The Daily Sabs

Today Randall and I hopped on a plane and headed down to LA. Chris's
film is screening at the LA Asian pacific film festival, and we
decided to come down to support. Besides we kept telling bao we were
coming to visit and a trip was long overdue.

After an afternoon of catching up, tito's tacos, and checking out
bao's place, we checked into our hotel, had a quick drink and then
went out to hunt for dinner. We didn't actually have to hunt hunter/
gatherer style, but we did cast a wide net. We originally thought we
go to sara's ham hung recommendation. But the English only menu was a
bit crazytown and Randall played the veto card. I was bummed at first,
but we went a block down to Honey Pig and my bummers went away. Honey
pig was Korean BBQ extreme complete with buzzers at the table to let
people know you need assistance. The food was pretty great, but sadly
the gimmicky pig shaped lighters they gave us at the end of the meal
was my favorite part. Honey pigs = Happy pigs!

Okay gotta go, it's time to go mingle at this really weird film
festival party.

my college didn't have frats or sororities, and i never really drank a lot of beer (popov was our poison of choice), but for some reason whenever there is a beer drinking contest, i feel the need to try and win. and since i am competitive, i like to win. today, at a+a's baby shower, i didn't win the drink beer out of a baby bottle contest, but i came close. i was second and that was good enough to score a green & black's dark chocolate bar.

for the record, i'd like to think that if i went to another baby shower where beer was suckled out of baby bottles, i think i could win. bottles are hard to use and i didn't have the technique down until about 2/3 the way through.

in other news, this morning i met my siblings and their significant others at ella's for breakfast. i'd never been there before and it was all sorts of delicious.

as you can see in these photos, i am exhausted (just look at those pandas). which is sort of crazy considering i've done a lot of nothing over the last few days. this morning we woke up to discover it was snowing. we threw a few scoops around, but it was too powdery and dry to even make a proper snowball, let alone a snowpig. that was probably the disappointment of the trip, but what are you gonna do?

in the afternoon we drove around and then went back to my grandma's nursing home. today was bingo day and she had made us promise to play. bao ended up winning twice and i won once. grandma didn't win at all. as you can see, she didn't appreciate that fact. let's just say that she's a bit competitive.

as an aside, why didn't anyone tell me that snowflakes actually look like those kind you make in school? you know, the kind where you take paper and fold it and make random cuts? i just assumed that was some sort of romanticized version of snowflakes.

late last night, bao and i hopped on to (separate) red eyes and headed east into winter to surprise our grandma. suffice to say, she was wonderfully surprised.

This is my brother bao. Today is his birthday. Usually we do a few
candles in a turkey, but today we decided to celebrate pig family
style. We started with soup dumplings at shanghai house and ended with
homemade chicken tortilla soup and chocolate-cinnamon cake.

It's weird, sometimes I think bao and I don't look much alike, but
other times I do. Samshrew says we look like twins in this picture. I
think it's because bao and i have the same guffaw.

geoloc