Grandma's Big Mac Day

Visiting Grandma on her birthday.

Tricia's first Big Mac ever.

Michelle's second Big Mac ever, sort of.

Mark likes his burgers with tomato, lettuce, and onion only.

Today was Grandma's birthday, and I figure one of the best ways to celebrate her life is to eat her beloved Big Mac. So we visited her and Grandpa, then went to the McDonald's drive thru. To our great surprise, McDonald's is having a special on Big Macs, 2 for $3.50! I'm convinced Grandma had something to do with this timely promotion.

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

Noggin Noodlers

My white elephant present from Allison. It is ruining my life.

Christmas Party 2008

Watching the Laker game


BBQing in the rain


White Elephant


Family Photo

It was a typical Christmas party for our family. We started by watching the Lakers beat the Celtics. Then we watched Eight Below and challenged ourselves to fight the tears. Meanwhile, my mom and Tito Melvin barbecued in the rain, Tito Melvin in his raincoat, and my mom in her rain boots. RJ stealthily collected more chocolate chip cookie cheesecake cups to satisfy his sweet tooth.

We enjoyed a bountiful dinner by a roaring fire that burned Grandma Perla's scarf, sending Tita Susan into a deafening burst of laughter. Grandma's perfectly fine; her scarf, however, will never be the same.

This year's White Elephant was fun because it seems our group is slowly growing. Jessica, Mark, and Andrew joined in the gift-stealing--I hope they didn't think we were too weird. All of the parents waited impatiently as we prolonged the game with more and more thievery.

As soon as the game ended we were all rushed to pack up our gifts and advised to force ourselves to urinate to prepare for the ride home.

Some of us stayed behind to reminisce our unusual childhood pastimes--preparing garden berry soup, various animal rescues with craftily crocheted harnesses, sacrificing new white shoes to reunite a lone duckling with his family, and other interactions with the animal world that, in retrospect, were somewhat cruel.

When Andrew and I finally left, we had to scrape the ice off his windshield before we could get on the road. Ice on windshields in sunny Southern California, who would've thought.

It was a Merry Christmas indeed.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

One of my favorite books when I was growing up was If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I went on Amazon to order a copy for RJ and Celeste and discovered that there's a whole series of If You Give... books!

Christmas Lunch with Grandma Eping

We took Grandma Eping to Tasty Garden in Alhambra so we could see her before Christmas time. Nice pic of my dad with his mom. Ninety-three and still quick like a cat.

Balikbayan Boxes

Ate Mahal sent me this hilarious video about the Filipino tradition of balikbayan boxes. Unfortunately, the video is all too familiar to me. Enjoy!

Finals Week Update

Tuesday: Physiology complete
Wednesday: Nutrition complete
Thursday: Speech Pizza Party canceled
Saturday: Statistics complete

Freedom!

Studying for Statistics

My statistics book has some interesting facts scattered around the margins, seemingly to keep one interested in the largely un-interesting subject of statistics.

Unusual stat: There are 1,929,770,126,028,800 different color combinations for Rubik's cube and only one correct solution.

Scientists think that a person is never more than 3 feet away from a spider at any given time.

Sixty-three percent of people would rather hear bad news before hearing the good news.

Tofu Ice Cream

A la Chabuya. Yum-o.

Christmas Pictures

We finally decided to use this one for our Christmas card.



Check out my dad's cool hat. Can you believe he's 52? He's diligent about maintaining his youthful appearance.



Andrew, our reindeer friend, and me.

We went to the Avenue of the Peninsula outdoor mall to take some pictures for our family Christmas card. We didn't exactly decorate the house for the Christmas season this year, so we had to find a cheerful, holiday scene elsewhere. I like the cool reindeer they have sitting on the benches throughout the mall.

This year we decided not to get a Christmas tree, opting to bring our 25-year old ficus tree inside as a substitute. I recently learned that my parents bought this ficus tree when they moved into their first house in Gardena, where I grew up. I remember my mom scolding Allison and me for tearing off its leaves to make our backyard "soup" for the chickens.

It was difficult to refrain from buying a fresh tree, but I decided that we're usually so busy with finishing up the fall semester that we hardly have enough time to put into decorating. I was considering purchasing a plastic tree that I could reuse year after year. However, after some research I decided against it because (1) many fake Christmas trees contain PVC, and plastic is of course, a petroleum byproduct, and (2) they don't have that fresh Christmas tree smell.

In the course of my research I came across a new trend in the Christmas tree industry: renting. Some companies will dig up a tree, roots and all, plant it in a pot, and deliver it to your house for the holiday season. When the season is over, they'll come back for the tree, bring it back to their farm, and re-plant it so that it can continue sucking up carbon dioxide and supporting local ecosystems for another year until the holidays come around again. How cool is that?

But for now, our family ficus tree will suffice.

Excessive Highlighting

Like most poor college students, I try to save some cash by buying used textbooks. I carefully go through Amazon to find books that are listed as "like new" or "no writing/highlighting." When I purchased my nutrition textbook, Nutrition Now, I was sure to do just that.

To my great disappointment, I turned to read the final chapter for my exam to find that some idiot has mistaken highlighting with coloring. The whole page is practically colored green, with the exception of the few parenthetical references.

Isn't the point of highlighting to highlight significant information? How can someone quickly find what is important if the whole page is highlighted! Not to mention it makes for some strained, uncomfortable reading...

Xena and Sonic's Breakfast

For the first time in a couple nights now, I was finally able to sleep well. This restorative sleep was unfortunately interrupted by the ravenous appetites of Xena and Sonic.

The two mischievous dogs decided to help themselves, once again, to whatever they wanted in the house. Today their breakfast included:

1 box of Cuties tangerines
1 bag of roasted peanuts
6 bags of Neogori packaged soup
1 loaf of tai san cheese bread
1 mini loaf of zucchini bread
1 bag of tangerines from Michelle and Dan's uncle
1 carton of eggs
1 Starbucks Halloween coloring book
1 set of crayons
1 House, M.D. Season 3 DVD set

Meanwhile, Ace sat in his house watching the other two destroy the house, yet again. Next time, a little warning would be nice, Ace.

Finals Week

Tuesday: Physiology complete
Wednesday: Nutrition complete
Thursday: Speech Pizza Party canceled
Saturday: Statistics

Freshia Market Part Deux

The secret for beautiful, porcelain skin? Naive skin cleanser for enhancing one's naïveté.

Who knew a platter of sliced beef tongue could be so elegant?

The Crab Lollipop

Freshia Market

Beef intestine casserole.

Drink from the toilet?

So I'm up late researching the problems associated with drinking bottled water. It's obvious that bottled water is bad for the environment. All that plastic takes a long time to degrade. But even for people who don't care too much about their giant carbon footprints, consider this:

Even when bottled waters are covered by the FDA's rules, they are subject to less rigorous testing and purity standards than those which apply to city tap water (see chart below). For example, bottled water is required to be tested less frequently than city tap water for bacteria and chemical contaminants. In addition, bottled water rules allow for some contamination by E. coli or fecal coliform (which indicate possible contamination with fecal matter), contrary to tap water rules, which prohibit any confirmed contamination with these bacteria. Similarly, there are no requirements for bottled water to be disinfected or tested for parasites such as cryptosporidium or giardia, unlike the rules for big city tap water systems that use surface water sources. This leaves open the possibility that some bottled water may present a health threat to people with weakened immune systems, such as the frail elderly, some infants, transplant or cancer patients, or people with HIV/AIDS.

If you're really interested you can read the full article here: http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/nbw.asp

Now consider how expensive bottled water is. If you bought a typical 20 oz water bottle from a vending machine for a dollar, you'd spend about 5 cents per oz. Now let's think about gasoline. Let's say gas is about $3 a gallon. 1 gallon = 128 oz. So, $3/128 oz is about 2 cents per oz. Bottled water costs more than twice as much as gasoline!

And speaking of gasoline, we used 17 million barrels of oil to manufacture plastic water bottles in 2006.

The cost of tap water: 0.00007 cents per oz.

Get a filter for your kitchen faucet. Get a cool reusable water bottle. Stop paying to drink from the toilet.

Mitsuwa

Random Christmas shopping at Mitsuwa. Check out Juno in Japanese.

Persimmons

Weird-looking persimmons.