CLICKITY CLACK

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I am proud to announce a new arrival to the household as of this afternoon. See a picture here!

Edit: In all the excitement, I neglected to mention the passing of my old Honda Accord (dubbed "Beastie Boyz" by Becky). That poor car has been through so much. For those of you unfamiliar with The Little Accord That Could, here is a brief list of some important moments in its life:

1) Purchased in Albuquerque
2) Shipped to Boston
3) Shipped back to Albuquerque
4) Driven for a couple years around New Mexico during all seasons
5) Rear-ended on Christmas Eve
6) Stolen for a week
7) Recovered and repaired
8) Shipped to California
9) Scratched by shipping company
10) Driven for 4 years to various places in and around California, including a particularly crappy drive to Tahoe
11) Scraped against a concrete pillar in EA garage
12) Traded in to dealer

That car served me very well over the years, and I hope whoever it goes to next will be just as pleased with it as I was. And when the time comes, may it rest in peace in that big parking lot in the sky.

If I ever have kids, I'm making them wear these costumes on Halloween.

I just bought Justin Timberlake's Rock Your Body off of iTunes.

And I am ashamed...

So it's been a while since I've updated this here lil' corner of the web, so I'll just do a quick list of the more interesting and probably unrelated events of the past 10 days:

- My friend Chris, er, Topu, now plays electric cello in a band: Skidmore Fountain. Chris is a really good friend of mine from high school, and I feel cooler now that I can say I know someone in a band. You can listen to some music samples on their website or on iTunes.

- The Kingfish Restaurant in San Mateo ("Eat like a king, drink like a fish!") has a waiter with hypnotic eyes.

- I test drove this car last weekend, and I'm afraid I may buy it.

- My childhood best friend Tara randomly showed up in the area a couple of days ago, so I had a great time catching up with her. She's completely crazy and totally awesome. At the same time, I discovered that another friend from home, Jenny, lives but a scant few miles from me. Rockin'.

- OCD lady smiles at me now when I pass her in the mornings. We're totally like BFF.

- It's a very satisfying feeling when you realize that someone you think you have nothing in common with is not so different from you after all.

- Nathaniel go back to Chicago. Sha Sha sad.

- Jenny (different Jenny now) "makes the monkey", if you know what I mean.... *wink wink*. You don't know? Neither do I.

- My new favorite phrase is "cash money." As in, "Yo man, I gotta hit up the ATM for some cash money."

This may be old news, but this was the first I'd ever heard of it: The Internet Archive Live Music Archive. It's a collection of thousands of downloadable recordings of live concerts, all approved for free distribution by the bands. Although it consists mostly of bands I've never heard of, there are a bunch of recordings by Maroon 5, which I think some people would be interested in, especially since there are several recordings of a certain Nine Inch Nails cover. (FYI Domi, they are in a wacky format called .SHN, but you can play them with Winamp after downloading a plugin. Check out the FAQ and it explains things. Let me know if you need help, though. )

Another week come and gone... Last week was better on the work-front. I had been at a motivational low recently, and this led to general apathy and uproductivity, but I got over it last week and managed to get back into the proverbial swing of things.

Thursday night I had dinner with Paul and Cheryl at Korea House. We ordered an obscene amount of food and scarily enough, almost finished it. Friday night was Paul-Sha-Cheryl Night Part 2. We had sushi in San Jose and then saw Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. The movie was pretty entertaining, but what I thought was even funnier than the movie itself was that as the theater was emptying, I realized that pretty much everyone in the audience was either Asian or Indian. Ha ha ha! Wait, that's not funny, that's just sad.

Since Nathaniel is leaving next week, we decided to hang out all day Saturday. I took the scenic drive from my place to Livermore to pick him up, and then we headed to Berkeley to pick up his friend Ryan. We drove to Indian Rock, which is a huge rock in the middle of million-dollar homes in the Berkeley hills. Very random. We met up there with Nathaniel's other friends Ngoc and Theresa. We spent the morning bouldering, which was very fun. I went rock climbing a couple times back in high school, but never since then, so it was fun to do again. I was by far the novice there, since Ryan, Ngoc and Theresa are all amazing climbers, and Nathaniel's definitely getting up there, if for no other reason than his freakish upper body strength and monkey-like arm span.

After bouldering we were supposed to go to the Takara Sake tasting room, but it was closed, despite the cheerful sign just inside the front door proclaiming, "Now open 7 days a week!" Despondent and sake-less, we settled for the only other alternative: beer. We headed over to Pyramid Breweries and had a "light snack" consisting of chili cheese fries, nachos, spicy chicken wings, and fried calamari.

Ngoc invited us back to her place for dinner, which Theresa was cooking. Ngoc has a little dog named Merlin who was, shall we say, a bit amorous with my leg. I'm hoping that it was because he smelled Enzo on my jeans, and not that I just naturally attract dogs. The dinner was a very tasty steak salad, some shrimp, and corn soup. After dinner Nathaniel's friend Anthony taught us all how to play mahjongg. I actually thought it was really fun, which must mean that I'm well on my way to becoming an old Chinese spinster.

Sunday was less exciting, although I finally got around to watching Pieces of April, which I liked a lot. They put the "fun" in "dysfunctional"! Or... something.

Finally, some random stuff:

- Will Farrell as Bush. Funny stuff.

- Skidmore Fountain. My friend's band. More on this later.

- In a moment of gadget-y weakness, I bought this. It arrived today and has a couple issues which I'm trying to work out with their tech support, but my lord is it cool.

For those interested, the major speeches from the Democratic National Convention are available on iTunes for free download. (That is an iTunes link; if you have iTunes installed, clicking the link will open it up and bring you to the right download page.) Yay iTunes!

Like Lilly, I'm also curious about whether iTunes will be doing the same thing with the Republican National Convention speeches when the time comes. Although that would certainly be the fair thing to do, I wouldn't shed any tears if they didn't.

As I've said before, I very much admire my friend Domi for her strong sense of self, and her "don't take shit" attitude. Another reason, which I've mentioned before, is that she decided very late in college that she wanted to go to med school, and basically worked her butt off to do it. And what better way to say "Right On, Domi!" than to have a surprise party? That's what I thought.

Mariel and I basically spent all of Saturday getting ready for the party, which in our case, means lots o' food. We made ribs, cucumber sandwiches, smoked salmon sandwiches, heirloom tomato and mozzarella and basil on toast, roasted pepper rolled with bacon (mmm...bacon), 2 kinds of dip and crackers, and Sha Sha's Surprisingly Good Pot Stickers (TM). We also made a slideshow of cute (and embarassing) Domi pictures from the past 5 or so years, complete with bumpin' soundtrack by MixMaster Sha. As a present from all of us, we also each made a yearbook-style happy memories page for Domi and pasted them in a journal for her. After the party, some of us went to a bar down the street, which was made all the more fun because of no cover charge. Plus, Matt blocked all the sketchy guys for us.

On Sunday after cleaning up the apartment, Mariel and I hit the Stanford Mall. Those of you who know me probably know that I don't normally enjoy shopping all that much. I tend to just wait around, and hope that other people buy me my clothes (hence my runway-worthy fashion sense.) However, something came over me that day and I left with 2 pairs of shoes, 2 pairs of pants, and a jacket. Mariel did just as much damage. As we were walking back to the parking lot, I felt like one of those people I make fun of, who leave the mall with a million bags in hand.

In other news, yesterday morning the water heater in the apartment above ours blew up, causing a bit of flooding in our apartment. To make matters more complicated, when maintainence tried to enter our apartment, Enzo wouldn't let them in! Fortunately, our dog walker showed up shortly afterwards to tame the Beast. Miraculously, the water missed our many electronics in the living room, and mostly hit our glass coffee table. The steam cleaners will be coming in this afternoon to clean our carpets. Yay for free carpet cleaning!