Married Life

I've been married for a month now and become an official Mrs. What's different? Um.. not a whole lot except that I need to make a conscious effort to refer to Ming as "my husband" and that I need to try to find time to unpack. I still have not fully unpacked into Ming's house yet because .. well, I don't really have a good excuse. My excuse is that I've been busy and lazy.

Over the weekend to commemorate our month of being married we decided to make a big purchase. It was our first big purchase together and it wasn't really to commemorate our month of being married -- it was more like because it was time for Ming to have a new car. We bought a 2007 Maxima and he is currently enjoying it everyday on his way to and fro work. It's his new toy -- got all the bells and whistles of keyless entry, bluetooth , navigation, etc.



I don't get to drive it very often since it is his car but it is a really comfy car to ride it. It gets decent gas mileage for a full sized car and I love the wood trim ^_^

Honeymoon Photos

Finally got a chance to upload the photos from the honeymoon
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=16iblc65.7fmpd1dt&x=0&y=vp97ox

Back and Married!

I’m back from Mexico and now I’m a Mrs.! It’s hard to believe that after all the planning and doubts that the wedding went off beautifully. If there were any snaffoos, people hid them from me. I couldn’t have asked for a better wedding and everything went off flawlessly. Everyone looked great and now the only thing I’ve got to do is twiddle my thumbs for 8 weeks until the photographer gets us our photos. Yes, it really does take them 8 weeks before they will be able to get our photos back to us.

We had a fabulous honeymoon. We boarded the plane bright and early on Sunday morning and landed in PVR (Puerto Vallarta, Mexico) without any issues. The smallest problem we hit was that we got nailed at the airport by someone trying to sell us a timeshare. Uh oh. Luckily we managed to eventually get away from him and take the shuttle (a taxi) to the hotel.

The hotel was the best! Upon arrival they served us some cooling fruit drinks. The checkout process was us sitting on the couch, sipping our drinks, and the guy coming to us to say “are you ready to go up to your suite?” The hotel itself is totally gorgeous. It caters to tourist (both from the states and Mexico) so it’s got top notch everything!

Our honeymoon package was for an all inclusive resort so all of our food and alcohol was covered. We took advantage of this and ate 4 meals (on average) a day! We had to get our moneys worth, so to speak, so we had to eat $360 worth of food and beverages. We drank so many drinks and ordered a ton of room service. With every room service order we ordered a bottle of liquor. We only found this out on Thursday but, after finding out that it was comp’ed to the room, we kept ordering bottles of alcohol. We didn’t mange to finish a bottle but sure had a good time trying!

The rooms had a Jacuzzi hot tub and that is the best thing to relax in right before you go to bed. Your muscles are totally put at ease when you sit in it for half an hour before bed. I highly recommend it ^_^

The weather was gorgeous and we enjoyed 90 degree weather everyday. Both Ming and I ended up getting a really dark tan, not that we’re complaining! ^_^

There were 2 peacocks roaming on the grounds of the hotel. One was an albino and one was a gorgeous blue and green one. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get any pictures of the blue and green one. We also saw a huge green lizard/iguana on the grounds of the resort also. Everything there was so vivid in color – except the albino peacock of course.

We went into the downtown area of Puerto Vallarta for all of 2 hours before heading back. It was too much of a city for us and we wanted something a bit more remote and less dirty and touristy. We went to downtown to buy some Tequipal (Tequila cream) and then bee-lined it back for the hotel.

The food was completely amazing at the resort. I found out what real chalupas and gorditas are – not a thing like the Taco Bell ones! They were so tasty that I believe I ordered one each day. ^_^ We ate fine dining almost every night and consumed a ton of seafood, lamb, chateau briand, etc. We had some really good food. I could go back again and eat more foie gras … ^_^

Pictures to come soon …

Plastic cups

I'm about to spend nearly $200 for plastic cups for the wedding. The plastic cups (actually champagne flutes) are going to be used for a grand total of 5 minutes before guests throw them away. *sigh* You've gotta love all the "little" costs of a wedding

12 days left and counting ...

I can't believe the wedding is almost here. I've got 12 days to finish all the preparations. Whoa ... Am I ready? Absolutely not. O.o

The one really great thing will be that I get a chance to see all the out of town friends and relatives .. it's just the sprint up to the wedding that is the scary part!

Officially Domestic

I have officially become domestic. I subscribed to the San Jose Mercury Newspaper.


Ming and I will now receive the paper 6 days a week and, like proper Palo Altonians, faithfully recycle the paper daily.

All I wanted to do was receive the Sunday Ads (him for the Best Buy and CompUsa and me for the Target ad) and I ended up getting the whole paper. O.o

RSS Feed reading

I've finally gotten my act together and stopped doing the "old school" way of manually navigating to a site to see if it's been updated. I have finally gotten an the habit of reading the RSS feeds instead. I am using Google's RSS reader. It's so much easier to read RSS feeds now! I can't say that I love Google's implementation but its better than navigating to each site manually.

If anyone has another suggestion for a better reader, let me know ^_^

Lemon Squares Part Deux

While Ming was out enjoying Sin City with his posse of guy friends I made lemon squares this weekend. Since not everyone knew what lemon squares were the last time I posted, I decided to take a picture this time around.

They were so tasty ... I wonder how long they'll be around before we finish them all.

Rainy Days

Rainy days bring me down. There isn't anything to like about rainy days. I suppose that one could see something special and likeable about them .. but after months and months of rain, I definitely can't feel that way. Had I ended up working full time in Seattle I think I'd end up suffering a big period of depression. :p

I'm a sun person. The rain gets my clothes messy, prevents me from wearing nice clothes, makes traffic terrible, and generally just brings bad news and circumstances. I used to laugh when I heard that doctors prescribed tanning salons to combat the winter time blues. I laugh no longer. I can see now how beneficial it'd be to get some sun in and pretend that all is status quo (well, status quo is sun for Cali). If I wasn't so against tanning (and losing my nice pale complexion) I'd actually consider going to a tanning salon.

Tomorrow is Easter. I hope that the weather is better and brings some sunshine for people who celebrate Easter as their one special day of the year. Hell, maybe going to an Easter celebration would cheer me up and be my "tanning" solution to the spring time blues -- yikes, that term shouldn't even be applicable but it is.

My Schedule for the next week

Wednesday - Friday	Get butt kicked at work during working hours. Work on assembling and sending wedding invitations until the wee hours of the morning.
Saturday - Sunday	Tahoe for Snowboarding
Monday - Friday	Get butt kicked by work. If invites are not finished yet, really, really scramble to get them out and sacrifice any and all sleep.

Boy, it sure sounds like fun >_<

Healthy Dinner for those on the Go

This is a really cool company idea: http://www.myprepcook.com. The company basically delivers all the food prepped and ready to go. It allows busy people to cook their own food when they get home and requires the person to have minimal equipment at home. The menus look actually decent. Price is a bit steep at $15/meal + $5 delivery but for those people who are too busy to prep their own food, this is an ideal solution.

Ride Around The Neighborhood

I bought a road bike and finally had a chance to ride it today because it was sunny outside. It's been a LONG time since I've actually ridden a bike so I was a bit wobbly at first but eventually remembered my bearings. My first trip out with the bike and it ended up 2.5 ride. I rode with Ming and we had a ton of fun. We rode around Los Altos and Palo Alto and even made a pitstop to pick up some veggies for dinner. I saw many, many beautiful homes in Palo Alto and Los Altos. There was even a point where I thought that we had to be in a neighborhood filled only with CEOs because the houses were so nice. Each house seemed to be a villa/castle. It was insane. I hope to one day live in one half that nice. =)

Back from the Dead: Drink Club

I received an e-mail from Drink Club today. O.o I thought that Drink Club was totally dead! I haven't been to a Drink Club event for a long time. I guess the promoters got their act together and started throwing parties again.

For more details, go here: http://www.sfdrinkclub.com/emails/060317.html

Taiwanese Food Explained

I can describe Cantonese food. I can describe "northener" food (Sichuan, Hunan, etc). I cannot describe Taiwanese food. I don't know what the exact differences are other than to say "everything I ate in Taiwan was yummy." Aside from eating delicious banquet style food while in Taiwan, I can't say what Taiwanese food is compared to Cantonese or any other type of Chinese cuisine.

Luckily I don't have to describe Taiwanese food because this site does it for me: http://www.eatingchina.com/articles/art-taiwanfood.html

Lemon Squares

I made lemon squares last night because my co-worker brought lemons to work. I brought a bunch of lemon squares into the office today and it was a total hit. I brought in about 3/4 of a pan and it vanished in about 45 minutes -- and it isn't even 10:30am yet. My co-workers loved it and couldn't stop thanking me for bringing in the goodies. It brings a smile to my face to make people that happy and appreciative. ^_^ I made them because it was therapeutic but it's a double gratification when I see how others appreciate them so much.

Paper is heavier than you think

I never would have imagined that invitations can weigh so much. The wedding invitations are being shipped and they weigh 20 lbs! How does paper weigh that much? Dear god.. what am I getting myself into with the postage. O.o

Mrs. Ming or Plain Ol' Cindy

There’s a lot of debate about whether or not the girl should change her name to her husband’s once they get married. It can be argued either way, change or not to change. In the Chinese culture, the girl never changes her given name (her Chinese name). If her name is Amy Chan before they are married and her husband’s surname is Lee, then she is still known as Amy Chan by friends. When she is referred to in context, then she is called the wife of Lee. This pretty much eliminates the whole messy ordeal of “does she change her name or doesn’t she?” Dear god, my ancestors thought of everything. ^_^

I found it particularly funny when I was researching wedding stuff to find a white girl who was marrying a Chinese guy trying to “asian-ify” her wedding. Because of the aforementioned statement, she’ll never use the guy’s last name, at least when writing in Chinese. They made a sign that contained his Chinese last name (written in Chinese calligraphy) with her English name and his English name. Now while this may look really pretty, it is quite the gaffe. It’d be the equivalent of getting a bad word tattooed on yourself when you really thought the word had an entirely different meaning.

Moral of the story: While giving things an Asian twist can be very “in” and it can look very pretty, you’d better double check before embarrassing yourself in front of friends and family.

What a million dollars can buy you

If you had a spare million dollars lying around you could buy this 3ct pink diamond ring:



Or this tiny house in Palo Alto:



Hm... ring or house .... ^_~

Shoes, shoes, and more shoes

I received my wedding shoes over the weekend. I ended up buying a pair of Vera Wang shoes O.o I couldn't help it... they were so nice and tall and had point tips. I'm a sucker for pointy shoes



I also bought a pair of shoes at BCBG that are pointy but they totally messed up there. They gave me a pair of mismatched shoes! I didn't think to check the sizes when I left nor did they check it when they rang me up. My left shoe is now bigger than the right. Grr.. I bought the shoes in Napa so going back isn't a possibility. I called them up the next day and they're going to send the shoes to the Great Mall store and I can go exchange for the correctly matched pair. Phew... The only bummer is that I now need to wait a week for them to transfer the shoes to the Great Mall.

Night of Gluttony

Tonight I'm going off my "diet" (not really a diet but promise to eat healthy) and I'm going back to the Lobster Shack. They got a fresh shipment in of seafood and that means I'm going to dine on fried Ipswich clams and oysters on the half shell. Mmm... I love lobster shack. The food is so incredibly fresh and I don't believe I've ever eaten sweeter scallops other than at that restaurant. All the seafood is flown in from the East Coast (Boston, Maine, etc) and everything is fresh, servings are amazing, and quality is outstanding.

I think I'll have died and gone to heaven after my gorging of clams and oysters tonight.