end of 2003 holidays….

The last 2 weeks have been pretty hectic and busy. Haven’t really had to time to update my journal or anything, but here’s a rundown of what’s been happening:

Sat dec 20 Blackout :

We recently changed the way we pay our electric bill. Now we have to put this little meter-reading card in our window at the end of each month. Well, unfortunately I totally forgot to do it for November and we were a little nervous as to how the electric company would react. Saturday night, we were hanging out at my house and all of a sudden, everything went black. Uh-oh! Turns out that it wasn’t just our house that lost power though, the whole neighborhood had gone pitch black. It was actually pretty exciting and fun to have all the power go out. Caryn and I hung out at our house for a while w/ Erica and Kevin. We lit candles all over the place and wandered through the rooms w/ flashlights. After a bit, we decide to venture out and see what it was like outside, so we grabbed some glasses of wine and headed out.

Being outside was pretty fun. How often do you get to see your whole neighbor hood all in pitch black?? It was such a strange sight. Lots of people were wandering the streets trying to figure out what as going on. We tried to call random people on their cell phones to see how widespread the outage was and it turned out that practically half the city was completely dark. Cool! We wandered down to joey and catherine’s house and they came and wandered around too. It was funny to see that certain restaurants were still open and serving by candlelight. Certain bars were doing the same thing. Later on that night (the power was out for about 8 hours!) a bunch of us went to a couple of bars and hung out in the dimly lit rooms drinking. What a night!

Sat dec 20 Circus :

The night of the blackout we had tickets to go see the circus performance called “seven fingers”. Luckily, the palace of fine arts was in one of the few sections of the city that still had power. Phew! The performance was really cool. It was all done in a similar style as cirque du soleil. Cool trapeze, and acrobatics performances, mixed w/ music, funny bits, and theatrics. All of us enjoyed it.

Dec21-24th Shopping :

The next few days were crazy and hectic. I pretty much always leave my holiday shopping till the last second, but somehow this season it everything seemed even more rushed and crazy. I think it’s partially because my work only gave me 2 days off for the holidays (25th and 1st) and also I had a bunch of different family obligations planned, so I really needed to get everything done in a hurry. I spent several days going to work and then stressing as to what to get various people. There was a lot of difficulty w/ some of the gifts, which I won’t bother going into the details about here, but everything was so crazy. Over the next several days I was totally exhausted. Trying to hit the malls on the 24th was insanely hard. Ugh!

Dec 24th Decorating the tree :

On the 24th we decided to get together and decorate the tree at my parents’ house. Because of so many different plans for the next few days, this was the only day we could do it. It was also one of the days of hannukah, so we celebrated that too. Caryn came over and go to light her first Hanukkah candle ever. It’s funny to have people take part of traditions they’ve never been a part of before and see how they experience it. During dinner, we were talking about the different Christmas light displays we’ve seen, and caryn happened to mention that at Vasona Park they have this thing called the “fantasy of lights” where you drive through the park and there are tons of different characters and stuff made out of Christmas lights. So my mom decides we should all just pile in the car and go see it right then and there. Totally random. The fantasy of lights was pretty damn cool. Afterwards, we decorated our tree as planned.

After getting home, caryn and I exchanged stockings. Now, this is something I’ve never done before. I honestly wasn’t sure what goes into a stocking or anything. In fact I didn’t actually even get her and actual stocking, but instead just wrapped a bunch of little gifts. The stocking I got from her was hella cool. Tons of fun small stuff like rubber duckies, hot sauces, little champagne bottles, candy, etc. t his whole stocking tradition is pretty cool!

Dec 25th Christmas :

For Christmas we drove up to rocklyn and spent it w/ caryn’s step mom’s family. The last time I visited her family, I had met her dad’s side, so now there were all new names and faces I had to memorize. And since it was Christmas, there was a *ton* of people there. Trying to figure out and remember who was who was nearly impossible. I didn’t really spend too much time talking to any of the people there. Afterwards, we went over to her parents’ house and kicke4d it w/ her dad and step mom for a while. That was much more nice and chill. Her parents bought me a travel book for me for Christmas. A nice and thoughtful gift, although it turned out to be a book I already had. So they exchanged it and got me lonely planet’s “southern Africa” which looks super interesting.

The next day was spent trying to do more last minute shopping and stuff. Ack. So stressful!

Dec 27th Christmas part 2 :

So, 2 days after celebrating Christmas, we drove up to rocklyn to celebrate Christmas again. This time w/ her dad’s side of the family. This was the second time I’ve met that side of the family, so I was much more comfortable that time. Caryn’s family is all really nice and I can totally tell that they make effort to be friendly and accepting w/ me. That’s pretty cool.

Her dad did most of the cooking for this Christmas, and he’s a really good cook so the food was hellza bomb. There was also a gift exchange that was pretty cool and funny to watch. We ended up staying there till a little past midnight.

Dec 28th New Years a bit early :

My brother left to go to Vegas this new years. He left on the 29th, so the only time that my family and I could celebrate new years was on the 28th. We went over there and had dinner, ate lots of food, and opened gifts. I had earlier mentioned to my mom that if “Santa” was still confused as to what to get me, he should get me Tivo. I didn’t think
she would actually go for it, but in the end, that’s exactly what I got. Shweet!! My dad made a toast saying that 2003 had been a year full of hardships and lots of bad things and that he hoped that 2004 would be better. It was interesting, because he said that despite the many unlucky things that happened, there was actually one very lucky thing that happened and that was my brother’s car accident. It was cool that instead of seeing it as an unlucky event, he saw it as all of us being super lucky cause my brother came out unharmed.

Dec 31st New Years Eve :

For new years a bunch of people went out to dinner at a restaurant called Andalus. It was a nice tapas restaurant in the mission. The food was sooooo good. Everything we ate was incredibly delicious. They had some pretty good drinks too. Afterwards we went across the street to a bar called elixir. The bar was packed, but instead of being packed in a festive and exciting way…. It was just packed. The midnight champagne toast was a bit confusing, abrupt and didn’t actually happen at midnight I think. Oh well. Afterwards we went to the Luna lounge to try to go to the popscene Nye thing, but the line was too long. After trying to figure out what to do next, we went to some house party. I don’t think anyone was doing all that much drinking and due to all the breaks in between doing things, we were all kind of running out of steam. Eventually we went home.

And now it’s the beginning of 2k4. Hopefully it’ll be an exciting and awesome year. I think it’s already gearing up to be. Caryn is moving in with me in just a couple of weeks which should be cool. And then in July we’re gonna take off to travel around the world. How crazy is that?!

-v