Random Thoughts from a Random Taru

One of my friends from UC Irvine got married this weekend. Kinda weird to think that he got married because he never brought his wife around to band events except for one.

Anyway, it was a long Catholic wedding with lots of rituals and stuff. Adam and I barely made it in time. That was kinda my fault as I took too long getting ready. (I got hungry so instead of getting ready, I was making hiya yakko.) There was also a blackout in the area, so the only lighting the church had was the light coming in from the outside through the stained glass windows, the open doors, and the candles.

Did I mention that L.A. was experiencing a heat wave at the time? Hot. Melting. Adam made a makeshift fan with the donation envelopes. Although, I doubt the A/C would have done much to help in such hot weather.

After the ceremony, the band kiddies went to Rock Bottom since it was near the hotel where the reception was going to be. Appetizers and such since there was an hour and half before the next event of the evening. (Ok, so it really didn’t make too much sense to be purchasing food when we were going to be getting free food in less than 2 hours, but we had to do something. We’re used to going out to get food after band events.)

(The beer there is tasty, I told Adam that we need to go there again so I can order beer. Mayhaps recruit one pregnant sister and her non-alcohol drinking husband… I is ebil. I know.)

The reception had a cheesy photobooth. I took a few pictures. Free alcohol for an hour.

Nothing really out of the ordinary for the reception. Food, dancing, cutting of the cake, etc. There was a candy buffet, which Adam insisted on calling it a candy bar (har har). I forgot to take pictures of my dinner. Oh, well.

And I caught the bouquet.

My sister is going to have a girl! No cross dressing boys in the future as I’ll get to make plenty of cute girly things for my niece. I’m sure there are plenty of cute patterns to knit and sew. I’ll just have to make sure I don’t go too overboard.

I need to get her a new nickname as Laurven sounds too boyish. Larvina is definitely not cute. I’ll have to think about it.

No, I don’t mean crunches as in sit ups. Saturdays, too. For the next 14 weeks. This is the 3rd week now, first Saturday was just this past weekend.

Now it’s time to sleep.

I finally uploaded my pictures from E3 onto Flickr.

I only went on Tuesday as that’s the only day the company gave. Some people went for an additional day, but I kinda felt that 1 day is good enough. I must be getting old.

I think the only game I really wanted to see was Final Fantasy XIV. My friend at SE let me in to play the game since there was a seat that was open. Woohoo! :) Ok, so the game was confusing, but I see the awesome potential there. Pretty, too.

MindHack is a WTH game. As in, this is not fun. :\

Medal of Honor’s multiplayer was kinda fun, but it felt like MW2.

Legend of Zelda’s controls were confusing.

Didn’t see Nintendo 3DS. The line was long and the wait could be anywhere between 30 minutes to over an hour. At my age, anything longer than 15 minutes better be worth it. I don’t find trailers and demos as worth it anymore. :P

The 2nd floor area was blocked off to exhibitors/2nd floor access badges, so I couldn’t get myself free water and food. My badge was exhibits only. That made me sad. Next year I need to figure out a way to upgrade my badge. :|

After E3 was over for the day, Adam and I tried to get into Wolfgang Puck’s so I can see the Lakers vs Celtics game. The restaurant was booked solid with RSVPs. :( We ended up walking around downtown Los Angeles looking for this one place that’s supposed to have a party, but we couldn’t find it. Turns out there was an intermediary location that we were supposed to go to first, but I never got the text because of AT&T’s network failure. -_- Anyway, at the party, I met up with people that I haven’t seen in a while. Pretty cool.

At a little past 9 PM, I was hungry and so was Adam, so we walked back to our car, stopping at the Panini Cafe for some grub. It was delicious. :9 Then back to the LACC to get my car and go home!

This year’s E3 started off with a bang tonight with a special Activision event at the Staples Center. Lots of music and guest appearances.

Let’s see if I can remember all the famous stars…

Usher
NERD
Rhea
Jane’s Addiction
Soundgarden
Eminem with Rhianna
Bohemian Rhapsody dude who’s name I don’t know…

Here’s an article about ATVI’s E3 event…

Ok, so I think the best part was Usher and Eminem. I don’t think I really cared about the rest, although Bohemian Rhapsody was fun.

When Call of Duty: Black Ops came on, there were fire coming out and fireworks! Crazy. That’s when Eminem got on stage, too. Pretty awesome.

Since the show started late, it ended late. I am so tired right now, but I’m really pumped about Black Ops and the event tonight that I had to make a blog entry.

According to the article above, the entire thing cost at least $5 million. Crazy.

The last time I went camping was back in the summer of 1995, right before I went off to Purdue. I can’t remember where we went or what we did exactly, but I remember it was a lot of fun.

Ok, the only thing I remember about it was that the girls tent was really cold, so we piled into the boys tent. I used a friend’s leg as a pillow. Very uncomfortable.

Memorial Day Weekend, one of my friends wanted to go white water river rafting near Sequoia National Forest. I’ve never gone white water river rafting before, so I was kinda nervous and I wasn’t too sure if I wanted to go.

I went.

Adam went with me as well. We drove up on Saturday morning and came back to Los Angeles on Monday. Rafting happened on Sunday.

When I saw the rushing river water, I thought to myself, why did I agree to this? I didn’t think I would die. I knew how to swim, and I had a life jacket and a helmet on. Surviving it wasn’t the issue. Coming out unscathed and in one piece was what I was worried about. I refused to sit at the front of the raft as well. More responsibility? On my first time? No thanks!

It’s actually a lot more fun than I expected. At least, after I got over my initial fears about it anyways. I got knocked out of the raft 2 times, and fell out once when we were doing a trust exercise (we stood on the edge holding hands while the guide spun the rafter around).

Another coworker went rafting, too, but I didn’t realize he was there until he saw me on Tuesday morning. He saw me and my Treyarch towel at the raft company’s parking lot. I had to go look him up in the office directory when I got back to my desk because I really didn’t know who he was.

Anyways, I think I might go rafting again next year. It was that fun. :)

I visited LA’s RenFair for the first time today. It was held in the city of Irwindale at the Santa Fe Dam. There were a lot of activities and events going on all over the place, so I enjoyed myself quite a bit. We saw a few comedy shows, drank mead, and watched a jousting event. I even bought myself a Legend of Zelda ocarina (which I’ve been wanting for a while) and several cute earrings. Adam bought a mug, but he didn’t check the price before buying it. It was expensive. Ouch. :(

The raspberry mead is tasty, by the way. I’m going to have to see if BevMo has any in stock.

There were a few incidents that marred an otherwise fun day. First was the amount of dust flying about. By the end of the day, I was blowing out black snot and my hair felt dirty. My camera was not spared either as it was covered in a good amount of dust. :( The other incident was while we were watching the last comedy act of the day, there were a group of drunks who wouldn’t shut up and watch the show, or leave. I really wanted to tell them to shut up, but I also didn’t want a fight on my hands. Oh well.

Overall, I had a lot of fun and I can’t wait to go again next year. :)

This past Saturday was Armed Forces Day. Torrance has a parade and event every year. I thought about going to Torrance Blvd to check out the parade, but I ended up hanging around the house cleaning.

Adam came over in the afternoon and we went to the Del Amo Fashion Center to check out the event there. There was a M1A1 Abrams tank, helicopters, various vehicles and such. They were even military guys dressed in Vietnamese army uniform. Pretty cool stuff.

I really want to fly a helicopter.

And an airplane.

There were no airplanes there.

Dinner was at a Korean hot tofu restaurant next to Gablehouse. Adam never had Korean hot tofu before, so it was new to him.

We also saw Iron Man 2. It was a good movie. I wasn’t disappointed.

On Sunday, one of my coworkers invited me and Adam to yoga. I left my house a little late, oops. I fail my Japanese ancestry. Punctuality not my forte. We got there about 15-20 after class had started. It was donation based, so I didn’t have to pay a lot to attend. The yoga place even had a store with expensive merchandise. I bought a yoga towel because my feet get sweaty on my mat. Probably could have gotten it somewhere cheaper.

After yoga, we wandered around the area. REI is having a sale starting this coming Friday, so I’m going to have to go back and purchase a few things before the Memorial Day rafting and camping trip.

And that is another boring update by yours truly.

PS – Can’t sleep, drank coffee at 8:30 PM. Doh!

Saw Kick-Ass this weekend with Adam on Saturday. I figured it’d be hard to get good seats to see Iron Man 2 and there were only 3D showings of Alice in Wonderland, so Kick-Ass. It’s a good movie, however very gory.

So I found out what that weird white stuff was that was growing in the bag of dirt. They’re mushrooms. I found out by opening the other bag of soil and out popped mushrooms among the mega-colony white stuff. I have no idea what kind of mushrooms they are, but I don’t think they’re edible.

On Sunday, Laura and I celebrated Mother’s Day by taking our mom to a restaurant for lunch. My mom wanted to go to Black Olive, so that’s where we went. The service was slow, but it was because there was only one chef in the kitchen. Ouch. The restaurant isn’t normally open on Sunday for lunch, so that’s probably why there was only 1 chef in there. We didn’t hold it against them as the food was very good and the servers were very friendly.