Happy Birthday Daddy!

Celebrated my dad's birthday with 2.5 cakes.  The half was actually the leftover of Andrew's cake.

Happy 25th Birthday Bebe!

I wanted to write "Happy Birthday Bhebz!" on his birthday cake, but he wouldn't let me.  No fun.

Lucky the Grasshopper

I've always thought of my dad as very in tune with nature. He's always had this fascination with surviving in the wild (he's an avid fan of Man vs. Wild). He also has this insane ability to catch insects with his bare hands. Which brings me to another childhood memory...

My dad used to catch grasshoppers while he was on his route at work. He'd skillfully grab them with his hands and tuck them away into an envelope or other handy container. Then he'd bring them home and place them on my desk. So, when I got ready to start my homework, I'd find a mysterious envelope there waiting for me. Thinking it was probably money, I'd excitedly rip it open, allowing the captive little bugger to jump out at my face. Of course I'd always scream in shock.

My dad would do this on a regular basis. When I started catching on, he'd put them in different places--I guess you could say he's a little bit of a prankster.

I'd always try to keep the grasshoppers as pets, even though my dad always insisted the right thing to do was to let them go. Actually, I think he told me to either set them free or feed them to Susie, our Rhode Island Red hen. I remember one particularly spunky grasshopper that I named Lucky. He got this name because while I was "playing" with him (I'm not sure how you play with a grasshopper) in the backyard, my dog Brownie snatched him in her mouth and almost swallowed him whole. Lucky survived the whole ordeal, but with some considerable injuries. He could no longer hop. I felt so guilty about my recklessness that I became determined to nurse him back to health. Allison and I smashed up pieces of grass and fed him through a syringe, no easy task, I might add.

Then I remember being upset with our parents because they wouldn't let us take the injured grasshopper with us to the restaurant we were going to. We did anyway. We brought him sandwiched in a pair of pie tins from Marie Callendar's, lined with a comfy layer of grass. When my mom found out we snuck him into Tita Glory's Volvo, she was upset because we couldn't bring the pie tins back for the 10 cent discount, haha. Now that I think about it, we left the poor guy in the hot car while we ate. He would've been better off at the house.

Surprisingly, the little guy even survived our shoddy veterinary care. He made a full recovery. Then he got lost in my room. I found him about a month later, after coming to terms with his probable death. I found him, very much alive, hiding behind my blinds while I was cleaning my window. I got so freaked out by his sudden reappearance that I instinctively sprayed him with the Windex I had in hand.

After surviving a treacherous journey in my dad's work bag, a vicious dog attack, the sub-standard medical care, the unrelenting heat of a closed car during a California heat wave, and finally, severe chemical burns by Windex, I decided it was time to set Lucky free. In retrospect, Lucky probably wasn't an appropriate name for him.

Baybayin

I just figured out how to write my name in baybayin, the pre-Spanish Filipino writing system. Cool.

My favorite part about taking Tagalog at UCLA was learning how to spell borrowed words--it's hilarious. These are actually words that were in my Tagalog textbooks:

1. maykroweyb
2. nars
3. pitsa
4. kerot
5. pokus
6. workbuk
7. pulis
8. titser
9. graduweyt
10. miting

25 Random Things About Me

1. I hate that whenever a curly-haired woman gets a makeover on television they insist on straightening her hair. Then for special occasions like weddings everyone insists on curling their hair.

2. I’m a hypocrite; I’ve been straightening my hair since 2002. Japanese hair straightening is a gift to the world.

3. I happen to enjoy paperwork. Filing, filling out forms, labeling, color-coding, sending out correspondence, stationary, Post-it notes—I love it all.

4. One of my favorite punctuation marks is the dash. It annoys me that most people use the dash and hyphen interchangeably (a dash is two hyphens). I'm also annoyed when people don't place the required comma in compound and complex sentences. I believe in the Oxford comma.

5. I have never seen Star Wars. I’ve been told that not doing so is un-American.

6. I enjoy pulling out my hair. There's an art to it.

7. My car’s name is Steve.

8. I have a birthmark on my right underarm. I was embarrassed by it as a child so I always raised my left hand instead of my dominant right.

9. I like to tell people that I was named “Elisha” (Alicia with an E) because my mom’s name is “Emy” (Amy with an E). The truth is, my parents first saw the name in one of my cousin Kuya Chester’s open houses in elementary school. They noticed she had good grades so they thought it was a good pick.

10. I’ve been sent to the principal/dean’s office three times. (1) In elementary school I was asked to verify this girl’s claim that another girl called her stupid. It was me, I said she was stupid. I guess I was right because she never suspected me. (2) I can’t remember exactly why, but I remember being there in middle school. (3) In tenth grade I was sent to the dean because my friends and I were apparently too rough during a basketball game in P.E. If we were boys, no teacher would have given it a second thought. The next day in P.E. we were lectured about how to act like mature, young ladies. Apparently mature, young ladies don’t play basketball.

11. When I was in 3rd grade, I wanted to be a nurse practitioner (yes, I specified nurse practitioner). In college at UCLA, I considered a number of different majors: physiological science, biology, psychobiology, psychology, English, sociology, and anthropology. Somehow I ended up in women's studies; my dual concentration was health care policy and psychology. Turns out I had it right in the beginning because I still want to be a nurse practitioner.

12. I can’t live without Q-tips.

13. I was once addicted to lip balm. My favorites are Aquaphor by Eucerin and Lip Medex by Blistex (the blue pot).

14. I’m obsessed with eyebrows.

15. I once cared for more than a dozen chickens in my backyard.

16. I can harmlessly put birds to sleep (think lullaby, not euthanasia). So far I’ve done this with chickens, doves, and parakeets.

17. I’m terrified of Green Fruit Beetles, Cotinus mutabilis (http://nathistoc.bio.uci.edu/coleopt/Cotinus.htm). As a kid I incorrectly identified them as Japanese Beetles, Popillia japonica. Very similar in appearance, both have a shiny, metallic green color. I’ve been attacked by these giant beetles on many occasions. In the worst encounter to date, a particularly clever little bastard flew into my car through my sunroof while I was driving. I’m convinced the green fruit beetles are conspiring against me for revenge. When I was a child, my dad taught me to catch them and tie strings under their wings to fly them on “leashes."

18. I hate ordering food, especially on the phone. It's ironic because I used to work at Starbucks where I took drink orders for many hours a day. I also ordered our store supplies on the phone. But I have never ordered a pizza on the phone. Thank goodness for online ordering.

19. Andrew and I met during summer school in 1999. We had cultural awareness and driver’s education together. In cultural awareness we were assigned a group project on the Philippines. I was in charge of compiling everyone’s research into our written report. His “research” was a tiny plagiarized paragraph from an encyclopedia. I was offended by the plagiarism—he didn’t even cite his source.

20. I like to write out the alphabet over and over again, cursive and printing, to evaluate my handwriting. I also practice writing my signature when I’m bored.

21. I like looking at people’s big toes to see what celebrities they resemble. Try it, it’s fun.

22. If I can’t give exact change when paying with cash, I try to make it so that I get quarters back. For example, if my total is $18.83, I’ll hand the cashier $20.08 to get $1.25. Andrew hates it.

23. I think it's ridiculous that the United States insists on remaining on the Imperial system instead of SI/Metric. At the same time, I have no concept of how long a kilometer is (but I'd be willing to learn). I also think we should switch to a 24-hour clock. I wonder if school-age children in other countries have to learn how to convert metric to imperial...

24. I love chocolate chip cookies sans chocolate chips.

25. My sleeping schedule is terribly screwed up. I used to work the opening shift at 3:30 a.m.; consequently, if I can't fall asleep before 2:00 a.m., I'm doomed to stay awake until 7 or 8 a.m. Sometimes I wake up at 2:30 a.m. terrified that I'm late for work. That's why I'm doing this instead of sleeping right now.

Rollerblading Trauma

Ever since Julie posted about puddle land and Christian posted about elementary school, I've been reminiscing about events in my own childhood.  I think I've blocked some of these traumatic events from my memory until now.

Rollerblading at Redondo Beach Pier

I can't remember what the occasion was, but I remember Julie and I were rollerblading at Redondo Beach Pier.  We were rolling each other up and down the slight inclines that are built into the walkways of the pier.  We were having a good time.

I distinctly remember one part of the walkway that was steeper than we initially anticipated.   

Julie told me to really bend my knees so that I would speed down the walkway faster.  "Kuya would do it!" she explained, although I didn't need very much convincing.  

"Remember to use all of your weight!" I instructed.  

And so she did.  I bent my knees and tried to make myself as aerodynamic as possible.  Julie backed up so she could get a "rolling" start.  She rollerbladed as fast as she could and pushed me down the treacherous walkway.  I was blasting by other slow-poke pedestrians.  Then there was a slight turn that I didn't quite make.  Before I knew it I was headed straight into a metal railway.  This metal railway was all that stood between me and falling about 45 feet right into the Pacific Ocean.  I slammed right into the railway, the top half of my torso pretty much hanging over the top rail (think of the bar that kids sort of somersault/twirl their bodies around in playgrounds).  I was that close to swimming/drowning with the fishies.

When we got home I noticed a blue-black and eventually yellow bruise all along my abdomen from where I hit the railway.  Now that I think about it, I had a dangerously high chance of falling off the pier that day.  And then I think, I wasn't a great swimmer, much less so with rollerblades on.  I think I seriously could have died that day.  Scary.  

And Julie and I thought nothing of it.  We continued pushing each other around on the pier.

Rollerblading at some Park

I just remembered another dangerous rollerblading incident.  I vaguely remember rollerblading down some hills in a particularly hilly park somewhere in Orange County with cousins Allison, Christian, Tricia, and Mark.  Probably on one of my famous Orange County vacations.  These hills were definitely not safe for small children to rollerblade down.  Nonetheless, we did--probably lead by our fearless, daredevil leader Christian (in retrospect, I guess I should have warned against this danger since I was the oldest).  

So we're rollerblading down these insane hills, and we're moving so fast that we can't control our descent.  So, to stop ourselves from totally eating it, I remember intentionally crashing into trees on the way down the hills.  We would run off the cement pathways into the grass, and eventually into a tree.  Someone could have suffered a serious head injury by crashing into these trees, and yet all we could do was laugh.  I remember Allison and Tricia laughing so hard that they peed.  And then Tita Glory got mad, not because we could have paralyzed ourselves, but because Allison had peed.

Rollerblading in the Backyard

I'm starting to see that we made rollerblading a very dangerous sport.  When Allison and Christian used to sleep over at my house, we'd spend most of our time in the backyard.  We'd play farm with the chickens and my first dog, Brownie.  During those warm summer nights, we'd try to catch as many "boogies" as we could (now I know they're called June bugs).  So we'd rollerblade around the backyard, trying to catch these flying beetles.  The dangerous thing is we'd skate around wielding these long, pointed sticks.  I'm not talking little kabob sticks, I mean wooden poles more than five feet long.  At the speeds we were skating around, I'm sure these poles were enough to impale each other.  We would swing them around trying to hit the boogies in mid-air.  Probably could have gouged someone's eye out.

It's a miracle we all survived childhood without any serious damage.  I used to think Grandma was overreacting when she said we'd all break our necks.  Now I understand why she was constantly warning us about that.

Ginataan

Bilo-bilo

My mom has been making a lot of ginataan lately.  Ginataan always reminds me of Grandma because she would call us almost every weekend to ask my mom to make some for her.  Then I felt bad because I remembered how it used to annoy me, because Colleen and I had to roll the bilo-bilo, or the little glutinous rice balls.  Then I laughed because I started thinking about all of the annoying things she used to do that aren't so annoying anymore.

Andrew and Bambi

I just thought this picture was funny.

Anal Glands

Allison came over to the house for a little weekend vacation.  I asked her to teach me how to express our dogs' anal glands.  I think this might require some explanation.  When dogs defecate, their poop creates pressure against a pair of small glands located near the dog's anus.  This pressure releases a small amount of noxious, fishy secretion along with the poop.  This foul odor is like a business card for dogs.  It explains why dogs always greet each other by sniffing each other's butts.  

Normally, the gland is self-draining.  But for many dogs, this unfortunately isn't the case.  Their glands become impacted, which is uncomfortable for the dog.  This is why we sometimes see dogs "scooting" to relieve themselves.  Perhaps it's because domesticated dogs don't eat as much roughage as their ancestors?  Today's dogs often need to have their anal glands manually expressed for them by their friendly neighborhood veterinary attendants.  Lucky for me, my cousin Allison is specially trained in the art of anal gland expression.  So in exchange for a lovely Korean BBQ dinner, Allison took me on as an apprentice.

I have to say, I was pretty nervous.  My first patient was Bambi.  Ironically, it was also her first time.  She was an excellent first patient--very calm, didn't bark or freak out at all.  I wasn't able to express Ace's glands, but Allison assured that I just need more practice.  

Needless to say, it was an interesting and informative weekend.  Quite smelly too.

New Menu at BCD

To my great surprise, BCD has a new addition to its already delicious menu: Stir-fried Squid and Vegetables.  I'm pleased with the new dish--the noodles are quite tasty, it's a nice portion of squid.  I do wish there were zucchini instead of the bell peppers though.  But overall, I think I'd order it again.  It still doesn't beat my favorite tofu soup with kimchi and mushroom.