Updates coming

Apologies for not updating this in a long time. I have been extremely busy and more fleshed out entries will be forth coming as there have been a number of very significant life events happening to me in the last month. These include:

1. Getting married.
2. Going to Greece for the Honeymoon.
3. Planning to move to Japan at the end of the month.

So yeah, big things that deserve some form of blogified recognition. Posts will come, but for now, I will leave you with MAN BABIES!!

And as a special bonus, how not to pickup girls…

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.

Time to Dance

It’s Friday! Time to dance.

In other news, today marks four years of dating Bronwyn, in what we’ve dubbed as our “Valiversary.” Due to its close proximity to Valentine’s Day and our mutual dislike of arbitrary holiday card festivities, we decided to roll what would be Valentine’s Day celebrations into our anniversary. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), since we’re set to be wed in May, this will be our last Valiversary as the dating anniversary will be replaced with our nuptial one. At any rate, though Bronwyn has to work tonight, we’ve got a fun weekend planned of picnics, Thai massages, ice cream, cooking classes, and lindy hop. Huzzah! Since I’m rolling solo tonight, I’ll be heading out to Midnight Ridazz.

Hawaii Chair

On a completely un-political note:

WTF?! I have seen no such chairs in Hawaii!

Ann Coulter Endorses… Clinton?

Ann Coulter says she’d campaign for Clinton if McCain wins the Republican nomination. What kind of bizarro universe have we entered!?!

It just goes to show the state of disarray the Republican party is in when one of their fiercest attack dogs would rather opt for a Democrat than one of their own.

Obama, on the other hand, has garnered an endorsement from MoveOn, whose members voted in favor of Obama 70.4% to Clinton’s 29.6%.

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!”

Round 1 - Fight

You’ve probably seen that clip of the break dancer kicking the baby. Well, here it is again, but this time with Street Fighter II sound effects for maximum LOL-age.

Slice of Random: Star Wars Trumpet lady

Sparkle motion!

Slice of Random: Ikea Commercial

At least I think it’s a commercial. Been a while since I posted a random YouTube video, so here you go.