Yup, she’s 18. I can still remember when her family 1st came to visit. I think she was mabye 2 years old, and her long hair almost reached the ground.  And sometimes her hair would be all up in her face and it would like she couldn’t see where she was going. And now she’s 18. Man.......

Like Jacqueline’s cotillion 5 years ago, it was a grand event. But this time, I feel like I had a bigger role. I helped out a lot more than I did with Jacqueline’s. For her’s, I just remember showing up and walking where & when I was supposed to. This time, I helped with the invitations & program, the name cards, and the surprise video playbacks. I guess it’s because Jacqueline more or less planned this whole thing, we had to help her out a bit.

It was cool seeing everyone all dressed up. I wore a purple dress shirt. There was purple everywhere since that’s Jasmine’s favorite color.

During the dead moments, like where Jasmine would go around to each table and take pictures, a bunch of us would go to the bar next door and get drinks. We killed their supply of Jamison, hehe. They happened to not accept American Express cards, and that was the only card I had on me, so I didn’t buy a single round (I think I had 4). I totally didn’t plan that, by the way.....

The only hiccup of the night was during the playback of the cousins’s surprise video. In the middle of it, the projectors started flashing, maybe every other second. It was showing fine on my laptop screen. It was the splitter on their end that was having issues (cause they split my connection to show on 3 screens). And the thing is, we used my laptop to play Chris V’s video earlier in the night, and it played just fine with no problems. So I dunno what happened inbetween, but Jasmine didn’t get to see our whole video. They eventually fixed the problem, but the damage was done. At least we have multiple copies of the video saved (dvd, macbook hard drive, external hard drive, usb flash drive), unlike our surprise video for Jacqueline where it was only on Jay’s macbook hard drive, and then it crashed....and I thought the Mac OS NEVER crashes.....

And then the After Party. Jasmine’s parents & grandparents got a room at a hotel next to where the debut was held so we could have the house all to ourselves. They said no drinking, but yeah right, like that was really gonna happen. With Jasmine’s court and most of the cousins, there were maybe 20-25 of us. We were all hungry afterwards (around 1am), so we went to McDonalds for some food. We ended up getting $70 worth of food, which I know included at least 7 McRibs, 40 piece nuggets, 4 McChickens, & 6 large fries. And amazingly enough, we finished everything. And we went through 6 bottles of alchy, including a Kirkland Vodka and a costco-sized Sky. It was sorta like the cabin trip without the Chris V yak. Drunk Daniel was Drunk Daniel. He would not stop talking! And Alan kept encouraging him. It was soo hilarious. We couldn’t get Carissa to rap, but Chris somehow got her to punch empty capri-sun boxes that he had put on as gloves. Yes, that looks as weird as it sounds. And for some reason, she kept on referring to herself as the “party fertilizer” (?!?!). There must be something in the Berkeley water....

Adam & I were the last ones up and ended up knocked out at maybe 6-630am. We both woke up at around 8am, cause it was freakin freezing. I had to put on my hoodie and Adam searched the house for a blanket (took him a while, but he eventually found one. it was hella warm, and he referred to it as “the bidness!”). Tj also woke up cause someone had stolen the snuggie he was using when he fell asleep. Hella shady. He ended up just leaving. I was sorta restless cause for some reason I was wide awake. Adam was getting mad at me cause he could hear me walking around. So maybe around 845 I laid back down. We all woke up at 10am to the sound of the doorbell, when Auntie Zeny came to pick up Shann. We thought it was the parentals, so we got up hella fast and tried to hide all the empty liquor bottles. So then we made breakfast, bacon & eggs, and watched some football.

I stayed till around 230pm, when the parentals finally came come home. I passed out as soon as I got home, since I maybe got 2.5 hours of sleep. I intended on waking up around 5 or 6pm, but I ended up sleeping till 815pm. And hence, my sleep cycle becoming borked. But it was totally worth it.

Thanksgiving was more or less the yoozsh, with a little give & take. The usual fam was there, with the addition of my cousins. Lots of food as usually, but we were missing one key thing: pumpkin cheesecake. Last year, we had 2 cause both Jacqueline and I brought one. This year, we both didn’t bring one because Caroline said she was going make one (we asked her when we were at her house for the Pacquiao fight), but she forgot to. She make cupcakes instead. They were good, but it just wasn’t the same at good ol’ pumpkin cheesecake. As sort of a consolation, Uncle Ernie brought a ton of oysters.

We played our usually poker game. I got knocked out first, but had to stick around cause I’m the all-time dealer (don’t really know why that is? really, dealing isn’t that hard.....). Edrick won, with Tj coming in 2nd. And what usually happens after our game is over, is that we go downstairs to get more food, and all the food is gone. But not this year. There was hella food still left over. Yah! for a 2nd round of food coma!

But the one thing different about this year’s Thanksgiving was Black Friday. After looking through all the ads, online & in print form, there really wasn’t anything that any of us wanted to line up for, at least nothing that was worth it to wait 4 hours in the cold for. Chris was looking for a 3D, I was looking for the tv Chris got last year (55” LED 120Hz) & a cheap SSD. But there weren’t any deals for those. The closest thing that I considered was a 1TB portable external HD & a 2TB desktop external HD that both Fry’s and Target had on sale for $70 each. A very good deal, but not worth lining up for, in my opinion. Like, if Fry’s had the tv I was looking for, I’d line up for that, and try to pick up the HD too, but the tv would the priority. But that wasn’t the case, so the 1st time in 4 or 5 years, I was asleep in bed at 2am on Black Friday. It felt hella weird, actually.

So later on in the day, I drove Jay & his mom to the Vacaville outlets. There was still a crazy amount of people there. Parking was horrendous. The line outside of Gucci was ridiculous! What recession, right? And the sales weren’t even that great, as some sales were only good till 12pm (since they opened at midnight....early bird gets the worm, I guess). I didn’t even buy anything. The one store I wanted to go, Puma, was on the other side of the street from where we parked, and they didn’t want to walk all the way over there, and trying to drive there and find parking again just would’ve been dumb. But it was all good. We stopped by the mall in Fairfield on the way home. They bought more stuff and I did more window shopping. I saw a jacket that I liked at Macy’s, but it was probably the only jacket not on sale. What are the odds, right? Then we had dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. The service was pretty bad & slow, but I love their wings so.

Oh, I did buy one thing on Black Friday. I found a cheap SSD, after rebate, on TigerDirect. I actually did more shopping on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday. On Monday, I bought the Back to the Future trilogy 25th anniversary edition blu-ray on Amazon and a bbq grill at Home Depot (website). My dad actually wanted the bbq grill on Black Friday, cause it was in their ad, but they had sold out at the store in Vallejo. I just happened to check online, and they still had it in stock, with free shipping, with 5% fatwallet cashback. Yah! for shopping!

Volunteering is awesome.

I found this event through OneBrick. This type of event was the reason I stumbled upon OneBrick about a year ago. Overall, the event was a whole lot better than I thought it was going to be. And it was fun, as well as fulfilling (as in I felt good for helping out).

There were a bunch of other volunteers that weren’t with OneBrick there too, so they divided us up to do different tasks. Some people helped in the kitchen (but the kitchen was small so not a lot of people could help in there), setup the dining area, walked around the neighbor passing out flyers about the event, and setup the clothes donation area. What did I do? I got stuck with the floral arrangements. WTF, right? Well, they received a truckload donation of miscellaneous flowers, which were bunched together in plastic, so my job was to take off all the plastic, while the others would actually place the flowers in vases and arrange them all pretty & stuff. I tried making a vase, but I obviously didn’t know what I was doing.

When we were done with that, they gathered all the volunteers together and we did some ice breakers / team building exercises, which were sorta fun. Then we prepared to serve the food. I volunteered to be one of the servers. It was setup like a buffet line, with us on one side serving to the people on the other side. The food we served was way better than I thought it was going to be. Like, in my head, I was thinking it’d be just turkey, mashed potatoes & gravy, and maybe a dinner roll. There was actually waaayyyy more than that, and it all looked really good (of course, all the food was donated).

So I served for maybe an hour and a half. It seemed to go by really slow, because they would only let soo many people in at a time (due to the size of the dining area; it wasn’t that big). So everything came in waves. And we were standing the whole time. But it was cool.

At the end of my shift, I really didn’t want to leave. I ended up staying maybe an hour longer. But I had to leave go to my family Thanksgiving dinner.

Note: my shift started at 8am, so I left the V a lil before 7am. I got there (in SF @ 7th & Howard) around 735am. Absoluetely NO traffic. It was soo awesome. There was no one on the roads. It was sorta creepy, like it would be something you’d see in a disaster movie after a mass evacuation or in a zombie movie right before all the zombie invasion.

It was pretty freakin’ awesome. Most fun I’ve had in a while, more so than last week (as a participant), mostly because our volunteer group was pretty cool. I recognized a few people from prior events, some from which were also beer-related (Oktoberfest & Brews on the Bay).

Oh, and we got shirts for volunteering.

We got split into pairs to help serve at tables were the vendor wasn’t going to show up. I ended up at the Unibroue beer table.

They’re a Canadian-based brewery that focuses on Belgian-style beers. There were 6 different beers:
Terrible, Blanche de Chambly, Don de Dieu, Trois Pistoles, Maudite, & La Fin de Monde.

With the exception of the Blanche (5%), all of them were pretty high in alcohol content, between 8-10.5%. My favorite was the Terrible, despite it’s name, was not terrible at all. It was smooth, sorta sweet, and had the highest alcohol content, 10.5%, but it didn’t taste like it was that strong.

My 2nd fav was the La Fin Du Monde, which is French for "The End of the World", and was the fav of my serving partner at the booth.

Being a Canadian brewery, not alot of people knew much about the different beers. So when people asked what we recommended, we told them those two, and we happened to run out of those two first. We were also telling people to try the Trois Pistoles, cause it had the most flavor of them all, and my partner and I couldn’t agree on what it tasted like. She thought it tasted like ham, but I didn’t get that taste, though I couldn’t put my finger on what I thought it tasted like. So we asked people to try it and tell us what it tasted like, and we got a bizarre range of answers: sugary ham glaze, salami, raisins, plum pudding, apple, pineapple, pear, & corriander. And it usually went like this: they sniff their cup, take a sip, have a confused/perplexed look on their face, then take another sip. After their responses, I’d tell them what everyone else had said so far, and a lot of people agreed with the raisins. In the end, I think I sorta agreed most on the ham glaze. Totally weird.....

It was sorta fun pretending to know the beers. The people assumed we were from the brewery or knew about the beers, and we did our best to generalize our knowledge of the beers. If they asked for any details that weren’t on the box or the labels, we just fessed up and said we just volunteers. It was still fun, though. In general, talking to hella different was cool, and a bit different for me since I don’t really talk much anyways, but I really enjoyed it.

As for the other beers, there was a wide variety. I tried something called the Denoginizer, which was 9.75% and it actually tasted that strong. The Alaskan Brewing Co had a beer that had a hint of smoked salmon that just made me trip out. I didn’t hate it, but it actually tasted like smoked freakin’ salmon, which I still can’t really believe. I had a gingerbread beer that tasted like gingerbread, an apple cider that was smooth & better than Hornsby’s, a honey beer that was sweet, a couple of good beers from Allagash, and some other beers that I can’t really remember. They were all mostly really good. But since I drove, I couldn’t get complete hammered, but I still tried out a lot of beers. Not as much as last week, but at least I didn’t have to pay to get into this one.

Probably the best part of the whole thing was that we actually got to keep some of the beer that they had left over after the event was over.

There were dozens of cases left over, so a bunch of us just called dibs on whatever we wanted, or what we could actually carry. If I had paid to park inside Fort Mason, I could’ve drove the X inside and loaded her up with hella cases. But I was cheap and found street parking, and with a case of beer being sorta hella, Kev & I only walked out with a case each. If only I had known earlier!! But still, any free beer is good beer.

Afterwards, I was craving people, so we stopped by Pizza Orgazmica on Clement.

Good stuff. The place has a nice ambiance. A cool place to chill. But it had been a long day, and I was dead tired. We worked the whole duration of the event, standing & serving for about 5 hours. And carrying that case of beer to the car was no joke. But it was totally worth it.

I would like to formally recant my previous declaration, "I'd rather be at jury duty than at the DMV." At the time, I was going off just one, albeit good & short, personal experience with jury duty, against multiple "shoot-me-now-this-wait-is-ridiculous" moments at the DMV. Why recant? Because on Monday, I spent the entire day, 8am-4pm, at the court house waiting to possibly be called. At least at the DMV, you spend maybe an hour, 2 hours tops, waiting to definitely be called.

My first (and only other previous) time actually getting called to go to the court house was 4 years ago in Fairfield. I showed up at 8am, was picked in the 1st group of 12 in the jury box, and was sworn in as a juror before lunch. It was relatively quick and painless. But no, not this time (maybe cause it was in Vallejo?) I showed up at 8am, and they made us wait till almost 11am to go to the courtroom, but instead of just calling 12 people at a time, like in Fairfield, they sent everyone in, all 100+ of us. Seemed like overkill.

And they spent the entire day going through prospective jurors. They maybe went through 50 people, and only choose 11 (out of 14: 12 main, 2 alternates). So they made us come back today, to finish choosing the remaining 3. I didn't mind, cause since I work for the state, I get paid my full salary while at jury duty. This case was going to be at least a 3 week trial, and I actually wanted to be on the jury. I'd see it as a mini paid vacation. And yes, I'd rather be in jury duty than in Merced & Fresno.

The thing that made it painful was that there were 3 defendants, each with their own lawyer, so whenever a juror was questioned, there were 3 defense lawyers as well as the 1 prosecution lawyer, each asking multiple questions. And one of the defense lawyers asked the same exact question to each juror. It really old, really fast, and even got on the judge's nerves too.

But in the end, I didn't get picked . Hope it doesn't take around 4 years to get called again.

Went with Mark & Asher, and met up with some more of their cousins. Knowing we were going to be taking full advantage of the unlimited beer tasting, we took bart & muni there. But because of this, we got there a bit late, and only had a lil over 2 hours (instead of 3). But it was still all good. That was still more than enough time.

I know I tried 20 different beers, cause I was counting, putting marks on the wristband they give you at the door. I don't remember the names of all of them, but I remember liking Batch 19 and Ninanski. Oh, and the ones at the Sailor Jerry Rum booth.

And now for some evidence pics:

The 8oz. sampling cup. It really should've read "Drink..Drank..Drunk"

Inside the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason. Lots o' beer booths. Even more beer lovers.

At the Sailor Jerry booth. Yup, a rum maker at a beer fest.

Shave & A Haircut = Sailor Jerry + Guinness + Coke
Sailor & A Ho = Sailor Jerry + Hoegaarden + Orange Juice

The Senior Sisig food truck. They were undercutting the other filipino food truck that was directly across from it. And they were the last truck open when the event ended.

After it was over, we were all more or less drunk. Luckily one of Mark's cousin's gave us a ride to bart. I'm fairly confident that we wouldn't have made to bart if we had to take muni in our current states.

But actually getting to Mark's cousin's (John?) car.....I'm not exactly sure why what happened happened, but I'll try my best to explain. And keep in mind, we're all drunk. Well, we had to walk up a grassy hill to get to the car. Mark kept on stopping & laying down on the grass as all of us were walking. So I kept on yelling at him to get up. And I don't know why or what had gotten into him, but Asher was sorta dancing/circling around Mark. I think I started instigating that Asher could take Mark (as in take him down, WWE-style). And then I started yelling at Mark saying "you gotta let him do that?!?!" or something to that nature, I don't really remember. As we got closer to the car, we moved from grass to pavement. Somehow I got ahead of them, so I had to turn around and start walking backwards. Uphill. And then they started, I guess, wrestling? or something? Scuffle, skirmish, grappling? Whatever you call it, they were going at it. On the pavement.

During all this, I'm hella laughing but still walking backwards, and I end up rolling my left ankle. It stung immediately, but I didn't think anything of it, as I was drunk and hella laughing. I walked around bart ok, not feeling any real pain. It was then that we noticed their battle scars. Mark had a cut on his cheek and a red mark across his nose. Asher had red marks on his cheek and on the top of his head. And between the three of us, we couldn't recall how any of that happened. Or why.

For me, it wasn't till when we got to Cliff's for the Pacquiao fight, were I started to feel real pain in my left ankle. By the end of the night, my left ankle was hella swollen, and I could barely put any weight on it. Sucks, but hey, what am I gonna do?

Other than my stupid ankle, it was an awesome Saturday. And next Saturday, I'm doing it again. Sorta. Same location (Fort Mason), same concept (Beer Fest), but this time I'm volunteering to work the event (with Kev). In theory, we won't be getting mega blasted, since we're working the entire time, but you never know. It should still be fun.

Hella feeling like a grandpa right now. I'm hella tired and it's only freakin' 9pm. And I didn't even do anything today. I wanted to stay up to watch the premiere of Conan's new shop on TBS at 11pm, but I'm not gonna make it. But I'm gonna set my alarm and try & wake up for it. We'll see how how that goes. Damn, when the hell did I get so old?

So my mom's sister from Japan finally made it over here to the States. It's my mom's only sister (as the rest of her siblings are brothers). I shouldn't be surprised, but they're very much alike. It's sorta like having another mom around.

When she was still in Japan, they would talk on the phone a lot. Usually I'd just see my mom on couch with the phone up to her ear, not really saying much, which made it look like my auntie was doing all the talking. Well, now that she's here in-person, their conversations are more or less the same except now I can see, and hear, it first-hand (not that I know, or want to know, what they're talking about).

Damn, the hostess / maitre d' at Princess Garden was hella distracting today. Don't know how old she is, probably hella younger than me, but still. Very niiice!! (Borat voice)

So I've been working for about 9 months now, and I have 1 project under my belt (main phase complete, now in "support" mode). Every day, I check the state personnel board (the state's online listing of jobs) for any new jobs that I can transfer or lateral to. They're still listing new jobs every week, but with the current hiring freeze in effect, I can't transfer out of Caltrans (say, to the DMV or other state agency). I can only lateral within Caltrans, but there hasn't been any new/open/vacated positions posted since I was hired. Hopefully with Jerry Brown being elected, him being pro-"state worker" & all, he'll lift the hiring freeze and finally get me out of Fresno.

Aside from being far from home, it's not that bad working here. I work with 3 other programmers at the same level as me (associate programmer analyst), and 2 programmers at the next level (staff programmer analyst). My co-workers are more or less ok, but they all have their quirks. There's the guy who adds a laugh after mostly everything he says and who also can talk a lot (honestly makes me want to punch him in the face, but I can deal.....for now), the older lady who acts like the mom of the group but also complains about a lot of things, the quite asian guy who is very soft-spoken and takes forever to actually say what he wants to say (makes me want to bang my head on my desk or punch a kitten, but I can deal.....for now), the loud asian guy with the thick accent, bad english, and overall horrible communication skills (I try to tune him out whenever he speaks), and the senior of the group (in terms of time with state) who everyone turns to for help for anything but also takes the most days off/leaves early for her kids (totally understandable, I'd probably do the same thing).

For the most part, I can deal with all of that. But one of them is making everyone else "feel the pain" (as another co-worker put it). This particular person, who I'll call Esil, has been with the state for 3+ years, got promoted to staff apparently for "good work", & has been on their current project for about 3 years. In those 3 years, Esil's done a horrendous coding job, violating rules & standards that even a noob programmer at a community college would know not to do. Due to this shotty programming, the application keeps breaking, and Esil keeps on applying "band-aids" to keep it up & running, but this things' about ready to collapse.

So our boss is effectively taking Esil off the project and putting me and another guy on it, to do it right this time around. I don't mind, it's work, and I'm not really doing anything major at the moment. It's also interesting that our boss has openly said (just to us, and not Esil) that he does not trust Esil with anything, since everytime he asks if everything is ok, Esil says yes everything is fine, and then the customer emails us with another problem with the application. So now our boss doesn't want to give Esil another major project (nor do any of us want him to get another project period). And that whatever project Esil eventually gets, someone will basically be supervising him to make sure he's doing everything right. This is soo bass-ackwards, since Esil is staff, he should be supervising the associate, not the other way around. It's a hella stupid situation, and we're all sort of dumbfounded as to how Esil got promoted to staff in the first place.

And the sad part is, that we've actually told Esil exactly what and what not to do coding-wise, after reviewing the horrible code, but apparently nothing stuck or Esil just wasn't listening or I just don't know, but Esil just continued the bad coding practices and didn't take any of what we said into account. Even sadder, we're stuck with Esil. Basically, my boss can't do anything about it unless Esil decides to leave voluntarily, which everyone is hoping for.

Yup, this is the state......I have another story of fail, but not nearly as epic, but it's definitely something that I'm not surprised that happened. I may only have 9 months of experience here, but that's way more than enough time to realize how things actually run in the state. It's more or less all political, which more often than not gets in the way of what's practical.

A state job, I can't believe this is what I "wanted"......