so... i've finally decided to do my quarter anual picture upload, so here you go:

- bbq at my place
(no link because stupid me accidentally deleted all the pics)

-walter & charlene's wedding
(again, stupid me - only have pics from reception since i also accidentally deleted the pics of the ceremony)

-holiday bowl
what a sad, sad day in cal football history.

-new years eve
(um a whole three pictures. i've realized i just don't take that many pics anymore.)

-jason & marcia's wedding
(woohoo! congrats! i still remember those days in religious studies lecture in leconte, before j & miggs were dating, when we would sit a couple rows behind them and watch them draw on each others notebooks and arms... ahhhh love was in the air)


here are some highlights:


since drew wasn't too fond of being called a "mediumlight" i decided to post a picture of the hyun twins. maybe you guys will understand why i made the mistake (although when you see them next to each other its much easier to differentiate between the two) but you know what i really mean ;)



some old aacf friends, hanging out at a mall before the game




texas tech's massively HUGE band. compare that to...




cal's teeny-weeny puny band



in the pregame show, a bunch of navy seal parachuted out of a helicopter and into the stadium. i tried to get a shot of two of the guys (one with a cal flag and one with a texas tech flag) landing in the stadium, except this texas tech fan decided to shoot his hand in the air and ruin my picture at the last second. texas tech fans do this really weird thing where they raise both hands in the air and wave it around. i think they're trying to pretend they're waving guns in the air, but the end result (to me) is that it just looks dumb. i have real shots of the parachuters in my ofoto album.




the flag was the last part of the pre-game show. now let's skip the game since that didn't turn out too great...




no, that's not a candle. you can guess what it is.




woooooo hot gma!




the newly married j & miggs!




you will never know what devious scheme we are plotting... that's only for the people involved to know. go team!


lastly... how many cal grads does it take to replace a light bulb?


apparently two. actually, three, since mike tried to fix it earlier. thanks again bob & george! :)

since i had to work most of the weekend (was in the office almost all day sat and then worked from home sun - but don't get me wrong, i definitely wasn't as stressed this quarter as i was last quarter, partly because my boss finally handed off some of my products to my coworker), we didn't have to come in to work today until after lunch.

it was a definite refreshing time. i still woke up decently early, around 8:15 since i just naturally wake up sometime between 7 and 8:30 (only because of work and my body is used to it. i am NOT a morning person). in that free time, i was able to read, pray and journal for a lot longer than normal, call sears to try to fix our treadmill, and while on hold, was smart enough to read our manual and find out all i needed to do was tighten the belt with the tool it came with (now i know what that tool is for!), so hung up with sears and fixed our treadmill myself, still log in and do a little work, eat lunch, watch an episode of ed (i forgot how funny that show is), and take care of some fellowship stuff. in a normal given week, it would have probably taken me a week to get all that stuff done! so i'm grateful to God, that He gives me a morning off just when i need it. It's amazing what a few hours can do.

at work, not only am i famous for my sneezing, but i am now also famous for being the destruction machine (at least amongst my group). I've managed to break oh, at least three mice (is that what the plural of a computer mouse is? it sounds weird) and at least five keyboards. i just broke my last keyboard on saturday. not to mention an entire laptop (but toshiba had a part in that one).

next weekend is going to be crazy. hosting a bridal shower and a superbowl party. call us party central. thanks to all who helped fufill my korean food craving last night :)

olivia and eva won't write me up illegal prescriptions. >:(

cmon all i want is to be put out of my misery. err... that is my allergy misery. i just want some clarinex! can't you help a poor suffering person out?

um i think i got shoulder tendonitis from knitting. how embarrassing is that. can you imagine what a conversation with the doctor would sound like? "how'd you hurt yourself? did you have an injury? from swimming? from tennis?" "uh... no, from sitting on my lazy butt in front of the tv, knitting."

so i'm officially retired. it was fun during the one month it lasted. it's not so fun now, suffering the consequences. my shoulder has been bothering me for several weeks now, even though i stopped knitting a few weeks ago, and it hasn't improved much. i can't do anything that requires my left arm to cross the front of my body to the right or lifting above my head.

on another note, i've been pretty disappointed with alias this season. it's like they tried to force it back to season 1, with the whole APO/ black ops thing. but they didn't do it in a realistic manner (although none of alias is really realistic). yeah, i hope it gets better, but i get more excited about lost than i do about alias nowadays.

>:O

o just dumped me.

for irving!

i picked up my car. result:

1) there was a nail in my tire, so there really was a slow leak in it. got it patched.
2) my oil life still says 30%. i don't know if they just didn't reset it or what.
3) my windshield wipers on mist still don't work. i think they forgot to check it.
4) they claim my intermittent on my windshield wipers now work, although they didn't seem to when i tested it out briefly.
5) i think they somehow disarmed my alarm. it no longer beeps when i lock or unlock the doors.

um i think my car came back more broken than when i took it in.

besides that, when i dropped off the rental car at enterprise, somehow, the guy who was driving me back to the acura dealership knew where i worked and started asking me all these questions about my job and company and stuff (just generic questions). yeah a little weird. it was the first thing he asked me too. i was too scared to ask him how he knew where i worked.

i think i need to take my car back to the service. :(

my lovely acura dealership story begins with an appointment at 8am. i needed to get the oil changed, but i also needed them to check up on several issues with my car while it is still under warranty. so i go to the counter, they check my car, blah blah, the usual. i then ask for my loaner car since it would take all day to check my car. unfortunately, all the loaners were gone, and although they didn't tell me this part, i know they were too cheap to pay enterprise to get me a rental car. they tell me that i have to take a shuttle to work. so i ask what time the shuttle leaves, and they told me at every hour, and of course since my appt was at 8, i missed the 8am shuttle. so i had to sit in the dealership for over an hour waiting for the next shuttle. while i was sitting there, several people dropped off their cars, and for some reason, enterprise kept coming to pick them up to take them to their free rental. i was the only one sitting there without the enterprise voucher.

so i get to work late, after grumpily sitting in the dealership lobby for quite some time. at around 3pm, i get a call from the dealership saying that they would need to keep my car overnight. then they actually said to me "enterprise actually now has cars available for rental, so we can offer you one now. do you need one?" excuse me?! enterprise NOW has cars available? uh they had cars available this morning when everyone who arrived after me got their rentals! so of course i need a rental - i need a way to get to and from work. so my coworker drops me off at the dealership, and enterprise picks me up this time. so we arrive at enterprise, and i do all the paperwork, and the lady comes out to me and says, well, unfortunately i can only give you a minivan. i was like ummmm... do you have anything else available? she told me, we only have two cars left. acura totally wiped us out of rentals today. your choices are... a minivan or a truck.

so folks, this pretty little thing is now sitting in our driveway.

drew requested that i mention seeing him & peter during my trip down to the holiday bowl as a highlight (he didn't just request it in my comments but he also IM'd me to ask). apparently, it wasn't a big enough highlight to jog my memory when i typed my original list, but since he specifically requested it, here goes. let's call it a mediumlight.

the medium:
seeing drew and peter in monterey park. i hadn't seen drew in so long - that, get this: they walked in, one in front of the other, so that i couldn't see the second person. so bentao whispers to me, "hey is that (refering to the first twin) peter?" i said yes, because you know, i haven't seen drew since um, he changed. then peter pops his head out from behind drew, and i was like "oh shooooooot. that's not peter, that's drew!" but unfortunately, it was too late and bentao already called drew pete. yes, it's been, what like 6 or 7 years since i've made that mistake. oops.

can someone tell me why everything in the central time zone is played an hour earlier on tv? like whenever you see TV commericals for shows, you always see "8pm/7pm Central." call me ignorant but i always thought it was because there are only farmers in that area and they go to sleep earlier. hahahaha. seriously, that's what i thought. but i want to know the real reason. can anyone explain?

it's confirmed...

rodgers is gone. maybe if the niners aren't too cheap they'll take him. although i don't know if i'd wish that upon rodgers, or anyone, for that matter.

the good, the bad and the ugly of my trip to the holiday bowl:

the good:
-seeing old aacf folk. even though our seats were scattered around, we got to hang out before & after the game. some i hadn't seen since college.
-the camaraderie among fellow cal fans. anyone wearing blue & gold in the entire state of california this week would get smiles, hellos, and go bears from others wearing blue & gold. the city of san diego was inundated with blue and gold on game day. anywhere and everywhere we went, there would be cal fans. on our drive down, we stopped by the customary in-n-out at kettlemen city, and the whole place was packed with cal fans. taking the trolley to the Q - at least in our car, i didn't see a single texas tech fan. it was just all blue. driving back up, we again stopped by in-n-out, and again, cal fans everywhere. this time we were wallowing in misery together. :(
-our "texas tech" section. "texas tech" because even though our section was supposedly a texas tech section (you had to get tickets through texas tech to have seats where we were), there were maybe 50 folks in red, scattered around, but a few hundred folks in blue and gold. our section even had our own mic man (who i swear must have been a mic man when in school) who led our whole section in cheers the entire night. he was awesome, and he claims that he "traveled 7000 miles from baghdad just to be at the holiday bowl." my throat was already hurting the first 5 minutes into the game.
-the pre-game and halftime show. they were way better than expected. the pre-game show had navy seals parachuting out of helicopters, fighter jets flying above the stadium, and both bands performing. (the texas tech band is HUGE. let's just say their tuba section alone was like the size of half our band.) the halftime show consisted of fireworks and band performances. i didn't know where to look because there were fireworks going off behind the stadium behind us, and fireworks going off from the middle of the field. quite impressive.
-being at the game live. It's just like none other - such a feeling of excitement, electricity, and it's great to cheer with fellow die-hard fans. there was one guy who sat next to us who went to the game by himself. decked out in blue and gold, had binoculars and a walkman (to listen to the radio broadcast), and knew every single word to all our school songs. heck we dominated our section so much that texas tech fans had to heckle us and try to ruin our cheers because there were so few of them.

the bad:
-cal band's drum major. texas tech's massively huge band, color guard, dance girls, baton twirlers and cheerleaders performed first. their performance showcased this one special baton girl who was in the middle of the field, twirling and twisting the baton and throwing it in the air impressively. afterwards, cal's diminutive (at least compared to TT) band performed. the drum major, who also has a baton led the band out onto the field, and as he (she?) tried to throw the baton in the air, the baton proceed to fly about 10 feet away from him, where he tried to chase after it, but of course couldn't catch it in time. the drum major had to run after the baton before coming back to lead the band again. embarrassing.

-the weather driving up from SD to LA. it was horrendous - raining so hard we couldn't even see the car in front of us. thanks gma for driving and getting us back safely!! the weather for the game was actually very nice. even though it had poured the day before, there was not a single drop in sight on thursday. although i think rain would have helped our team greatly since you can't rely on the pass in the rain, and TT has no kind of running game whatsoever. aud's mom told us that if it had rained, we would have been soaked through, wet, and probably would have caught pneumonia; to which we replied - we'd rather be sick and happily victorious than healthy and miserably disappointed. yes, we're true fans.

the ugly:
-the outcome of the game. need i say more. what a disappointment. we played horribly, couldn't catch a ball, and couldn't defend the pass, period. the worst part of this is we now have no right to whine about the bcs snub. it totally invalidates everything that has happened because people will now (and do) say that cal didn't deserve the rose bowl. honestly, i think we would have beaten michigan. i was more worried about texas tech because they did not match well with us. we're bad at defending the pass, and they're a heavy pass-oriented team. despite the big disappointment, you can't deny the awesome season that they had prior to this game. seriously, when we were at cal, enduring the holmoe days, did anyone ever imagine we would be in this position three years later?

so that was my trip to SD. i'll post pics some time later. big thanks to gma & aud for letting me stay at their places!!

happy new year everyone.