So to finish the rest of my trip...

Saturday, July 19

As I mentioned earlier, all my friends were out of town except for Nicke so I decided to meet up with Kulaya (who I drove down with) and Talesa and their friends at Huntington Beach. It was their friend's Dana's bday so they decided to have a beach BBQ. Besides Kulaya and Talesa, I did not know anyone else there so that meant I didnt have to talk and BS to anyone else and that gave me plenty of time to pig out. I preceded to scoff down the kalbi and rice that was there. Then it was on to a sand-laced burger, then the chicken, then the watermelon, and then the cake.  What a greedy ass pig I was!.. I wasnt even invited to this BBQ, let alone even know the Bday girl, yet here I was shovelling as much food as I could into my stomach! Dana was looking at me every time I went up to get more food! She was probably thinking.."who is this guy and why is he here?!"  Well, after I was full to the belly, I had nothing else to do except the inevitable... try to chitchat and mingle in with the other people who was there. That was hard. (I had already scoped out the scenery upon my arrival and had concluded there was no one that was eye candy. Excluding my lovely two friends I knew, the only other cute chick was the Bday girl and she already had a boyfriend.) Luckily, some people were playing cards so I decided to join them and impress upon them my uncanny skillz at playing "deuces". Sadly, I lost to Kulaya who must have somehow cheated coz it's really rare that I lose at deuces!

I actually ended up chatting with Dana on the drive home to her place (we were going to go out that night to some bar and fondue place) and found out that she was also Chinese Cambodian like myself! That was pretty cool... its always nice to find someone that you can relate to. She was born in Cambodia like myself and came over to the US when she was four. She didnt speak any Cambodian tho, only Chinese. She turned out to be pretty cool and I'm sure that if she didnt have a boyfriend, that we would have gotten along pretty well together. Oh well...

 Saturday nite, we all hung out at this bar and fondue place. The place was interesting.. everyone sits down on pillows or bean bags and they serve fondue with alcohol. The fondue was pretty good. Nick came by later that night and joined us for a beer. After, I left with him to go eat and back to his place.

Sunday, July 20

Went fishing on a boat off of Newport Beach with my family friends. Hella fun. The fish were biting like crazy. One dude on the boat would catch a fish every time he dropped his line in the water. Literally, every two minutes, he was catching something! Here's what I caught (well, ok, I didnt catch the barracuda but I did catch 4 VERY BIG sand bass.  All in all, it was a good day out on the ocean and a good day for fishing.

Monday July 21

Gambled the night before at Pachengo, this Indian casino in Temacula (where I was staying with my family friend). I played my first real game of poker in the casion--texas hold 'em. Since I was just a beginner, the old men sitting at the table with me (they're regular customers who frequent the casinos often. My friend must also go there a lot too coz the minute we walked in, every dealer was callin him by his first name!) were teaching me strategies on how to play. They were pretty nice old fogies. One of them asked me what I majored in while at Cal and I answered "recreational pharmaceuticals". The only person that got my joke and chuckled was an old Black man sitting to my right. Not sure whether that was a good sign or not tho...I figured he probably did smok a couple or two back in his hey days! Well, as a result of their wise teachings, I won over $100 but ended up only winning $50 after four hours. (moral of the story here.. don't teach a rookie how to play poker coz he's gonna rape you for all your money!) Sadly though, I never got to see this money as I had to give it to my friend because he lost $600 and I felt bad for him!

Monday nite.. had dinner with my friend George, Jessica and Lillian. I was going to leave Sunday night but decided to stay an extra day so I could hang out with George. What a good friend I am! After dinner, it was the long drive towards home. Didnt get back till 2am! Overall, my LA trip was really fun. Ok, next entry... my camping trip in Yosemite!

My "Forced" Vacation

So its been a damn loooooonnnnng time since I last wrote an entry in my Xanga site, but because of my annoying (jk) nagging friend John (Kreasian7) (and no, you cannot click on his name to get to his Xanga site.. this ain't no premium edition, just the cheapest (free) version that I can afford!). So here's a looonng entry about my week off from work and what I did... that should satisfy all you hard core bloggers out there for at least a couple more months! 

Anyways---so at work, we get 25 Personal Time Off (PTO) days every year. I never ever use up those 5 weeks so I'm always rolling over 5 days ever year. I have about 5 weeks of vacation left and my boss strongly "recommended" that I take a week off sometime in July so that I won't be stuck with having to take the whole month of December off! (last year, I did not work a full week the last month and a half of the year and I had to take all of Christmas week off). Therefore, I chose last week to take a vacation. Since I couldn't find anyone who could take a trip with me out of state (my friends were all working and those who were unemployed just didn't want to hang out with me), I took a trip with my friend Kulaya down to LA. Of course, thanks to my great planning skills, all of my friends who I went down there to visit were all busy that weekend and couldn't hang out with me! That SUCKED.. but luckily, my friend Nick, my one-time bookie and recovering gamboholic and old neighbor from Berkeley, let me crash with him and his "friend" Tina at their place in Brea. Below are some highlights of my LA Trip:

Friday, July 18

I got to LA at about 1030pm and met up with Nick's friends at some shabu shabu restaurant in Redondo beach. Afterwards, we went to go hangout at this bar/nightclub called "705". The place was EMPTY, almost as empty as that one NOS (Night of Seduction) party at 236BX in San Mateo that was kinda sponsored by Abzolut a few years back. (all you San Mateans.. and George..will know what I'm talking about). Anyways, the place was dead and watching the people dancing on the dance floor somehow made me feel I was at a high school dance. The people on the dance floor were all slow dancing to a fast song! So we cut out of there after about an hour and went back to Nick's friend Jeff's place. Nick bragged to me that Jeff's place was 16000 square feet. Of course I didnt believe him but I guess Nick doesnt BS around. His house was HUGE. I mean, it reminded me of my apartment complex in Berkeley except that it was all one house! By far, the biggest house that I've ever been in. Jeff jokingly refers to his house as a hole in the wall which is just as ridiculous as another friend of mine who refers to her Hillsborough home as part of the "ghetto" section of Hillsborough! Oh, did I mention that he had a brand new souped up M5 and a really cute girlfriend? Damn, I wish I was rich! Oh well. Just gonna find myself a suga momma....

Saturday, July 19

The Boob Tube

After a month of not being able to watch any tv channels, not even the pathetic local channel of KRON that NBC kicked to the curb, my roommate and I finally got satellite tv for our place. Now I have over 500 channels that I can fry my brain with. We "subscribe" to a "special edition" of DirectTV that allows us to receive every single satellite tv channel possible, including all the pay per view channels, every single sports game telecast, every HBO channel--East, West, North, South, NorthWest etc.. and um.. 5 "entertainment" channels. Its AWESOME! I think I have bags underneath my eyes right now... 

Having been deprived of tv for a month, I've been immersed in trying to log in as many tv hours as I can for the past couple of days and getting my daily allowance of Rudy Bachtiar (she's the MSN NBC Newsanchor). I like to stay informed with current affairs-- its actually kind of sad and maybe its a sign of the times of how old I'm getting when the first channel I turn to is the newschannel to find out the headlines for that day.

Anyways, I was watching this HBO special last night called the Best and Worst of Shock TV (or something like that) which was about these crazy tv shows from all over the world that would NEVER be shown here in the US for obvious censorship reasons. Some highlights of the various shows that your pen pals could be watching: butt-holes singing (england), nude talk show where the audience is all nude as well (switzerland), how strong is your buttcrack? contestants show off their buttcheek muscles by breaking things such as metal forks! (japan) how strong is your penis? (taiwan) and my favorite, Women's world cup soccer: Italy vs. Germany--NUDE" Final score: Italy 7, Germany 2. Those Italians were quite talented. Haha

So if any of you feel too cheap to go to Blockbusters to rent a movie, you are more than welcome to come over and watcht tv at my place...

I'm glad I'm left-handed...

I'm so glad that I'm left-handed. I went boarding last weekend and ended up landing a frontside 720 on my arm (ok, i did a little jump and biffed and landed on my arm).  I had to go to the the resort's emergency room to get xrays on my right arm because I couldnt move it and I thought that it was broken. I thought it was broken because a) it hurt like hell and b) there was a huge swelling on the inside of my arm which I thought was my bone! thank god that my xrays turned out negative. The doctor put me in a temporary cast and sling. I've been in that ever since. I still have it on currently and am typing with only one hand. Good thing I'm left handed and can do this with relative ease. What I've realized though is that it really sucks having only the use of one arm.. the simple things such as taking a shower, tying your shoe laces, putting on clothes and even wiping yourself after dropping off some kids suddenly become laborious.. Imagine if it had been my left hand, I would have been totally out of commission! I can't wait till the sling comes off. Right now, the swelling has somewhat subsided but my whole arm is black and blue and looks pretty disgusting. I think I'll have to go through rehab to get it back to the level of strength that it was before. Meanwhile I'm trying to go through the sympathy route and getting my friends to do stuff for me such as cooking me dinner etc...(this hasn't really worked yet though but I'm still trying...) ok, I think my hand's really tired so I'm gonna have to sign off now. More to come....