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| Saturday marked Charlie and Ernie's annual bday BBQ, with Ernie turning dirty thirty, and Charlie just a slightly less dirty 29.
I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
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| So it's not been about 8 days out here in Scottsdale, and I think that in the past few years, we've done just about everything there is to do out here. We capped it off yesterday with a day trip to Sedona, which I've been told to go to for years as the place where the "red rocks" are. I've always been pretty whatever about it. I mean, red rocks, whatever, right? Wrong. Once we really hit Sedona, we were both completely blown away by the beauty of the rock formations. We set out from Scottsdale pretty early in the morning, with plans to stop at Out of Africa, an African wildlife park, as well as Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, a couple of historical landmarks. Out of Africa was great - we got to feed a giraffe by hand (which is safe, by the way, because giraffes don't have top teeth) as well as see a bunch of other hooved animals up close from our safari bus. We also got to see bears and tigers being fed as well as hear a hyena laugh, which is a really, really creepy experience (they only laugh when they're scared, trying to protect something, or hunting I think). Montezuma's Castle and Well were, well, OK. The castle wasn't so impressive live, but still looked kind of neat. The Well, on the other hand, was pretty neat, a HUGE hole in the ground filled with water. Made me want to leap into it, but as Jenin mentioned, we've probably been watching a little too much Planet Earth. Once we hit Sedona we drove around in one of the residential neighborhoods to get a better view of the red rocks and spent about an hour at a local coffee shop catching up our travel journal - just killing some time until our sunset ATV ride. I haven't been on an ATV or done anything similar to it, but oh man, it was awesome. Even on the gimped Yamaha Bruin we were on, I had a huge huge blast just driving slowly until the other ATV's were ahead of us and then blasting off at full throttle. I think we probably were close to the 35mph max speed! To add to the thrill of the ride, it started POURING on the way home, which was nice at first, but it lasted all the way until we got back to the van. It was only a 90 minute ride, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Oh well, I'm pretty homesick now, I'll be glad to finish my work early this week and get home on Wednesday night or something. Hope you're all having great weekends out there. Pics to come after we get home. | | |
| I think Jenin hit on everything that we did during our trip up to the Pacific Northwest, but I'd like to say that we really loved how green it was (figuratively and literally)! As much as I love my car and just driving places, I think if I was somewhere with a decent public transportation system, life would be so much easier. I'm sure that being in public accounting doesn't help much, but hey, any little bit that I can do will help the environment. Maybe that means getting a hybrid RX at some point, haha. Other stuff:
- Seeing tons of movies this summer, enjoying them all, even Harry Potter 5
- Helped Giang buy a car today! Woohoo! She was able to practically steal a well-loved IS 300 AND get rid of her junker (well-loved and frequently repaired though it may also have been) at the same time!
- Sitting around at home sucks... Come home soon, baby! | | |
| A very eventful past weekend (and mostly hinged around Hollywood, no less)! - Pre-kicked it off with dinner at Houston's with Benda and Knocked Up at Century City. The dinner was good, and the movie was freakin' hilarious. I highly recommend it to anyone that hasn't seen it yet... As Charlie put it, just enough wrong comedy to be just right, with a good plot, too.
- Kicked it off with happy hour at El Torito with Jenin and her co-workers. Mojitos, Bohemia, and half price appetizers for all! Oh yeah, we saw Ocean's 13, too. Pretty disappointing, actually. No trick to the execution of the "caper," no leaving the audience guessing as to what was going on... Jenin was really disappointed by it.
- Had dim sum on Saturday with my Mom and Jenin to celebrate Jenin's graduation. No violence ensued. Good sign of things to come, I hope.
- Went to Jenin's co-worker's niece's birthday party in the Valley. They had a beautiful house just off of Ventura, which was filled with lots of small children and perhaps an ass of a brother-in-law.
- Saw John Mayer at the Hollywood Bowl Saturday night... He didn't play Comfortable or Covered In Rain, but it was still a pretty great show. He extended almost every one of his songs with great guitar solos or extended intros. The Bowl was really cold that night, though, so Jenin and I got a little bit sick.
- Saw Pirates 3 again at the El Capitan for my cousin's birthday and had ice cream at the Disney soda fountain next door afterwards. Black Pearl Sundae (2 scoops of chocolate ice cream, waffle pieces shaped like a ship's mast, AND a free bowl! Now Jenin can eat cereal and gaze at Johnny and Orlando... *vomit*) FTW. Great movie the second time around, and it wasn't spoiled by a cheesy live show prior to the movie, as the El Capitan is known for.
- Got home, slept about 10 hours, and hooray, back to work. Happy Hump Day! EDIT: Oh, and I got 2 toys! Optimash Prime and My First Barrel of Monkeys! Haha, all I need now is that Executive Barrel of Monkeys and I'll have all of them. Oh yeah, we also had Toi on Sunset, which was actually quite tasty. Yes, Charlie, I had the Pad Thai. :) Also, photos from my phone via Splashblog. | | |
| Owwie. I'm bummin' it at home today because I strained my back last week at the gym and aggrevated it a little bit last night. Oh well. Guess I'm relegated to jogging for the next month or so... Finally landed the Matrix trilogy in HD (I watched revolutions via on-demand just to get perspective, and wow, the HD versions are awesome) thanks to amazon's aggressive pricing and free amazon prime trial. I'm looking for more stuff that I can get cheaper online. Currently I'm just shopping for some graphic novels to get me caught up on my reading. I've actually got a bunch of stuff on my plate, though, including the entire Bone graphic novel, several Chuck Palahniuk books, and of course, the last Harry Potter book when it comes out next month. Not much else to report. One of the mystery snails in one of my fish tanks always crawls out at night, and yesterday Jenin found him about 5 feet away from the tank, the furthest he's ever made it. I swear he's headed for Minnesota or something, but to appease him, I'm going to start dropping some algae wafers in his(?) tank. | | |
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