Browse Category: family

My Tour of LA

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had a pretty tiring weekend touring Southern California/LA. On Saturday, Jes and I went to Snow Summit for a half-day trip. The snow was nice and we finished by 1:00 to get a $15 voucher for our next trip. We got back to Irvine by 3 and packed up for the Bike Tour. With the bikes on our car, we drove up to the LA Convention Center to pick up our bibs. We were so late and I had to make a quick dash to the expo in heels. We later went to dinner in Beverly Hills. The place was called Mastro’s and was next door to Spago…your typical LA scene. The restaurant was voted “The Best Steakhouse in LA” so it was worth checking out. We even saw Warren Beatty as we waited for our table. The ambience was upscale casual and the dining room/bar was pretty boisterous. Overall, it was a cool experience but I probably won’t be going back any time soon. We didn’t get back to our motel room in the USC area until midnight where we stayed overnight with my cousin and his wife.
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With only 4 hours of sleep, Sunday started really early. We woke up at 4:45 am and the LA Bike Tour started at 5:45 am. Supposedly there were 17,000 riders this year! It’s no wonder why there were so many crashes. With lots of amateur riders weaving and cutting people off, I felt so lucky to not take part of any of the crashes. We rode through Crenshaw, Wilshire District, K-town, and parts of South Central. The 22-mile route was cool and very reminiscent of my LA Marathon experience in 2003. I was just glad to be on a bike this time. On our way back to Cerritos, Pish and Debbie followed our Acura CL with two bikes on top with their CL with 2 bikes on top. It must have been a funny thing to see on the road. The Acura LA Bike Tour should have given us some discount for the free advertisement today. When we got back to Cerritos, we took a nice 4-hour death nap before dinner…a good end to our Super Southern California Weekend.

He’s almost here!!

Jes and I went to dinner with Marie and Kenji last night and got a little update on her baby. Her due date is March 17th but we all have a feeling it may happen much earlier. When we were ordering dinner, Marie said that she wished she could have the Seared Tuna. Alas, with the recent reports about high levels of mercury in today’s tuna, she took that out of her diet for the last 8 months. I would be so sad not being able to have my favorite foods/drinks. No coffee. No sushi. No wine. *sigh* However, it’s neat to see how excited they are but I can’t help feeling anxious for them as well. It’s such a life-changing event…so much more than getting married. I see what it has done to Patti & Howard and cringe at the thought of not getting more than 4 hours of sleep at a time and all the worrying that comes along with it.

Merry Christmas!!

We had Christmas dinner with the family at our house this year with turkey and all the trimmings. By the end of the night we had eaten until we couldn’t move, torn up and thrown all the wrapping paper on the floor, and watched Sound of Music on TV. I also scored a Game Boy from my brother and new sunglasses from Jesse! I promise I won’t lose either ones…at least I’ll try not to.
My mom also called from Thailand tonight. She was shopping and talking to us on the phone when the really big earthquake hit. She got cut off and called us back after all the chaos. She said that everyone ran to the exits in complete panic. She’s ok though…it’s a good thing she had already returned from the islands in the south. Many tourists died at the beach resorts when the tsunami came 45 minutes after the earthquake.

Full House

We had the cousins over for another poker game on Saturday. I was the first one out in the first game but during the second round I took both Pish and the brother out of the game on the second hand when I called Pish’s “all in” with pocket kings and a king and two 10’s on the table. Haha…it was sweet.

All in!

I was sick on Friday but worked from home. Crazy heart medicine is making me lightheaded again. I also learned how to play poker as I wrote my reports. Haha. On Saturday, we had the family over for a BBQ and Texas Hold’em. Pish and Deb brought their tabletop and we opened our poker chip set from Costco. I got kicked out of the game early but Jes won the pot! Sweet. We also had our first rain of the season on Sunday. The wormies came out again and Koa looked confused.

More jellybeans please.

This past weekend in San Jose was pretty crazy. First of all, traveling with the family is pretty interesting. I guess I’ve been traveling so much lately that I forgot how “exciting” it can be for most people to fly on a plane. It was Ishya and Billy’s wedding weekend and boy…it really did take up the whole weekend. The wedding was on Saturday morning. There was a Thai ceremony on Sunday morning and a Chinese banquet on Sunday night. We literally took the last flight back to LAX last night and I didn’t get home until 2am this morning. Whew!! Ishya looked beautiful and Billy was very emotional. The girls were dressed in cranberry red, lunch consisted of filet and shrimp, and we had enough jellybeans to last the rest of the year. Overall, it was a very organized affair and us riff-raffs even got to help out at the sign-in table.