Chatting with Sam, a long time friend, for the first time in a very long time:

corona13 (11/1/2005 4:00:41 PM): did i um, tell you about the rap song i wrote?
lecrivains (11/1/2005 4:00:53 PM): no!
corona13 (11/1/2005 4:00:59 PM): it's nothing epic, but it's hilarious, in my opinion

...

lecrivains (11/1/2005 4:05:25 PM): i like it.
lecrivains (11/1/2005 4:05:36 PM): the song is cool..
corona13 (11/1/2005 4:05:40 PM): HAHAHAHAHHA yay thanks!
lecrivains (11/1/2005 4:05:48 PM): the caroline has rhythm. cool!

...

lecrivains (11/1/2005 4:20:46 PM): i added your song to my iPod.
corona13 (11/1/2005 4:21:35 PM): HAHAHAHHA YES!!!!!
corona13 (11/1/2005 4:21:42 PM): that is freakin' awesome

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That made me feel good. I mean, Fri and I got added to someone's iPod! Wow.

Congratulations to Sam and his wife on expecting a baby girl in February. He's gonna be the best daddy ever!

This morning was bizarre. In between snoozing on my alarm clock (as usual) and trying to ignore people calling the house NONSTOP for an hour straight (very unusual) I had this weird dream that some contruction workers had broken into the house and were building this really ugly statue on the roof. I was aghast because if the landlords were to find out about this, I would for sure be in deep doodoo. I was telling the workers to stop and that they were building on the wrong house and to take that thing off the roof but they insisted that we had ordered it. Weeeird.

A disjointed post for a disjointed start to a day.

I was too tired to go to the Hallowe'en parade, so I just went to a little costume gathering tonight.

It was nice.

I gave a girl a lap dance as an upcoming birthday gift for her - as per her request.

Someone threw up at the end of the night but it wasn't me. Whoa.

I'm now peeling everything off and showering and washing all this gunk out of my hair and getting all the makeup off my face so I can just collapse. Into. Bed.

Yay for an extra hour of sleep.

It has been a trying couple of days. I have reason to believe I left my brain at home before I went to Austin ...

missed IH-35 on the way up to Austin to Wei's place. How the hell did I do that?!

got a parking ticket downtown for being 8 minutes late to my parking meter. My walk-in appeals hearing did not help.

locked myself out of car. Did not know where keys were, if they were in the car, or what.

friend Sharon was telling me she was going to buy a bus ticket to come back to Houston this weekend. I went with her to purchase her round-trip bus ticket. Only 30 seconds after she purchased it did it occur to me that she could easily just ride home with me.

on my way back to Houston, when getting on SH-71, had a TOTAL brainfart and went WEST instead of EAST!!! Wasted 2 hours going the wrong way in bad traffic before realizing what I had done. What. The. Hell.

left my hoodie at Sharon's house after dropping her off and going in briefly to say hi to her parents.

The silver lining:

missed IH-35 on my way up, but turns out I did not stray too far and easily rectified the situation.

found free parking on University Avenue today.

Oscar came home from work just to help me out. Movers passing by spent time trying to help me out. Really felt the love. And while Oscar was helping me out, he got a call saying their offer on their new home was accepted!!

1 minute after checking with the apt leasing office lost 'n found, a couple of ladies found my keys laying around in the grass and turned them in!

the bus ticket purchase is good anytime in the next year.

because we went the wrong way, we got cool pics of bad traffic and weird things in the back of trucks. And had plenty of time to chat.

I'll be able to retrieve my hoodie tomorrow when I go check out my Sharon's dad's sunglasses shop for the first time. And hopefully pick up some cool shades for my tiny noggin.

just felt really loved because so many people took time out to chill with me. I even got "serenaded" by the wonderfully talented and candid Howard (Chi-Wei's bro) - I love it when people play stuff for me (Windows Media Video, 2min 44sec, 5.3Mb).

overall just loved the radiating energy of being around younger people on campus, bonding with kids who are now all grown up, and catching up with Wei.

This site really disturbs me. I mean, a dating site dedicated to infidelity. Wow. Hard to believe such a thing exists. Money is a strong enough motivation to build a business out of anything, I guess.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned in that I figure if you aren't ready for commitment and wanna play around, do it, but if you are ready to settle down, do it, and stand by your decision.

Three hours of driving almost nonstop in a lot of total darkness listening to nothing but the drone of the road rolling under me and my munching of Doritos is strangely therapeutic.

So, to the few people I still know in Austin, I'm around for a couple days. So if you see a little Asian girl who looks about seven years old, possibly on rollerblades, taking goofy pictures of herself around UT, that'd be me.

Shoot, it's 12:33am, and they're STILL playing baseball. The Astros need to hurry up and win so that I can go to sleep. [yawn] I guess they can accompany me as I get some work done ...

Those players have gotta be tired too. They sure are playing like it. I guess who wouldn't, after playing 5 hours of baseball.

1:22am: fux0rs, the 'Stros lost. BOOOOO.

1:35am: some stupid-ass reporter on Fox26 just said, "I'm seeing a lot of sad faces on the fans, Ron, lot of sadness, and just a lot of fear of getting swept, just terrified that we'll be swept. Back to you, Ron."

F@#$. Whatever. Isn't "terrified" a little too much for a fucking baseball game? Um, I think I remember feeling terrified when Hurricane Rita was headed our way. Yeah, I was pretty terrified that I was possibly going to die and had no control over it. I hope the Astros win, but I am NOT terrified of them losing. Stupid media, I hate them all. I'm terrified of the day the public stops critically thinking about what is fed to them and just eats up everything the media says. Now THAT'S a terrifying thought.

OK I hate all the stupid media except for my bro. And I guess my bro's friends. As long as they don't incorporate the word "terrified" when referring to fans of a sports event ...

Verdana is currently my favorite, most-used font for typing stuff up. I use it on anything I type out for patients, on my brochures, my website.

Prior to being aware of the existence of the Verdana font, I did some research on readable fonts when trying to decide which font to use for publishing stuff. The sans-serif stuff (the stuff without little curly things on the ends) is easiest to read (ie. Arial). The serif stuff somehow takes longer to read - probably cuz there's more "clutter" (ie. Times New Roman). Looking through my list of available Windows fonts, I finally settled on Verdana, and have even switched my default font styles to Verdana in MS Office. (When I like something, I do all I can to submerse myself in it. More of my obsessive-compulsiveness showing through here.)

What's your favorite commonly used font?

Oh my god - tonight, my only "had-to-do" mission was to buy a plane ticket, but it took WAY longer than it should've and with WAY more frustration. So I was having a pretty good time using Yahoo's Farechase finding cheap fares to go to my "big sister's" wedding in SoCal (I felt they had the best search engine interface compared to my usual suspects Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz - and was cheaper too! I wonder how long they can go without charging the $5 "service fee" every other fare comparison service charges?). Hundreds of clicks and typings later I finally click "Purchase this Continental Airlines ticket" ... and then I find out that it's better to use IE6 (I was on Firefox) and the transaction doesn't go through!! Yarrrrgh ... then I switch over to IE6 and input the exact same times and dates into Farechase and have it all down within 5 minutes and ... what the heck ... all the prices go up by $6!! Not much, but what the hell?!

So, being Internet shopping savvy (some call me a cheapass Internet shopaholic, but I like "savvy" better) I instantly hop on over to Continental's website and breathe a sigh of relief cuz the prices are still the same there. And then I go through the whole process AGAIN, clicking and typing, all in IE6, and AGAIN IT FAILS!!! RAHHHHHHH

Fine. I pick up the phone and am forced to talk to a real-live person (my pride in being Internet savvy makes me feel that much MORE savvy doing everything online - c'mon, talking to real live people is SO last year). Thank goodness she was nice and waived the $10 "ticketing fee" since I did try my hardestest to book online. The best part? I found out they have vegetarian snacks! A few years ago, I'd asked about a vegetarian meal on the flight, and some Continental employee very rudely told me that they were no more! That Continental "didn't do special meals" anymore! Maybe snacks and meals are different?

I'd also like to share a car rental comparison website that beats out the rest (I haven't looked on priceline - I'm shying away from that just cuz I don't know how it works anymore, and the last time I used it - when it first came out - you couldn't control your schedule and stuff): Car Rental Express. Dude. Cheeeeeeap. Me likey.

Mission accomplished. Although there were moments when I felt like using my head to bludgeon the computer to pieces, so I had to bring back the gruesome gif here.

So um, am I the only one out there who shops online so much that I have my credit card number (and 3-digit CVV code) and expiration date memorized? Say it ain't so ...

With Ashley, whom I hadn't talked to in a while:

Me: Hello? Hello?
Ashley: Hello? Hello? Wei?
Me: Hey, can you hear me? It's Caroline!
A: What the hell - Caroline? Hey!
Me: Hahahaha! Nice way to greet me ... [sarcastic tone] nice to hear your voice too, girl friend! Hey, whatcha doin' Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights?
A: Are you coming up to Austin? Do you need a place to stay?
Me: Yup!
A: Well, we have an extra bedroom. I'm not in town right now, but John's home ... I'm in China.
Me: WHOA ... holy crap ... okay then bye! Shoot! It's probably like $3 a minute to talk to you!
A: Well John's home ...
Me: Oh dude don't worry about it, I can stay with other friends, I was just thinkin' that I hadn't seen you in forever.
A: That's cool, I'll call you when I get back and we'll hang out OK?
Me: OK hurry up and hang up bye!

Yeah. I should uh, try to stay in touch a little better. Well, not really ... although our friendship is super low-maintenance (we might talk twice a year), whenever we do get a chance to catch up it's like we never missed a beat.

Although ... if I'd had known she was in China, it would've prevented me from running up her cell phone bill by $3. Sorry, Ash!

Saturday night, Violeta and Viet had a housewarming BBQ at their new digs. Viet got the party started by getting the girls tipsy [ key lime pie margaritas ... mmmMMMM ] and grilling some scrumptious veggies. Then Violeta changed into her Thai shirt (Fri got me mine from Thailand too!) so that we could pose as twins [ back ] [ front ]. Then we busted out the Scrabble set (my first time playing on a Deluxe set!) and watched the Astros play. We learned that "merlon" is a real word. The Astros lost, but it's all good. Apparently they lost tonight too. Mark my words, they'll come back! (The official prediction from someone who doesn't follow sports, hahahaha.)