Things I Miss About L.A. In No Particular Order

• Peanut butter - Preferably Trader Joe’s brand, unsalted
• Coffee beans from the sellers at the Silver Lake Farmer’s Market
• Red bean boba
• Swapping drinks at Tiki Ti
• Sabina parties
• Dinner parties with friends
• Rock Band nights at Maaron’s
• Eva and Esta
• Santa Barbara county wine
• Beer - Asahi/Sapporo/Kirin is great and all, but a little vairety wouldn’t hurt
• Cemetery Screenings at Hollywood Forever
• Midnight Ridazz
• Shows at Spaceland and The Echo
• Bacon hot dogs at 2AM
• Carne asada burritos at 4AM
• Chilaquiles with chorizo smothered in Cholula or Tapatio
• Pho
• Hangover brunch at Fred 62
• Leisurely brunches at The Kitchen
• A kitchen with an oven

St. Patrick’s Day?

I’m confused. When is St. Patrick’s day this year. The usual date is March 17th, but the Vatican says it’s on the 15th, which is convenient as it gives Sunday as a recovery night. Then again, all the St. Patrick’s day celebrations around the city that I’m seeing are happening on Monday, and I’d hate to miss out on those. I guess the answer is to celebrate Saturday and Monday.

Goings On

A lot has been going on lately, so this is just a broad update. A couple of weeks ago for President’s Day Weekend, Bronwyn and I went with a bunch of friends up to Santa Barbara wine country (as in where they filmed Sideways). We stayed in Buelton, and hit up a number of wineries around Solvang, Santa Ynez, and Lompoc. In the process, we spent far too much money, but at least now I have a closet full of great wines and more souvenir glasses than I know what to do with. I’m by no means a connoisseur, but some of the spots I was really impressed with were Ampelos in Lompoc, Artiste in Santa Ynez, Trio in Solvang, and Clos Pepe and Foley in… somewhere between Buelton and Lompoc. The days of tasting expensive wines were balanced out by nights of drinking cheap beers in a hotel room while dancing to “Quemados” and other jams. I regrettably have no photos to report as I haven’t gotten around to uploading anything on my Flickr.

Last weekend, I successfully conquered all ten hills of the “Feel My Legs, I’m a Racer” race. I think I even managed to snag 6th or 7th place overall, with a second place finish on the first hill. Not bad, if I do say so myself. An official write-up hasn’t been posted anywhere, and I’m still scouring the interwebs for photos, but here’s one someone snapped of me. Note the angle of the horizon in the background. That was the first hill, Eldred St., the one this article talks about. While going up the hills was agony (sweet, sweet agony), going down them scared the crap out of me. I had to walk down Eldred St. and a few others, and I think I wore out my brake pads slowly riding my way down the rest. Indeed my fears weren’t unfounded as one rider crashed going down Baxter at 40mph. He hit an unexpected bump at the bottom of the hill, flew off, and slid some 20 feet up the next hill, winding up with a fractured collarbone and a couple of broken ribs, as well as several patches of road rash. But to show you what kind of a manimal this guy was, he still placed fourth overall even though he only did five out of ten of the hills AND he showed up for the after-party at Pure Luck once he was done at the hospital. Insanity.

On Sunday, Bronwyn and I had our engagement shoot with our wedding photographer, Allana of Ars Magna Studio. We spent a few hours wondering around downtown in the Grand Central Market, the Bradbury Building, the Biltmore Hotel, Pershing Square, and a bit of Echo Park. She posted the results yesterday and they’re absolutely fantastic!Check out her blog or the online gallery to see more.

Finally, in completely unrelated news to anything, other than the fact that I’m Filipino, watch this video:

S.F.A.

I’m all for experimenting with bacon. I made some great bacon-wrapped scallops last weekend, but this is tragic. That bacon should be in my mouth, not smacking against a guy’s thighs.

Bacon

More bacon love

Christmas Recap

Things are finally getting settled back home. Having been away for a week and a half visiting the future in-laws in Memphis for Christmas and New Year’s as well as going to Knoxville and celebrating the wedding of Bronwyn’s cousin, we got back last Tuesday meaning last week was a short one at work and this is the first “normal” work week I’ve had in a while.

Anyways, vacation was great. It consisted primarily of sitting around in pajamas watching the Discovery Channel in high definition. If you haven’t experienced that yet, get thyself to a Best Buy and tell the salesman you want to see some grizzly bears.

I also spent a lot of time acquainting myself with one of my Christmas presents, a shiny new PSP. When we weren’t watching the mating rituals of Galapagos iguanas, one of the things we would do whilst exploring Memphis was drop into the local Gamestops from which I quickly put together a core collection of PSP games. Most notable of those acquisitions are two peculiar games. One is Loco Roco, a game in which you roll a singing blob around a maze, all the while munching on bugs and berries to plumpify your Loco Roco. The hypnotic experience is akin to playing with one of those ink hourglass things that were so popular back in the ’90s, except that this sings and won’t break and stain your carpet. The second game is called Puzzle Quest, which is an unlikely pairing of a puzzle game and RPG. At first the concept seemed a bit too quirky, but the game appeared on the top of 2007 lists of quite a few sites, like Gamasutra’s Top 10 Games of the Year and Gamespot’s Best Game No One Played, so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, you move around a map completing quests, collecting treasure, conquering undead hordes, and laying seige to cities, except that all manner of “combat” is determined in a puzzle game match up. As odd and dorky as it sounds, Puzzle Quest is ridiculously addictive. I had to give it a few hours of gameplay before the mechanics actually started to click and I figured out why I couldn’t beat the stupid giant bat (it’s his shriek spell, duh! Like Officer Michaels’ coitus interuptus of McLovin, I’ve got to block his mana collection).

At any rate, as great as my shiny white PSP is, it pails in comparison to Bronwyn’s other gift to me: the gift of bacon. It’s a collection of five of the top bacons of 2007 according to The Grateful Palate, which offers a bacon of the month subscription service, so they should know their bacon. We cooked up the first of the bacon this last Saturday morning for breakfast, opting for the Jim Oliver’s Hickory Smoked Country Bacon.

Alls I can say is, “Oh, Glory!”

L’shana Tova!

No, I’m not Jewish. I just happen to work for a very Jewish company. One of the benefits of this is that I get to celebrate Rosh Hashanah by not going to work tomorrow. Not that it matters as things are pretty busy at the moment and I’ll be working from home tomorrow anyways. But it’s a nice change of pace. I’ve been having trouble focusing at the office lately. I don’t know why, exactly, but I think changing the setting up will help me be productive tomorrow. My current plan is to get some breakfast at one of the many fabulous local diners then head to a local coffee shop with wi-fi, plop down with my laptop and itty-bitty Wacom tablet and get down to bid-ness. I’m always fascinated by the world that exists from 9-6 as it’s something I only get mere glimpses of during my lunch break. In L.A. especially it seems like there are a lot of people who have copious amounts of free time and I’ve got to wonder what the hell it is they’re doing! Are they unemployed? Self-employed? Trust-fund children?

Until then, I’m celebrating my bisected work week with a little malted beverage action. At first I was thinking some Oregon honey beer would be appropriate, seeing as apples and honey are a big thing for this holiday. But instead I decided to crack open a bottle of He’Brew Pomegranate Ale that I’ve had sitting in my fridge since the Beer Cruise in August. It’s not bad. A decent bodied ale with the pomegranates making a very distinctive appearance, maybe a little too heavy-handedly. Or rather, if you’re looking for the pomegranate taste it’s definitely there, but it exists more as an afterthought such that the taste doesn’t really lend itself to the rest of the flavor. It was still pretty refreshing. Not altogether memorable, but ’tis the season.

42 Below Vodka Ads

Saatchi & Saatchi of New York won the Clio Award, the Oscars of the advertising and design world, for their 42 Below Vodka campaign. Their clip art mastery gave me a solid fifteen minutes of chuckles today. Check out the whole campaign.

La Grand Crew ‘007

Last weekend, the handsome geniuses Alex and Evan over at Hot Knives held what promises to be the raddest event of August (and believe me, there is some cool shit going on in the city even just this weekend). The idea was so simple it’s a wonder it hasn’t been done before - a 40-mile bicycle tour of L.A.’s best beer stores. A group of about twenty, we ended up hitting six astounding locations and amassing copious amounts of brew.

At the end of the ride was the afterparty and tasting where we attempted to reach the mythical “99 bottles of beer on the wall.” Alas, in the photo are only 77. However, I think that at least 30 bottles of beer had to have been consumed along the way. I had two. Next time we’ll just need to hold on to our empties… or work on our tolerances.

Oh, and I can’t forget to mention the fantastic hot nuts prepared by the Hot Knives crew to complement the fine beers at the after-party. Delicious and oh-so-satisfying.

The Hot Knives have a write-up on their blog. Additional photos are available from the Flickrs of Wildbell, Existential Media, and Hair of the Dog Dave.