crystal.dot.me

In cased anybody missed Aanjae’s First Birthday part all the way out in Lancaster, here are the pictures from the event. I semi-lied about my blogging but I’m making an effort here. Next post: my life as a badminton superstar, ok well not superstar, but Hung and I just started playing. Mon-Thurs 8 AM – 10 AM, yep. Have a sexy new racquet now too!

I went to the Make Music Pasadena worldwide celebration here in Pasadena this weekend–alone. It’s pretty monumental since I usually never go to concerts, movies, or any events by myself. It was a free concert featuring music from around the world including street performers and indie acts. It sounded like a great photo opportunity for me to break out the SLR and do some portrait shooting.

A free series of concerts featuring some power-pop is definitely my thing, and they were really good, but it was easily pushing 100 degrees when the crowd got there. I became lazy about taking pictures so I only snagged some of The Switches and The Little Ones. After awhile even the camera in my hands became exhausting after six hours in the sun.

I’m going to begin restructuring my blog soon but I’m trying to get into the groove of posting again. It’s been awhile. The set is on Flickr.

Crap. I’m coming back. I work at home so I have no excuse except for lack of inspiration and apathy but I will vow to hide it from the masses in my new blog–out next month. Or week. Or something.

I’ve been working from home for awhile now, the past 8 months or so, and as cool and awesome as it is I am beginning to have problems distinguishing the two apart. I feel like my days just blend together now and sometimes it’s hard to get motivated. It doesn’t help that my most productive hours of creativity are from 11 PM – 3 AM where I have fits of vision or go on sprees which leads me to very ungodly sleeping patterns. Which is something I should work on, apparently my Mom mentioned to Hung’s parents that I’ve been like that since a kid, that I always seem to work from 12 AM onwards if I had the choice. I’m a vampire. Maybe I should get dressed up to go to work at my desk. There are days where I try to finish a project up that I don’t ever leave my pajamas. Unhealthy I know. Anyhoo! Expect more ramblings. I guess now that I live with someone I ramble to him instead of the blog, maybe I should alleviate that burden some. =P

Alright. I’m back, work’s been over for awhile and I’ve been working on other projects. In fact I’ve been trying to build my resume and portfolio for web work so I’ve been trying to read and learn. Eventually I’ll make an online resume and revamp the blog, maybe add a few things to it. I am trying to figure out if I should design a template from scratch or continue to use these free ones I keep finding (like this one).

Since I’ve written I’ve taken quite a few pictures. You can find them on my Flickr account and I’m sure I’ll find a more than adequate plugin for Wordpress soon when I’m not so lazy. By the way Dave please call us, we still have to play Halo 3 and I think we’re acquiring the new Smash Bros. Brawl which you should come over and play with us because Hung isn’t as busy as he was with school. I’m kind of at another crossroads in my life right now, I’m not sure what I should be concentrating more political work or web work. I’ve decided that I want to combine the two but I feel like I really need to brush up on web skills. I’ve been out of the game for awhile, I think to mitigate it I’ll still be participating in a few campaigns till November, after that I will decide if school’s an option or if it’s time for more work. Till then Obama-o-rama is on hold until it comes to the general, if it comes to that. I’m alive!

I sent our XBOX 360 in today (to be repaired, grrrr…), but something else  arrived in the mail for me today! My first DSLR, a Pentax K100D Super. I’d been contemplating one for awhile, but this definitely the most serious camera I’ve ever owned. Hopefully I’ll make it into a full fledged hobby of mine, too bad this hobby is so God damn expensive. There’s a few reasons I chose Pentax over the digital leaders Nikon and Canon but that’s something you can ask me about. A camera bag and other goodies are coming soon!

Over the years I’ve owned quite a few digital cameras (five), I should pay some homage to them.

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Obama makes me giddy with excitement!

I try to avoid politics on here. I talk politics all day lately it seems, because it is my job, but I am so excited about Iowa. I didn’t think it could happen, and the fact that it DID, it’s like–WOW. Everyday we work trying to lay groundwork for people to know our candidate, we never know if it works, and poll after poll, we tried to knuckle down and persevere. To have it actually happen, in spite of the fact that I had this pessimism inside for so many months, is liberating.

“For many months, we’ve been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.” – Senator Barack Obama

It was inevitable. Disc errors, a few hiccups here and there. We knew it was coming. We just didn’t know when, but it finally happened–our XBOX 360 took a crap and the three lights of death happened. Too bad our games were mostly on the 360 including Rock Band.

It’ll probably take about 4 weeks to fix once we get the box to ship it in. Thank God it’s still under warranty.

Merry Christmas!

For the second time in my life I had to get stitches on Friday, four of them. They’re beauties–actually no, they’re very unattractive and I am squeamish. Despite my fine bio scores in high school, I am not cut out for the medical profession, which is sad really, mostly for my parents.
Hung and I went to visit my good friend Christy and her boyfriend Kyle. We all went to middle school together, minus Hung because he is old . We decided that we’d go to Lucille’s BBQ for their awesome and delicious Southern black sweet tea. I love iced tea, and I like iced tea with sugar in it. The fact that is is served in jar here is just a little icing on the cake, but it would soon lead to the demise of my ankle.

We ordered, sat down, ate our biscuits with apple butter, commented on the nostalgia of the jar-as-glasses concept that used to be at Claim Jumper. Add additional comments about how great the service was just to add to the irony that would ensue. As we started eating our entrees that just came out, our waitress started busing the table next to us. Soon after we hear a tray drop and my left butt cheek smells like beer, and I get a weird stinging sensation on my ankle. It felt like one of the ridiculously heavy jar glasses landed right on my ankle but the sting wasn’t going away. So I lift up my pant leg and my severed flesh looks at me. A deep clean slash, it hadn’t started bleeding yet instead I just saw a sliver of white before the flow of blood started, glad my bones are a normal color. I was a bit shocked, and I began to elevate my foot and muttered to Hung and Christy about being cut.

Hung comes over and looks at it and starts picking up fresh clean napkins and tells me to apply pressure but not until after he and Christy surmise I’m going to have to get stitches because apparently it’s so deep “it looks like a vagina.” Thanks for the technical term Hung, I’m glad physiology has helped you out there. The rest of this is kind of a blur, Kyle was way on top of things and starts packing up the food immediately. Good man Kyle, good man. I apply pressure, talk to the manager who looked freaked out and suggested that I didn’t need stitches. Hung looked like he was going to smack him, he didn’t use the word vagina this time and just said it was pretty deep. I hobbled down the elevator and Hung carried me to Christy’s car while I exposed my ass crack and full of bbq stomach (as a result of me being carried) to the fine patrons of Lucille’s. They took to the ER and in 1.5 hours I had stitches and a tetnus shot that makes me feel like I got punched in the arm still and it’s been a few days. I couldn’t believe it was that fast, I expected a long wait while I bled profusely in the waiting area. When I finally got to be seen by a doctor I got curtained next to a drunk teenager who apparently puked all over his Christmas gifts and got puke in his ear somehow, his mom found him passed out and brought him into the hospital where he was annoying the entire hospital staff and me.

So now you know why I’m hobbling around for the next few weeks. I’ll let you know how big my giftcard is when I get it, and I shudder to think how big my ER bill will be. Thank God I’m insured, but they’ll probably be picking up the hospital bill. I recommend the hot link sandwich and the grilled corn.

Hung is an exceptional boyfriend most of the time. When he pees he sprays Lysol on the rim of the toilet and flushes it to keep it clean. When I cook, which is always, he does the dishes without complaining. We haven’t really had the problems most people talk about when they move in together, it’s pretty awesome minus the fact I’m away from the Orange County I am used to.

He even tries to not fart around me most of the time, unless he’s purposely trying to gross me out. I respect that he tries to wait until I leave the room before he lets one rip. The problem is, for whatever reason, I always manage to walk back into the room right after he’s let one go. Almost every time he thinks it’s clear, I choose to make an appearance post-fart, it’s horrific. I don’t know what it is but he has the smelliest farts ever, it is a combination of natural gas and sewage, earning him the moniker sewage butt. When we were in Taiwan, I mistook his fart into a fan as the sewage barge coming by the harbor as it did every morning. I couldn’t figure out why the hell it’d come by at 8:00 in the evening. It wasn’t till an hour later that he revealed to me that it was not the barge, but his butt, that had caused the potent smell that permeated out of the room and lingered into the hallway. Such is life. I wonder if God is trying to tell me something…

Tomorrow, how I got stitches on Friday.