kids, steaks, work and a sprained foot.

1. KIDS: one of the things I will miss most about Philly… is my kids!! my sunday school kids that i’ve taught for 5 years. I can’t imagine leaving them, and I’m going to cry when i leave them. Last week, Stevie said to me “my mommy says that you’re leaving me”. i almost cried. i’ve been taking care of him since he was just born and now he’s a strapping 5-year old boy! below, we have my buddy, LC, who it’s probably one of the most intelligent and articulate 2 year olds that i’ve met. a 2 year-old that talks like a 4 year old. i’m going to miss him

2. FOOD: on another unrelated note; in my review of my good eats last weekend, i forgot to mention Sam Ng’s STEAKS!! I don’t have a picture of the steaks (filet!) that he grilled for me last sunday, but i have to say, it was wonderful. i’ve paid much more before and haven’t had a steak quite as good. Thanks Sam. you’re awesome. I’d love to have another steak when i come back to visit! Perfectly grilled to a almost-dangerous rare/medium rare, i’d give Sam’s Steaks a huge thumbs up

3. LAST DAY: at last, today was my last day at work. I turned in all of my keys, all of my ID’s, and locked all of my file cabinets for good. it is a wonderful feeling.

4. CRUTCHES: so today, i am unexpectedly back on my crutches. it’s 5.5 months post surgery, and i was just starting to finally be able to walk around and be independent again, and BAM, i sprained a muscle in my foot today. according to the docs, this is a common effect of my surgery, since I am re-learning how to walk properly, and i’m overworking a lot of my muscles. well that’s just great. back on crutches, and it hurts a LOT. like, a LOT. this is hindering my goal of over-eating!!

a weekend of good eats!

I have decided that before I leave philadelphia in 2 weeks, I want to eat as much good food as possible. I began on Saturday… when I had lunch with jess, matt, sunwoo, and dr. peter at cafe estelle , on 4th and Willow in the Northern Liberties area. I was very impressed with the food. It’s a small BYOB that serves only brunch and lunch, and it has a pretty large menu full of reasonably priced, and delicious food. Below is a picture of the Breakfast Pizza… which sunwoo had and said was delcious. yummm.

Place: Cafe Estelle at 4th and Willow streets (between callowhill and springarden)

Cost: $ - $$

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5. YUMM!

Later that night… I finally had a chance to go to Franklin Fountain, which is an old-fashioned soda fountain and dessert place on 1st and Market streets in Old City. Let me just tell you… it doesn’t even matter that i’m moderately lactose intolerant; this place was amazing, and worth the stomach ache later. with an extensive menu of all sorts of banana splits, soda floats, homemade icecream, and its famous waffle ice cream sandwich, jisun, mike, jess and i were in heaven.

After all that ice cream — we went to Yakitori Boy in Chinatown, which was sooo good at midnight. Fresh sushi, with a carafe of warm sake to end the night.

Places to eat before I leave: Lorenzo’s pizza, Fogo de Chao, Rita’s Water Ice, the vietnamese hoagie place next door to La Lupe, Saad’s and maybe Pat’s. Good lord. That’s a lot of fatty food. who wants to come with?!!

I solved the rubik’s cube!

Yes, nerdiness upon nerdiness, i actually solved the rubik’s cube last night.  I stayed up until 2am doing it, and now i’m paying for it at work.   I went to the official site and figured out the “algorithm” that you use to solve it, and about 15 tries later, I did it.   And then i felt completely stupid for staying up to solve the rubik’s cube.  i have never felt nerdier. 

On a completely different note… I was reading the METRO newspaper this morning, and there was a story about a woman in Kansas that was stuck on a toilet for TWO YEARS. 

“Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who sat on her boyfriend’s toilet for two years, so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the boyfriend finally called Police…it appeared that the 35-year-old Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat.   She initially refused emergency services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.” 

This is unbelievable.  I don’t even know what to say.  Someone please explain to me… how do you sit for 2 years??  Did she eat, sleep, and play all while still on the toilet??  And after sitting that long, my medical side wonders if she would have at least had MAJOR swelling in her feet and legs, or even developed deep vein thrombosis?  this is just too ridiculous for me.

salad!

so the other day, my officemate that i mentioned below…let’s call him L … sits down to eat his lunch. he eats his sandwich first, and then casually mentions that he’s going to have salad as well. i wasn’t really paying attention, but suddenly, he pulls open his desk drawer and pulls out an ENTIRE HEAD of lettuce!! he hastily ripped off giant leaves of lettuce, crumpled it into a ball, and noisily stuffed the entire thing into his mouth. i was secretly cracking up the entire time. it was 15 minutes of him manually ripping leaves off of the lettuce (without washing!!) and stuffing them into his mouth. Very interesting. It sounded crunchy and tasty.

atlanta it is!

Atlanta it is!!  I’ve finally decided.. that I will be attending Emory this fall.  Along with that… I also switched to WordPress for my blog…  only because i feel like it is more customizable and looks better.   Please read this one from now on!! 

blogging at work.

my days here at the VAMC/PENN hospital are quickly coming to a close. i only have 13 official more days of work until i am outta here! i can’t wait to leave a cold and musty office, and get away from a particular office mate…who although is a nice guy, loudly gargles and swishes his water in his mouth everytime he takes a sip, presumably to clean his constantly food-encrusted braces. he always proceeds to swallow that mouthful of water, full of floating soggy food particles that he just loosened from his braces. sometimes, he accidentally farts too… but i always pretend not to hear it. i also pretend not to care when he shuts off the lights in the office, props up his feet, and goes to sleep for an hour at a time, lightly snoring with his mouth hanging open. but seriously. shutting off the lights while i’m still here? i hope he never sees this.

it’s really disconcerting that i still don’t know where the heck i am going… even though i am moving out in 4 weeks. sometimes it’s fun to live on the edge, but having 4 weeks left and having absolutely no idea what city or even part of the country i will be moving to is cutting it too close! people keep asking me where i am going, and the answer still is… I HAVE NO IDEA. i still have to hear back from 2 grad schools, after which i will finally make a decision.

this summer, i think i need to take a trip to hong kong or japan, JUST to get on this plane. AWESOME. EVAAIR kittyjet!!! more to come on the kittyjet.

counting down the days..

does anyone want to take a spontaneous trip to NYC? i need to apply for a visa to taiwan for the summer and need to make a trip to the taiwan consulate. that’ll be my last trip to new york anyway, before i leave. with that, i’ll leave you with some good memories from good ‘ol NYC… from a trip to LIPS for a bachelorette party… what’s LIPS, you say? you know, it’s that transvestite bar!

haha… i forget “her” name… but the “woman” on the right was Ginger.

scandal!!

anyone following the scandal that’s rocking the HK entertainment industry?? Edison Chen … one of the foremost actors/singers/producers in HongKong was stupid enough to take a ton of sexually explicit photos and videos of him engaged in various obscene activities with several of Hong Kong’s biggest female stars. his PINK macbook broke down, so he brings it to a local shop, where the workers find hundreds of these photos and videos and then proceed to post them online.

how stupid can he be? way to ruin your career and the careers of many others! even if you are stupid enough to take all these photos, why would you store them in any easily visible place on your computer? ugh. makes me sick. maybe these things are readily acceptable in America (i.e. paris hilton, lindsay lohan, britney, pam anderson), but this is definitely unacceptable in Asia. i don’t think anything when i read about American stars doing this stuff, but when i heard about Edison Chen… i seriously feel shame on his behalf.

It even made it to the NY Times.

total girl crush!!!

ladies, do you ever get a girl crush on someone? like… a woman who is so beautiful, classy, elegant and smart that you just can’t stop staring?? haha just kidding. that sounds really creepy. but i do mean the part about being impressed with a woman with elegance and class.

last night, i was the photographer at a huge fundraising event in chinatown. i will leave out the details, except that there were lots of politicians, community leaders, VIPs, socialites and other socially well-connected people there. denise nakano, the NBC10 news anchor was the MC for the night. i met her in the beginning and we struck up a conversation. i was wary at first because i wasn’t sure if someone like her who is a local celebrity, would even speak to me, especially with all of the politicians/important people everywhere. but she did, and she was so incredibly nice. she took time to get to know me and even joked around with me, in between talking to State Rep. Dwight Evans and the Honorable Judge Ida Chan.

if you guys ever see her on TV or around town — don’t be afraid to approach her. she is great. ok i’ll stop my praising now, and leave you with a picture from last night.

what does my blog title mean?

many of you have asked lately: “what the heck does ‘happiness is beebs-shaped’ mean?”

i have avoided this question for months, because i didn’t really feel like explaining, and quite frankly, am embarrassed about where it came from. but, i’m tired of being asked, so i will put my embarrassment aside, and explain.

3 years ago, i was introduced to a website called songfight.org. on this site, there is a weekly theme “word”. you have 1 week to compose and record an original song and post it, and then people vote on the best song. this particular week’s theme word was “TROUBLEMAKER”. i found out about the website at 10:30pm. The deadline to submit, was 12:00am. my sister and i were inspired, so we decided to join… even though we had 1.5 hours to write, compose and record a song, with NO recording equipment.

our solution? we took my laptop, which has a microphone the size of a PINHOLE, and a windows standard “voice record” utility… and we got started. my sister wrote the lyrics, about our troublemaker dog, Titus. i sat down at the piano and pounded out some chords in about 10 minutes. here is how it happened:

step 1: recorded me playing the piano… mostly improvised. placed laptop on top of the piano. sound quality is CRAP! oh well.

step 2: i looped the piano clip and busted out my violin, improvising a melody and recording over the piano.

step 3: hmm. still not enough. i then busted out my Yamaha recorder (leftover from 5th grade) and improvised some more, over the looped violin and piano clip.

step 4: looped the piano, violin, and recorder clip… while singing an improvised melody from the hastily written lyrics. i had to literally hold my laptop up to my face while singing.

step 5: painfully converted the file into an mp3 and uploaded it onto the site at 11:50pm. WHEW!! i put my “band name” as “HAPPINESS IS BEEBS-SHAPED”.

*disclaimer — the sound quality is absolutely hideous!! static all over, and i kept catching noises in the background… my dad slamming a door, my rustling clothes, and in MANY parts, me trying not to crack up while playing violin and the recorder. you can totally tell that i’m laughing.

1 week later, after all votes were in, i won!! much to the chagrin of all of the veteran songfighters, (some of whom were established artists!) i won, despite the crappy quality. they said i won because i played 3 instruments and sang and made the song in 1 hour.

if you really are brave enough — here is the song.

now you all know, why this is my title. enjoy.