today, yelena is on a train to copenhagen

and there are 1.5 days until my jet plane and (!!!) jazzfest. i love it. for now, i'm dealing with the summer interns. the structuring ones are all very eager and pretty smart. well, one's very eager, and one's pretty smart. i like them b/c they help me realize how much i've learned in a year...but when i explain things to them, i still feel i'm just a pricing monkey. oh well, bonus soon! summer is a very exciting time indeed.

and i should post about the dragonboat festival. we won our first race (incidentally, the slowest winning time of all the heats, but hey, the trophy tastes just as sweet...errr...right). 6th in our second race dropped us to the bowl final, in which we got 3rd (=more hardware). the day was...tiring. not just the rowing, which lasted less than 5 min cumulatively, but the...elements were hard to withstand. it was Hot. and the beach was full of trash. i'm surprised my feet didn't rot off from all the stuff washing up onto them, which is Sad. i dislike standing around in trash. and there was lots of standing and lots of trash.

credit suisse hired a junk for the day, which involved food and alcohol, which meant i ate pretty much continuously from 10am till 6pm, at which point, jon and i got left on the junk (everyone else disembarked to party in stanley). i went downstairs at one point in search of more food and found the caterers hosing off the table tops of a very empty boat. whoops. i made off with two packs of their ritz crackers just to spite them.

last weekend, we went on another junk. well, technically, we went on another 8 junks (tied together). it was a huge party full of alcohol and floaty toys and food. jon really liked the brownies (i know what you're thinking, but no sketchiness--they were catered), until he fell asleep for 4 hours, during which i got hit on by a girl. she was literally leaning against me and trying to whisper drunk nothings into my ear. this was right after she fell flat on her face, and a little before she fell flat on her face (she did it twice--at least). paulie eventually rescued me. i was awkward.
i tried to give her a tanline
food food food

i think i'm junk'd out for a bit though...especially since the asswipe junk owners decided to empty the septic tank right where everyone was swimming, and then they confiscated our whipped cream (apparently we were making too big of a mess). mess my ass. we paid for the boat (HKD4000), we expect you to do a little bit of cleaning up after us later. seriously. it's not that much work to hose the place down. and what did you expect? that we'd be having a tea party with white gloves and crustless sandwiches? and the biggest offense: they threw away countless items of half eaten, unattended (but not unremembered nor unmissed) food (eg cans of pringles, bags of chips, cookies, bottles of water). i understand you have to keep your boat clean. but really. it would be much less work to start cleaning AFTER we're done messing. and it's no f'ing excuse to waste food. jerks.

btw, today was like the christmas of blog posts. thanks everyone :-).

**AND even more christmas: TODAY IS BEN AND JERRY'S "FREE" CONE DAY!!--you hafta donate HKD10 to some charity, but still, much cheaper than a normal cone. whoopee!

some fancy ball that my friend dragged us to...original cost was over $200 but she used her doughnut challenge money to sponsor us.

my chiropractor wants my soul

i've been going to a chiropractor for the past 3 months. it's expensive, but covered by insurance. now that my plan is about to end, the good doc is making a bid for the full year plan:

ch: "you know who goes to the chiro? ac milan. the entire team goes to the chiro regularly. are you familiar with football?"
me: "i play frisbee...?"
ch: "but you've heard of ac milan right?"
me: "sure, but it was from your partner who made the same pitch yesterday."
ch: "you know who else? arnold schwarzeneggar. he's been going to the chiro since the 1960s! how do you think he got to where he is today?"
me: "you mean, governor?"
ch: "yes, the governor...yadda yadda."


and so it goes. if i sign on for the rest of the year, i'll be paying for it myself. here is another oft repeated conversation:

ch: "within the next year, you'll feel your symptoms disappearing."
me: "but i don't have any symptoms."
ch: "how do you know? maybe we're curing symptoms that you would've had had you not come here."

hmmm...here are the before and after xrays of my spine. the green line is where the "optimal spine" is. the red line is my spine. basically, my neck used to be tilted slightly forwards. now, i'm all akilter. i feel like i have to sign on for the full program to get them to straighten me out again. bah.

jealousy

my friend is getting HKD4000 to eat ten donuts in an hour. ten. why don't people throw money in my lap like that? i eat ten krispy kremes in an hour for fun.

mario party!

if you dress like mario at a party, you cannot:


dance sexy
shoot drinks without concern for your mustach
jump on sketchy men to kill them

but you do have a license to:

dance SILLY (EVEN SILLIER!)
pepper your conversation with the word "meat-ah-ballles" (as in, "i'mah swea-ting like ah spicy meat-ah-ballles")
jump around like a cartoon

it was a fun night of outrageous italian accents, boogying like a robot with a toilet plunger, and of course, chowing down on bar food. the music was all over the place. everytime a strange song came on, i would envision a celebrity from that period and dance like them. a lot of my celebrities ended up being john travolta (as in, disco--what would JT do? country--what would JT do? 50s--what would JT do?), except in that footloose song, where i was obviously kevin bacon.

mmm...pizza!
die koopa troopa!
this dude won the costume contest
wantonly, wontons.
we found a cool crepe place
but jon's wasn't very good
yo luigi, word to your mother.
holla.

i'm only happy when it rains

i'm leading sunday's man D practice. finally finally, these people will learn the backpedal drill. i'm slightly nervous but mostly just excited. hopefully, i won't ramble. they're all mine to smite-ify. MOOHAHA.

the sun's blacked out again, which means i'm given to evil laughter. MOOHAHA.

does anyone else have the problem where their nalgene cap comes off all the time? it's annoying when you carry it with a caribeaner.

one thing i really enjoy about hk: the stray cats.

a weekend with shuang

we picked shuang up at the macau ferry terminal early saturday morning and made her row in our boat. she was a good sport about it, pulling with the rest of us galley slaves. the guy sitting next to me threw up. the people behind us kept yelling "TIMING!", but they didn't realize he was dying. i patted him on the back to show that its not his fault he can't keep up with me. i think shuangy did ok. she sat in the back and yelled "TIMING!" with the other tyrants.

then we dragged her to frisbee practice. everyone was super excited that here was this girl who could throw. she crushed twenty people's collective dream when she said she was leaving monday (you could see the light dying in their eyeballs). otherwise, she was very useful in my campaign to be a mid. see people? here's what a real handler looks like. i'm a MID! a MID i say! i got chastised for arriving late. apparently, if i'm to continue in my ass-captaincy, i have to actually warm up with the team and show up on time and do all of these other serious frisbee things. i wasn't pleased. i hate warming up. boo! i bargained for introducing more smite plays if i actually hafta put effort into this program, but the stupid diplomat captain shot down every single one in a diplomatic way. i didn't even get the red call for the io throw to the front.

for food we had too much. shanghai for stone pot ma po tofu rice, a pot of stewed pork with chinese buns, half a chicken wanton soup, xiao long bao and sticky rice shao mai, salad, and soy milk. shuangy and i both out ate jon by two whole points (we didn't even normalize for weight).

technically, this is food with henri, but it's at a shanghainess restaurant, so i think it counts.

henri lost the rosh for the fried "fin".

and this is just a "pudding" i had at wildfire.

and this is just a lemon tart that "jon" had.

and finally, we come to the stewed pork we had with shuangy (i tried to take a picture of the stone pot ma po tofu rice, but the server had already stirred it up, and the picture resembles puke in a stone pot).

shuang, valiently downing the half-chicken.

and that night, after showers and lounging (in which our hero lily is soundly defeated by a kakuro puzzle), we went to chez kate for homemade green curry and gado gado. shuangy played with the two cats (attention whore cat and shy-half-tail), while jon and i avoided socializing by perusing kate's extensive book collection (she's a third generation journalist).

sunday morning, i was greeted by wistful harmonica music. what a good way to wake up, i thought, until i realized they were trying to play twinkle twinkle little star...the wistfulness came from the mournful pace they used. to show jon how it should be done, i joined shuang in a rousing rendition of said song in which i harmonized by squatting on the G note and blowing extra hard whenever shuangy came to it. yay me!

while jon and i dragonboated again, shuangy wandered the city streets in search of animals. she found the monkeys and the tai chi elderly. somehow, she had enough time to climb to the peak and back before joining us for noon dimsum, in which (guess what?) we ordered too much food.

a bouquet of fried chunks (they should let me write their menus).

then frisbee again, then food again, and THEN a night of zelda on wii (jon had a toys r us voucher begging to be used). we named our horse quiche. Yum!

and now, i am shuangless again. 4 weeks and counting!