11.30.08
Shopaholics Anonymous
This is the worst time of year. Everywhere you look there’s another coupon or deal or discount and I’m getting overwhelmed. I don’t think the fact that I should be focusing on boards is helping at all because it just makes me want to distract myself even more! I’m like a crow with shiny stuff except with me it’s all about sweaters and new bags and oh look! An AEROBED! (Although, I count that as a necessary purchase. I mean, I’m not about to spend 3 months sleeping on the floor in Sacramento.) I think I need help. Maybe I should freeze my credit cards in a block of ice. OH WAIT. Any real shopper knows that’s a load of bull because you already have your credit cards memorized! I’m sorry to people that are visiting me before I leave Seattle. There may be a lot of happy hours and home cooking instead of my usual fooding extravaganzas. I have to cut back somewhere…
On a happier note: Congratulations to Yellowumbrella!
Here’s a picture of my new bag for anyone that’s interested. I actually like it a lot more than any of the grey bags I was considering in my earlier post.
11.28.08
Thanksgiving!
Wednesday night Fisher, Em, & I went to dinner at Applebee’s (it’s cheap and it’s close) and then to watch Quantum of Solace. I really liked it. I think Daniel Craig is a good Bond, and he looks great in all those sharp suits they stick him in. I didn’t think the Bond girl was pretty based on the cardboard cutout in the lobby (it made her nose look twice as big!) but she’s so gorgeous in the movie. I don’t really understand why they had a Russian actress play a Bolivian girl but she was good, so that worked out.
We headed to Campbell’s house for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday afternoon. His parents made two fabulous turkeys (one barbecued and one roasted) and there was so much good food. We had the famous “Soup Family Sour Beans” which are green beans slow cooked with vinegar and bacon. MMM. After dinner we continued Fisher’s Bond education and watched Dr. No. Em & I catnapped (okay fine, I’m just narcoleptic) in preparation for our midnight expedition.
We decided to go to the midnight outlet mall sales because we heard about some potentially great deals. Now on the other side of the day I don’t know if I would go back, because it was insane. But I don’t have buyer’s remorse, so there’s that. There were a lot of lines and the crowds were huge. We got home at 4:30. The last time I stayed out that late it was after QK’s wedding. The Seattle Premium Outlets are really nice, and there are some really good name stores there. I’d go back! (well, I would, if I had any money left.)
11.27.08
More Things I Like About Washington
Hmm. There was a big spike in my stats after I wrote the NKOTB post. Annnnd it’s gone steadily downhill since. Heh. I guess I could have written more but I really didn’t know enough to. I have become a fan of the new CD though. I burned it from Em and I’m listening to it for the first time right now. I have to say I have a definite preference for their newer songs because I just don’t care for the falsetto. ::ducks flying tomatoes::
I skimmed through my archives trying to remember what Kat’s pseudonym is and I saw the previous “things I like” post, which made me laugh. I was rhapsodizing about gas being $3.49! Tonight I saw it for $1.79. WOW. I don’t think it’s been that low in 8 years. Amazing what changed in 3 months.
So, the list!
1) Gas is $1.79 here.
2) The servers at every restaurant we’ve been to have willingly offered to split checks. We went to dinner the other night with the residents and other interns and they gave us eight checks for eleven people. Is it just me or is that crazy?! If you even ask them to put the check on more than a couple different credit cards, everyone in the Bay Area gives you the sniff ‘n sneer, and refuses.
3) Giant pancakes. I like this trend. I don’t think I saw any pancakes in CA that were bigger than 4-5″, and every pancake I’ve seen here has been 10″ and filled a standard plate. That’s nuts, in a good way.
4) I like working at a VA. I like not having to nickel & dime every procedure, and running the tests that need to be run without feeling guilty about how much healthcare costs in this country.
5) We get to see deer and raccoons mere feet away from our house, and again…we get to live 20 feet from a LAKE. Ever since daylight savings time started, the sun sets right about when we’re charting or wrapping up the day, and the whole area is suffused with a deep pink light. I can’t really describe how beautiful it is.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
11.25.08
OHHHHH CANNNAAADDAAAAAA
I have a bunch of family in Canada. My mom has four siblings and three of them live in the Vancouver area. My grandparents lived there until they passed away. When I knew I’d be coming up to Tacoma I planned to visit my aunts and uncles because I haven’t been there since my grandfather died. Fisher & Campbell were game to visit the great NORTH so we drove up on Friday night after work. There were a lot of emails between my aunts, uncle, and myself. Suffice to say that there was a lot of back & forth for what ended up being 1 overnight visit and half a day.
The drive up wasn’t too bad but I…don’t handle the questioning well. The 19 year old working the border booth fixed me with her steely gaze and I fell to pieces. She wanted to know what our jobs were, where we lived, why my car had California plates, what we did before school, what we did during school, etc. She scanned all our passports, and then made us pull over for a background check. THAT was fun. I made some jokes about racial profiling because everyone waiting around in there besides Fisher & Campbell were Asian. Although, um, racial profiling isn’t funny. I tell bad jokes, okay? We were finally set free with no explanation as to why we were stopped.
We pricelined (BIG SURPRISE RIGHT? I pink puffy <3 Priceline) the downtown Vancouver Hyatt for $75/night. Yeaaaa baby. Our room was on the 23rd floor and overlooked a lot of office buildings. The beds were awesome! My only peeves were that they didn’t have free wifi and the shower was weird (came out of the ceiling, no way to adjust it at all).
We checked into the room and then walked over to Robson street to explore the city a little. Campbell led us to a bar he’d remembered from a previous visit and we enjoyed some peach bellinis. MMMM delicious. We hung out there a little longer and they had some beer, but then the bar closed.
Twee little plastic animals from the drinks
We all slept in the next day and then took a walk through Vancouver to the hockey arena so Campbell could try and get tickets for that night’s game. Here’s a hint: Don’t try to buy tickets for a same night hockey game in Canada unless you have $$$. We actually tried to get tickets when they went on sale but I forgot and when I checked the next day they were sold out. I liked Vancouver a lot! It reminded me of Chicago – another big “little” city that I liked.
I spent Saturday night and half of Sunday with my relatives, and met some for the first time – my first cousins once removed. I had to look up the relationship on wikipedia. The nicest thing about being there is getting to hear a lot of my family dialect. All of my cousins on both sides are more fluent than I am because that’s what their families speak. My parents obviously speak it too, but since they focused more on Mandarin and I went to Chinese school for 432789424 years (11), my Mandarin is tolerable and my Fukienese is laughable. I kept accidentally ignoring my aunt when she talked to me because I thought she was talking to my uncle, and then I could only respond in English. I can understand it all, I just can’t connect the synapses to respond coherently. But hearing it reminds me of family and good memories so I like to be around it. I ::ahem:: even followed people for a little while around Costco a couple weeks ago just to hear it. I spent some time with my little cousins who have no memory of me and they’re pretty much all grown up so that means I’m OLD. My aunt cooked a great Asian dinner for me and my uncle and other aunt took me for dim sum (<3) so my Asian food cravings were met. My uncle even bought me a bunch of Chinese buns to take home, and my aunts all gave me assorted Asian snacks (dried mango, dried squid?, chocolate, mantou, and fried peanut dumplings.)
I picked up the guys and we headed back. It took us almost 2 hours to cross the border. In a fit of panic I decided that we might not be able to take the bread across (filled with meat? I think my aunt mentioned something about rules changing.) so we ate most of it in the car. Here’s a picture of the arch at the border.
It was fun.
11.23.08
NKOTB
We bought tickets a couple of months ago and were looking forward to a girls’ night. We decided to go to Indochine again because it was close to the Tacoma Dome and because I procrastinated about choosing anywhere else to go. When we got there it was really busy, due to local high school formals AND a whoooole lot of other groups of girls. We shamelessly eavesdropped and realized that they were all headed to the concert too.
Drinks! I had another Indo Mojito (in the regular glass), Kat had a Drunken Buddha (yellow one), Terry had a Mango Martini (pink one), and Sherry had a Blue Mermaid (I think you can figure it out).
Toasted Sesame Chicken Wraps
Spicy Lemongrass Prawn soup
Honey Walnut Prawns
Spicy Siamese Noodles
Crying Tiger Beef Salad
There was also a curry dish I forgot to take a picture of. Everything was okay. I think there was a little timing issue because nothing was very warm. My favorite item was the Toasted Sesame Chicken Wrap, which was a little like roti with sauteed chicken instead of curry. I hated the lychee and pineapple chunks in the prawn dish because…who likes cold lychees and pineapple with MAYO?! Also, the prawns were cold.
The best thing we had was our dessert. We were all pretty full so we chose two flavors of gelato to share.
Pistachio & Almond
Then it was time for the show!
Our seats weren’t bad considering we hadn’t sprung for higher levels, and I think we had a decent view of the stage. We missed most of Lady Gaga’s act, but…eh. Natasha Bedingfield was pretty good. I guess since the tour was so long it’s almost inevitable that your voice gets strained so she either was tired or had a cold.
When NKOTB came out the crowd went WILD. It was insane. The arena wasn’t quite sold out, but there were still about 10,000 people there, easily.
I was not a big NKOTB fan (my era was more Backstreet Boys) but we had a lot of fun. They put on a good show, and sang a mix of their old hits and newer stuff. I have to admit, some of the newer songs are really catchy. We screamed, “WHOOOO”ed, danced, waved, and generally had us a BIG TIME.
Sherry, Em, Kat, Me, Terry
Afterwards we were still winding down a little so we stopped at the Hotel Murano in downtown Tacoma for a drink. It’s a really nice modern hotel that wouldn’t be out of place in San Francisco. We hung out in a corner booth and went over the concert program that Em bought. Kat admitted that NKOTB was her very first concert, and she also confessed that Jordan was her favorite. Em’s been a Jonathan fan from the beginning! While Sherry initially denied that she had a favorite, eventually she copped to liking Joey the most. I liked Donnie, probably because I like Mark Wahlberg, and so does Terry. Poor Danny. None of us were cheering for him and he never gets to sing solos. That sparked the next series of photos.
EM + JON 4EVA!
Sherry + JoeyMac
Terry & I both like Donnie
uh, no <3 for Danny.
More and more girls were showing up in the bar and sporting NKOTB shirts or confetti from the concert. We finally figured out there was a rumor that the after party was at the hotel and so they’d all shown up to mill and gawk. We, uh, left them to it and went home to SLEEP.
Review: Marcia’s Silver Spoon Cafe
OMG. Washington is truly the land of giant pancakes. Sherry, Terry, Kat, Em & I were summarily defeated today by some seriously huge plates of food.
Terry & Sherry
Kat, Em, & Me
I found this place on Yelp since I knew our visitors would be game for brunch. We stayed up late after the NKOTB concert (future post) but still managed to get up and out of the house a little past 10.
I had biscuits & sausage gravy, a poached egg medium, hash browns, and a ham steak. The ham steak took up an entire normal dinner plate. I managed to eat the biscuits, 1/2 of the potatoes, the egg, and 1/3 of the ham.
Sherry & Terry shared the kid’s order of biscuits & gravy along with the country fried steak which came with eggs (they had over easy) and 2 pancakes on the side (requested instead of toast, I think it was extra charge). They got through most of the biscuits, the eggs, half of the pancakes, and most of the steak.
Kat ordered the 2 pancake breakfast with eggs & sausage links. She finished half of her pancakes, half of her eggs, and half of the sausage links.
Single 10
Madeline was extremely…brave. She ordered the scramble special and a single pancake on the side. The waiter was so impressed that he told a regular at the counter to wait around to see the expression on her face when he brought the food out. It was a GIANT mound of hash browns, eggs, peppers, onions, ham, bacon, tomatoes, cheese, and green onions. I took before & after shots. She definitely made a hole in the pile, but I think the five of us could easily have been full off that one dish plus one order of pancakes. Talk about ridiculously large portions!
Overall impressions?
food: 4 Great simple diner food. Hash browns could be more browned (a lot of plain shredded potato on the middle), and everything could use a sprinkle of salt & pepper, but the biscuits & gravy were tasty.
ambience: Hole in the wall diner! Clean tables and booths…what more can you ask for?
why I’d go back: To try more brunch stuff and see the expression on Campbell or Fisher’s faces when the giant platters land on the table. It’s really food for three meals on one plate.
11.16.08
<3!
I saw these at Target (along with the plates, mugs, glasses, latte mugs, bowls, salad plates, and cookie jar) and couldn’t resist. I missed out on the super cute penguin stuff last year so I dug deep in my pockets and found $6.50 so they could come home with me.
I named them Fred (red earmuffs) and George (green hat). It should be easy to figure out what that’s from. =)
OKAY FINE. They’re salt & pepper shakers! But…so cute!
11.15.08
Review: Babblin Babs Bistro
As always, I have to give Em credit for finding this place. It’s in Tacoma, but not near anywhere I’ve been before, and I think she happened on it while driving around exploring.
Campbell, Madeline, & I went there for brunch last weekend before a long afternoon of studying in the library. (Fourth year rocks!)
Em had already visited before with her friend Jolene and Fisher. Thanks to a few wrong turns and a lot of quick “recalculating” noises from Emily, we ended up taking a very circuitous route to the restaurant. But who doesn’t want to see more of scenic Tacoma?
Campbell ordered the vanilla waffle. It lived up to its name.
Em & I split two dishes. This is my favorite thing to do at brunch because I always want something salty and something sweet.
The Bess Of sandwich had egg, swiss cheese, spinach, ham, tomato, & red onion on a piece of french bread. It was served with Yukon gold potato wedges and fruit. I liked the sandwich but it wasn’t transcendent. Maybe if I had tried it when it was hot I would have liked it more, because my cheese wasn’t melted and I could barely taste the bacon.
I liked the banana brandy waffle a lot. Even though the menu says banana puree is mixed into the batter, it wasn’t overpowering and I liked the mix of chopped firm banana and nuts that covered the waffle, as well as the real maple syrup.
Overall impressions?
food: 4 It was good food that didn’t sit too heavily.
ambience: 3.5 It’s a cozy little restaurant with a lot of kitschy decorations. To me, they’re trying too hard to make it seem like they aren’t a little strip mall cafe. But…that’s what they are, so it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. We had a good sized table, but I could see that most of the two tops were way too small and people were awkwardly reaching around plates to cut their food, because there was no room.
why I’d go back: The chef has a lot of really interesting looking menus for special dinners or their regular dinner & lunch menus. It is a little pricey IMO, but he clearly tries to use quality ingredients.
11.14.08
Veteran’s Day
The original plan was to go to the Jason Mraz concert on 11/10, then sleep over at Alex & Alexa’s since Alexa & I both had Veteran’s Day off. Unfortunately, the concert was sold out. New plan!
We ended up at the Southcenter mall in Tukwila, which is a huge mall that is also surrounded by massive shopping centers. Seriously, everything you could want is there, including Target, Ulta, Ross, Nordstrom Rack, DSW, etc. Neither of us had actually been to the mall before, although I did visit some of the stores around there with Laimelien a few weeks ago. The bonus is that it’s pretty much in the middle between us so neither of us had to drive very far.
I took Alexa to Sushiland where we had a ridiculously cheap (but decent!) lunch that came in under $20 for both of us. UNHEARD OF. Then I made her go watch a movie with me, and then we shopped, and had our brows done. This afternoon of fun was capped off with dinner at CPK after we realized getting on the freeway right then would mean hours of traffic. NO FUN. So, dinner! I’m glad we had another day to hang out before I leave here…
11.09.08
Funny sites
Most of you have probably already seen
mymomisafob.com and mydadisafob.com, but if you haven’t, go take a look. I laughed til I cried. Coincidentally, I talked to my parents last night and this is a transcript of what happened when my dad called. Think it could make the cut?
Phone rings:
Me: Hello?
Dad: Hello. How are you?
Me: I’m fine…how are you? (I had literally hung up the phone with my mom 1 minute earlier)
Dad: Ohhhhhh…we have no power.
Me: What? You don’t have electricity? Is there a power outage?
Dad: Noooo…we didn’t pay the bill.
Me: Are you kidding? Why wouldn’t you pay the power bill?!
Dad: HAHAHAHA yes I am…do you have electricity?
Me: Of course I do. Why are you asking about my electricity? Why did you say that earlier?
Dad: This is called humor.
