stav's little corner

I get all excited when things are growing. This amuses Andy to no end, of course, when I excitedly point out the camellia that has resprouted (Joy called it our "Lazarus plant" because I managed to kill it and revive it probably five times now), the green beans in the planter that have popped, and the tree that I have managed to keep alive for four or five years now, though it's definitely starting to look a little diseased. :( I'm still waiting for the flowers to grow in the smaller planter, but it had a longer germination time. So all I have to do is keep watering and keep hoping they'll grow.

We hit up the zoo again today, and saw the half we didn't have an opportunity to hit last time. I think the only exhibit we swung by again was the tigers. We tried to see the lions, but no go on that one. Andy walked out of that one claiming that he didn't want to have more than two kids. (Heh.) It was quite warm, and I was very happy I lugged around my Nalgene filled with ice water the couple of hours we were there.

We celebrated our six month anniversary tonight (even though the actual day is tomorrow) by going to a restaurant in Berkeley called Maritime East. Quite tasty, and the restaurant was really nice, even though it didn't look like much from the outside. I think we're definitely going to need to stop by again the next time we have a yen for a semi-expensive dinner. The oysters were very tasty, and I think Andy was surprised by how good they were raw. I'm going to see if he's willing to go for an oyster bar sometime soon. (Tastiness.)

The adventures continue! Tune in next time...

Well, you guys heard the biggest news, but I'd like to recap the excitement that was February. There were lots of ups and downs, and I'll try to capture them all in this post...


And that was my February.

I really hope March is a little less exciting.

I have a tail. No, seriously, I have a piece of hair around the base of my skull that extends far past the length of my haircut. This tail is usually braided and is incorporated into my hairdo somehow. I have had this tail since 1994, which would make it, unsurprisingly, about 13.5 years old now. However, over the years, the amount of hair that was braided into the tail just grew larger. I don't know how it happened - tail got unbraided, I would start rebraiding, and boom, more hair got caught up, grew longer than my haircut, didn't get trimmed, etc.

So then I was left with a braid that was fat at the top and skinny on the bottom, since hair all tends to break at some point in time. My stylist, Benley, was even arguing with me to let him at it next time, I think because he was having problems combing my hair when it was wet in order to style it.

Very late last night, I combed out my tail, figured out approximately where it was parted back in 1994, and started braiding. I then looked at the rest of the hair, some of which was past my tailbone, took a pair of scissors, took a deep breath, and cut.

My tail, therefore, is still existent, but much slimmer now - probably back to where it was back in 1994. It is much more even now, and I think much neater. I asked Andy if he wanted a lock of my hair to remember me by, and he looked at the neatly coiled hank of hair dangling from my hand as if it were a live snake.

Oh well, at least I'm back where I started - except the tail is much, much longer this time around.

Well. We've made it to 2008. Last night was fun and games at Kiki's house, and we stayed until about 1:15 or so, which was about an hour later than I really wanted to stay. (I was definitely starting to droop around midnight.)

So yeah, fun fun fun.

As promised, Goals for 2008:

PERSONAL
- Exercise at least 5 days a week, 45 weeks out of the year.
- Go to bed on time whenever I have work or worship team the next day. "On time" is defined as in bed by 10:30pm, lights out at 11pm.
- Plan in a visit to my grandparents once a month.
- Drink 1 L water at least 5 days a week.

HOUSE AND HOME
- Cook healthy meals for our household 4 days a week.
- Get into some kind of life and cleaning rhythm/schedule, a la Flylady.

SPIRITUAL
- Do my devos in the morning 5 days a week, 45 weeks a year. Try devos in the morning on weekends.
- Read 10 faith-related nonfiction books this year.

Well, Christmas went as well as could be expected, all things considered. I mean, seriously, a six day trip, five of which without one's luggage, is a little more than can be dealt with... but at least we got to do laundry every day, so we had clean clothes. We even had toiletries, since we'd left some the last time around. But I digress.

We got back home with little fuss yesterday, and I'm quite excited about that. Even though it was about 12 hours door-to-door, it was fairly low stress. We started out the day by packing up, then went to the Cracker Barrel with the fam for some gorging on breakfast food. I managed to make it through two blackberry-smothered pancakes, two small turkey sausage patties, and mostly the whites from two poached eggs before I called it quits. Andy actually finished his third pancake, but I'd just about had enough of that.

Afterwards, we played "Rayman's Rabbids," which is what we got Andy's younger brother for Christmas. (Well, that and a second Wiimote. Can you believe that his Wii only came with one controller? I guess it came with a nunchuck, but still...) Then off to Chattanooga airport for an hour and a half, a two hour flight to Dallas, a four hour layover in Dallas, and then an uneventful flight back to San Jose.

In other news, I went to the gym today after worship team rehearsal and hit about 40 minutes of cardio, a good stretch, and about 10 minutes fat-burn cardio. I didn't know it was that hard to stay in the fat burn zone, but hopefully next time I'll remember a book and stay on the bike for the full 40 minutes, which is what I wanted to do for a good double workout.

Also, completely randomly... I went to go sign up for Leann's Crockpot Menu Mailer, just to discover that they discontinued it! So I made my own this time around, put it in the calendar, and hopefully we'll have three or four hot meals this week and three days of leftovers. At least, that's the hope... we'll see how it works. My crockpot is going to get more use this year, darn it!

I'm in the process of figuring out precisely what it is I want to set as this year's goals. I haven't done much of that since about 2005 (besides "survive this year" and "finish grad school, take my second dan test, and get married), and I think 2008 is a good year to do that.

Rar.

I have been sick with a cold since Sunday, though I tried to go into work on Monday and lasted until about 4pm before I needed to go home. I've been at home since then, valiantly fighting the slow migration of the cold from the back of the nose (so no stuffiness or dripping) down to the throat, and now finally in my upper chest. Sigh. I decided not to go into work today, even though I'm not coughing much, because every time I do cough, it brings up some nasty lemon-yellow stuff in a very painful manner.

I think the only thing I stepped outside to do was to mail off the Netflix on Tuesday morning, and I've spent the rest of the time hovered over my humidifier in the office. It gets nice and toasty in here.

Whee.

I'm alive, really I am. Work has gone into overdrive mode, as we're trying to release a product right now, and I managed to draw the build engineer straw as well as the only full time quality engineer we have on the project. And there are, yes, 6 developers, 2 managers, and a director on this project. Thankfully my manager's also testing...

Anyway, I had a post I was going to put up last week about an incident that occurred only a few days earlier. I've edited it so that it refers to the right timeframe.

This is a true story.

Scene: My usual grocery store, 7pm, last week.

I walked into the grocery store intending to get in and out within 30-40 minutes in order to get home earlier. I grabbed a cart and started shopping, first by picking out what I thought were 8 beautiful apples. During this interlude, someone came by and started asking who it belonged to. I quickly spoke up, and the guy backed off and went back to filling water.

So here I was with apples and vegetable oil in my cart, and went for the pears. I took some time selecting pears, and finally finished bagging them up, and turned to place them in my cart.

My cart was gone.

I spent about five seconds just gaping, then looked around to see if someone was walking around with a cart with only apples and vegetable oil in it. I scanned the entire produce section and found another cart with food in it, but I felt a little strange about taking it. After all, what was I going to do with someone else's groceries? I walked around for about five minutes, looking confused, and finally decided to drag the cart along with me while I looked for the person who took my cart.

While I was walking through the produce aisle, my right foot hit something - vegetable matter? - and all of a sudden my foot slid forward... and kept on sliding. I found myself going down into the splits in the middle of Food Maxx, hanging onto a bag of red pears and looking for my cart. I made it about five or six inches from the ground when my left knee hit the concrete floor.

So now my knee was throbbing, I was trying not to blush, doing the thing where you scan around and figure out whether or not anyone saw you do something terribly embarrassing. I got back up and continued walking around, apparently with a shocked expression on my face, because a few minutes later a man with his toddler daughter asked if I were okay, and I said, "Yes, but I think someone stole my cart." He insisted he saw my cart back over there, and I went back, but only saw the cart the unnamed person had left. Not my cart.

I decided I would just give up and get a new cart, though I was somewhat resentful - I had chosen eight PERFECT apples, and where was I going to find another eight in a bin full of apples? FoodMaxx is great for prices but you really have to dig. So I went back outside for a new cart, got another thing of oil, tossed my pears back in, and tried to ignore my knee while choosing new apples and trying not to feel resentful that someone put me through this fifteen minute rigamarole.

I turned around just as I finished with the apples, and I found a woman there transferring stuff from one cart to the abandoned cart over there. I walked over there, looking confused, and she apologized profusely and said she hadn't realized she'd taken my cart until she got to the checkout counter.

I got my cart and my eight perfect apples and finished my shopping. My total time in the grocery store: about an hour and fifteen minutes. The resulting bruise on my kneecap was quite impressive - covered the entire kneecap and turned a nice eggplant. The people at martial arts were quite amused, as I seem to injure myself doing the most mundane of things. One person commented that I had great balance for going straight down like that instead of tipping over.

Riiiiiight.

And that was my adventure.

Haircut this morning... cut 4 or 5 inches off. Woo!

Andy slept close to 15 hours, I slept about 10.5. This morning, we tried to make waffles in our brand spankin' new waffle iron, which we got as a wedding present from one of his cousins. We had bought Bisquick before we left for Tennessee, and so now I was hoping to get back, make some waffles, and have a "lazy Saturday morning."

But I decided I couldn't do a full serving of it (really, twelve 4" waffles? Too much for two), so I decided to halve it all. Should be easy, right?

It came out watery, dribbled out the side (Andy noted that there was some serious internal bleeding), and then proceeded to crust itself on the waffle iron. It was at this point that I was reviewing all of the measurements, and realized that we had divided 1 1/3 wrong - we had come out with 1 1/6 for some reason instead of 2/3. So I went back and eyeballed adding more Bisquick and egg.

Fifteen minutes later, we had scraped the waffle iron with a plastic spatula and a pair of chopsticks (guess who was using what?) and were ready to try. I forgot that I wanted to spray it with oil before we put down the waffle iron, so again, it ripped in half when I opened it up, and it ended up being another round with the chopsticks.

Ten minutes later, I had two brown waffles and one we had to scrape off the iron.

Lesson 1: Don't try to do fractions in your head right after you've gotten up.
Lesson 2: Always spray the nonstick surface with oil.
Lesson 3: A round with the waffle iron is always more trouble than you think it is.

I would like to preface this post with the following caveat: this is not a rant about people who smoke cigarettes, cigarillos, or cigars. In fact, is has nothing to do with this topic, and those who were readying their own voices to add to the debate and/or discussion have their hackles up for no reason.

No, this post is about barbecue.

My new husband of three weeks is a barbecue purist. I discovered this early on in our relationship when we were talking about things he liked about the South. "Barbecue" was on his list, and this isn't what those of us on the West Coast think of as a barbecue. I have fond memories of barbecues at friends' houses or at parks, where someone spends a fair amount of time preparing the charcoal, marinating the meat, and then gently lays the food over the top of a grill.

No, Andy quickly explained to me when I attempted to demonstrate to him that we indeed had something in common, that was grilling. Barbecue, he explained to me, was a real Southern science, one that involved something mysterious called a smoker, a fair number of wood chips, and sides that have nothing to do with what we in California call healthy.

He raved about a friend's smoked brisket (which was, admittedly, tasty), ranted about how hard it was to find good barbecue in the Bay Area, pooh-poohed the Tony Roma's-style barbecue with dripping sauce. Chains didn't cut it for him, it had to be a full on homestyle barbecue like the kind he gets back home in Southeastern Tennessee.

Well, the hint was apparently well-taken, because we received, as a wedding present from his three business partners, a Smoker.

Now I capitalize this Smoker because it has all of a sudden become Andy's New Gadget. No, he couldn't wait until after Thanksgiving to season it, we had to go somewhere and get a large piece of fatty pork to season The Smoker. I also had to go to Costco, so we made it a date and got to Costco on Wednesday evening. (I know, he's such a romantic.)

In the midst of the typical Costco chaos, I had called his parents, and then had passed the phone off to him while we were shopping. So here's what actually happened:

Andy: "Oh yeah? Oh. Uh-huh. Really...!" (etc.)
Me: *points to pork*
Andy: *turns to look, makes a face* (Okay, I think to myself, we don't need 16 pounds of pork.)
Me: *searches in bin, finds one that's only 11lbs*
Andy: "Oh... okay, sure. Right. Uh-huh." *kind of gives a thumbs up*
Me: *searches in bin again, finds one that's 10 lbs*
Andy: *thumbs up*

No luck on finding the brisket, but it turns out we didn't have time to smoke that anyway.

Thursday morning dawns, and we've had the pork marinating overnight. I head off to work. Then I get this IM:

Andy: I don't think we needed the entire piece of meat, so I only put half of it in the smoker. What should I do with the other half?

So here I was thinking that we would have smoked pork, and now we have 5 lbs of smoked pork and 5 lbs of raw marinated pork. Could I freeze it? I wasn't entirely sure. Finally, I hit on the solution: stick the whole thing in the crock pot and cook it that way.

At the end of the day, we had 10 lbs of cooked pork, 5 of it in the crockpot and 5 of it raw on the inside but heavily smoked.

We ate maybe a pound of it that night.

This is the problem with the Smoker: it is very difficult to make something of a Reasonable Size (tm) in this thing. There's only two of us here, and if you count my former roommates down the street, that's five. Even so, my roommates only took half the pork to feed the small group (ranging from 6-12 people) and maybe a pound of the smoked stuff to bring home to eat over the weekend.

So then we had about five pounds of it left... you can see the dilemma.

We have not yet worked out the best use of The Smoker, but there is one thing I can say: Andy's eyes lit up like a Christmas tree when he found out we were getting it, and he has been puttering around that thing since it came. He looked disappointed when I said there wasn't enough time to play with it. He was genuinely excited when he discovered it would fit in the balcony closet.

Maybe he's found a lifelong passion. But I guess I can say one additional thing:

I will never understand why grilling is not barbecue.

Here's a summary of what's been going on in my life:
- got married on Oct 27
- went to Tahiti on the honeymoon
- came back, did lots of laundry
- only had 575 Emails at work and 350 threads to read through at home
- home is still a big crazy mess, but we're trying to keep it contained
- Pictures forthcoming (still organizing on flickr)

So we're at about a week and a half from the wedding, and I'm over half moved over to Andy's place. I really think it'll be doable to move all my stuff over to Andy's, and my room is already looking less like a natural disaster hit it and more like I'm in the process of moving. Slowly, slowly, the move is happening. I'm already spending a majority of my evening hours over at Andy's, mostly because my computer is there.

The biggest pain point right now, though, is the fact that I am currently growing out my nails. They're currently longer than I normally keep them, and they're already driving me nuts. How can I stand two more weeks of this?

Things are progressing nicely - sometimes it feels like it's going a little too fast. And every once in a while, I look around and think to myself, "How'd I ever get to this point? I never thought I'd be preparing for my wedding, much less being married!"

It's an odd feeling, let me tell you.

In other news, I accidentally kicked Andy in the face. In my defense, I didn't know his head was there, and he was attempting to tickle me. However, I felt really bad about it, because I try to never kick people in the face.

Once again, I was reminded that I don't really write anything that's particularly interesting to read by anyone who isn't curious about the minutiae of my life. So, for a change, I've decided to go back to microposting - posting about inconsequential moments in my life... you know, the interesting parts.

~~~~~

I've been fighting a headache for two days now. It started Monday night, bled into yesterday (I decided to work from home), went away slightly, and threatened again this morning. I've been getting plenty of sleep, so I chalked it up to dehydration, stress, or both. But I dredged myself out of bed this morning and took BART to work.

Two things of note during this half an hour ride (which ended up being more like 35 or 40 minutes, thanks to a disabled train in front of us):

- I noticed, as soon as I sat down, that the woman in front of me was wearing rollers in her hair. Bright yellow rollers, held in by some ivory-colored hairpin. During the course of the trip to SF, she began to put on her makeup, finally taking out her rollers and brushing her hair. I tried to guess how old she was from her hands alone, and my guess was confirmed when she glanced back at the end of the journey. Late 40s, I'd guess, Asian, wearing faux fur in her jacket and a professional suit. I don't terribly mind people doing makeup on the BART, but there's a line I draw in the sand about wearing curlers onto public transportation.

- Situation: man in his early 50s, Southeast Asian, wearing headphones, sitting in the disabled seats (the side-facing ones near the entrance), approximately ten feet away from me (sitting in the third row from these seats). I could hear his music [the squealing Chinese-type music] clearly from where I sat, high pitches only (so 3k-10kHz), enough to aggravate my headache. This continued for the first 30+ minutes of my BART ride, until he got off at Powell Street.

~~~~~

One of my friends just had his baby - Jiana(sp?) Claire. 8lbs, 10oz, first baby. Holy COWS, that's a big baby - his wife is only 5'2". Congrats to Michael and Molly!

~~~~~

I'm still trying to figure out why it is my mother aggravates me every time I talk to her on the phone.

Before I get started, the downward spiral does not refer to my mood or anything like that. In fact, it refers to the fact that the wedding is literally just around the corner - in less than a month - and, as I've been saying to a number of people, it's like gravity, in that the longer you're in the process of falling towards the mass, the faster and faster you approach. Which is, from an Earth perspective, is somewhere around 9.8 m/s2. If I were a cartoon, I'd be at the point where my cheeks were flapping from the g-force, eyes wide open, looking at how close the ground really seems to be.

Things are coming together, but there are still a number of small details that still need to be worked out. I'm in the process of moving stuff over to Andy's. Life is moving, once again, at a frenetic pace, but for some reason it doesn't really bother me all that much. I guess this year has been so frantic, what with finishing my masters' thesis, preparing for my belt test, and planning the wedding, that just having one thing to do isn't as bad. Except it's just not one thing, it's a gazillion things...

Hopefully, I'll have an opportunity to sit down tonight and get through a lot of the paperwork involved with the wedding, unpack some boxes, pack some boxes, all in between watching Heroes. Which reminds me, I need to schedule my box to record Heroes while we're busy...

Things. Move. Fast.

I rarely have instances where I feel like I must post, but this was one where I literally felt compelled to share. I had to walk to work today from transit due to some system-wide delays, but it was such a nice day I didn't really mind. But there was one person on my walk down that really caught my eye.

Subject: Asian woman, likely Japanese
Body Description: Slender, in her late 40s or early 50s, approximately 5'5"
Makeup: Excessive eye makeup (e.g. extensive mascara)

Let me preface the rest of this description by saying that any of the individual pieces she was wearing would be perfectly acceptable in my wardrobe, with the exception of what she was wearing below the knees. (You'll figure it out.)

Hair: Shoulder-length, the top half of which was braided into 8 braids around her hair, capped off with little flower hair ties of different shades. Added in there was a standard silver-colored Goody hairclip with a bright yellow braid of yarn hanging down to about the same length of her hair.

Item #1: Shirt, various shades of blue, white, and gray, full sleeved but cuffed from mid-arm down with red crochet down to the wrists. "Vintage chic."

Item #2: White/silver belt, belly-dancer style with lots of little coins attached to the bottom so that she jingled at every step. I didn't see the front of the belt, but it was likely a tie-on belt. Again, vintage chic.

Item #3: Rust colored skirt falling to slightly higher than mid-calf, single slit to the knee on the right side.

Item #4: Black underskirt to about the same level, with four baby-pink ruffles.

Item #5: A set of dusty rose-pink leg warmers.

Item #6: A pair of Ugg-style boots, but in a wild pattern of blue and sea-green on black.

Item #7: Vintage handbag, again with crazy patterns.

My reaction to the entire outfit was a mixture of horror, pain, and amusement. I'm no fashion maven, but I at least know enough to avoid the mixture of too many patterns and colors. Gaaaaah.

I have this habit of reading livejournal and not posting anything of substance because I Just Don't Have the Time (tm). But now I'm waiting for my feature to build (my feature IS the build system, so I'm just doing an integration test right now), so... here's a pretty significant update of the past week or so since I posted anything interesting.

~~~~~

My awesome bridesmaids (roommates + sister) threw me a kickin' bridal shower this past weekend. Everyone was impressed, and it was very well done and very laid back. I think everyone had quite a bit of fun, ate well, and generally got to know other people. My mom was great and taught everyone how to make mochi, so we spent a bit of time playing with that. Karen's comment was the best: "I just made play-doh for my kids yesterday..."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/47731152@N00/sets/72157602065688373/

Lots of cookware and cookbooks. Mm, tasty.

I'm still up to my ears in boxes in my room, and it looks like I'm going to be moving all my stuff a week earlier than I had planned, but still crashing at my current place for a while. Does anyone in the Bay Area want a large chest of drawers (Becky)? It's functional, but one of the drawers won't be able to handle heavy clothing. It's fairly girly.

~~~~~

It's pretty cool - I had gotten really sick of wearing my glasses, so out of desperation, I asked my roommates to pray that I'd get my contacts SOON. They were supposed to take 2-3 days, and I saw Susan on Thursday to get a new contacts prescription. I'm switching to soft contacts (from rigid gas perm lenses), so in preparation for that I had simply worn my glasses every day. It was very convenient for those get-out-of-the-house-FAST days, but otherwise it was inconvenient, both on the mat and at the end of the day, when the earpieces made little bruises on my ears.

Well, that was Sunday, and I got a funny phone call on Monday from Susan. "Are you going to workout today? Well, your contacts are going to take 3-5 days to arrive and I ordered them on Thursday. I got some contacts without your astigmatism prescription and put them in Norman [her husband]'s dobok [uniform] bag. You're going to have to ask him about it, because he doesn't know I put them in there." And then she proceeded to give me instructions on where to find them.

Susan cracks me up. But it's nice knowing that my optometrist can get contacts to ME instead of me having to go to someplace in the middle of nowhere to go pick them up.

In other news, I have come to hte decision that it's going to be too hard to live without the astigmatism prescription. But I'll try things on this Sunday and see if that helps.

~~~~~

Wednesday night was amusing. Andy and I had received a gift card for $20 for Horatio's (a nicer local restaurant). So we made plans to go on Wednesday night, and figured we wouldn't need to make reservations. We showed up at 7:30, and the line was 1-1.25 hours. (!!)

We made the decision not to stay, so we hurried back out to the car (it gets super windy out there on the marina) and tried to decide where to go. The problem was, all of the restaurants I knew were Japanese restaurants, and I wasn't really feeling like Japanese that night.

Some snippets from that conversation:
"You got me to dress up, at the very least let's go to an Applebee's."
Re: not knowing that many restaurants: "We should get out more." "Well, we're trying!"

~~~~~

My Finnish lessons have stalled. But I can now conjugate "to drive"
minä ajan
sinä ajat
han ajaa
me ajamme
te ajatte
he ajavat

I am such a nerd.

I killed my alarm clock this morning. It's a travel alarm clock and has been with me many places. This morning, I somehow managed to break off the plastic part that covers the faceplate and doubles as the stand. So my alarm clock, when I actually got up this morning, looked remarkably like a turtle on its back, wobbling back and forth. Since it had already lost its back plate (somewhere underneath my bed, I imagine), I decided to replace it.

The new one apparently syncs with an atomic clock and can tell the temperature. It also has two alarms you can set. And all this for $10.99... progress is certainly catching up.

~~~~~

In other, probably worse news, we found out today that Andy's parents had to put down one of their golden retrievers. Honey was a beautiful dog, and was the quintessential golden retriever - friendly, actually retrieved, long and lean, with the gentle smile of a doddering old (but quite beloved) great-aunt. I was looking forward to seeing her (well, and the rest of the family) over Thanksgiving.

They still have another golden retriever, but that was the one that sat on my feet and burped in my face. She's a copper-colored butterball of a dog, but isn't quite the adventurous kind. She's the Mad Max kind of dog: "Have fun storming the castle!" Honey was the one that would storm the castle with you.

Farewell, Honey - I only met you twice, but both times proved to me that retrievers can be a lot of fun.

Well, okay, so that's not true. I just rarely post anything of substance, mostly because I've been too busy doing "stuff." Here's an example:

- Learning how to count in Finnish (I can now confidently say numbers up to about 999k and can probably wiggle my way past a billion)
- Cal vs. Tennessee game (it was weird being in the stadium - I think both Andy and I prefer to see games on TV at home)
- The Incredibles with some peeps from church (the invite list kept on growing... by accident)
- Cleaning my room, and getting about 75% there (yes! I can see floor!)
- Nathan and AJ time yesterday (including the point where we had the Elaine and Andy jungle gym, with both boys crawling over and under us, much to the amusement of their parents and of Andy, who apparently couldn't tell whether or not a boy was crawling over his back)
- Wrote a letter to my landlord saying I'm moving out (wow, I'm getting married?!)

Wedding stuff seems to be coming together. Kind of. The funny thing is, we're still missing some pretty important things... like rings... the marriage license... sigh. Still need to talk to a bunch of vendors about the schedule before I bump it back to Melissa (I know you have this on RSS, Melissa, so it's on its way).

Nrgh.

Weekend was up and down over here.

Friday night, we went to our mentors' house, where we sat around and chatted about cultural differences. I came to the conclusion that Andy and I are actually fairly well off in terms of our families - both families seem to accept the other culture matter-of-factly. I think I can context switch pretty well, and I think Andy is definitely getting the hang of the Chinese culture. Of course, it helps that he's very polite and respectful to elders. They all love him.

Saturday morning, I started on my first tiramisu. However, little did I know, angel food cake absorbs rum like CRAZY and it ended up being too strong. Arrgh. Next time, add rum to the marscapone/whipped cream instead of to the angel food/ladyfingers.

Saturday night, went to Joel's place for a big "Italian" party. I brought in the tiramisu, Joel provided the games. Played the Wii for far too long. Eye was starting to be a little puffy, so I eschewed the eye makeup until the evening. Took 2 Benadryl for the puffy eye, since I thought it was an allergy. Boy, it knocked me out something fierce.

Woke up Sunday morning with a super puffy eye - enough that I touched it and thought to myself, "I can't wear my contacts." Red, puffy eye half the size of my other eye. Wore glasses to church, got a bunch of people to look at it. It's not pinkeye, it's an eyelid infection.

Skipped Sunday school to go home, where I passed out for four solid hours and woke up a little groggy. I thought I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep, but I passed out for a solid 7 last night as well.

So it's been up and down. And I've been reading Ursula LeGuin.

Well, I tested for my 2nd degree black belt. Most agreed that my weapons form was awesome. I was looking forward to doing my counterthrow form, but my partner was injured and the person giving the test didn't ask any of us to do it. I wiped out in the first 10 minutes and then slowed down.

I was also the loudest.

I'm glad Nigel was there to encourage me, saying that "everything was solid" and that "your weapons form was very impressive." YAY!

We'll find out in a month as to whether or not I passed.

So the focus now shifts away from high-impact, high-performance, and now into the next Big Thing: fitting into my wedding dress. The week before the test, I had a chat with a man from TKD who is really into fitness. He advised that I swap my training to work on fat loss (once I mentioned I wanted to fit into my wedding dress - no matter that the dress is going to fit to ME).

The workout? 60%-40% HR intervals + weight lifting 2x week, and anything low-level cardio related for 90 minutes 3x a week.

I went for the first time today, and boy, was it tough to do those intervals. I've been training for the past number of years at that 70-80% heart rate level, and keeping it down was tough. Imagine me on the elliptical, anxiously monitoring my heart rate, forcing myself to slow down (and the elliptical yelling at me to "pedal faster!"). (I calculated my target heart rate to be 78 for 40% and 112 for 60%. I normally train at HR 165.)

K. made me promise not to weigh myself, but to take a waist measurement every week. I seem to have misplaced my tape measure, so I measured out a piece of yarn, knotted it on one end, measured around my waist (on the loose end, not sucking it in or pulling it tight), and knotting it on the other end. He promised me that I'd see results within the first 2 weeks. (I have to say, this is probably better for me psychologically than getting depressed at my waist measurement.)

I'll be starting my weight loss/exercise lock for like the one person who is interested in reading it. If you're interested on being on that lock, please let me know.