life goes on in SF-O

Model boys are so hot =) these are from the DSQUARED2 Summer 2008 show. left one is my fav Andre Ziehe from Brazil

Just finished Final Fantasy XII. Spent 100 hours on it . . . always felt lost and sad when I finished any FF games. I’ve been playing them since FF VII  but I didn’t finish VII yet. My fav is still FF X. It made me cry =) hehehe.

FF News:
FF XII’s Sequel is going to be on DS and XIII will be released late 2008 on PS3. YAY!!!!

Balthier is so super hot:

I spun at our 2008 NYE house partee!!!! I rule!!!!! Well, I just started practising and I only spin CDs. I have no vinyl records. Judy must testify!!! Was I ok or not?!?!?!? AND JASON: they’re all white people in this pic. Who said yo gonna be the only white dude? HUH HUH HUH?

nothing deep and meaningful to report . . .

had lunch with neil at that korean place at rincon food court. note to self: beef bowl is NOT bibimbap, the veggie bowl is.

email server down at work. still don’t understand why we pay someone to do less than what gmail does. i really don’t mind the ads. this email service delete our WORK RELATED emails after 70 days. gmail never deletes my emails. conspiracy.

went to church st 24 hr with mandy man. ran 4.23 miles. exhausted from work, couldn’t do 5. treadmill is boring anyways. but it was raining. there were some cute boys to look at at the gym =)

had a big fat crepe with provolone cheese, pinenuts, roasted chicken, pesto . . . etc for dinner at crepevine with mandy man. she had some salad with a few pieces of chicken satay looking things. i think she ordered the chinese chicken salad and a catfish po boy to take home for peter. i didn’t order anything for mike . . . hmmm . . . mike had frozen chicken pot pie for dinner HAHAHAHAHA

something about pesto+chicken/turkey+advocado that works magic for my tastebuds. then i took the muni train home. time flies when i play zelda on my NEW nintendo DS. mike thinks i am ready to move to the East Bay, NOT.

judy called and said she’s gonna be working at the SF office for 2 weeks!!! YAY! i didn’t call her back cuz i ain’t got no job number to bill to when calling the gensler wall st office. they have the new SHoretel system, they can call anywhere in the world with no job number. wait, why didn’t i use my cell phone? hmm? oh i remember now. i hate talking on the phone.

i am so happy i made dear friends in NYC *muah*

oh and i watched Hairspray (2007). James Marsden is sooooo yummie dancing and singing in that movie. Zac Efron has some growing up to do. TOOOOO twinky for my taste. Brittany Snow has 6 pac abs (see John Tucker Must Die). Amanda Bynes did a pretty good supporting role but sorry she can’t sing.

Tarnation (the movie) gave me a headache.

Mandy did 6 miles this morning without me cuz I got up too late to run and then go have brunch with the in-laws. So I did 7.4 miles by myself. I miscalculated so I was short. Finished in 60 minutes. So that was approximately an average of 8-minutes miles. OH WELL!!! 9 miles next week!

Misc. stuff:
Karoleen suggested going to Ghetto Disco at the Endup Friday cuz Melissa was going with her friends Mike and Jonathan and a couple o dykes. We got there 3 minutes late and had to pay $20. I was like I ain’t gonna pay $20 to go to the Endup, no way missy. But then Melissa’s super generous friend Mike offered to pay us in. How can I refuse. I tried to pay him back but I think he’s part Chinese (he looks white though) so it was very difficult. May be I wasn’t trying hard enough. Had fun, got 2 free packs o camels, a shiny cigarette holder, a torchy cigarette lighter . . . and Melissa got a ton of free photo booth photos shot, with us, with random stranger boys, and more of us.

My fingers are getting tired and they’re still a bit frozen from the run. I’ll run through the rest:
Edward brought us to a house party one of the coowners of Club 8 Jonathan was throwing. Very fun. Met some of Edward’s very cool friends, Roy, Wayne, and Jo-Jo, hosts Jonathan and Vince, and super nice Wyman from LA. I didn’t talk much to the super cute bartender (I was too shy) but Jonathan said he’s gonna start working at Dragon =) hehehe

Before then we went to Classic Sichuan in Millbrae right by the Bart station on El Camino Real. Similar to Spices II in SF but with more depth. I was very impressed with the dishes.

This morning, we went to Suppenkuche. My dish - farmer’s omelette - was forgettable. When I order something with bacon, I want to see bacon. If I had my eyes closed, I would not have known that there was bacon in that omelette. It was seriously 99% potato. Whatever. Not somewhere I’d go, wait for more than an hour, and pay more than $10 for a plate of taters with some egg around’em. puke. Mandy’s tiger prawn omelette did have around 2 tiger prawns chopped up in minute pieces tho, was tasty, I give you that.

This hasn’t happened to me for a long time. Ratatouille (the movie) made me cry. The scene when Ego tasted Remy’s Ratatouille teared me up. It was a sweet moment =)

Work has been nuts but for some reason it’s easier to deal with when I have a real home to go back to at night. AND Mikey too!

third week of marathon training!!! 4 miles Thursday at lunch YAY!!!!!

Sep 19, 2007 Wednesday. Did my first SF Chase Corporate Challenge, 3.5 miles, 25:53 min. Just under 7:30 min miles. Not bad for a smoker. Karen did a great job organizing and she was still waiting for folks to show up after the race started. So selfless. I’m very grateful to and proud of her setting this all up for us.

Course was very similar to the Presidio one we did last year with Mandy, Mikey, Rob
Chen, and someone else . . . I forget. It’s a little longer than the 5K (3.1 miles) run but it was way fun anyways. At the beginning of the 3rd mile, runners were turning back running downhill while I was running uphill to the turnaround point. I was all pumped up by them. All I could think about was "I want to be one of them", running back down looking at the running up "slower" runners. HAHAHA I started running like there’s no tomorrow and sprinted like I’ve never done before at the last 0.5 mile.

I gotta try do 7 min miles next race. Oct 7 Run for Peace in Berkeley.

*
“既來之，則安之”Just trying to see if my blog page would display Chinese characters. It means since you’re here, why don’t you settle down and be content. The last part may be implied (by me) but it sure is implying that one ends up somewhere reluctantly, and instead of sulking all day and night whining about not wanting to be there in the first place, one shall try to make the most out of the experience.

Tong Cho Pai Gwut (sugar-vinegar-spare-ribs)

Time to talk about food. Not about a restaurant this time. I started putting my restaurant reviews on YELP. They’re a bit more organized and communitized (is this a word?).

So I was getting my $9 haircut in SF Chinatown, depositing allowance for my dad at the HSBC on Clay and Montgomery, AND buying Vitasoy for Mikey. I went into this tiny little shop that’s still open at 6:45pm on Stockton. Most Chinese grocery stores are closed by 6pm. I don’t know why but we seem to always run into kitchen crew, wait staff, store keepers eating dinner when we go about our own business. Anyways, while stocking the ramen shelves with her super agile feet and toes, this auntie was eating a simple bowl of rice with boiled cabbage (I think there’s dried shrimp on it too) and a few pieces of braised spareribs with sugar and vinegar TCPG (see above). It was so simple but beautiful my eyes got watery, or was it the salivary glands in my mouth . . . screw the details yo.

I was so inspired I immediately bought some spareribs and made it at home. God I was good. Sometimes I’m so good I scare myself. But then I get scared by my own shadow at times.

I used the Chinese black sweet rice vinegar (ChenKiang, similar to balsamic) and a couple pieces of the Chinese wafer brown sugar. The tanginess of the vinegar and sweetness of the brown sugar were deeply infused into the meat, OMG. And the pork fat combined with the thick brown sauce coating the spare ribs seeping down the little pockets of air between clusters of rice. Shit, I’m drooling on my keyboard now. Gotta stop typing and stuff my face with something substantial quick . . . butter on sourdough English muffins would be a nice little first breakfast course!

Gotten used to the crowded city streets in NYC, now I get bored running along the Embarcadero *yawn*. I barely see a soul for the 30 min run at lunch from the YMCA, past AT&T ballpark, then to 16th and 3rd st and back.

So today I ran down 3rd street toward Market, up Kearny towards Chinatown, along Columbus all the way to where Tower Records used to be, up Bay Street to Laguna, touched the Fort Mason monument sign, then (catch this catch this) all the way up to the top of Laguna, back down the hill towards J-Town, thru the projects and turned left on McAllister towards Market, along Market back to 4th St, and back to Stillman. 80 min total. Whoever can tell me how far that is gets a GOLD STAR =) hahahaha

Pix of the week taken by pervy boy Daniel. Taken at Sunset house outdoor party, McLauren Park, some of you have already seen the hunky drummer dude). After much effort, we still could not figure out what jeans he’s wearing. If you wanna try figuring it out, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/dtsao/ There are a number of close up "back pocket" pix.

Been back for more than a week. I guess I got into the nasty habit of keeping a blog. Last night I was super antsy. Contemplated going to have happy hour with
Norm/Lucia/Rowena/Crouton/Karoleen and hitting the gym before then (all
because Kristien stood me up, were supposed to start swimming again
every Friday YO!). But none of those happened. Went home sulking and
went for a run, a game was on at AT&T Park. Still not knowing what I was really craving I let my mind wander . . . Ryoko . . . Foreign Cinema . . . Slanted Door . . . Beard Papa . . . R&G Lounge!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mike was a little sulky too when I came home from the run (139 Stillman to 20th and 3rd st and back thru th UCSF Mission Bay campus). So we decided to go eat steamed dungeonus crab at R&G Lounge. South Sea Seafood Village in the sunset is my fav but it’s a bit far when I need to feed soon.

We ordered the steamed crab with egg white and shaoxing cooking wine, eggrolls with salmon and avocado, R&G beef, and the XO sauce stir-fry chicken cubes. R&G beef was fine but probably not worth mentioning. I always order the XO chicken. THE dungeness crab tho put me right in perspective after my 2.5 month long trip to NYC. It pulled my soul that has been lingering in East Village right outside of Oh! Taisho 3000 miles West and dumped me right back here in San Francisco. Not a millimeter of the crab meat was stuck on the shell. It was perfectly cooked and flavored. Crab juice was absorbed by the bed of egg white at the bottom of the deep dish. Mike and I sucked on the egg white off the shell like it’s crab meat spilling outta the shell. Don’t mean to be blasphemous but it reminded me of what one of my pastor said in a sermon, "The church has no boundary, these walls do not define the church. We have to carry out God’s words even outside of these walls." The egg white did just that . . . blending the inside and the outside of the shell . . . is this analogy offensive?