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Today is Super Bowl Sunday (XXXVIII). I was going to watch it just for the commercials, but then I realized that was dumb and why do I want to sit in front of the TV to watch advertisements that don't even apply to me? I wanted to work on my website while watch it, but since my TV and computer are in different rooms, it proved to be difficult to do that. So instead of watching it, I'm listening to it. That's all I do anyway. Not like I really care who wins. I'll watch the halftime show when it comes on.
There was a clever commercial from Apple, for iTunes. A teenager sits there and says that she was one of the teens prosecuted for downloading free music from the internet and there was nothing they could do to stop her from doing it again. It was a commercial from Apple and Pepsi, who are giving away a million free iTunes downloads. Check it out at http://www.apple.com/itunes/pepsi/ads. I admit that I'm a diehard Mac user, so I'm partial to all things Apple, but it was a neat commercial.
I had to go check my last updated rambling to see where I left off. It was from the beginning of Winter Break. Since then, we hd a low-key Christmas with lots of food and then New Year's Eve and Day with an equal abundance of food. Nobody was home for the holidays, so I spent New Year's Eve with my parents, Aunt, Uncle and Cousins. We had a rollicking good time playing card games and drinking rum and cola (no, not even Coke. We're a Pepsi people). My dad got pulled over on the way home because it was almost 3am and nobody else was on the road. He had hardly had three sips of champagne at midnight and I was asleep in the backseat. The cops were just out looking for drunk drivers but needed a reason to pull him over, so they told my dad that he was going 78 in a 65 zone. My dad started arguing and I thought for sure he'd get a ticket. They checked his license and registration and sent us on our way with a warning. For a good three days Dad bitched to anyone who would listen about getting pulled over.
New Year's Day we went to my Dad's Aunt's house and sat and ate. You know they're getting old when all of the conversation in the house is about what ailment they have and what pills they're taking, and they're all yelling at each other because no one can hear and they're too stubborn to get hearing aids. After a few hours we left to go to the Uyeda's house to eat some more. My cousin Erin came down from Palo Alto and Michelle and her mom met us over there and we had snack, second lunch, third lunch, dinner, second dinner, snacks and dessert. Abby's always fun and she liked having so many people there to play with her in her tent. After she went to bed, the cards came out and we played a game of Baja Rummy with Michelle and Akiko.
On Saturday, January 3rd, Louise invited me to go to see Chris Rock's "Black Ambition Tour," so I drove up to San Jose and then Berkeley where we took the BART into The City. We went to Chinatown on Sunday with Louise's mom where she bought live frogs! But they had to be butchered before you take them, so we had the lovely experience of seeing frogs get their heads sawed off and then be skinned. It was gross and fascinating at the same time. On Monday Louise and I went on a little hike up in the Berkeley hills, where we had a great view of the bay.
We had been saying for a long time that we should take a trip up to Tahoe to hit the mountain, and we finally did it this year. Louise found a great vacation rental in Truckee that ended up being only $150 per night and nine of us went. The snow was great and the weather was gorgeous. I had never been to Sugarbowl before and it's nice because the sun hits it in the morning and softens the runs up early. It snowed the entire previous weekend and chains were required pretty much everywhere, but it was clear skies the whole way up, after the rain stopped by the time we drove through Auburn. I'm the only skiier amongst all of the riders, but that's what I learned on way back and I'm just barely confident on skis, so I've given up trying snowboarding. Maybe if I get an entire winter to go up more than once per season, I'll try again. For now, here's a picture that we setup as we sat at the bottom of a lift. You can't really see any snow, but I assure you, we're sitting on it.
I hadn't seen Emma over the entire break and she had already moved down to Winnetka and started school. She was coming back up to Salinas on Thursday the 15th so we made plans to do another one of our don't-know-what-to-do-but-we're-going-somewhere-to-sit-and-talk-until-the-place-closes chats. We had exhausted our options of big corporate chain restaurants in Salinas and didn't want to give business to Starbucks so we took a trip to Monterey to sit at Plumes until they closed at 11. Back at her driveway, we sat for a record four hours and talked some more. Why do we sit in my car and talk rather than going into her house? I'm not really sure, but we've done this a number of times. It made for interesting if-I-didn't-know-we-were-sober-I'd-think-we-were-stoned-because-the-moon-rose-and-then-disappeared-an-hour-later-right-in-front-of-our-eyes conversation at 3am.
That Saturday my parents and I went to Sue and Jim Catalano's house for Brenna's engagement party. This fall will be fun. Two weddings in two months! The Catalanos take a close second to Michelle in being friends I've know for a long long time. I think it was the 1985 photo album when I started appearing in the birthday party photos. That night we had dinner with Dave, Otto, Jordan, Joey and Jason. Otto came down from The City and made dinner for us at Dave's house. We had a good time talking with everyone and it was nice to just be able to sit for a while without having to vacate the table. But it got to be almost midnight and I needed to get home to do one last load of laundry before packing everything up to come back to school.
And that brings us to the present. School started on Tuesday, Jan. 20 because we get the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. I'm taking Vascular Plant Morphology, Social Ecology and Calculus for the Biological Sciences on top of figuring out what to do for a Senior Project. Then I have to take the GWPE (Graduate Writing Proficiency Exam) to make sure I know how to reed and rite real good. At least I don't have to worry about lodging for my relatives who are coming for graduation (which happens to fall on my birthday). After a lot of internet searching, I came upon a place called Trinidad Retreats that manages vacation rentals and they had a vacancy for the weekend. It was a bit more than my parents wanted to spend (there's a three night minimum) but it's a really cute place and there's lots of space and a full kitchen (minus an oven). If I haven't told you already, we couldn't even consider hotel rooms for everyone because apparently all the rooms within an hour's drive get booked up like a year in advance. I'm so serious. I don't think the population within that hour radius is even 100 thousand, so hotels are quite limited. But for our purposes, I think a vacation house is best since there's room for people to sit and eat and whatever. I live in a one bedroom one bathroom apartment by myself. I have all of like 385 square feet of space. Having more than six people in here at any given time would be way too crowded. It makes it so much more real when the lodging is reserved and people are confirmed. Only three and a half months to go! Yikes!!!
I think that just about covers everything. Seems like time passes so much faster when I write it all down. I mean, January came and went like nothing! It's already February! I hope I survive this semester. There's a lot to do and very little time to do it in. I'm going to have to join the grown-up world! Akkk!!!
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