Quarter Century Passes

This weekend was a great flurry of activity. Had an amazing time, but having a 4 day weekend just made it that much better. For some reason, the office decided that tuesday would be a holiday, so while most everyone i knew was back at work, i had another day to relax and savor my first days off since work started.

Quick recap:

Friday - Stupidly agreeing to head out to Stanford Shopping Center and watch my friend and her roommie go shopping. At least i got some good dinner and cheesecake out of it.

Sat - Fillmore Jazz Festival. There were some AMAZING musical acts there. By far my favorite was the cuban band, playing their latin groove. I think it's one thing to listen to a recording, but watching/listening to a live band, there's just no way to describe it. It's just awesome to be in that kind of atmosphere. There's just no way you can stand still listening to this music. Just makes you get up and dance. In addition to all that great music, there were some major barbeque pits going as well, inundating the whole area with smells of smoke, ribs, and sauce. What a tease...

After the jazz festival, ended up going to the beach at night with some old church buddies. didn't do a whole lot since the beach/park ranger showed up and kicked us off around 1am, but still had a fun time with the bonfire and lighting firecrackers/works/bottle rockets/smoke bombs/etc... Something about being on the sand and having the waves lick your feet, it's very relaxing and theraputic. Such a shame that it was so dark though

Sun - KCPC Summer Picnic. Quite a contrast from the Jazz Festival. Instead of a whole lot of black people, it was a whole lot of korean people. And korean food. Good stuff. Played stupid korean games i.e. tug-of-war, carry-the-kid-in-towel relay, hula-hoop contests (the little kids are freaking crazy at this), misc. relay games and the likes. Since the park we had the picnic was next to SFO, spent a lot of time watching the airplanes land. Went home and slept the rest of the afternoon. I think i had way too much sun all at once. I think i'm spending too much time indoors.

Monday - 4th of July BBQ. Went to another outdoor event. Met up with some high school friends, and ended up meeting people from Cal that i recognized, but didn't know personally. Someone set up the bbq and made a vain attempt at cooking some food on it. Grill got so hot that the tin-foil we put on kept melting away. Talk about flash-cooking. I think just about all the hair on my right hand burned away. Afterwards, watched fireworks at Shoreline. Times must be really tough, since the fireworks display only lasted about 10 minutes. It was probably one of the most sorry fireworks display in recent memory. But apparently it was one of the only decent displays around, since there were THOUSANDS of people there, and since it's in the middle of nowhere, no choice but to drive. Spent the next hr and half sitting in the most inefficiently managed road blocks attempting to go half a mile to get to the freeway. There was a cop sitting behind me who looked even more frustrated than me. Even if he wanted to turn on his lights and zoom away, fat chance. Absolute gridlock. All i could think was "what a waste of gas"

Tuesday - Relished the fact that I still had the day off while most everyone else was back at work. Played a little bit of the 18 holes with my dad. Golf is such a ridiculous thing. The only redeeming factor of the day was the golf cart (can't stress enough how fun these things are), and that when you add a little bit of beer and sun to the mix, you get some great results. The only downer of the day was losing more golf balls than i have fingers, and being held up constantly by a bunch of korean ah-juh-shees who couldn't figure out how to putt efficiently.

So to quickly sum things up, I ended up eating bbq everyday this weekend, was outside more hrs than the past 4 months, and burned like a bundt(?) cake. My ears are peeling, as well as my nose, my scalp... it's pretty gross. Thankfully for you, no pictures.

But i'll leave you with some other ones which are more pleasant.