2008 – 4th Quarter Summary

We have neglected our blogging duties. This probably doesn’t matter because no one is reading this blog anyway. Regardless, here is a summary of the past three months:

• We planned our wedding.
• We argued about wedding planning.
• We had a beautiful (IMO) wedding in the rain on November 1, 2008 (see the millions of pictures on flickr and the one here of my gorgeous wife).
• Afterwards, we’ve disappeared from the face of the earth (only to appear now).
• We’ve stopped arguing (yeah right) and are now happy.

We’ve also started a page as a journal for our new home experiments. see the Domestic Experiments blog if you’re curious.

That’s it. Happy 2009!

 

Wedding Rituals (and Duties), pt. 1

Ingrid and I spent the labor day weekend fulfilling our wedding duties down in Southern California. Our immediate families spent the weekend together at Truong and Sonya’s house. Rather, I should say, we invaded their house despite the fact that Sonya is about to burst with their third little creature. We even dragged our KitchenAid along for Ingrid to make a magnificent cake. It was a busy and nice time for the families to be together and the Mai brothers dragged Fritz (Ingrid’s dad) out on the golf course where we proceeded to humiliate ourselves by managing to hit every tree on the course.

The main ritual of the weekend consisted of going over to Ba Ngoai’s (my grandma) house to pay our respects to the Do family (my mom’s family) ancestors. In addition, Ingrid and the Andersons got to meet most of the living Do clan, who showered us with unexpected gifts. Ba Ngoai spent the morning telling everyone the story of how she used to put me in garbage can when I was a stubborn brat (some things don’t change). She also reminded everyone how Ingrid barbecued some food at her house 5 years ago (we’ve only been together for less than 3 years). Note: Ba Ngoai is 95 years old…

The day concluded with a fun picnic at the park. Part 1 is done. Now if only the other parts could wrap up…

Some random notes: Today is Ingrid’s 27th birthday. Erika would say she’s wayyyy over the hill, but I think she’s just hitting her prime (points for Trieu!). Also, I’ve sold my Nikon so I am camera-less for the time being. Hopefully that’ll change shortly and you’ll see some more posts up on flickr. I can smell the D700 full-frame 12.3 Mpx already though I can also smell a hole burning in my backpocket.

 

Those veggies are ours

Those photos on flickr (and temporarily on the the sidebar) and below are one day’s harvest from our garden. I just have to brag about them. They are like our children. Seriously, we prepped them for this photoshoot and everything (made sure the lighting was good, polished them, grouped them by color, etc.). Anyway, just some shameless self-promotion.

Harvest August 2008

 

Dream Ticket

The Grand Ol' Dream Ticket

I thought this was the perfect picture. This is what I call the Dream Ticket. Two really old guys grinning ear to ear about how great it is to be American. Forget that smooth-talking good-looking multi-racial young senator from Illinois or that sharp-witted intelligent sexual barrier-breaking senator from New York! We’re going wtih a Google-geezer from Arizona and a dull-witted businessness “genius”.

 

A Disgruntled Non-Voter

I had another grueling drive to Palo Alto this morning with NPR morning edition accompanying me. Just like for the past 18 months, the election took up a large portion of the coverage. Of course, this ticked me off. I thought of two major qualms I have with this whole democracy thing that we’re experiencing in our great nation.

The first is the fact that the three major candidates that have been actively campaigning for the past god knows how long are senators (Obama, McCain, and Clinton). There are numerous stories of them campaigning full-time, going from city to city, state to state, and now country to country. Now, what about their other full-time job? You know, the one that entails legislation for the whole damned country! I guess that could be put off on the wayside, it’s clearly not as important. It’s not as if we have any pressing issues at hand. And it’s not as if we’re paying them a gov’t salary. Imagine if you had a job and you spent a year publicly looking for another job, do you think your boss would keep you employed? Only with the U.S. gov’t.

Furthermore, there are only 100 senators. If 3 of them are taking off full-time, that’s 3% of the work-force not doing their work all the time. If you include the other senators who may be sick, on vacation, or doing their own campaigning (e.g. Joe Biden), how many senators do you have left? Is being a senator really that easy? Can I just take off for a year and a half and accomplish everything I want during my short term in office? If so, does senate experience provide any qualifications for the presidency? Sign me up for this whole senate gig, I can dig this perpetual vacation time where I’m “campaigning” in Fiji.

Secondly, the major news story of the day involves the bruhaha over comments by Gen. Wesley Clark about John McCain’s war service. The oft-repeated quote reads: “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.” Wow, what a thrashing Clark gave to McCain’s patriotism. I mean, he has the audacity to say that being a pilot and getting shot down doesn’t make one a good president. Wesley Clark must be some sort of anti-american nut. I mean, I think any american who is shot at for our great nation should automatically get a cabinet position. Now, if you’re flying a fighter jet, that’s president material.

Sarcasm aside, what the hell is wrong with the media and the people who care about this quote. They always conveniently leave out the previous section of Clark’s comments, where he said “I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war.” In my opinion, there was no mudslinging, it’s just a valid point. I think the straight-talking John McCain should not be denouncing these comments and I’m disappointed that Barack Obama is distancing himself.

Maybe it’s true that Wesley Clark was trying to swift-boat McCain, but it backfired and he got swift-boated himself (thereby swift-boating Obama). The point is that this is all insane and provides another reason for me to never vote again if the elections are this stupid . Oh wait, I forgot to mention that I almost got into a car accident this morning. I think that experience qualifies me to be mayor…

 

On the Oregon Trail

Ingrid and I are sitting at a coffee shop in Seattle. How Cliche. We are cold and cloudy, but, at least, we’re not wet. This past week we have taken a mini-roadtrip up the pacific northwest. The “mini-” refers to time and not space as we’ve already driven over 1100 miles. We left saturday morning, stopped in Sacramento, and drove on through to Grants Pass, Oregon. We spent an evening at a beautifully empty campsite (whitehorse park) on the banks of the rogue river. Since the days were so long, we were able to play frisbee until past 8pm, shortly before our usual bedtime.

From Grants Pass, we made it to McMenamins Hotel Oregon in McMinnville, where they have an annual UFO festival. Alas, we were not abducted and probed, but we did have a great evening of wine tasting, beer drinking, and playing pool (I kicked Ingrid’s butt). McMinnville is a nice quiet town (big surprise there) and we had been fortunate with the sole sunny day they’ve had all winter. And we haven’t seen the sun since. Damn, I love california weather.

From McMinnville, we snaked our way through the Willamette valley, only stopping by to try a couple of glasses of Pinot Noir. The wine in Oregon is quite tasty and much better than the wine from central california. We left the peaceful wine country and drove past Portland to a campground at the trailhead of Eagle Creek in the Columbia River Gorge– and that’s when the gods decided to piss on us…

The night was loud and damp. Ingrid and I ate our bagel with salami and cheese in the car and spent the rest of the evening in our tent, playing cards, and reading “I am legend” (which is nothing like the movie, btw). It rained all night and all morning. We struggled out of bed and packed our soggy gear away and started to hike. At first, the rain was refreshing and the air was cool. 6 miles later, it felt like a f*cking deathmarch. The trail is beautiful, easy, and as green as can be, but when you’re wearing soggy shoes, soggy pantlegs, and a soggy t-shirt, you couldn’t enjoy it as much. Plus, my dying camera-battery was making me very unhappy. 12-13 miles later, we were back in our car and dying for some hot cocoa.

We are spending the rest this week in Seattle, where the latest headline reads: “Seattle – Colder than Siberia!” Saturday is Hans’ high school graduation (Hans is Ingrid’s brother) — only 11 years after mine!!! Unfortunately, during this trip, we received news that Ingrid’s grandmother has died. She’s flying off for the funeral in Michigan this Sunday while I head back south, alone in the Prius. Ingrid will return next week and will start her exciting new internship at IBM. I’ll be back at work on Monday, praying that I don’t go mad…

 

Wedding plans aflame

Well, again I am waiting for Trieu to get home from work. This time, though, I’m feeling silly for complaining about wedding planning (see last post, below), because all our plans are about to go up in flames. Literally. This morning, our wedding site, Pema Osel Ling, was evacuated because of a huge fire that started in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Looking at the (highly highly inadequate) map on the San Jose Mercury News, it looks like POL is inside the red circle of destruction.

Now, I should be feeling worried about all the people whose houses have burned, etc. etc. But instead I just feel absolute terror because our wedding (yes, our wedding that we already sent invitations to, got a caterer for, etc.), is probably going to have to be shifted in a major sort of way. Crap!!! (to put it mildly).

 

Wedding Wedding and more Wedding

Well, I’m sitting around waiting for Trieu to get back from work, and I thought I’d update the wide world out there (or at least the close friends who actually know about this site) on our recent wedding activities.

This weekend was filled with serious wedding-ness, starting with our first caterer tasting. On Saturday we tasted what might be the worst food on the planet. There was nasty shrimp salad, undercooked rice, soggy spinach, and even soggier salmon. This (along with an extremely salty chicken roulade in what looked like clotted cream) precipitated some truely horrible digestive issues. Not only for Trieu but for me (that’s when I knew it was bad).

After coming home and resting our stomaches, I went online to order paper for our invitations. Through the mysterious forces of the Internet, I ended up looking at books on wedding cakes (which led to looking at old pictures of Faye Dunaway, for some reason). Anyway, I got terribly excited about making my own wedding cake, which prompted a trip to Borders. Which prompted looking at every available wedding book, and taking quizzes about “whether you know your fiance/e.” Just a note: Trieu does not know as much useless information about me as I know about him.

After our ultimately futile trip to the bookshop (I will update later about whether making one’s own wedding cake is a totally stupid idea), we came home and tried to finalize the wording for our RSVP cards. The time was 11 pm. Anyone who has ever tried to socialize with us in the evening knows this story will end in disaster. And it did. We ended up arguing about whether to state room choice as a “preference” or as a “willingness.” This evolved into many other, more petty (if you can believe it) arguments, which had me thinking: Why can’t Trieu just be like a normal male and stay out of this process altogether.

But after all is said and done, I’m pretty glad Trieu has butted his anal-retentive self into this process. Most of the time, we’re pretty good at making decisions together, and the fact that we do things with such democracy is one of the reasons I love him as much as I do. I just have to keep that in my mind as we go through all this wedding craziness. Just keep that nasty chicken roulade away from us and we’ll be fine.

 

Planning on Getting Hitched

Most of you who know about this site, already know that we plan on getting married. But in case you’ve missed the news, I’ve posted it here.

We made the decision in Bozcaada, Turkey. Of course, Ingrid had read my mind before I even said anything so the element of surprise was never there. Also, I didn’t get a ring. But that’s ok because we were in relaxing Kale Pansiyon atop a beautiful island floating on the Aegean Sea. We’re sharing that view with you at the top of this page.

I told Ingrid to take a very thorough shower and laid out the Susanni blanket on our bed. The blanket was purchased from a carpet dealer in Avanos as an anniversary present for the both of us. I conned her into giving me her mom’s ring the night before. After she came out of the shower, we smiled and the Susanni became a wedding present. And that’s the story.

That happened on September 30, 2007. In one year, one month, and one day from then, Ingrid and I will finish this part of the story at Pema Osel Ling located between Santa Cruz and Watsonville.

 

The future is here: Hybrid Synergy Drive

Ingrid and I purchased a brand new Prius today. I sat in the driver’s seat and learned that the future was a push of a button away. I pushed the button but I was still stuck in 2007. Was this a fluke? Is this some sick Joke? The radio was playing, the AC was on, the touch screen was working, but the car would not go to “Drive”. I sat there wondering if we just blew our entire life savings on a broken toy. Alas, I recalled what Greg, our kind salesman, told me. You have to press on the brake pedal while pressing said button. Aaah…the hum of 50000 Volts (or something like that). Now all I need to do is sit back and stare at the screen showing me the energy flowing from the brakes to the electric motor and out toward the wheels…oh wait, we’re heading uphill so the gas engine is kicking in…oh shit! I have to look back at the road instead of this damn screen.

The future is here and we are sitting inside of it. There’s another gas station going by with $3.15 per gallon. God bless Toyota.