OakMonster's Den

2009 in pictures

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2009 Awards

Drinking Buddy of the Year: Brandon, actually. Surprise!  The mister doesn’t usually party down, but he has taken up a beer here and there this past year, a stressful one for his work.  So we had gone out for a beer together more than the year before.  Cheers to you, honey bunny!

Bar of the Year: Hennessey’s Tavern and Beachwood BBQ in Seal Beach. These two places never fail to deliver cold pints and some great eats.  They’re our go-to places when we want to run away from the daily life for a little while.

Sorry to disappoint y’all with the lack of Downtown LA’s bar feature this time around.  I haven’t partied in town much at all.  Climate change around the office will affect your happy hour weather, I tell ya.

Newcomer Award: Twitter Gang. I have grown to love folks I met at Tweet Ups especially @dananner, @anaperiodista, @fstop23, @davidmoyle, @sendchocolate, @joncruz, @vbesack, and the disappearing @phraktyl.  We went shooting pictures.  We played Rock Band.  We got drunk.  We had overall great times on and off line.  Great year to make new friends!

High Point of the Year: Watch Thrill the World Los Angeles became the awesome success. From mere 100 last year grown into the thousands. It still blows my mind.

Low Point of the Year: The Christmas Flu and USC Football Rebuilding Year. Yep. Suckage.

Best Holiday: Halloween…again. I mean, prancing through Pine Street as Zombie Princess Leia, rocked that stage with my awesome crew of zombies?  Best. Halloween. EVER!

Song of 2009: Glee soundtracks. I mean, I can barely pin it down to just ONE song!  Almost everything from Glee I totally dig.  I’m especially partial to Somebody to Love, Don’t Rain on My Parade, Defying Gravity (the duet), No Air, Sweet Caroline (Can I get a hell-yeah from Team Puck?), and this one I can’t stop singing.  Lea Michele.  What a revelation!

Movie of 2009: Avatar. I’m sorry, Star Trek and District 9!  You came sooo close!

Surprise Movie of 2009: Bangkok Traffic (Love) Story – Rod Faifa Ma Ha Na Tuh – รถไฟฟ้า..มาหานะเธอ.  I’m soooo in love.

Restaurant of the Year: Bottega Louie. Great food and ambiance.  Totally a favorite place to run away from work to for a long lunch.  Okay it’s a little loud, but what an awesome place to be!  Affordable awesomeness.

Book of the Year: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Seriously. Go read that.

TV Show of the Year: Glee. Duh.

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2009 Goals Tally:  6 out of 10…kind of.

1. FAIL – Explore Kung-fu.  HAH!  I did not.

2. FAIL – Drink more water.  Did okay for a couple of months before waking up to pee in the middle of the night got old.

3. FAIL -More guitar/piano/singing – at least twice a week.  I did try for once a month, but that didn’t happen since my office got so messy I can’t even get to the piano.

4. PARTIAL SUCCESS -Read more books – One book a month at least.  Actually did 10 out of 12.  Not too bad!

• Water for Elephants, Sarah Gruen – Love it.
• Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, Lynne Truss – Learned all sorts of new things.
• Watchmen, Alan Moore – The movie ending makes a hell of a lot more sense than the book I tell ya.
• Turn Coat: The Dresden Files Book 11, Jim Butcher – Always love Jim.  This is no exception.
• Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert – Definitely love the Eat/Pray part. I could do without the Bali experience.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith – Best. Book. EVER!
• Bad Things, Michael Marshall – I’m still scratching my head at that one. Whuh…?
• The Foodie Handbook, Pim Techamuanvivit – Totally enjoyable and awesome.  She takes gorgeous pictures.
• Heat Wave, “Richard Castle” – Totally a fun read for us Castle fans.

5. FAIL – Add yoga to the routine – at least once a week.  Not so much.  However, I ended up losing 6 lbs. from September through November with the Thriller work out and stress diet.  Haven’t gotten any of it back…yet.

6. SUCCESS – Take a language class.  Buongiorno! 

7. PARTIAL SUCCESS – Cook one new recipe a month.  I went with a few new ones in a month and then go without cooking for weeks.  But we did try new recipes.

8. SUCCESS – Fix them teeth.  5 more months!!!

9. SUCCESS – Fix them eyes. Well, I *did* decide on not getting LASIK done after extensive reserach and serious discussion with my optometrist.  There’s a 50/50 chance I would come out normal or my dry eyes are going to get more severe to a level that’ll become problematic.  I’ll stick with the glasses with that kind of odds, thanks.

10. SUCCESS – Keep up with whatever is working well.  Still a latte a week here.

Halloween night? Massive fun. My team of Thrill the World LA and OC kicked ass at Halloween on Pine. We literally rocked the stage. I mean, the fucking thing was swaying with our every moves! Not once, but TWICE! It was complete and total rockage.

Brandon was a complete trooper, escorting me up and down the street and once again played photographer and roadie to our rag tag team of zombies.

Obviously, I barely watched USC…and even more obviously, I had a bra on.

Sorry, team. My bad. Moo. Moo…

Sunday came easily. First Sunday with zero schedule. No Thriller. No meeting.

Holy shit.

I had no plan.

I took it in stride and parked on the couch for the first half of the day, picked myself up to go get a massage, took luxurious long shower, and went out to dine stress-free at James & Aurora’s.

A normal Sunday, I quit you for so long. It’s so good to have you back!

How was your weekend?

Oh hell yes.2,300 or so on paper but it felt/looked like 6,000 out there in the plaza!  Brandon shot over 700 pictures and I had another 200.  (What a trooper he is, braving the Blue Line and all!)

Worldwide, last counted, 23,000 people.

What a moment.  What an adventure!

You can’t see me in this clip though they did close up on me for the “Coming up next” before this section.

Life is slowly getting back to normal.  I have to lead my little Long Beach team to perform on Halloween at Halloween on Pine and that’s it for Thriller for a while.

This one I’m on the right toward the front.

Yep.

This is all I’ve been doing outside of work. And work is a whole other issue.  October 24 is Thrill the World at LA Live

Watch out world. Here comes the horde!

Zombieland. Who knew that movie would give you some great life lessons.  Well, you know, aside of the Zombieland Survival Rules.

Enjoy the little things, Talahassee said.

My life has been kind of a whirlwind these past few months.  There are many little things I totally appreciate and enjoy.

Like a bouquet of flowers Brandon bought for me. Very unexpected.

Like getting a ride home from a bus buddy who drove in in the morning.

Like getting my Italian homework explained to me by the Italian Coworker.

Like watching Dresden react to “big people’s food” we offer him.  On Tuesday, James, Aurora and Dresden were over for beef pot roast.  Carrots were a hit.  Tonight at a burrito place, the boy who, according to mom, doesn’t like eggs, asked for more chorizo and eggs from my plate, and later on for more of his first Dippin’ Dots experience.

And by asking, I meant he would reach out his hand toward whatever it is he likes and say, “Nom?” Yes, with a question mark.  It was the most adorable thing.

Like receiving the pictures from our Thrill the World LA shoot this weekend that look FANTASTIC.

Breakthrough zombies

Or…one of the goofy ones like these.

Zombie no like trees...

Like everything GLEE.  It doesn’t matter how my day was, music from the cast of GLEE cheers me up.  I frickin’ love this show.  The gem of this clip at about 2:22…

What are your little things?

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

On Friday night, I was out at L.A. Live with 6 other Thrill the World zombies, entertaining the crowd waiting for Michael Jackson’s This Is It tickets.

We performed once and we taught the dance for another 1.5 hour.  And mind you, this is just folks hanging around LA Live here, nobody’s a professional.

If we were given another half hour, we could’ve taught them the whole thing.  But with the time we had, we were just a few moves away from completion.

People were having fun. They were putting in efforts to do the dance. And they all had a great time.

Forward to Saturday morning at my Italian class in Irvine through Fondazione Italia. This is our second class and our class size is pretty big.  We were told that the class may split up into 2 sessions because of the class size and also, as it turns out, the teaching style.

The lady who’s been teaching us is actually a substitute of another lady who’s returning next week.  She’s not much for having us repeating the conversation like a parrot, but deconstructing what we were saying.  It’s more grammar than conversational at this point.

However, some people didn’t like that so much.  They want to be able to walk out from the first class already talking.  Did you folks not notice that this class goes all the way to January?  This ain’t speed Italian.

Sure, when my Italian coworker asked me on Monday, “Come stai?” – How are you? My answer was, “Uh….si?”  I didn’t have an answer to that after my first week.  However, I know how when to use Un/Una/Uno (the) on a word.

I’d rather have the basic understanding of how everything works and THEN learn the conversation to go with it, than just sitting there memorizing the phrases. I want to be able to hold a conversation on my own outside of Hi! How Are you? Where’s the bathroom?

Seriously, I have a whole bunch of Japanese phrase I can spout out to you right now but I won’t understand a dang thing you said back to me outside of the standard reply.  What does that get me? Nowhere.

But then again, I digress.

Back to the bunch of whiny adults.  There were also others who have already taken last year’s class and wanted more.

“Can we have an all Italian class?” someone asked.  That would be across the way in Intermediate, we were told.  “But that’s too fast for me.”  But obviously, you weren’t going to get all the beginners in here to understand a lick of Italian.

So, here lies the problem. Our class has mostly newbies, maybe with Spanish background, and some that already had the skills.

Those were the one saying the our class is too slow but they couldn’t go on to intermediate because that one is too fast.  Here they are, in our BEGINNERS class, trying to make us go faster.

I have never heard grown adults bitch so much.  If beginners are too slow for you, then don’t bitch that class is too slow for you.  Obviously, it’s not the class for YOU any more at this point.  Suck it up and go catch up with the big kids in Intermediate.  Can’t hack it there? Well, you either do better or come back and learn the basics all over with the newbies.

We sat in class for another good 15 minutes just to agree to split the true newbies to 9 a.m. and the Advanced Beginners to 10:45.

I know this is probably an unfair comparison as the two occasions are completely different.  But going from one group of learners to the next, and I should probably add, one demographic to the other, I notice that the level of whines goes up with the median income.

Just sayin’.

When our beloved excuse themselves to disappear into their video games, we call that being a [insert game name here] Widow. For example, I was an World of Warcraft Widow, an EverQuest widow, and most recently a Fallen Earth and Fall Out Widow.

Now, the table is being turned around.  I’m making a widower out of Brandon for the next few months.

As in, a Italian Class Widower…

Nora and I are taking Italian lessons together in Irvine on Saturday mornings, starting this weekend on through January.

A USC Football Widower…

If you’ve read my blog long enough, you’d know that Brandon is not allowed to watch any USC game.  Not that he would to begin with, the boy’s no sports fan.  But anytime he actually sat down to watch, even a few minutes, it all went to hell.  It was entirely my fault to have him and his friend sat down to eat dinner and watch the USC-Texas game a few years ago.

A Thrill the World Widower…

It wasn’t supposed to be as big of an event this year with Thrill the World. But then Michael Jackson died.  So now we’re in 120% go for this year’s event.  I’m still leading the PR/Publicity campaign. And now also a dance instructor.  Oh crap, I have to freshen up!

A Big Gala Widower…

Oh yes. The giant work event. A lot of pressure to raise money in this economy. A lot is at stake for the people we serve and for, well, the wellbeing of our non-profit.

And finally, A Thanksgiving Widower…

I’m heading home to Thailand for Thanksgiving for a quick week.

On top of all of this, I have 3 blogs of mine, a Tweet Up social life, and, oh yeah, the monthly cooking challenge.

Thank GOD we are putting long camping trips on hold until spring.  With my Italian classes, we couldn’t go far. And with my crazy schedule, I won’t have time to train. I guess the timing works out.

However, the Mister has scheduled us some together time of date nights, our monthly massages at Massage Evny, and game nights.  Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 just came in the mail.  /rubs hands together…heeheeheehee…

Am I nuts do be doing all this stuff? Perhaps.

But am I having fun with all the madness? Oh fuck yeah.

This will be one of those years I’ll never forget.

My epic battle with time this week?  I guess it’s a draw.

I didn’t start on Monday morning as planned.  Because, as you all have heard, we plan and God laughs.  Or something like that.

Last Sunday night, the night I wanted to go to bed by 10 to wake up at 5:15 and work on my stuff? I ended up going to bed closer to midnight and woke up the usual call time for morning with hair wash of 5:45.

I was up peeling and scraping the piths off of 25 lemons to go into my first ever batch of homemade Limoncello.

You heard me. Home made. Limoncello.  I will write ALL about that over at HmmFoodGood later.  But for this post, let’s just say that peeling and de-pithing took many more hours than I anticipated.

So, Monday was regular day.

Time 1. Oakley 0.

Tuesday morning, I’m on the new early riser schedule.  Was up by 5:15 and at station with a mug of tea at 5:45. I got a whole lot done.  I went to bed at 10 as planned.

Time 1. Oakley 1.

Wednesday morning, still on the wagon.  However, the near end of “Bad Things”, the book I’ve been reading, kept me up way past my bed time.

Time 1. Oakley 2.

Thursday, up a little later but was still up.  A couple of hours into work, an alien tried to dig his way out of my brain through my forehead and made me nauseous while at it.

Migraine in the office. That’s just great.  I couldn’t look at the screen, let alone tolerate the fluorescent goodness.  I took an Aleve around 10 and went to ask a coworker if I could go sit in her boss’ office–the boss is on leave.

My coworker let me inside and closed the blinds for me.  She went to tell my boss who came over straight away to check on me and told me to just take my time.  20 minutes later, feeling a lot less like a vampire, I crawled out to ask another coworker for a can of Monster to get the caffeine into my system.  A couple more coworkers came by to check on me and gave me some neck rubs…and those did help.

Nausea finally subsided around noon. The alien was now, digging more slowly, trying to get out behind my ear instead.  I downed 500 mg of Tylenol and continued to sip Monster to get better, fast.  After all, I had to go down to LA Live to check out a few venues for staff holiday party at 2 p.m.

Miraculously, that last bit of crazy self prescription did the trick.  I toured the facilities pain free and even scored some free brownies from The Farm of Beverly Hills.

That lovely bit of heaven sent me a wee bit over the edge on the jitters.  But hey, my head didn’t hurt any more.

Needless to say, it was an early night for me that night.

Time 2. Oakley 2.

Friday, I tried to get up early but my body screamed in protest. So I slipped back to nearly 6 a.m. scrambling out of bed.  My body continued to protest with some scratchy throat and sniffles.  I’m sure all these smokes in Downtown LA and all over Southern California doesn’t help either.  I fought it with echinacae tea, wild honey, and Airborne. By the time I was home, I was spent.

Time 3. Oakley 2.

I was woken up this morning from a lovely dream about my little country house in an orchard with the fact that I couldn’t breath through one of my nostrils.  Then both.  Getting out of bed was an out of body experience–as in I was out of my body, dragging it.  A cup of echinacea tea later, I had enough energy to make breakfast.

And now, I am stewing in my office intentionally.  I am hoping sweating all of this badness out might help me feel a little better.

Time 4. Oakley 2.

Things that have gone wrong? Not going to bed as early as I should have.  And the fact that I started this new program on the week before my boss goes on vacation when everything needed to be done before she leaves.

Stress + Change of routine + Lack of sleep + not eating much because of stress = System crash.

So here I am, sweating out my sickness in my home office, instead of out in Studio City, rehearsing Thriller with my fellow LA Zombies.  Here I am, missing out on a Beat It flash mob.  Here I am, sniffling, sweaty, and icky.

All because I want to beat time.

Next week awaits a new battle strategy.  But for now, back to the couch and more tea.

Ah. Columbus Day. A holiday where everyone else you know outside of government is hard at work.  Usually, Brandon would be off work today too, but Mr. Crazy Pants over there had scheduled a 2-day training course for today and tomorrow.

Here in my home office at 9:30 a.m. on Monday with a mug of tea.  It feels like I’m playing hooky.

It has been a very short and exhausting weekend so I’m grateful for today.  As you know, Saturday early afternoon was all zombie stuff.  Later that evening, we were at the Orange County Police Canine Association benefit show.  Horrible venue at Glover Stadium in Anaheim.  Parking was a mess.  Staging area was so that at some point no one was allowed access to the restroom because the K9 and their handlers were in the same tunnel.  And the helicopters couldn’t get low enough for us to see.  At Fullerton stadium, they even landed those bad boys!

However, the show was great.  I will have pictures up sometime today.  We sat so far away though, so I might now have the best pictures ever.  OCSD K9 Storm won the toughest dog this year.  Deservedly so.  That dog is a BEAST!  He looks like a son of a German Sheppard and a tiger.

Yesterday, we ran some errand and I worked on the Princess Leia costume a while.  Then we were off having dinner with Shane’s family for his dad’s birthday.

It would be a great day to not do anything today, but I do have a long list of stuff I have to do in front of me over here.

Like calling the apartment manager about the garage. (Check!) Our neighbor told us some dude was trying to pull our garage open the other day.  He confronted the guy who cussed him out and left on his bicycle.  A Los Alamitos officer came by this morning to take a look after Brandon reported it in.  We just really have to fix our garage door.

Then I have to catch up on household paper work.  Do some more PR stuff for Thrill the World.  Go to lunch with my friend Terence. Grocery shop. Do laundry.

And on top of that, I even sent email for auction solicitation for my Big Gala to businesses I thought of over the weekend on my day off.

At least I will try to sneak in a nap this afternoon.  Otherwise, it’s NOT a day off!