cindy's world

All Mr. W wanted for Father’s Day was to get rid of his kids. His son was already at mom’s, and we dropped off his daughter there also, right before he and I went to meet up with my parents and maternal grandmother at Sam Woo Restaurant for Chinese seafood. Mr. W never had Chinese seafood before, so I treated the most exotic stuff they had on the menu. Jellyfish, shark fin soup, sea cucumber, among some of the more normal stuff, Chinese broccoli, pepper beef, clams, steamed fresh whole fish. Mr. W was at first hesitant to try the sea cucumbers (sauteed in baby bok choy and shitake mushrooms), remembering them from when he used to scuba dive, but gave in and enjoyed them after I said, “Oh, come on! You ate a live worm in Peru!” One of my and my parents’ favorite things about Mr. W is his willingness to try new and different stuff. He doesn’t have to like them, but at least this way he knows for sure whether or not he likes something.

As we were drinking our dessert soups, my mom and dad had a conversation in Mandarin about what the first thing is that my dad’s going to do as soon as he gets home. Then they turned to Mr. W and my mom said, “See, after 30 years of marriage, I know him so well that I know what he’s going to do as soon as he gets home, and he only has to say one word and I already know what he’s thinking.” My dad, addressing Mr. W and not my mom, said, “After 30 years of marriage, I’ve learned to just let her think she knows me and that she’s right. It’s easier just to make her happy.” My mom again addressed Mr. W without looking at my dad, “I’m just pretending to be happy to make things easier, so he thinks he’s successful at making me happy.”

My parents are such goofballs.

Saturday night, Mr. W and I had plans to meet up with my cousins Diana and Jennifer plus other friends/coworkers of theirs at the Irvine Spectrum, an outdoors mall/entertainment center for dinner and possibly a movie. Navy Girl Vanessa just happened to call and say that she was planning to be at the Spectrum that night for a movie, too. We agreed to meet up there. Mr. W’s teen daughter had 2 girl friends with her, and the three of them had also planned to go to the Spectrum, so he and I drove the three of them there with us, where we separated.

Mr. W and I met up with my cousins, etc. and had dinner at California Pizza Kitchen, but decided to scrap the movie because of general disinterest in the movie my cousin Jennifer wanted to watch, Jack Black’s Nacho Libre. So after dinner, we all just stood around for a bit, chatting, and the group decided to go their own ways and go home. Just before that happened, we ran into Mr. W’s daughter with her friends, which had grown into a group including 5 or 6 punk rock-looking pierced boys. The kids disappeared pretty readily, with his daughter casting a guilty glance behind her in our direction as she hurried away. All of a sudden, I felt someone’s arm around me from my left, and it was Vanessa and her boyfriend having just come out of the movie theatre we happened to be standing in front of saying goodbye to everyone. Perfect timing! The four of us (me, Vanessa, and our men) wandered around Irvine Spectrum chatting when Mr. W got a phone call from his daughter to meet them at a food court.

When we got to the food court, his daughter said, “We have to go, now, cuz we gotta get one of our friends home.” Turned out the “friend” was some new teenager boy that she’d just met, longish black hair, pierced lip, fur-lined green jacket, jeans so tight that they looked like denim-patterned pantyhose, a studded black belt, and canvas shoes that were frayed around the edges to look like they spread out. The daughter asked if we could take another person, as well. Mr. W said we don’t even have room to take the boy that was coming with us now, because we now have 6 people who are going to cram into a truck. Regretfully, we left Vanessa and her boyfriend and went on our way.

We asked the boy where he lived, and he said off Harbor and Adams. We didn’t know where that was, but he said it was just off the freeway. It was now 11pm, 2 hours past Mr. W’s normal bedtime, and Harbor off the 5 freeway was way off course by 15 miles. There were strange traffic jams, and Mr. W made the other girls call home to say they were gonna be an hour later than promised due to his new detour. So we got off on Harbor, and Mr. W asked the boy where to go from there. The boy hesitatingly said to turn left.
Mr. W: Are you sure?
(Silence from the back seat.)
Mr. W’s daughter: No, he’s not sure.
(But we turn left anyway.)
Boy: We don’t usually go from here, so I’m not sure of the area, but I think this is right. It’d be faster if you get back on the freeway.
Mr. W: And get off where?
Boy: On Harbor.
Mr. W: This IS Harbor. You said you live off Harbor and Adams, and there’s no Adams exit, so this is the only place you can get off. (We drive by Disneyland.) You live in Anaheim, right?
Boy: No, I live in Costa Mesa.
(Mutual silent gasp throughout the car. We had gone 15 miles northwest to get from Irvine to Anaheim, and now he was telling us to go 15 miles south from Anaheim to Costa Mesa. Well, he didn’t tell us. It would’ve been easier if he had told us anything at any point when we were going in the wrong direction.)
Mr. W: So you live off the 405 freeway, not the 5 freeway.
Boy: Uh…
Mr. W: We went north on the 5 and got off on Harbor. You live off of Harbor off the 405 freeway, nor Harbor off of the 5 freeway.
Boy: (sounding confused, as if it had never occured to him that there’s more than 1 freeway in California) Yeah. …?
We didn’t get home until way past midnight.

Just came back from watching Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock’s The Lake House, which plotline opens with Sandra Bullock’s character Kate in 2006, touching base with Keanu Reeves’ character Alex in 2004 by putting letters, notes and other goodies for each other in the outside mailbox of a glass house on the lake, built by Alex’s dad. When I first saw the preview snippets, I thought there’s no way it’s a real fantasy movie; the time thing was probably just a metaphor or the way the previews spin a misunderstanding. Nope, the two actually find a time porthole. The plot is nearly the exact opposite of Christopher Reeves/Jane Seymour’s movie Somewhere in Time, another one of my favorites about a love that transcends beyond the boundaries of space/time continuums. The Lake House takes up some Back to the Future elements in the theory of the future affecting the past thereby altering the future. There was an internal plot so predictable from the beginning setup that as I watched the characters develop, it broke my heart. And then they did a twist that redeemed the story! Okay, this is already enough of a spoiler, so I’ll stop here. I’ll only tell of its effects on me, which is that I cried in this movie shamelessly, almost as hard as I did watching the last Keanu Reeves movie I saw, Sweet November. If I were watching The Lake House in the isolated midnight conditions of Sweet November, I would’ve undoubtedly been just as snot- and tear-wracked.

“That was one of my more favorite movies I’ve seen in a long time,” Mr. W just said. I’m definitely getting it when it comes out on DVD, so I can watch all the director’s cuts. “But it IS a chick flick,” he adds.

As the credits rolled, after I’d composed myself enough to be able to stand and walk out of the theatre, I said to Mr. W, “Don’t you go back in time 2 years to meet me.” He laughed and said it’d be a good thing cuz then he’d be younger. I said, remembering our brief brush with potential romance in 2003, “Actually, I wouldn’t have been interested in and did turn you down a few years ago.”

Today is Mr. W’s last day at work before his two-week vacation. He’s going to Alaska for a manly-men hiking/touring/kayaking/fishing trip. My dad’s looking forward to the giant salmon and halibut (?) Mr. W will be sending back. I’m looking forward to reuniting with my stinky man in a couple of weeks, cuz the day after he comes back will be my 30th birthday and he made some secret plans for us to spend the day. I predict I’ll be really sick *cough* on my birthday *sneeze*. I predict I won’t be handling *wail* turning 30 *rocking back and forth* very well and will need *hysterical laughing* a mental health day off *hysterical sobbing*.

While Mr. W is fighting off the bears (“…and the seals! The fuzzy white ones!” he said this morning), I’ll be in San Jose with college roommie Diana & pals for a weekend. She made reservations for a nice fondue dinner at The Melting Pot the night I arrive, then hanging out and dinner the next day, and kayaking the following morning before I fly back that night. I’ll get to hang out with Dwaine before I fly there since he’s dropping me off at the airport, and afterwards when he picks me up from the airport. I’m leaving my car at his nice new house over the weekend. Hmm. Maybe I should wash it so I don’t embarrass myself. Dwaine’s pretty clean.

I have the last week of July off. No plans yet, I may just take a couple of days for 2 long weekends and give the middle of the week back, save up vacation days for some long-ass China trip next year that Mr. W wants to take. The Gilroy Garlic Festival is the last weekend of July, and Mr. W gave me the green light yesterday to go, so that’d be fun, as long as I can still find hotel rooms. I’d always wanted to attend the Garlic Festival.

Mr. W’s bday is also coming up, so I’m trying to plan a mini trip for that, if only he’d get back to me on which weekend he’s gonna have free.

And then in late October is our 8-night Hawaii trip with my jujitsu class! Luau banquet, USS Missouri, snorkeling, stick-fighting, here we come! And maybe even swimming with sea turtles or surf lessons!

AND…I’m pretty close to caught up with the stupid family law divorce cases they make me do, so no pre-vacation stress and overtime trying to process those damn things for me this time!

Hmm. So what would make me feel better about turning 30? How about a 30th birthday bash at Disneyland, open invite, with a scavenger hunt and prizes? That way I don’t have to worry about reserving a venue to hold a certain number of people, or cleaning up, or catering, or even head counts. I’ll celebrate my big 3-0 with Disneyland celebrating its big 5-0! Just cuz I’m 30 doesn’t mean I’m aging! (At heart.) I’ve got someone who can get discount tickets, so people can RSVP with me or just show up. And then a bday lunch or a dinner together with everyone, perhaps somewhere in Downtown Disney. If people don’t want to spend the $ to get into Disneyland, then they don’t go, no big deal, that’d keep population control down to only the people who really like me, or who really want to go to Disneyland. And they can go off and do their own thing if they want, or stick with me. This way, kids are also welcome so people don’t have to hire sitters or worry about getting home too late or drunk.

I guess I should do flyers for work and an e-vite for my friends.

Yesterday was a very pleasant day. Mr. W and I strolled to Ralph’s and got some ingredients, and he made breakfast (hash browns, pork steak & eggs, apricots, guava juice) which we ate while watching “Friends.” It’s nice to watch “Friends” from the beginning through so my brain can piece together the progression of events. Then we went to Lowe’s and I bought my parents a new kitchen faucet, and we drove over to my parents’ house where Mr. W got down and dirty under the kitchen sink to remove and replace their current leaky faucet. After he scored those major brownie points, my parents treated us to Japanese food. Then Mr. W and I came back to his place (after scrapping plans to run a few miles and/or to wash both our dirt clods that we race around in), watched a couple more episodes of “Friends,” and hit the hay. I slept very soundly.

I was only slightly guilty that as I was having my leisurely day, Vicky was in San Diego running her limbs off at the Rock n Roll Marathon. Props to her for finishing! I called her on my drive to work this morning and asked, “Do you still have feet?” There was a pause, during which I assume she was checking, and then she said, “I can see them, but I can’t feel them.”

Today Mr. W and I are gonna meet up for lunch cuz my mom gave us some Chinese dzong zi she’d special-ordered from Dragon Boat Festival day. Yum! Man, tonight, I definitely have to work out. Jujitsu or running or both.

Mr. W got Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon DVDs which are in Chinese, so he suggested we watch them with my parents after he changes the faucet. I went online and read some reviews and plot synopses, and saw that China banned Concubine for the depiction of sex and use of opium. I don’t know…I’m just not comfortable sitting in an open area within sight of my parents while sex scenes are playing on TV. Blech.

Today, Mr. W and I brought 3 kids with us to visit UCLA. All 3 (not all his) want to attend my alma mater, so they were excited at the prospect of a tour. It was sweltering hot (in the 90s Fahrenheit), there was lots of walking involved both on campus and around the neighboring Westwood, but they had each other so they didn’t complain much. The two boys tossed a baseball back and forth to each other throughout their walk, but they did ask a few times whether we were close to the car. The answer was usually “HAHA, no.” Kids are so not used to physical exertion these days, not because their bodies can’t handle it (we had one cheerleader, 2 baseball players), but because they’re spoiled by technology. There’s a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin is bugging his mom to drive him to his friend’s house to play. His mom tells him to walk there, since it’s only a couple of blocks away. Calvin refuses to walk. His mom starts yelling, and ends with, “What do you think people have FEET for?!” Calvin yells back equally irrately, “To work the gas pedals!”

We got to show them much of the beautiful North campus and Sculpture Garden (where they played toss-the-tennis-ball with a huge yellow labrador retriever that was wading in the Sculpture Garden fountain and took photos hanging off a bossy looking fat woman statue), they bought souvenirs at the Student Store, walked through Powell Library and got to peek in a lecture hall doing a video presentation in Dodd Hall. They admired the state-of-the-art athletic facilities inside Pauley Pavilion and the Wooden Center. At one point, the five of us were studying an unusual looking sculpture, and I was in the front with my back turned to the kids. I heard a “wap!” and then the girl’s voice, “Ow!” I turned and the boys were grinning so I thought they threw the baseball at her and hit her. She turned around and gave the younger boy a dirty look, then looked around and realized it was a pine cone that fell from a tree overhead and hit her. She said, “I thought you threw the baseball at me! I was gonna shove you!” Her older brother said, “Man! I heard that, too! It made a sound as it dropped, like whoosh, BAM!” The girl, whom her dad always calls a drama queen, said, “If that had hit my head, I would have a CONCUSSION! Lookit, my hand’s all red! Ow!” I thought it was hilarious. On our way out of that area, we once again walked by that area, and she ran up to me and showed me the offending pine cone. “Lookit how hard it is! It totally hurt!” I said, “How do you know that’s the same pine cone?” “Because,” her brother said, “That’s the only one over there.” “Only you,” I told her. “Only you can stand in a big broad grassy area, and there would be just ONE pine cone falling, and it’d hit you.” She laughed and said, “I know, really.” I told her she should go buy a lottery ticket, cuz what are the chances? “But she has bad luck,” her brother pointed out.

In Westwood, we dropped by Diddy Rease’s, where they’ve been selling 2 freshly made cookies of your choice and a gob of ice cream of your choice to make an ice cream sandwich for $1, for as long as I’ve known of them. There’s always a line, which goes by fast because the people behind the counter spit out orders like nobody’s business. (I have no idea what that cliche means, but it seems appropriate here.) We’ve always marveled at the low price. Obviously, they make money off volume, but to have that price for over 12 years was impressive. (They sell a dozen cookies of your choice for $3.75, which the older boy bought.) However, we saw a posted sign that says they will be increasing their prices for the ice cream sandwiches to $1.25 starting June 5, so the 5 ice cream sandwiches we got today for $1 each would be our last time. 🙁 But heck, even at $1.25, I’d buy. You can’t get just a scoop of ice cream at any ice cream shop for that price.

I can’t believe it’s been 8 years since I went to school there. Time flies so quickly by when you don’t have midterms, finals and quarters to mark its passing.

I’m gonna take belly dancing on Thursdays beginning in a few weeks. That’ll replace yoga (which Mr. W says he’s starting to hate). There are a few coworkers that took it together this past session and one of them has been on me about joining in. Vanessa and I have been saying we want to do that anyway. I hope Vanessa is able to make Thursdays with us, that’d be really fun! By next month, it’s gonna be weights, running, jujitsu and bellydancing. Don’t you guys wish you live closer to me? You could come, too! (I have no idea whom I’m talking to. *looking around* Uh…Jordan! *pointing*)

Speaking of running, I did 4 miles at lunch today. The heat almost lifted me away like a dirigible. My trainee did over 2 miles next to me. She’s now able to sustain a 5-min run. That’s really impressive.

Oh yeah. This Sunday, I was in the emergency room at like midnight and the nurse took my blood pressure. He said, “Your heart’s really good! You work out? Run a lot?” I looked over at the machine. My pulse was 55, which is lower than I’d ever seen it, it’s usually in the high 60s to low 70s. Unfortunately, my diastolic (or systolic, which ever one means the higher number) blood pressure was 134 or 136, I can’t remember which, and I asked him isn’t that kinda high? He said for my age, “high” would be 140. I said, “Isn’t it getting kinda close to that?” He said dismissively, “Eh, you’ve been up all night.”

Speaking of exercise and goals and stuff, I hear Hawaii is a great place to take surfing lessons; the water’s warm, the instructors give discounts to women, you’re learning with other beginners so you don’t have to feel stupid… so I may be crossing something new off my old goals list after all come October/November.

This is the entry I would’ve posted yesterday had the site been up and running.

There is something about watching X-Men Friday night, then X-2 on Saturday afternoon, and then the newly released third X-Men movie in the theatre yesterday evening that just makes me feel so…ordinary. This imperfect affliction they call homo sapien. When I was a little girl, I fantasized about having special powers. Making water shoot out of my fingertips, communicating with animals, psychically locating lost objects. I think I most often wished I could turn into a spider and disappear around a table leg so that I could be there without people knowing I was there. I don’t know why I’d never wanted to be actually invisible. Also, something about watching Halle Berry in a tight bodysuit and Rebecca Romjin naked except for some blue body paint and scales inspires me to lose weight.

The continuity between the 3 movies was great, very entertaining.

I didn’t take any photos this weekend. It turned out that we didn’t do any sight-seeing. On Saturday, we had a very nice breakfast out on the patio deck of the tennis club resort we were staying at, then went back to the room. As Mr. W took a nap, I went to the lobby and got on their computer to research local movies. 100-degree weather is not one to randomly wander around in and keel over from heat exhaustion. The adult pool was full as we were leaving breakfast already. I found a theatre half a mile away from our resort that was showing DaVinci Code, so I went back to the room, killed some time and then we walked by foot to the theatre. This was a great idea, since Palm Springs was pretty uncrowded so we weren’t in a line hundreds of people deep trying to see this movie (as we would have been back home), AND the theatre was large with reclining leather seats and armrests that you can lift out of the way and tuck between the seat backs. And, all movies before 6pm (I think) were only $6! The movie was pretty good. I don’t know why the reviews have been lukewarm. It stayed true to Dan Brown’s novel except on a few minor points of deviation which I agreed with. For example, the casting of Tom Hanks as the hero Robert Langdonwas odd because the character in the novel was described as young and muscle-clad, which Tom Hanks no longer is, if he ever was. So they killed the inkling of romance that the novel hinted at in the end between Robert Langdon and the young French officer Sophie Neveu.

As an aside, on the drive to work today, I found out why the reviews were so mixed. A radio personality on a local hip hop radio station did movie reviews, and if his IQ were higher than the number of appendages on his body, he wouldn’t have hated the movie so much. His complaints, after he attempted 6-7 times to even pronounce DaVinci Code correctly: “This is why I don’t go to church! It was sooo boring! There were some kids playing in the aisle, and I wanted to go play with the kids, I was so bored. There was too much talk in the movie. And there were subtitles! When I go to the movies, I don’t wanna read! But in one scene there’s subtitles when they’re speaking another language, and then in the next scene, the same characters are speaking English again. I’m like, Why can’t you just speak English through the entire movie, then? Why you gotta speak in another language and make us read subtitles? And there was this dude who was all pale, brotha needed a TAN or something, but in every other scene he’s standing there naked in front of a cross and you see his back and his ass, and he’s torturing himself! I don’t know what the hell was up with that, he needed to go out and get a tan! I don’t understand why Tom Hanks was out by himself at Biblical times, all by himself, just this one American. I don’t know what he was doing there. And there were symbols everywhere, there were symbols on the floor, on the wall, on the ceilings, all this code and symbols and stuff. I didn’t like it AT ALL.” I’m not even going to bother getting into how RETARDED this guy is, but you’ll all know if you watch the movie or have read the book.

So anyway, we were walking back to the resort from the movie theatre when we passed by a ticket store for a traveling show called “Cirque Dreams.” Mr. W is really into Cirque du Soleil stuff, so I got us tickets, even tho it’s not a Cirque du Soleil production. I thought it was gonna be a bite off of Cirque du Soleil, but it was great! Altho it’s less theatrical than Soleil shows, I think the acrobatics and stunts in this group was better, riskier, more advanced than Cirque du Soleil. Plus, this troupe was more male-dominated, which fit in with the sexual orientation makeup of current Palm Springs well, and men are just stronger and can do more stuff than women. We caught their last show, they’re now traveling out of state.

Sunday, since we had just a good experience with DaVinci Code, we walked to the same theatre to catch Over the Hedge. That movie got a few chuckles out of me. It was clever and funny and witty, with some big names on the cast (Bruce Willis, Wanda Sykes, Avril Lavigne off the top of my head). It still maintained the feel-good moral-learned end of any movie aimed at kids. I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that the plot wasn’t darker.

It was weird to leave such bright and sunny weather that required misters to spray off of restaurant ceilings onto the poor parched sidewalk-trudging pedestrians, and drive into cold overcast Los Angeles threatening to rain.