Thursday, July 29, 2004

Multilingual

It's pretty convenient to be able to speak more than one language. If you are in a crowd of people and want to say something to the person next to you without others understanding, you just switch to another language. Tonight while hanging out with some of my girlfriends, we were having a hard time making a decision about whether or not to go to an upcoming event. After debating for awhile, we settled for doing rock-paper-scissor. When a couple of the boyfriends called, instead of saying "hi" we said, "yes or no?" Without knowing what the question was for, both guys who called said, "yes." While I was asking Bertrand this question, one of the girls put up two of her fingers and said, "Ask him how many fingers I'm holding up." I spoke to him on the phone and said, "Hai" and he responded with "Two." The girls were in awe. How did he guess? "Hai" in Vietnamese means "Two", but all the girls heard me say was "Hi."

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Savoring the memories

I went to a scrapbooking party tonight with some of my girlfriends from high school. It's funny how none of us scrapbooked back then and how even though we've been apart for awhile, years later, end up having the same interests. I love looking at pictures and especially love to look through scrapbooks which are made with so much time, energy, and love.

Some people can just sit down with a bunch of pictures and just crank out a beautiful scrapbook in a couple of hours or weeks. It takes me years. I have boxes of pictures from over the years that I have been meaning to put together and now a ton of digital pictures that I need to print and then put together. During finals spring quarter of my senior year in college, rather than study, I decided I would scrapbook instead and cranked out a good 15 pages of photos. I've been working on a scrapbook for me and Bertrand for about 2 years now. Originally the goal was to have it done for our one year anniversary but now I have finally accepted the fact that it will be an ongoing project that will take forever. Maybe I'll finally have it done by our 5 year anniversary.

Monday, July 26, 2004

Musical Flashbacks

My brother can't remember events that happened a year ago...or sometimes even a day ago, yet while watching T.V. together tonight, he started singing a line from a song and humming the rest of the tune. I looked at him and he said, "Remember that? From A Cowboy's Dream, the play you were in." Um yes. When I was in 2nd grade!

Saturday, July 24, 2004

Surprises are good

Bertrand surprised me tonight with a night out in the city. We went to North Beach and had dinner at a cute Italian restaurant. We arrived a bit earlier than our reservation, so we took a walk around the area. We passed by a crowd of people standing in line outside of a theater and he said, "I wonder what they're all waiting for." I agreed but didn't really care and kept walking. Instead of walking with me, he turned around and walked up to the building. I stood on the street wondering why he even cared what these people were waiting for and started getting frustrated when he disappeared for awhile. When he finally came back out, I asked him why he cared so much and he said, "Oh, because we're going to that show after dinner." When I thought he was just being nosy, he was instead going to will call to pick up our tickets.

After dinner, we went to see the musical/comedy show Beach Blanket Babylon. We arrived later than most of the crowd had, yet when we walked in, we were seated at the very front of the theater dead center. San Francisco's own Steve Young sat a couple of rows behind us with his wife. I spent the first half of the show completely nervous that I was going to get pulled up on stage. Not only could I see every detail of the performer's costumes and facial expressions, but they could also see mine. Throughout the show, the performers looked straight at me and I almost felt like I needed to be a little more enthusiastic just so they could be assured that they were doing a good job. After the great show, we ended the night having yummy crepes at a little crepe shop down the street.

Thank you for a wonderful night Bertrand.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Geekin' it

I am a geek. I admit it. Things that other people might find nerdy or dorky excite me. Finding out that Apple has improved their iPod and that I now have the option of getting a 20GB iPod for the same price as the 15GB one used to be makes me happy. But aside from being geeky, I'm also a girl, and girls like cute things. Therefore, the iPod mini seems oh so appealing also.

I love the fact that my sweetie 'gets' my geekiness and also joins in on my excitement. It's so nice to be able to talk to him about techy things without getting a blank stare in return. If anything, I'm the one with the blank stare after some of his technological banter. I told him about my mini dilemma over what iPod I wanted more and then told him about how we could get a BMW and then even iPod our BMW. The fact that that made him excited too makes me a very happy girl.

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Yoga'ing

I've thought about trying out Yoga for some time now, but it was always something I'd do in the future...whenever that time would be. It's kind of like when told my grandma when I was six that I would leave my parents and come live with her when I turned ten, because I didn't think ten would ever come. But I'd toyed with the idea and my uncle even got me 'The Everything Yoga Book' to peruse.

Last week, John, one of my coworkers bounced over to me on one of our exercies balls and asked if I wanted to go to a Yoga class with him and a couple of the guys in an hour. I thought about it for a little bit and told him I'd probably try it out sometime, but not that day. Besides, I didn't bring any workout clothes with me and I surely couldn't do yoga in my jeans. But John had gone to Walmart earlier that day and bought a couple pairs of sweatpants and told me that I could wear his extra pair. He went so far as to place the new sweatpants on my desk to taunt me for the next hour. I came up with more unconvincing excuses until I finally relented and decided to join the class. It was something I'd wanted to try out anyways, and I thought that I might as well get off my lazy butt and actually do it. (Btw, The pants were horrible on me. Guy's sweatpants on a little girl do not go together. The crotch went down to my knees and the tapered legs were hiked up over my socks.)

I came to the class late and walked in after everyone had already started. I tip-toed in and started trying to get in the zone and imitate the instructor. Yoga is hard. Any flexible'ness' that ever existed in my body went away and this class definetly proved it. I fell over a couple of times during the balancing/stretching poses and was embarrassed when I could barely touch my toes. The first half of the class was incredibly hard for me, but the second half got a lot better. At the end of the day, I felt worn out but good.

I have class again tomorrow and in preparation, I did some additional stretching this evening and practicing. If I keep this up, I'll soon be a yoga pro.

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

The grass is greener on the other side

Every time I'm not feeling well, I try to remember what it feels like to feel "normal". Sometimes, it's so hard to remember how it felt to just go about my day without being conscious of what my body is doing or feeling. Those are the times that I appreciate good health and the regular things that I take for granted every day. Normal sounds really good right now.

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Breathe

I had a pretty stressful drive into work this morning. I usually see one or two accidents on my drive into work but never am I the one who is almost in all of these. I'm still shaken up from the whole thing. Breathe...breathe...

Sunday, July 11, 2004

25 years ago

Two crazy kids decided to get married and spend the rest of their lives together as a family.



Happy 25th Anniversary Mom & Dad!

Friday, July 09, 2004

Kimmy the Defender

I ran into an old friend who I hadn't seen in awhile this past weekend. After a bit of the small talk, she turned around to introduce me to her boyfriend. Before she got a word out of her mouth, he looked at me and said,
"Oh, I know you Kimmy, but you probably don't remember me. We went to the same church in Anaheim when were little kids, about 6 or 7 years old. You were the only girl who was "normal", you know...you didn't think that boys had cooties. There was a bully picking on me and you walked right up to him and said, "Hey, leave him alone." You saved my life and are my hero. That's probably why you've stuck in my head all these years. So yeah...I already know you."
Haha! I don't remember any of this, but he swears it is true and that I am his hero.

Thursday, July 08, 2004

Long, fun 4th


I had a blast on my long July 4th weekend. We left Friday afternoon for SoCal and got there late Friday night due to the crazy traffic. Bertrand got to meet my entire family including grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my parent's friends who I call family. He handled himself very well and the reactions from the family were great. I felt especially loved when one of my uncles asked him if he treated me well, and when Bertrand said, "I try", my uncle said, "You'd better, she's my baby."

On the night of the fourth, after visiting some friends and their new baby, Bertrand, my brother, and I headed to Downtown Disney in Anaheim to watch the fireworks. I love being a tourist and feeling like a little kid when I go to theme parks. We woke up crazy early and went to Universal Studios in Hollywood. We were all excited, especially Bertrand who hasn't been to Universal Studios or Disneyland since the 80s. Somehow we managed to be lucky enough to be the very first in line to enter the park and got in every single ride and attraction by the end of the day. There was one attraction that followed the movie Van Helsing that literally nearly scared me to death. It was scarier than any haunted house I have ever been to in my entire life. At one point, when the werewolf jumped out at me and was a centimeter away from touching me, I ran screaming afraid for my life into the stranger ahead of me.

After getting a short night's sleep, we headed to Disneyland for another fun filled day. I love Disneyland. Disney has always been a big part of my family, especially since my brother is an Animator. Since Bertrand hasn't been there in years, we made a whole plan to hit every single ride so that he could catch every attraction. With great timing and fast walking, we managed to also see almost every show and ride. We ended the night with the amazing Fantasmic show and a final ride on the Matterhorn.

Now I am home and exhausted, but very happy.

Makeover!

I won a makeover from Mary Kay awhile ago and today, the representative came to work to give me and Tine a makeover. You like?



Note: Yes, we tried not to smile and look as sad as possible in the "before" pics.

Friday, July 02, 2004

I'm going to Disneyland



*dance* *dance* *dance*






Technological Advancements

I'm up late chatting online and getting some work done before going on vacation for a few days. It's amazing how many people are online at 1:45 in the morning, does nobody sleep? Thinking back to my days in college, late nights chatting were always the best times for long interesting conversations. I chatted with an old friend whom I haven't had a long conversation online with in about a year which is a long time considering 6-7 years ago when we used to talk all the time. After talking for awhile and seeing how nice it was to talk again, we reminisced about the time when we used to stay up late chatting on ICQ with the real time typing feature. Every time he'd type something and pause or backspace, I'd call him on it and make him tell me what he had hesistated to do. It's amazing how much technology and the internet has become so much of our society. Without it, this friend and I could not have kept in touch over the years with all the various places we've been and with all the things that we've been experiencing. I remember the days when my dad taught me what 'e-mail' was. I used Juno to dial up only to download my messages and send them, and since nobody else used email, I only emailed my dad and uncle who was a professor at a university. Now, I literally live and breathe the internet. I hardly know what to do with my computer if it isn't online except play Freecell or Solitaire.