We’re winding down our New Zealand vacation with my dad. He leaves Thursday afternoon and we leave Friday. So far over 1,000 photos have been taken. I have yet to calculate how many kilometers/miles and hours Brandon had driven in the 5 days we spent in South Island…on the opposite side of the road from the U.S., no less. We had killed absolutely no possums (different than what we have in North America) and rabbits where are both non-native pests

Before we move forward, let’s see how I did with 2010 goals, shall we? Goals for 2010: 6 out of 10 1. SUCCESS: Lacto-vegetarian Tuesdays. I totally rocked that. Sure, there were some accidental lapses and a few intentional ones, curiously some of those cases involved bacon.  But more or less, I did REALLY good. And I even threw in no alcohol to that mix. So yay me! 2. FAIL: One hour of piano/guitar/singing, twice a month. Another victim of

It has been a crazy year.  You can tell by the infrequency of my posts.  Despite the fact that I have given up my involvement with Thrill the World almost completely (I still do twitter for TTW headquarter), I managed to remain as busy as ever. I mean, look at how neglected this blog is!!! Let’s take a look back this year, see what all I did, and give out some 2010 awards, shall we? 2010 in Pictures: Drinking Buddy

12,470. That’s as far as I got, which is not too bad considered the constant cage match with my Inner Editor and my serious time management issue. Writing was quite fun but at 1,500 words a day, that has proven to be a little bit too much for me and my crazy fall schedule. I may not have reached the 50,000 words. Or even my personal goal of 18,000 words. But I do have in my hand $230 donation (with

My inner editor must die. Seriously. As I continue to get encouragement emails from the main NaNoWriMo people as well as my regional leader, I keep finding myself doing all the wrong things which they said would happen anyway. I can’t just keep writing things out; I go back and rework things as I go.  And that’s not really the point of NaNoWriMo. Being a blogger also doesn’t help as I try to rein things in to keep you folks

It’s been an entirely unexpected and interesting journey only one week in.  4,869 is the word count I have on the 8th day of this challenge. Ideally, I should be around 13,300 words.  I start to wonder if I could ever make 50,000 words.  But I promise you, I’ll at least write as much as your donation. That I will do. First of all, balancing the time between my numerous hobbies and activities, as you all know, during USC football

We’re in October now and I’ve realized I’m not doing entirely well on my 2010 goals.  Determined to accomplish something this year and inspired by my friend Irena, I’ve decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo, in November. NaNoWriMo is is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. So, staring November 1 and wrapping up on November 30, participants are

We’re child-free by choice. We don’t hate kids.  And we make great auntie and uncle.  We just like to play with them and hand them off to the parents at the end of the day. We adore Brandon’s two nieces age 8 and 11.  We can hardly wait to hang out with Aurora and James’ 2-year-old Dresden and baby Chloe.  Olaina and Justin’s Ella is still too little to play with but we didn’t mind hanging out with her too.

I went online to shop for an item I needed for the kitchen that I couldn’t seem to find in the stores.  [I can't say what the item is until it is given. Read on to find out why.]  My friend @MacabrePhotog was the one who inspired me to get one of these, but he himself does not have one. When I tweeted him that I bought him something, he was quite surprised.  Another friend chimed in asking it was

Oh yes. The tradition is back. First of, in this blog, soccer will be called by its proper name of football.  Thank you. You know, I’m not an all-the-time football fan.  But every time the Olympics and the World Cup come around, I’m all into it all over again. It’s a family tradition that I just can’t shake. Having grown up with 2 older brothers, it’s not difficult to get roped into the spirit of all of the teams.  Frankly,