Two years ago today

Today in 2007 I had my first date with K. Who would've thought on that day that we had so many days to look forward to together? We've had so many wonderful moments together and I couldn't ask for a better girlfriend. I really do love her with all my heart.

We're playing it low key today because we were out playing cards with our mutual friend. We first all went out to dinner at a ma and pa style Mexican restaurant. The poor lady who served us really did not know English and we had the hardest time ordering. But the food was pretty good. So it was worth it. We then went over to our friend's house to eat pie! I don't remember what it was called but it had graham cracker crust, dulce de leche and banana slice filling and it was topped with whipped cream infused with coffee and sprinked with dark chocolate shavings. It was delicious. We then made up a card game and had some good conversations. I even got to try some homemade meede. It's wine made out of honey. Time flew by and next thing we knew it was waaay past 2AM So today we're relaxing. We're ordering pizza and watching the movie Traitor. It'll be great, I'm sure.

Last weekend

I took a long time to write about my weekend this week, but I really had a great time. On Friday I went out to John Barleycorn with some friends. I hadn't seen most of them for months! The night ended pretty early for who knows what reason, but at least I got plenty of sleep! I guess we're all getting old and can't stay out like we used to!

Saturday was a sad day. My 3 week old pro lens broke all of the sudden. I went to use it and what do you know? The AF motor didn't move the focus ring! Man, you'd think when you drop a load of cash on a specialty lens from a good brand, that you lens will last longer than 3 weeks. At least I can get it repaired under warranty and the lens is insured. But The lens will be away for about 2 weeks. That's no fun!

On Sunday Kristin and I had a St Paddy's day dinner party. That was really a lot of fun. We made corned beef and cabbage from scratch. We even corned the beef for a week! Everybody had a blast. Even Dino had a great time. He danced and partied like crazy!

OK I changed my mind

I LOVE my camera. I had a great time photographing just about everything yesterday! And people do enjoy my hobby as much as I do, hehehe. But seriously, I'm excited because it is looking to be a super fun hobby from here on out. I'm getting used to the camera, and I'm getting better and better at taking good pictures with it.

I also had fun Saturday when I went out with K and another friend. We had some good conversations and we really had a blast. I made country fried steak as well that day, but it tasted more like pork chops than anything because the recipe called for a bread crumb crust.

Fun few days

So I had some fun the past few days. On Thurs I played Catchphrase and ate Lou Malnatis with some friends after a day of shopping in the city. I didn't buy anything, but it was fun to go into stores where you could buy a t-shirt for $150. On Fri I went to the Shedd Aquarium and ate at Protillo's. mmm mmm. Saturday, I went to the John Hancock building's 95th floor for lunch. I had an awesome cheese steak sandwich. And for only $15 after tax and tip, I'd do it again!

And today Kristin is coming back into town. I can't wait. I also cleaned my apartment, now it's sparkly clean. boy isn't cleaning fun? I love cleaning so much, I should become a butler. hahahaha

It's almost Christmas!!!

It's so much fun to spend time with your friends and family for the holidays even if you have to spend your whole morning shoveling the driveway :P I've been eating mostly cookies instead of meals lately. It's fun, but now I'm actually starting to crave un-sugar! Well I wish everybody a Merry Christmas!

mmmhmm

On Thursday I made fried catfish for Kristin, her grandmother and her sister. They loved it. I cheated and used Zataran's cornmeal breading though instead of making it from scratch. Her grandmother also made some delicious traditional cornbread that contained only corn meal, oil, salt, and eggs. It reminded me of those corn cakes I tried to make once as a kid because I learned that George Washington loved em! I didn't like the corn cakes so much because they were very dense and had little flavor, but Kristin's grandmother's cornbread had plenty of flavor. I even put a little maple syrup on my piece.

Friday was a pretty awkward night. K's friend met a new girl about a month ago and they're already official. They call each other by nicknames regularly and cuddle more than any other couple I've seen. This made it kind of awkward because I find it annoying when people can't keep their hands off one another while in public. And they just met and they were cuddling like they knew one another for months. We played Apples to Apples entirely too long, and I suggested we stop playing that game and move to another once to everybody, but I was ignored. So I secretly begged K to intervene since it was her friend, but even that took awhile. The strawberry daiquiris were very good though. I only had a tiny bit because I was driving. Her friend is a good dude though so I hope he is happy with his new gf.

Saturday was a pretty laid back day. We made 49ers flapjack dough the night before and let it ferment over night. When Kristin came back over the next day, we cooked them up and they tasted more sour than we remember from Walker Brothers, but they were great with syrup. We decided that we'd try not to let them sit over night at room temperature next time and see if the taste was more similar. After that we did our youth volunteering thing at Kristin's church. They had a special speaker who told her story about how she tried to kill herself and how she found God afterwards. It's sad that she felt so desperate to kill herself though, but I'm glad she is happier now.

For dinner I had a Work Burger from Crave. It is one of the better burgers out here. It comes with bacon, onions, mushrooms and cheddar cheese. They even cook the beef to -order, so if you like yours a little more pink, you can ask for it! We then watched Apocalypto. It was a pretty good movie, but yes, Mel Gibson is still the king of gory snuff films. There was a lot of blood. He sure loves his blood.

On Sunday Kristin and I hung out at her parents' house and went shopping at random stores. Her parents fed me brownies with walnuts and I ate too many. But boy oh boy were they good. At least Kristin is keeping me working out over the weekends. That makes me feel a little better. We also ate dinner at her parents' house. I had Lou Malnati's pizza and herb crusted tilapia. After all that I watched Queen with Kristin and took an online "personality strengths" test. Apparently my strengths are: Competition, Achiever, Focus, Strategic, and Significance. So basically, I'm gonna kick your butt at whatever I do every time by focusing on my strategy and it'll be a significant butt kicking. yeah that's right. :P We tried making flapjacks again just to experiment and we only let the dough rise for an hour before cooking it. It was a lot more self-adherent and dough-like, but the flavor was better. We still have to experiment more to get the recipe right! Maybe leaving the flapjacks in the refrigerator over night instead of at room temperature, or adding more butter to the recipe will help.

Crazy dream

I had a dream that I wasn't able to finish, but it still made me wonder what made me think this up while I was sleeping. It was my birthday party and my family had invited like everybody I ever knew to it. And they lived in this gigantic house with a parking garage with four or five levels and a club house that was so big I had to run across to get from side to side. Anyway, I get there by train and for some reason there is this girl Ellyn there in the same car. Back in the day I had tried to date her but somehow she just ended up not calling me back, and I didn't call her back ever. She was on the train with my sister because apparently my sister needed her help or something. So I was trying to be nice and talk to her and I was trying to be nice by asking where she worked. She was like "nowhere... nothing" and she looked away, so because I was such a smooth guy in the dream, we got off the train and I kept talking to her and she admited that she worked at a plant nursery, but I was expecting that she'd work in a law office or something. I was shocked but I thought it was cool and I told her that my mom loved plants and that they should talk. At that point Ellyn disappeared from my dream.

Then came in Brian Brecha (not my best friend Brian) And he starts talking to me and people swarm around him and somehow this makes me feel cool. I'm saying hi to everybody I used to know in high school. I roam the area and find different pockets of people, and everybody was there even people I didn't like. Phil, the jerk who hated me in middle school who ended up flunking out or something senior year was also there. It was crazy! I ignored him. I then remember seeing a guy "Andrew" who was somebody that my family knew but I didn't and there was an even bigger crowd around him. I didn't want to compete so I took my crowd outside. Then I wanted to find Kristin because I felt bad that I hadn't seen her. So we all went to the parking garage and looked around and then went back into the house to find her. And that's when I woke up. hmmm.

During the dream i remember seeing a lot of faces of people from high school, but I don't remember where I saw them in the dream so I didn't write about it. But I wonder why my brain chose to reunite just about everybody I could think of from my high school and a few people from college at my parents gigantic dream house. Why brain why?

Myspace

I really don't think I like Myspace. I held out subscribing to it for the longest time, but since one of my ex-roommates had great success picking up high school girls with it, I figured I'd give it a try. I mean, who doesn't want high school girl friends with all their high pitched screaming and blabbing on about how billy in class looked at them and they think he is so dreamy and how they wish billy would just dump his 2 timing girlfriend who is complete trash and has a skin rash problem and steals from the church offering and hates puppies?????

No but seriously, my friend did end up meeting a few high school girls, but I figured I'd give it a try just to meet normal people in the area, maybe with similar interests. Well I gave it a few months and to my dismay, nobody wanted to be my friend. (Well I didn't make any friend requests) The world is a tough place. I kept considering deleting it, but then my best friend Brian jumped on the bandwagon and I decided to keep it for now, but still not encourage anybody to use it. Then a couple more people started flowing in, my sister found me, even though I told her to stay away from evil Myspace. Then a couple other people. And now I just can't get rid of it, because some people like Kristin have private profiles, so I can't see them if they're not my friend :( (Mine's private too, I don't want anybody to find me) I still don't like Myspace, but I'm stuck now. How can I e-stalk my closest friends without it?

But yesterday I had the biggest dilemma yet. One of the high school aged girls from my parent's church back home made a friend request. And I don't even remember her name. Did I ever even talk to her? You see, my dilemma was, I made a pact with myself never to add anybody that I didn't talk to in real life at some point. But then again, I recognized this person, and the good Christian in me says to accept people into the fold and not to shun people off. But I don't want to have other people from my parent's church find my profile, and to be honest, I'm not too fond with some of the people my age that are left there. This will probably open a door that I wanted closed, but I still accepted the friend request, just to be nice. Being nice is so overrated.

I don't know why, but I just get this weird feeling about Myspace every time I use it. I really dislike it, but I want to use it minimally at the same time. I used to love Facebook because it was clean (Nobody was allowed to put those ugly backgrounds and animated flashy stuff on their profiles. My eyes were saved!) and only college students could join. But now they've opened the doors to everybody and I've already started getting weird friend requests. Thankfully, you still can't mess up the clean look of Facebook. Maybe I should just close my Myspace down. I mean Facebook is now open to everybody. It would sure make me feel a lot better, and then it'd be harder for people to find me once again.... Nah, I'm too lazy to do that.