Celebrating a 91st

On May 6th, Tung and I headed down to SoCal with his family to celebrate his dad's uncle's 91st birthday. Our Doubletree hotel room was quite comfy and welcoming, especially after a day on the road.


On the night of our arrival, we ate at Tan Cang Vietnamese Seafood Restaurant. Among the dishes we tried were abalone with bamboo, snow peas, and shitake mushrooms; catfish hot-and-sour soup; and my personal favorite, crab sauteed in tamarind sauce.



The next day, we met Tung's sister at the UCLA campus to pick her up after her campus tour.




We stopped at the the sleek and modern campus Jamba Juice to reminisce upon the days when Tung and I would wait for our campus-job paychecks from SJSU to afford to treat ourselves to one Jamba Juice, power-sized and split into two cups. He would never let me have the Femme Boost.



After UCLA, we browsed Rodeo Drive, home of the unaffordable-and-preposterously-overpriced tourist window shopping.





Big-brand-name shops and fancy cars are a commonplace around Rodeo Drive, and Tung had fun car-watching. He even scored big with this picture next to a Bugatti. Insurance for this bad boy must cost...how much? A mere million dollars or so?


Even the Beverly Hills chihuahuas come here all dolled up and decked out.


Million-dollar, precious-gemstone-studded clubbing clutch purse, anyone?


Inspired by an "ancient" statue, Tung thought he'd fit in a yoga session.


I'll just kick it with the bouganvillea here and wait for him to finish.


May 7th, the night of the birthday dinner. The red cloth is laid out to serve as a "guest book."


Here's our "birthday boy"! It's been explained to me that the Chinese believe odd numbers are lucky, so they will celebrate landmark birthdays such as 71st, 81st, and 91st, never on an even-aged year.


The immediate family gather on stage to sing happy birthday to him. How odd it must be to hear this song sung to you for the 91st time throughout your life!


Tung's parents take a picture with one of his dad's relatives. He has not seen most of these people for a long time.



Here we are, enjoying the dinner.


On the road trip home the next day, we dropped by Sanuki No Sato Japanese Cuisine for lunch. The place is renowned for having a lot of famous people, including Hollywood stars, visit to eat.



Tung had a "tofu custard" as one of his appetizers.


And I enjoyed a steaming bowl of udon. The fresh noodles were delicious and definitely distinguished in taste and texture than the refrigerated or dehydrated udon noodles.


Our last touristy stop before heading home for the work week was Solvang, CA.


There were horse-drawn-carriage tours around the small town.


We dropped by Carivintas Winery so Tung's dad can experience his first wine tasting. I'll admit I was a little jealous to have to sit out due to being on medication.


Carivintas Winery has doggie decor all over its walls, from quirky pet photos to blown-up modern art of dogs. They donate a portion of sales to shelters to help homeless dogs.

Light Switcheroo

It's nit-picky, but we think the light switches with the lame on/off labels from the 70's are tacky and ugly. So Tung, all by himself, embarked upon the project of changing them out to the more modern, big-tab switches throughout our entire house. It's a good thing, too, because what goes on with electricity in the dark, cavernous confines of the wall is something that I don't want to mess with. Here's a picture of the switch after the wall plate has been removed:


Um, yuck. I wasn't around to hear the cursing that must have inevitably come forth when Tung discovered the lack of color-coding of the positive and negative wires, but I'll bet that was fun times for him. Below are pictures of the old double switches, along with a new and old switch mounted side-by-side for comparison:




And here's the ugliness of the wall stuffs aesthetically covered up with new wall plates:


The double switcheroo:

And now, all that's left to do besides enjoying the pretty new switches is getting past the muscle memory of flicking instead of pressing whenever we want to turn our lights on and off.

Against the Grain

Time flies, like a kite cut free of its tethering string, borne on the fickle winds, fluttering and drifting aimlessly against a backdrop of dark clouds and gray sky. In between being out of town and being sick, I hadn’t been to the dojo in over a week. A week on break from training feels so long, and my internal sense of time gets knocked off kilter. The hours bleed into days, and I forget where in the week I am without the benchmark training evenings to regulate myself.

It serves me right for being healthy for such a long streak—I knew that whatever I got next, it would be heavy enough to knock me out for a while. Memories of the last few months’ events drift into my prescription-drug-induced unconsciousness, of Sensei badly injuring his knee during the Hawaii Doshu Seminar, of his surgery and time away from the dojo. Sensations of jo training with Sempai lace my dreams; I am struggling to manipulate the jo to bring him down in a shihonage, but the wood bends in the middle and refuses to lend me its strength. “The wood is strongest along the grain,” Sempai tells me, “so extend through the jo.” I understand, but I cannot physically move to make it work. Sweat drenches my brow and soaks into my shirt as I sleep. It’s all I want to do for a long while, and I shun the sensations of consciousness and the healing sunlight to stay in that Sandman world where I hope my body can heal.

But I do wake. Yesterday, I stepped back onto the freshly-varnished wood of the dojo floor. My body feels weak from muscles left unconditioned and from the release of antibodies to fight the foreign intrusion. My lungs ache from the constant, hacking cough that still lingers. But Sensei is there for his frequent visits, hurt knee free from the clunky brace, and now walking without crutches. He’s been off the mat for a lot longer than me—since February—so I know I don’t have a right to complain. He inspires me to heal, shows me that if you work at it, it becomes possible. I bow in, and I take it easy during my first evening back, but I still sweat and struggle. My coughs bring forth a copper-tinged taste of weariness, like there are holes inside of me that bleed out my energy and passion. I have been off the mat, but I have never stopped fighting. It feels like a constant battle against the grain to get better and regain my strength. How can I blend and make it work? “Take it slow, but don’t baby it,” Sempai would advise. “Keep training,” Sensei would say. So I do. I take slow and steady steps back onto the mat, say “Onegai-shimasu,” and give the best that I can from this body recently broken.

Dome Light Installation 101

You know there's a problem when you're trying to play an interactive video game such as Wii tennis or Kinect Sports, and both you and your guests keep whacking the damn, low-hanging chandelier in the TV room in your zest to move your limbs. Yet another reason to replace a brand new, fully functional item in the house.


Because neither Tung nor I are very well-versed in the art of home improvement, we confess we almost gave up when we first cracked open the box and thought, due to the crappy instructions included, that we were missing some parts, But after getting over the wussiness of wanting to give up early, and maybe partly from the laziness of not wanting to drive back to Home Depot, we decided to give it a go.

Let me just stress that a dining chair ghetto-rigged with two Yellow Pages books for height enhancement is not the greatest way to go about installing a dome light.


We did have a ladder in the backyard but decided it wouldn't fit in the house, so for the most part of two hours, we came up with various creative (maybe stupid?) ways of enhancing our height, including me holding the parts up to the ceiling with a blunt wooden stick while Tung used both hands to connect the wires together, along with him using my wooden meat pounder and a flat-head screwdriver to chisel away aspestos bits in an effort to create a bigger hole (with no small amount of cursing involved).


Who says kitchen tools don't come in handy during home improvement? This gives a whole new purpose to P90-x arm- and shoulder-workouts, as well as the 5th bokken suburi done on repeat.

Finally, out of desperation, Tung asked to try the tall ladder, so after wrenching it free from the backyard tangle of overgrown winter weeds, I managed to fit it in the house. What a difference an extra step makes--with the right arsenal, Tung was able to finish screwing in the flush-mounted light.


Here's the aftermath of what it takes to install a single dome light for the first time:


And finally, the sweet results:


Clean and ready for some Wii whacking and Kinect volleyball!

2011 Garden

We are growing tomatoes for the first time in our house. It was just around this time last year that we were preparing to move in, so this year, it's time to focus on the garden! We put in some Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes, Early Girls, Aces, Beefmasters, Champions, and Miracle Sweets, along with two zucchini plants. Can't wait to see how well they fare this summer.



Our herb garden consists of the existing mint, and I put in some new Sweet Basil plants and Cilantro.


To make the front of our house a little more colorful, I put in some small pink daisy bushes (osteopermums) and kalanchoes in magenta, yellow, and red.


I also planted some red, orange, and yellow marigolds in the round plot of our mimosa tree.

Napa Valley Wine Tasting

We spent a 3-day weekend in Napa Valley, our first time wine tasting. Aside from it being slightly cold, April is a lovely time to go as the hills, vineyards, and cultivated gardens are all lush and green from all the spring rain. Our first stop was V. Sattui, a great place to picnic. V. Sattui has a monopoly on the sales of food such as sandwiches and cheese--the winery was grandfathered-in after the Napa county decided to prohibit the sales of food on winery grounds.



Our next stop was Peju, a rather private winery with a quaint koi pond on the premises. The spring tulips were freshly in bloom right outside the tasting room.


Our sommelier was an old man who goes by Alan "The Yodelmeister." Not only does he yodel (which we did not hear), he also raps (which we did) when presenting the wines we tasted.



Next stop, Robert Mondavi, a popular tourist attraction known for good tours of the vineyards for beginner wine tasters. We did not taste here but toured the grounds on our own.


We also visited Chandon (home of the bubblies!) without tasting. Chandon has an impressive wine-bottle wall and has a more modern, chic ambiance to it.


Last stop for our Thursday: Silverado, a less-known and more private estate with tasting tables overlooking the beautiful valley.


I confess that by this time we were a lit-tle tipsy--everything tasted the same here, so we decided it was time to check into our hotel in the small city of Santa Rosa and call it a night.


The next morning, we had breakfast at Chloe's, a hole-in-the-wall, French-owned bakery/breakfast cafe. All the pastries and breakfast items were yummy! I had a chocolate croissant (pain du chocolat) and an apricot tart, and Tung had a breakfast baguette with eggs, bell peppers, sauteed onions, and cheese. The food was so good that we bought some sandwiches for a picnic at lunch.


We then went to Sterling Vineyards, where an aerial tram took us up to the tasting grounds.


This was a self-guided tour, and we walked around the "modern castle," getting our wine glasses refilled at designated stations while we enjoyed the magnificent view and learned about winemaking in the process.


We decided to stop by Old Faithful Geyser Park to see the natural geyser shoot off every 15 minutes as we ate our sandwiches from Chloe's.

A fun part of the park was the sizeable petting zoo, where I enjoyed petting and feeding the llama, goats (including the Tennessee fainting kind) . . .


. . . and Jacob three-horned sheep, who just had her spring lamb not too long ago.


Next major tour, Castello di Amorosa, the sister-winery of V. Sattui, built by Dario Sattui, the grandson. To me, the castle was an impressive piece of architecture with ironwork and stones imported directly from Europe.


It was fun to see the towers, courtyard, royal dining hall, and, of course, the dungeon, complete with all ye torture devices!


The Castello has a summertime Renaissance Fair for wine members only. Boy, I'd like to crash that party. Due to not yet being able to get permission from the county to host overnight guests, the only live-in residents of the castle are the small flock of barnyard animals and two cats--a blondie named Lancelot and a gray tabby named Guinevere (the English geek in me thought that was a cute and clever naming scheme).


After stocking up our wine purchases at the castle, we walked around the Town of Calistoga, regretting leaving our bathing suits at home and not being able to take advantage of the mineral-water baths that the region is known for.


For dinner, we decided on a whim to drop by a hole-in-the-wall barbecue house called Buster's Southern BBQ with a narrow ordering aisle reminiscent of Wienerschnitzel.


We were blown away by the quality of our BBQ dinner, served on modest paper plates. I tried the habanero hot BBQ sauce, and they weren't kidding when they warned me it was HOT! Tung had the tri-tip, and I had the half-chicken dinner. We loved it so much that we dropped by for lunch on the next day.


On Saturday, our last day of vacation, we visited the Petrified Forest to see trees that had been naturally petrified by volcanic eruption.


We guided ourselves through the short loop tour and then dropped by Prager Port, whose interesting interior decor includes dollar bills left behind and tagged by previous guests. Ports are too sweet for Tung's and my taste, but we did get a dessert wine out of it.


Next, we dropped by Sutter Home, home of the white zinfandel, and walked around the gorgeous garden.



And then it's homeward bound, but not before another stop to V. Sattui to stock up some more! This place gets ridiculous crowded on the weekends--the difference between our trip on the quieter Thursday morning was painfully obvious. But we did make it out with a bottle of 12-year-old Port and a Cabernet Sauvignon as a gift to Tung's family.


And finally, the stash, to commemorate our first wine tasting trip. For sure, we'll be back!