three months younger

my cousin just got married today. it was a really beautiful ceremony. my cousin is about three months younger than me. it's odd to think that she's married now. even though i know that she and her (now) husband had been seeing each other for so many years, the reality of the fact that she's now "mrs. kim" is pretty difficult to come to terms with.

.. it's weird.. and kind of sad. perhaps "sad" isn't the right word, but i'm not very good with words, so it'll have to do.

so for the next couple of days, i'll be in vancouver. i'm enoying the weather which is sunny and mild, and the company of family which i normally see on our annual trips up north.

good times, good times.

that, and i'm studying for a pharm exam on monday, which i'll take right after i fly into sfo.

good times.

summer school

ah, so now i'm almost into my fourth week of nursing school. since every week's been kinda crazy with various deadlines, tests, and assignments, time has gone by super-fast. i'm just trying to keep up with everything right now. the other students in my group are major overachievers who all seem to do their reading BEFORE the lecture (amazing, huh?). ai.. it just makes me feel like more of a slacker since i really haven't been keeping up with things the way i would like to.

anyway.. i'm trying to get some major studying done this weekend. next weekend, my cousin's getting married and we're throwing a birthday party for my grandma, so i'll be in vancouver (yay for yummy chinese food!). then when i come home, i can look forward to two midterms, a presentation, and the deadline for an assignment.

i'm not stressed at all!

well. kinda, not really. =/

i cooked today!

yup, you read it right. i actually cooked today! following yan can cook's quick and easy cookbook, i made ginger chicken, bok choy, and carrot and pineapple rice. couple of things: it's not that quick and easy. it easily took me over an hour. secondly, although yan can cook may disagree, i don't think that carrot should be cooked into rice.. it's just.. WEIRD. however, the bok choy came out rather well. the chicken was not very well marinated, but i'm sure i can figure out something to fix it if i want to try to make it again.

my mom was gracious too. it was her birthday today, hence today's cooking experiment. she said it was "different" and "colorful".. i like how both of those adjectives don't specify whether it tasted good or not. =P but everyone finished up their food, and there were hardly any leftovers.. so that's a good sign. anyway, we finished up dinner well. i got a mango mousse cake from sogo and that's always a winner! =D

hmm.. i'd like to practice cooking more. just trying different flavors and making different sauces is fun.

finished behind a demon

Another View of the Devil
Originally uploaded by SeenyaRita.

this is from 2005, but i'm pretty sure this is the same dood from yesterday. he had wings this time, though.

i could've beat him! if i just went a little bit faster...

bay to breakers

Running Roman
Originally uploaded by jmmorton.

i was running at pace with this guy during most of the bay to breakers yesterday. i kept telling myself that if this guy can run wearing FULL ARMOR, certainly i can keep up with him. he kept a bottle of water hidden behind his shield too. i thought that was amusing.

that, and i finished right behind a guy dressed as a demon. he got into the finishing chute right before me. as we were coming out, some guy commented to him, "i thought i died."

only during the bay to breakers.

=D

just to let people know, i'm officially in the nursing program. good sam in san jose offered me a hospital sponsorship, so i'm finally official. no more wondering what i'll be doing in two weeks! i'm super-happy, but now i have so much stuff to get done: immunizations to get, insurance to purchase, books to buy, cpr certifications.. the fun never ends!

eep.. that, and i have a final tomorrow.

and if someone knows, please answer this question: how the heck is one supposed to clean spilled soap out of a carpet?? it just foams more and more and gets worse and worse. =*(

i am loving pandora. check it out, uber-cool.

since i'm a sucker for cute

NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.

The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about 300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.

“It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a ‘mother’,” ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.

“After it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,” the ecologist added. “The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,” Kahumbu added.

“The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years,” he explained.

it must be something in the air

but i've been having problems focusing lately. it's especially bad since it's almost the end of the semester and ugh.. i just feel like bumming around and not doing any work. the fact that the past couple of days have been gorgeous hasn't made things any easier either. the other day, i was driving to san jose state, and i was just thinking to myself, "if i keep going 880 south, i'll hit the 17, and then santa cruz.. i should just keep going." but then reality hits and i realize that i have work to do and that i'm driving to SCHOOL.

*sigh*

responsibilities.. career... i feel old sometimes. the other day, i went out to see a movie, and we were supposed to get tea afterward.. i don't even think it was midnight yet, and me and my friend were practically falling asleep in the car, so we decided to skip tea. eep. oh well, older and wiser i guess, because there's no way that i'd want to be 19, 20, or whatever again.. i just wish i had this head and that age.

hee. oh well, life goes on. live, learn, move on.

words cannot describe...

.. just how awesome these people are.

hey

i'm in the accelerated program. i got the email confirmation today. i am happy, i guess that it's been on my mind for so long that i'm too exhausted to really show it.

*big sigh of relief*

still gotta interview with those hospitals though, so i'm not outta the woods yet.

spring cleaning

i just cleaned out 100+ unread emails. after all, i don't think i'll be needing those emails from last november after all. now, i still gotta clean my room (it's messy again!). and.. by the end of this week, i should get an answer about the nursing program. although i'll still have to do interviews with the respective hospitals.

will be kind of busy for the next couple of weeks...

nolastalgia

okay. so i know that i haven't updated in a while. i've been a big nerd lately, and my life's been boring. but since i'm on spring break now, i have some time to catch up on lost sleep and things i've been putting off (my eyes seriously have this perpetual sunken in and tired look). i was looking at some old pictures. omigosh.. memories are a funny thing. i definitely don't feel like the same person that are in those pictures, it's weird.

working at the library, skateboarding along the beach, random birthday roadtrips to vegas (complete with 100 mile "detours"), scary hotels with holes in the bathroom ceilings, 24-hour tofu, even commencement.. i remember speeding up to l.a. fresh from jen's ceremony so i wouldn't miss my own ceremony.

so weird.

well, enough introspection. i'm gonna work on getting rid of those dark circles and get some sleep.

nippon?

a friend of mine taught english in japan for a year, and when she asked me if i'd be interested in being pen pals with some of her former students i told her that it was fine. but what i didn't realize is that i'd become a class project! i currently have four letters from various japanese high school students. their letters are cute and i appreciate them taking the effort to write to me, but it's so difficult to write while trying to maintain perfect grammar! writing like this is a breeze because it's just like my stream of conciousness where i just write whatever i'm thinking at the moment, but when i write to them, i make a concerted effort to write with perfect grammar because i'm afraid of being a bad example.

aish.. i'm wondering just how many more letters i'm going to get...

crazy travel bug strikes again. aish.. wish me luck over the holidays, take care and see you all in the next year. =D

a picture's worth a thousand words

i wanted to post some pictures, but 1) i'm lazy and 2) i just don't have time, so i'm just going to post them here for now, but i'll properly update my photo page eventually...

bep free concert sponsored by honda civic.. as if you couldn't tell by the background~

u2 concert! picture stolen from brian's site, who apparently stole it from pearl's site.

grx christmas banquet with my small group buddy! (aka joanna) gotta love food pictures~

still at the grx banquet, the kids put on a really cute skit! notice the empty chair next to mary? what's up with the deadbeat joseph???

it really is christmas =)

i just got home after a long and cold, albeit happy, evening. matthew and i went to the 'sing-it-yourself' messiah event given by the sf conservatory. basically it's about 3,000 people who may or may not know how to sing taking a stab at handel's messiah. matthew had a chorale background from high school so he actually had an idea of how to sing some of it but i had no clue.

it was amazing.

i didn't expect it to actually sound good, but when you have so many people sing (or try to sing) the same thing at once, there's just something magical about it. when we got to the part in the middle where we were singing the hallelujah chorus, it was just awesome. the entire auditorium was filled with voices raised and singing, and when we got to the final hallelujah, the crowd broke into cheers and applause. after the performance, we continued to clap, and got a final curtain call and a treat from the conductor when he lead the orchestra in an encore performance of the hallelujah chorus. the first time was good and this time it was even better.

it's hard to describe in words how it felt.. but it was just so uplifting and awesome. i wish i were a better writer so i could describe it better.

as we were leaving the auditorium, i could hear some people softly singing 'oh come, all ye faithful' and i sang along. we paused at the exit as we could hear the strains of the carol growing and growing, and peoples' conversations stopping, until all the people who had been pushing towards the exit stopped and all you could hear were the sounds of people singing. that spontaneous connection through music suddenly made these 3,000 strangers into a community.

and now here's the funny part. after this wonderful, uplifting evening, i almost stranded myself at the castro valley bart station. i missed my transfer at bayfair, and ended up one stop over. i went downstairs to ask the station attendent if there were any more trains to sf (because i thought i needed to take a sf train to head back to the bayfair station) and he replied no. after the requisite freak out moment, i called les and was just about to have her pick me up from castro valley. i need to ask the attendent for directions to the station, and he asked me where from. when i replied fremont, he was like, "why didn't you say fremont in the first place??" turns out, the last train of the evening goes only to bayfair and over there i could hop on my train to fremont. i had to wait about a half hour on the freezing cold platform of the station, but when i got on the train around 1 am, i was just relieved to be heading home without any major consequences.

regardless, i'm still really happy and i feel really fortunate to have had such an awesome experience. tonight's been wonderful. merry christmas, merry christmas...

been a while...

yeah, i know i've kinda ignored this blog for a while. sorry!

as some of you may know, i quit my job at the bank. workplace drama sucks and i think once you start bringing that stress home with you, it's a sign that you should be moving on. so that's just what i ended up doing. i'm glad i did it.. but forgoing a steady income and my "grand plan" for the subsequent months was tough. honestly it was scary to just leave without really knowing where i would go. although it's only a couple of months until the start of school, i like having a good idea of what's going on and where i'm going, so all this uncertainty was killing me.

but things have kind of worked out in their own way, and it's already been over a month since i left us bank behind me and there's been no major blowouts and i'm still standing, so i figure i must be doing ok.

=)

holidays are upon us. i'll be heading to hong kong for christmas.. i'm excited, it'll be my first time in hong kong and a chance to have REAL hong kong-style dim sum. that's the highlight of the trip, of course! i'm anxious to start school in january.. but i know with the holiday season, time will just fly.

time has just been flying lately.. but i'm optimistic and hopeful about next year. i'm sure something good will come.

eep.. sorry if i'm being overly sentimental.. holidays do that to me. happy holidays all!

clean slate

i gave my two weeks today. very hard and emotions are still kind of high, but i think it's about time that i moved on.

...

still sad, though.

colors!

this is neat.