was the biggest mistake of her life and treat as such. why further add to the overburden of the orphanages and other child care systems.

ever thought you had too little furniture but were too poor to do anything about it? well apparently so do the swedish people who ended up decoration this apartment (http://www.kleqkleq.com/dole/). it was kind of funny looking, i wonder if it's at all comfy?

so grace's party wasn't so bad. actually kind of fun to see frances again. some of the other people i felt sort of uncomfortable around since they were ALL from alza where i interned last summer. (don't you remember? i loved saying that my line of work was in drug trafficking). i mean, i'm sure they're nice people, but i had no idea who they were really, what they did, what the hell they were talking about (and what about that confidentiality agreement guys? huh? i could be a spy) and more importantly, why they were all so obsessed about work during after work hours? me? i can't wait to get away from work! and if i do bring it up, it's mainly cuz i have such amusing stories to tell, not to whine about the pointless monthly meetings, yet again. oh well, i guess it probably did happen that day so it was fresh on the burner. i brought some champagne (because she said it'd be rude to come and just eat), but we didn't open it, so now grace is the proud owner of korbel champage (don't ask where i got it - long story).

yesterday i went out with freesh to pasta pomadoro, which was yummy and then next door to borders, where i proceeded to begin to read "the boy next door" by meggin cabot. which is kind of neat, because, so far, all the text has been in the form of emails. i think i might have to go to another bookstore tonight and sit and read it (because like i'm really going to pay 13 dollars for a book! please!)

i'm supposed to go to watsonville (and then carmel) tomorrow with char and tim (and pick up robin on the way) for the day (shopping, food, hanging out), but robin thinks it's too cold to stay down there so she might come up here, which means then we'd have no reason to go down there and i would yet again, miss seeing her new apartment. i had to remind her that it's normally cold this time of year, it's call winter. i think living in san diego for 4 years has majorly changed her, some good things and some bad things. but, she was originally from here, i mean, all 18.33 years of her life prior to SD was spent here, so doesn't that mean she should know it's colder up here? just a thought.

i was thinking there were so many things to blog about today during group meeting (*yawn* - there was some napping involved, i do admit). and now when i sit down to do it, i can't remember a thing. my webpage is almost done being re-encoded. i've decide that while i like css and it's nifty, no other browser i know does. like netscape 4.xx, what the hell? i told you my text was white, don't you get it? or mac platforms. supposedly (according to : the master grid) it should work on mac platform ie 5.1, but in reality (according to robin), it doesn't. oh well, screw people with macs. i can't make every single browser happy.

i just found this nifty gif! i'm going to put it on my side bar, i mean, come on! gir dancing is what everyone needs!

i'm really tired and i don't want to go out tonight despite hte fact that i've elicited two invitations somehow. what were they thinking!?!? i'm not a fun person, i like going to bed. a lot.

'that's what i call a centerfold! look at those pci slots!!!' - wj, phd

wow.. it's been a long while and i thought that i had mastered the whole frequent blogging thing recently.

where to begin?

let's see, last week at work, our admin was out, so work was a bit more fun and a bit less? i know, that sounds.. like it can't happen at the same time, but it can! wednesday i got up uber early (i wish i knew how to do the u with the dots over it.. i could always look it up, but i'm lazy), got to work just as early and left at 11 so i could hitch a ride from my older brother up to my grandparents. it was really nice to be driven up instead of me doing the driving. i even fell asleep at one point and when mike needed directions, he had to wake me up and ask and i felt like i hadn't been asleep or if i had, it was only for a short while. however, we apparently made it through the wind mill country (i forget the name of the grade, it's right after livermore). i baked pies (my crust making abilities are improving people!), had dinner and in general chilled out.

thanksgiving day was really quiet in comparison to last year, where we had my aunt and uncle, their two kids, their exchange student/co-op (ewen from scotland, now at cambridge) (that's 5), my other uncle and his wife and her sister and brother and law and their two kids (under the age of 10 i believe =P) (that's 11), my family (that another 5 so 16), plus my grandparents (2). it's funny how i think that most of my thanksgivings are these busy, bursting at the seams affairs, but i just don't think they are. so this year, we still made a huge variety of food, but lesser quantities, and boy was it good and yummy. but because of the lesser quantities, we were done earlier and thus had more time to relax than normal, which was just weird.

friday we went into town to the used book store (yay, i now own my own (wtf, own my own???) copy of sharon shinn's summers at castle auburn, which for some reason i love). then we hit the pharmacy, picked up some presents (can't say what they are though) and then the small cafe for a mocha. on the way back to the house, we stopped at the post office - i didn't realize mail got sent on the friday. truly weird. we had turkey sandwich leftovers and then art and i drove home. originally my parents were going to stay up a night longer, but they decided to come home that night. i ended up going over to robin's house and watching legally blonde again. it's a really cute movie.

saturday greg came down (yay!), took me out for japanese lunch and then we went shopping with robin and freesh. according to art, tommy and mike, this is absolute cruelty. not just the shopping, but apparently, shopping where he is out numbered and not even accompanied by another male person. i shall have to try to be better next time. we actually hit valley fair mall, which was kind of impressive, because it's one of the largest malls (w/good selection of stores) around. but it wasn't so bad. it might be a bad christmas season for the stores after all. i did see a quote in a toast's book at restoration hardware that was pretty funny: show me a nation where the national beverage is beer, and i'll show you advance toilet technology. i don't remember who said it, but it was highly amusing. after that, robin, greg and i went to dinner at max's (in saratoga) and then greg and i went to downtown MV to get pearl tea and go to the used bookstore there (i was hunting for the tommyknockers for art (lil bro)).

sunday we went for a walk and then greg took off and i spent the rest of the day being completely sloth like. it was wonderful.

anyhow back to the grind.