I'm trying to put the holiday spirit on hold

...because I'm trying to focus on finishing this semester before I get too carried away with the upcoming holidays, but it's too late! Plus that have already been made:
- Going to the DSO with my mom
- Frankenmuth with the family and B
- Lunch with Lynda, who I haven't seen since this summer
- Dinner at Claude's (Eek!!!!!!)
- Dinner with Chris and Natalie to catch up
- Holiday dinner "with the fam" aka all our friends and their S.O.s
- Holiday party at Tom H's, which will be fun because it's all Ricardo people who don't know I'm B's "plus one" yet
- Ugly sweater party at Nicholas and Lauren's
- Lots of time with my hunny!

I've even got so many surprise gifts planned with different people about each other, it's been a challenge trying to keep them straight!

On a separate note, I don't know if I can last a week with this apartment with these roommates (not Britney though... I'll miss her). I have put up with too many stupid pig sty things... like toilet paper never being replaced and random toilet paper rolls sitting all over the bathroom. The garbage never being taken out, piles of garbage sitting next to the garbage can because no one has taken them out, falling asleep to Ginny singing her heart out at 2am... no more! I can't take it anymore!

Just gotta get through finals and a few more days...

Al Dente pasta party night

Swedish Meatballs Night

Ya know what? Umm I'll be right back

I've started about 4 entries on Blogger in the last week and a half or so, and none have really stuck or explained anything that has been going on. And a lot has been going on. I guess I'll go backwards with some of the fun events :)

BGS family's in town and I finally got to meet them for the first time :) Just like him, they are all very open and welcoming people. And it's so cute because him and his brother are such momma's boys! They absolutely adore her and it is so sweet to see the three of them together!

Benny Benassi was Friday. Awesome music but terrible night! It was so unbelievably crowded, we had not other choice but to brutally push our way through to move anywhere. But at least the music was good for how short we were actually there before the boys got fed up and we left. And I didn't get a chance to meet up with Nicholas either :(

Lunch with Claude on Monday when he was in the Belleville area to see Karen. And somehow Joe, Suzy, and Phil went also, so I did too. It was so good to see him! I definitely miss him a lot.

Went to the Robyn Hitchcock concert at the Ark with Bry, Chris, his wife Gill, and Dave P. from work. Went to Conor O'Neil's beforehand... had strawberry and rhubarb pie for the first time! I thought rhubarb was some kind of garlic... dunno why! Anyway the concert wasn't really my style (I guess Chris is somehow related to Robyn through some in-laws or something), although the opening guy - can't remember his name - was really good! But Robyn was a little bit odd... he rambled on about the most random things I've ever heard in my life. Like he told an anecdote about a girl who bought herself flowers and couldn't see herself in the mirror because ironically the flowers were in the way, but then some man appears and the flowers begin to spread everywhere and he transforms, and the flowers grow and grow out the door and down the street, then something about people in a coffee shop watching him fly by, and then something about a guy melting into a pile of nothing at the end of the street. And that was the end of the anecdote. Yeah.

Dropped by the new Hammell Music in Wixom with Bryan on our way to pick up my car. I've kind of forgotten everything about the differences in pianos and brands, but it was still fun to pretend we were going to buy a $70,000 Steinway.

Went to a house Techno party with BGS for a little bit, which was fun while it lasted (why do I feel like I keep repeating this? haha). I have such a blast dancing with him even if we just turn some music on in his room and goof around.

BGS and I had a little dinner date with Brett and Layla (and eventually Dave came) at Seoul Garden, a Korean restaurant close to where the guys live. We ordered a couple Korean barbecue dishes that you cook yourself on this little grill thing that they set on your table. Aside from just having a great time and drinking a bit of Soju (okay maybe more than a bit), the food was actually really good! Bry even ordered cow tounge, which was surprisingly not that bad.

Friends etcetera etcetera

I absolutely love BGS's friends! They always give me hugs and good handshakes and genuinely want to know how I am doing or what's new in my life. They remember what I've talked about before and ask how those things are going. And BGS is so good to me - we talk to everyone around us in seperate conversations but he always has his arm around me or is holding my hand, but we also talk to each other every so often as if nothing else matters.

I went to Cafe Felix with BGS last night to meet up with Sammie, Brett and Layla (finally got to meet her!), Lovell, and two of Sammie's friends from Toyota and for wine. Had an absolute blast - couldn't stop laughing and smiling while still having both hilarious, stupid-funny conversations as serious, intellectual conversations (and I'll point out I wasn't even intoxicated).

This past weekend, we went to Sammie's to meet with DB, Hugo, Brett, and a bunch of other people from the FSAE team I'd met a few times before to watch the F1 race. Okay, so this time I was a little bit intoxicated (you know, beer on an empty stomach), but I still had such a good time. Sammie made salad and this really good shredded BBQ pork and Brett brought Hobgoblin (yusss an excellent combination!). I actually really got into the race now that I've been following and watching the previous races.

Sam has been pushing the idea of getting together to do weekly potlucks at his and Lovell's house, on top of our sort of regular Wednesdays out to Cafe Felix. I am so excited to feel like I'm part of their group!

Eat Drink One Woman

I started writing this entry called "Favorite Restaurant Foods" while on the phone with BGS and he thought I was talking about one of those "You Are What You Eat" entries on Eat Drink One Woman. So I decided to write both :)

Name: Tammy

Occupation: Student/Eternal Intern

Borough: Suburbia a half hour outside The D, MI

Relationship: Taken, by someone I'm head over heels for!

What did you eat today?
I'm ashamed to say because I ate so poorly today! An iced tea, croissant, and banana for breakfast/lunch, and another iced tea and dumplings with rice and corn for dinner.

What do you never eat?
Tomatoes... even though I like salsa, marinara sauce, and ketchup. Not a big fan of olives or seafood with tentacles.

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:
Shredded Mozzarella cheese, apple juice or high pulp orange juice, baby carrot sticks or some other kind of veggies for dipping, Marzetti's Veggie Dip to go with the previous item, fresh frozen fruits for smoothies or other desserts (in my freezer), eggs, sliced turkey, and a roll of croissant dough.

What is your favorite kitchen item?
My Magic Bullet, which I realize sounds like a sex toy but it is really just a small, powerful blender that I constantly use for smoothies, milkshakes, and dicing foods like boiled eggs for egg salads. Best used for pulverizing though.

Where do you eat out most frequently?
Beirut La Pita but probably because it is close to work, fast, inexpensive, tasty, and everyone I'll go out to eat with likes their food. They have this amazing dip they just call Garlic Dip, which I could live off of.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?
A four course fondue meal at the Melting Pot with a couple close friends (which I've mapped out below), and a ridiculous amount of wine:
1. Cheddar fondue: Aged, medium-sharp Cheddar and Emmenthaler Swiss cheeses, lager beer, garlic and seasonings. Served with diced apples, celery, and bread cubes for dipping.
2. California Salad: Mixed baby greens, Roma tomatoes, walnuts, Gorgonzola cheese, with a raspberry walnut vinaigrette dressing.
3. Coq au Vin fondue: Flavors of fresh herbs, mushrooms, garlic, spices, and burgundy wine. Served with chicken, shrimp, teriyaki beef, broccoli, potatoes, mushrooms, yellow squash, sauces for dipping (curry, chipotle, teriyaki, sour cream & chives, and Gorgonzola cheese dip), and two batters for breading (tempura and a sesame seed batter)
4. Yin Yang chocolate fondue: half dark chocolate, half white chocolate. Served with strawberries, bananas, pineapple, graham cracker covered marshmallows, oreo crumb covered marshmallows, cheese cake, and pound cake.

My favorite restaurant foods

Steve and Rocky's House Salad: Assorted greens, pine nuts, grapefruit segments, red onions, dried cranberries, with a honey-mustard vinaigrette). It's a very simple salad, but with a little bit of fresh ground pepper, I can never stop eating it even when my food arrives.

Buca di Beppo's Chicken Marsala: Sautéed chicken breasts and fresh mushrooms in a sweet Marsala wine reduction. Much sweeter than any other Chicken Marsala I've ever had. Until I had Buca di Beppo's Chicken Marsala, I always felt like chicken marsala sauce at other restaurants tasted more like a gravy with a little wine mixed it, but now my opinion has changed! This is what real chicken marsala is!

Zingerman's Roadhouse Mac and Cheese: Homemade cream sauce and lots of 2-year old raw-milk Vermont cheddar caramelized with the Martelli family's artisanal macaroni from Tuscany. I'll never be able to associate the words "real mac and cheese" with "box" ever again.

Sushi House's Lion King roll: Crab meat, avocado, spicy shrimp salad. Toasted, then topped with crunched tempura. Puts a spicy spin on the California roll. Plus, I've never had sushi toasted before.

Beirut La Pita's Chicken Schwarma Sandwich: Aka "Schmarma" or "Schaaa-warma" as we now call it... grilled chicken, tomatoes (not on mine though!), pickles, and garlic sauce wrapped in pita bread and grilled.

Ajishin's Udon noodles: You can't beat a huge bowl of Udon noodles in a broth with crab, seaweed, green onion, and mushrooms for five bucks. Amazing, and you get your money's worth!

Olive Garden's Pasta e Fagioli soup: white and red beans, ground beef, tomatoes, and pasta in a savory broth. Think upper-class chili with pasta, but not as thick as chili. And you know I'm a fan of chili!

The truth is all there is

Events from last weekend through this weekend:
Barbecue chicken pizza
Lehv
East Lansing
Seeing Zach
Zingerman's
Whole Foods dinner
Curry lunch in Canton
Mrs. Belo
Steve and Rocky's celebration
Car shopping
Buca di Beppo
SNL
Pad Thai noodles

I've changed my mind on a few things

1. iPods, specifically the iPod Nano.

I went to the Apple store with BGS recently after stuffing ourselves with sushi at lunch and walking around the mall a little bit. We were playing around with iPod Nanos, and I guess I'm starting to see what they hype is about iPods. I mean, no offense, but it's just another fancy tool that I think I'm familiar with enough to still say with validity that it's never really impressed me. On a separate level, I've never been a fan of people who close themselves off from the world by always having their headphones on everywhere we go. How do you approach someone with headphones? I heard a friend of a friend ranting at a Pistons party awhile back about how he sort of met this cool girl at the gym but avoided talking to her as much as he wanted because she always seemed focused listening to her music and didn't want to ask her to remove her headphones just so he could say hi.

2. Raw red onions in sandwiches.

Asians don't eat uncooked vegetables. Maybe with new-age/Westernized foods they'll try to, but for the most part, I haven't been a fan of raw veggies until I recently discovered raw carrots, raw broccoli, and raw cauliflower dunked in Marzetti's ranch veggie dip. Anyway, I was feeling adventurous last week at Subway and decided to order a sandwich with raw red onions on it (which I've always thought the taste was terrible). Turns out, I really like it now except for the fact that no matter what you eat, your breath will smell like onions for the rest of the day. I guess it's a risk I'm willing to take now that I really enjoy having onions in my burgers, sandwiches, and salads.

3. How a relationship is defined.

This isn't something I've turned 180 about, but... since I'm seeing someone new, this is a revisited, much redefined, and re-evaluated idea for me. All I can say is, I can't believe I was okay with not feeling like this before in past relationships!

Get ready and prepare yourself

I bought these babies today

Soooo dress? Check. Shoes? Check. Date? Nope. Still deciding if I'm going by myself or going to try to con a guy friend into going with me. If only I could buy those off Amazon also. Or I could just not go. Wait who am I kidding? This is going to be the night my shoes make their big debut. I can't rob them of that :-P The only thing is, I have what is apparently called toe cleavage. When I put the shoes on and saw my toe cleavage, I sort of freaked out that my toes had somehow grown abnormally large recently (I didn't have this problem with any other shoes). But I asked CE, who is much more with this stuff than I am, and I guess it's the new, somewhat popular style. I checked online, and sure enough. It's a hate it or love it kind of look but I love these shoes so I'll risk looking like I have freakishly long toes just to wear them.

On a separate note, my new computer toys came in at work today! You'd thinking being in IT, we're spoil ourselves by always having the latest equipment. Nope. It wasn't until recently did Claude tell me to go ahead and order Kristi and myself Dell Latitude D830 laptops! To order them in a certain price range, we had to make sure everything "upgradeable" was as low of a spec as possible. Then we can, as Claude said to me, "pimp it out". It has a 15.4" screen, Core 2 Duo (2.20 Ghz), 24x CD/DVD RW, and 256MB NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 140M graphics card. I already upgraded the RAM (it had 512 MB and I added 2GB) and plan on upgrading the hard drive from 60 GB to 80 GB or 160 GB. Hmm what else can I do to actually pimp it out so it looks nice? I also have a new 22" Dell widescreen monitor to go with it. Claude let me have his old monitor when he got a new one, which then got traded out for the 22" (the old one was a 20"). Definitely super geeked - ahhh!!

I've forgotten to mention! Props to Blogger for all these awesome new features ! By far, Blogger has got to be the best and most sophisticated blogging site I've ever worked with. I feel like I'm finding new features every week that make editing entries and the template easier and more customizable. The best is that I've been looking online for a long time for an HTML code that will simply allow readers to flip through entries that are older or newer rather than having to click on all the archive links.

A few things I'm really looking forward to:

CE's Swedish meatballs on Friday - CE and BGS and I have gotten into this swing of cooking together/for each other. I'm have to boast I'm pretty impressed at what I sort of did. CE decided we would make some sort of asian noodles with veggies and some sauce her roommate had. I used my exquisite taste (not really, haha, I was just hungry) to add some soy sauce and PB to make it a little more Thai. Then over the weekend, BGS made chicken and peppers grilled in Italian dressing with the rest of the noodles we didn't use from the Thai dish. I already have my plans for food laid out, but it looks like that won't be until after Friday.

Zoo Day on Saturday - like last year except this year it will be at Toledo and not Detroit, and there will be no plus one for me :(

You're the party baby, I'm just the guest list

Pictures from this past week: taking a boat from Jason's cottage to the Detroit fireworks, grilling outside on the patio with the other interns/E1s, dinner with the robotics folks, and partying it up with Megan, Matt and D.

Some kind of summer weekend

This past weekend was productive and fun, but somewhere deep inside of me, I've still been anxious for this upcoming final exam. I've gotten to the point now where I'm not worried about the grade I'm getting, but more so just passing this dreaded class so I can get it out of my system.

I try to avoid having to talk about school as much as possible because I just cringe thinking about it. But when the topic does come up, I very often get one of those, "No offense or anything, but your Asian" and I go "I know I know!" As if it isn't enough to wake up and see in the mirror that my image does not match my scholarly success, people have to tell this to me like they've just seen a Penguin try to fly. "But Penguin, you're a bird! You're supposed to be able to fly!"

Aside from all this, D took me out for lobster on Friday after work. It might have been the first time I've had real lobster that you break open yourself. It wasn't bad but I did get a little squeamish when D started snapping the claws together to show me how the lobster moves his claws.


Afterwards, we swung by to pick up Romey and went back to D's to see Inga, her mom, and her dog. Romey and Cici (the Shi Tzu) are so funny together! They're also complete opposites. Just for fun, we walked over to Cat's to see her and her parents and show them the puppies (kind of a blurry picture).


I couldn't fall asleep Friday night. I just laid there like an idiot with so much on my mind, I finally woke up and read through some work emails and stuff until I felt a little more tired. I just feel so restless sometimes, I don't know what to do. It's kind of ironic though because once I'm asleep, that's it!

Saturday was a trip to Ricardo with Tim, and then to Uncle Lazslo's for Goulash. Romeo, Cici, and Daytona ran around the yard all night until Romeo discovered Martha's horse. He threw a fit and growled and barked at the horse all night until we left.

Saturday night, I fell asleep on the couch at 10ish (I don't even remember D leaving my house). Woke up at 12 for long enough to walk upstairs, and then I woke up at 5 to change into pj's, and fell back asleep until 1pm. Talk about abnormal sleeping habits.

Fall Out Boy... and two girls

So D and I were at the Tran's house with Gabe, Andy, and Stephanie when we got a call from Jason. Apparently, the Fall Out Boy concert that he went to with the other Stephanie and her little sister was a bust.

Before even making it into the concert, the girls had each received two misdemeanors and of course he had three. Probably because Stephanie's sister is 15!! I would never bring a 15 year old with me to snack on jello shots when tailgating.

Either way, good thing D and I didn't decide to go! I can't forget I'm stil underage ;)

Rock on the Range in pictures

Maybe they just don't get got.

I haven't been on the computer for awhile or writing here, partly because I've been trying not to write when I only want to rant, and partly because I've just had so many other things to do in my free time.

My winter break started off on a great note (mostly because finals went so well), except I was also sick for most of break. Because you all love my lists and I am too lazy to write solid sentences:

- Annual family Frakenmuth trip to Bronners- Christmas Eve with the Brhliks and the rest of the Hungarian gang- Christmas at home with the family and Anna's family
- Lots of family games like Chinese Checkers, Jenga, and Extreme Jenga
- Cooked dinner with Yvonne- Martinis and daiquris with the group (didn't have margarita glasses with me though)- Playing "Santa" to Olivia and Antonia
- Goulash party/bonfire... outside in the middle of January
- Ate at Jim's restaurant, City Cellar, curtesy of Jim, the head chef :)
- Pool at Tom's with the group
- Bowling with the group (which I am terrible at)