i think my dried fruit went bad

:-(

2007 Survivor Beach Hat Tournament

i was waiting for pictures to publish, but meh, its been too long.

i've survived my first TD experience.

• our columbia sponsored shirts got cancelled. instead of shirts printed with the tourney logo, we bought white shirts and made ppl paint them in their tribal colors (or not, depending on their mood). the columbia sponsored water bottles were awesome.


• fewer ppl showed up sat night than expected. more ppl showed up sunday than expected (==> financial fiasco). more organization from me would've helped. we managed to sneak 8 extra ppl into lunch (we'd only paid for 40. i have no morals, i know, but neither do the restaurant owners. they claimed the buffet lunch of chicken, fried rice, fruit, french bread, pasta salad cost $180 a head).


• we didn't get to do a lot of our survivor challenges, but our buried water idea turned out beautifully (we dug holes in the sand and buried trash bags with ice wrapped around 5-gallon jugs. we used electric pumps (meant for petrol, but completely new) to pump water up).


• some cable tv channel showed up to film.


• nobody got seriously injured, so our team of 6 paramedics (3 male, 3 female--who knows why they separate their teams into male and female ones) got pretty bored.

i also survived the weekend, despite some serious set backs:

• jon, alicia, and i rented bikes on saturday to venture to the nearby supermarket. little did we know that the road to the supermarket was a MOUNTAIN road. i was heaving and hoing all the way there. and my back brakes didn't work, so careening wildly down wasn't really an option (especially with all the construction trucks and buses coming the other way). and then we had to heave and ho all the way back (uphill both ways! downhill both ways!). and then my pedal fell off. luckily, we were pretty close to home by then and the road was flat for the rest. i rode it one footed using the push-pull method. i would raise the pedal with the top of my foot and then push it down again. i lost my shoe in the process.


• kevin made a pipe out of a coke can. it worked much better than the aluminum foil one we were using before.


• sat night, one of the guys started blowing fire from the tikki torches. and then he swung fire from the ends of ropes (like at that waterfire festival we went to last year). in between flaming feats, he'd walk on his hands. turns out we had a circus performer amongst us. awesome.


• no one actually got naked for the glow-in-the-dark game of disc, but i'm ok with that. there was a huge hole in the side of the field. christina ran straight into it and face planted. her wig went flying. did i mention that i love slapstick?


• when we went to find our tents, we found a cow. maybe it was a water buffalo. anyways, it was standing between two tents. what was it doing? you guessed it: pooing. it left a huge paddy right in the middle of the path, next to a lamp that wasn't working. we chose tents on the other side of the grounds.


• apparently, other ppl found the tents super hot (i thought it was quite nice). they moved to sleep on the beach, right before it started raining. whoops. and apparently, the sex noises from one tent kept the dogs howling all night. i was oblivious to it all.


• and then sunday went swimmingly. one ruffian tried to sneak past me without registering, but i tracked him down (i had to tackle him to the ground and stick my knee in his mouth). nancy, you should really teach your brother better manners.

following the crowd

ditto on the johari window:

http://kevan.org/johari?name=makazooer

gridlock

The jazzfest saga, part deaux:

in preparation for my marathon flight, jonnie charles elliot and i breakfast'd at the flying pan. (if i call him by all his names, it sounds like i have more friends).

and then i was off...to spend all eternity stuck in ORD airport. my connecting flight to boston got cancelled, and i was supposed to get on the next flight, except the customer services lady gave me another huang's ticket. as such, they kicked me off the flight, refused to hand me the ticket back (it was the only proof i had that i was supposed to get to boston eventually. they claimed it was a security risk, even tho they had already let me on the flight as the imposter huang, and the flight had already left). my only recourse, it seemed, was to stand by with a bazillion high school kids (also from boston, also coming from hk). the next seat for sale wasn't for two whole days. so daddy booked me a hotel room and talked his agent into changing my flight into a direct one for montreal the next morning. i called cchu who called keister who stole my bag from the boston airport (no security issues at all) to bring to montreal for me ("uh lilz, is your bag the one with the donkey ears inside?"). the silver lining? daddy booked me a king sized bed and a complimentary breakfast. AND, a giordano's was waiting right around the corner. i consoled myself with a whole stuffed hawaiian pizza and all the sitcoms i could watch (welcome home!).

and then the next morning, i got in the domestic line (cuz you know, i want to go to the state of canadia). and then they told me i couldn't get a ticket from boston changed into a ticket for montreal. and then they tried to tell me i had to stand in line again (for the third time). and then i cried. so they told me to speak to a supervisor. who left before i could speak to her. so i made them call me a supervisor. but they refused to pick up the phone when it rang again. and then magically, a supervisor popped out of nowhere, and i sobbed my story to him, and he clickedy clacked on his keyboard, mm-hmmm'd a couple of times, and let me on my flight (FINALLY!). apparently, it's not that you can't change a flight's destination (even if that destination is in a different country). it's that you usually can't do it for free. but they dicked me over, and my dad flies a lot, so eat my shorts, united. next time, i will try REALLY HARD to fly thru san fran. ohmigod cuz life is too short, and i have important things like this to get to:

at jazzfest, smitten lost in the finals to storm (whom we beat in the finals last year). we ran out of legs, and i gave up on a couple of deep discs. the last turn was a run thru d on me :-(--she laid out right past me. over the course of a year, i've gained a few things and lost a few things. i've traded 1) my will to cut continuously and 2) my backhand huck for 1) a better read and 2) a better flick. ah well, maybe my lack of intensity means its time to take a break.

the drive back from jfest consisted of sleeping and eating (for me). first we picked up some roadside strawberries (and then i fell asleep), then we visited the cabot cheese place, where i learned that i CAN eat cheddar and other aged cheeses cuz the lactose all gets digested by the process (proccess, you are my hero). if anyone knows of any non-cheddar aged cheeses, lemme know pls so i can start consumption post haste. and then i fell asleep. and then we were at the beer place. the bottling process is pretty phenomenal. stuff like that always makes me want to be course 2. and between naps, we went to 2 more cheese places (one of which sold yummy chocolate). the next time i woke up, we were in boston and atong had stuck some sour patch kids on my face. oh, and somewhere in there, atong managed to lose a bet about how to pronounce the double-l in peru, which meant she had to chubby bunny a 700 calorie chocolate muffin that had been sitting in the sun all day. it was mighty sweaty. moohaha.

while i was in boston, i generally hung out with smite a lot and ate a lot, which is par for the course for when i'm in boston. otherwise, i:

• had a picnic in the commons with kdob during which i made marshmallow taffy, ate foodtruck food, and beat atong+meryl at flutterguts (yang is REALLY good).
• bought matching hats with laura and yelena.
• 
yelena's so beautiful
• ate at the northend
• (both plates are mine)
• ate at soundbytes (where we learned of the soundbytes strife
• 
• slept thru the fireworks (which was quite the feat cuz it was cold and rainy and loud)
• slept thru ratatouille
• had a marathon eating day where we started at 11 with lunch at veggie planet, had mochi and boba at tea stop, test drove a prion(?) to finance our second lunch at border cafe, walked back to tea stop cuz cchu wanted some too, walked to christina's cuz ICE CREAM!, walked to tosci's cuz MORE ICE CREAM! and got home in time to get take out from red bones. phew.
  

AND i found this poster that described me perfectly (it says: I'm Lilly! I am the queen! I like EVERYTHING! (to eat)). That thar next to it is a daisy.

that was quite the mouthful. also also, i just wanted to say that i'm doing phone interviews at work. whoa the responsibility!

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!

digging for nuggets

mcdonalds is having a promotion, and i'm possibly 1 box of 9 mcnuggets away from 365 boxes of free mcnuggets! everytime you buy some mcnuggets, you get a card. you win if you can make the big picture (which is only divided into 4 cards).

at first i thought, no way, too easy, what's the catch? i mean, i expected to get a ton of 1 card and maybe 1 of the other three...but now i realize that their gimmick is not giving people cards unless they ask for them. they've even stopped branding the mcnuggets boxes with the promotional picture. but you can't make me forget mcD, i've got your number! you and your nuggets are mine! of course, i'll have to share the loot with jon once i win. he's such a crybaby otherwise.

come on lower left quadrant! come to mama.

jon the giant

china nationals

we lost to beijing 8-7 in the finals. we were up 7-2 at half. they bageled us in the second half, going on a 6 point run to take home the first ever championship title.

i'm a little bit pissed, but not as much as i normally would be...most of our turns were first pass turns by handlers...one stupid upwind hammer from handler to handler (a guy in the cup got to it first)...one dropped chest-level pass...silly mistakes that had nothing to do with me. maybe this is a bad attitude, but a kdob philosophy that i take to heart = you should change the things you can change and let the rest be.

i had an almost perfect game. i think i scored 2, assisted 2, threw 1 turn (an around backhand in the redzone that floated a bit too much--i had another backhand that got caught in the wind, but i think that was against shanghai)...no drops, no one scored on me, and the girl i was covering only touched the disc once or twice (both on dump passes). i'm pretty proud of the no-one-scoring-on-me clause, considering i was constantly playing transition d. you win some you lose some. it would've been nice to be the first ever china national champs though. and it would've been nice to actually hold a lead in the finals for once.

otherwise, the fields were much nicer than i expected. we played most of our games on a super nice turf. fields were narrow, allowing more poaching on our ho stack than we would've liked...one endzone was roughly 10 yards shorter than the other--very noticeable b/c the turf was striped lightgreen-darkgreen like a football field (one endzone had 3 stripes, the other 4). personally, i need to work on catching. i couldn't get my hands to close fast enough on saturday, prolly cuz of sleep dep, but i used to be able to catch without sleep (or it could be bad karma from commenting on yelena's blog about catching). i think i had 3-4 drops in the first two games on saturday, 0 on sunday (yay for sleep!). something else to work on: i'm much better at triangulating with a flick force than a backhand force.

food was pretty good, i ate lots and lots of baozi (a type of dumpling). saturday night, we snubbed the tourney buffet and found a restaurant built inside of a temple. there were buddhas everywhere (some headless), they even had a donation box. a donation box in front of an altar inside of a restaurant. we ordered too much food for the table (the plates wouldn't fit). i think we got 7 or 8 dishes for the 5 of us (if you count all the dumplings as 1 dish). it got to the point where waiters would bring us random food that other ppl ordered, cuz odds were, any food coming out of the kitchen should be coming to us.

anyways, there were 3 types of baozi, sweet and sour shrimp wrapped in crispy noodles, pot roast (chinese style), fish, soup noodles, and lots of veggies. when we tried to take pictures of the food (we remembered halfway thru the meal), a waiter came by to tell me pictures weren't allowed. luckily, i was the only one who understood mandarin, so jon continued snapping away (earning concerned glances from the waiter). i bargained for flashless pics, and then for pics only of the food, not of the relics (their actual concern), which i got, b/c it was pretty obvious that the foreigners were gonna do what they wanted, and this was a good face saving solution for all.

(you can even see the temple creatures in the background)

people still heckle white ppl in china, or at least in tianjin. something was even thrown out of a bus window at us (jon and i)--i'm assuming it wasn't incidental. BUT he was also the sole reason we caught our train from tianjin to beijing...the taxi wasn't licensed to drive within tianjin city limits. he took his taxi light off and made us pay before we entered tianjin. if we were asked, we should say that a friend was dropping us off. if it weren't for jon, the driver would've suspected me of "fishing", a practice wherein undercover inspectors try to trick drivers into taking them into the city, fining them for their trouble at the other end.

back to food. my favorite chinese foods are still jian bing (a crepe thing with a crunchy and an egg--still only RMB2.5!!), chinese yogurt (thick and sour), and chinese popsicles. my parents call me a peasant whenever we go back. seriously, the simple stuff's the best.


the end.

happy birthday, mr. buddha!

tomorrow is a hong kong public holiday, in honor of the venerable mr. buddha. i may have dropped my harvard buddhism class faster than a goose drops, well, droppings, but i kinda feel like instituting a public holiday may go against the tenets of buddhism. you know, the part about not having any idols and finding your own way. not that i'm complaining of course. here's to you, sid!

shuangy is coming this friday! i am veeeery (read: VEE-HEEE-EERY) excited. unfortunately (or fortunately), i'm heading to tianjin this weekend to play in the First Ever "china nationals" (can you have a nationals if you don't have a governing national body?). It's run by a bunch of college students so i'm not expecting too much, just a slice of history. and then shuangy is heading to china with her parents...so i'll probably only get to spend a weekend with her. nevertheless...better than being shuangless. AND henri is coming next monday to start her internship. soon, i will be very friendful.

and foodful:

fried milk
shrimp dumpling
lily on a rock (not for ingestion)

incidentally, i've joined the CS dragonboating team. i managed to get myself noticed last week (by sitting behind someone who sucked even worse than i do), so next week i get to move up in the boat. don't you see? it's like a mini-promotion in the one thing that i'm definitely good at: dabbling in sports.

competency

work is getting stressful. i'm hitting the 1Y barrier at which i'm required to be more than just pretty and enthusiastic. add to this that we're short staffed by 2 (leaving brian and me to do the pricing and philipp to do the managing), and well, my days are not happy. i keep reminding myself that banking is a windfall for me, and it isn't the rest of my life, not necessarily, so if i screw up and get fired, meh. i'll just go back and...what? get a masters? go to law school? go to MED SCHOOL?! ha, fat chance. i'm not freaking out, just taking a step back. gosh.

its funny the things that keep you sane. i'm only 22, i've still got options. i feel like i'll be saying that well into my 50s, but that's ok.

korea

last last weekend, i sojourned with a cast of nine to jeju, korea, the land of wind, rocks, and women (seriously, that's what it says on all the brochures). poor jon was so disappointed when he found out that women didn't necessarily refer to hot women, just female women (many of whom were as old and as wrinkly as the seaweed they sold). our team, love parade, gathered from all over asia, and we had sweet jerseys to match our sweet temperaments. our cheer was a group hug and a proclamation of LOOOOOOVVVVEEE. sometimes we would sing it at people in nine part cacophony.

korea is a 9's tournament--limited rosters, 6 guys, 3 girls. it caused lots of drama in cities that had to cut ppl. skill always trumped commitment. yeah politics.

i really enjoyed the enforced PT. it helps that we managed to keep our games short, forcing fast turns at the other teams endzones with our female cup. the fields were the best fields i'd ever played on...world cup practice fields. i even laid out in our last game for a one handed catch in the endzone. it was totally unexpected. the thrower zipped the disc right past me, and all i remember is annoyance that he couldn't throw it better. actually, i wasn't expecting the throw at all. my teammates were pretty surprised cuz i'd played in perth with some of them and they never saw me layout, even after lots of heckling. i think my catch was our last score...we lost to shanghai 15-13, which earned us $50 a piece for coming in second and all the soju (sp?) anyone could ever drink. this may be the best asian tournament of the year (jazzfest will be better, of course).


brian's squeezing jim out of his ass. jim got so drunk that he used his body to stop balls in the batting cage. both front and back. boy had red welts all over his torso...one ball came pretty close to his balls, but did he flinch? no sir, he did not. this is the type of person who can own a furniture store in beijing. go give him some business.

mmm...korean bbq...

jon and i stayed an extra day to explore. apparently, i'm pretty good at shooting clay discs (50% hit rate!--jon didn't get any, but he was much better at the pistol. we've decided that if we're attacked by terrorists, he'd shoot the stationary ones with a pistol and i'd shoot the moving ones with a rifle). spycard, chaching!





he didn't want to lie in the hay, but i made him, cuz i wear the pants.

deep fried hot dog! no, not a corn dog, the dough is gooey and ricier. yum!

the joke that jon's enjoying is...these are NAVELS...haha...ha. besides setting an extraordinary number of korean dramas, jeju is also famous for its tangerines, as displayed here in the tangerine museum (unfortunately, we didn't learn of jeju's sex museum until it was too late to go).

and this is sunrise peak, a volcano. we woke up at four to try to catch the sunrise, but it was cloudy. all we saw was a dumb rabbit and a bunch of chinese tourists.

ah, and of course, the pig rock.

jeju is pretty and nature-y. the end.