miguel’s happy campers birthday trip

i think the pictures speak for themselves…

Sequoia National Forest/ Kern River

best weekend ever?

This all happened way back in March, but I swear it seemed like just a few weeks ago.

First of all my good friends Rebecca from Brooklyn and Jill from DC arrived on Friday afternoon while I was frantically baking a cake and making lemony custard. Rebecca and Jill, along with my friends Rosa and Kelly were my best friends in college, and they were in town to celebrate Camila’s birthday and baptism and most importantly to eat street fruit and banh mi. Yes! But first, we must eat sausage!

Had a lovely time at Wurstkurche downtown. We drank delicious beers, ate the sausages (I had bockwurst, reminds me of my childhood) and the fries with yummy dipping sauces and were very loud. However, I have no pictures of this delicious event, so just imagine 5 girls eating sausages and drinking beers. I like wurstkuche, it was a very lovely space inside and i like that there’s a second bar in the eating area. i really have to decide on whether to capitalize in this post. i’m going with no.

on to saturday! i woke up early to make the cake, but it was slip sliding all over the place since the custard was not setting up. so i had to start over with the assembly which would have to wait until after the baptism.

the first thing you have to do if you are going to baptize a baby is dress the baby in the cutest white clothes ever. we found this cute dress at a fancy kids dress shop in the fashion district downtown. it was pretty much the only one with out millions of ruffles, beads and lace and therefore camila was the best dressed kid at the church by far. also the most adorable!

 

then you must take a million pictures of camila with her ninos and her parents.

with padrino Miguel

with mama Rosa (ha ha, we used to call her Mama Rosa freshman year for some reason i forget!  i guess it was meant to be.)
 

then we headed to the La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora Reina de los Angeles on olvera street for the mass baptism ceremony.

where we got in one line, then another line, then filed into the church, listened the the priest make jokes about christianity and then finally baptize the child. camila got tired after all of that!

ok, time for the fun stuff…the party!

rebecca’s new bangs are straight pimpin!! this picture came out so nicely!

miss camila and her first pinata

friends enjoying some beers

guess what we had for eating?

tacos were awesome

then camila opened some gifts like this adorable sheep hat.

the dress i made for camila. my first sewing project in ages. used the pillowcase dress pattern loosely, which means i totally made up my own shit which is how i roll, yo.

the adult party was later, says michael

and by adult, i mean shrimp salad!

i bounced in the bouncy castle. 

 

ok, the next day jill, rebecca and i headed over to our alma mater to walk around.  

starting at the greek theatre…

here are some funny things we happened upon

 

then we got some banh mi in the san gabriel valley on our way back to LA

back in echo park, we continued our street food binge with some fruta from the fruit man

and some perro caliente from the hot dog man

and obviously, elotes from the corn man

and we enjoyed it all at the park. got to love LA weather, man.

come back soon, mis amigas!

for rebecca, who couldn’t come

1/4th of the fabulous foursome of pomona class of 2004 was not able to make our 5th reunion this past weekend. i dedicate this post to you, rebecca.

i missed all the debauchery on friday night, and when i arrived on saturday morning it seemed that many of the reunioners from our class were sleeping it off. well, unfortunately they all missed the cute baby, camila!

this is from our lunch on marston quad.

then there was a really lame (and i do mean lame, as many of the participants had to be driven on golf carts) parade of the classes.

then we went into town (ie the claremont village which is now huge and has all kinds of fancy shops now and a museum of art in the converted orange factory which is a gorgeous building and a movie theater, etc. those things were not there when we were in college sadly.)

kelly and i bought new shoes. apparently she doesn’t remember giving me all sorts of shit for wearing birks in college. ha ha.

then there was some prepartying (aww, memories) before the wash party where we caught up with tons of people i haven’t talked to in ages. here’s a strange fact: they served pomona queen beer (that’s not the strange part) and also tortillas with guacamole, cheese and sour cream. doesn’t it seem like they were missing some meat or beans or something?

i forgot to take any pictures of that wash party or our class dinner with the in n out truck! there was some debate about why we were paying $10 for a dinner with only burgers (since in n out trucks do not do fries), but when juan reassured us there would be wine i shut my trap.

and now for the later “unauthorized” wash party thrown by juan.

here’s where the husbands/boyfriends all talk to each other because we were so busy catching up.

or taking a trip to wig basement.

sorry i’m too lazy to fix that photo cuz i fixed it once and that’s one more time than i usually do.

rosa and ryley wrote notes to the people who live in their old rooms.

then we tried to see if any of the stuff we left in the ceiling was still there. no. it was not. but we did manage to freak the froshmen out in the process.

and now for shits and giggles here’s me as lord voldemort in the one and only picture of me at this event (well, the only one i have so far, it’s from juan). this is me after boring mr. trevor about something. i have a feeling it was dentistry related.

note the red cup.

year of the ox

Happy Lunar New Year everybody.  This is the year of the ox, the year both my mom and my brother were born.  eggcellent.

first of all, check out this cutie apron my mom made for me for christmas. i love it! so retro!

also used my mom’s pork dumpling recipe. outstanding as always. i made dozens and dozens throughout the night.

and as the night grew longer, the stickers got more blurry!

rosa and hannah. love that red scarf.

scallion pancakes in the back. veggie dumplings and char siu bao in the steamer. i also made glutinous rice with chinese sausage and water chestnuts and some with mushrooms and baby corn. and some spicy ginger garlic peanuts.

big al, iggy and marie chillin’ on the couch.

who put karla in the corner?

sebastian is here.

well that’s about it. nothing better than dumplings and beer. gong hay fat choy!

flea market and greasy food

Anyone wanna go to the Pasadena City College Flea Market?

The last one was on a beautiful Sunday!  I’ve found amazing stuff here like African beads, a vendor who sells vintage designer sunglasses, and of course, vinyl records (the main attraction for Miguel and Sebastian!).

While they browsed the music section (4th floor of the parking garage), Rosa and I hung out with Camila and looked at things in miniature.

Rode the elevator. Looked at vintage clothes (I bought a wool cape. What the hell was I thinking? This is Los Angeles.) Checked out the massive amounts of cheap jewelry and other crap.

Then we went to the Hat for a greasefest!

Camila was hungry!

i suggest you make yogurt cheese

Because it’s freaking delicious. Basically you take some yogurt, drain it (either in a yogurt drainer or doubled up cheese cloth) for a few days, roll it into balls and marinate in a mixture of dried chiles (i used the ubiquitous arbol), garlic and dill. It was unbelievably good when I served it for hors’deouvres on Thanksgiving. Though next time I might just scratch the whole ball making step as it was frustrating and impeded me getting these balls in my mouth. However, if you just did a bowl of this stuff swimming in the marinade, you lose out on fun jokes about marinating your balls. Of which I made a few that weekend. I am a garlic fiend and these totally hit that sweet spot of garlicky goodness.

Adapted from Victoria Jenanyan Wise

Here’s a picture of the yogurt balls in their natural environment.

are you ready to LUUUUUUUUCHA???!!!???

Miguel won tickets to Lucha VaVoom, which I’ve always wanted to see, but was too cheap to shell out $33 for previously.  Amazing.  That’s about all I have to say.  I will probably go again and buy my own ticket next time…they’re starting a special Cinco de Mayo show!

no te metas con mi cucu – Chicos de Barrio
You may want to listen to this while reading the post. It kind of sets the mood.
 

It was a windy, cold and overcast night when we walked up to the Mayan Club on Hill St. downtown.  

We were passed by a bunch of guys in these old timey cars. I really like old timey things, but these cars were loud! They kept backfiring and scaring the bajeezus out of me. I kind of liked it.

Turns out, the performers were arriving in said old timey cars. Very dramatic and exciting. We saw some later arrivals when we were sitting inside as they were projected onto the wall.

The Mayan is very spectacular inside and out.

On to the luchadores!

The first fight featured Dirty Sanchez and 3 others who I don’t remember because clearly they were inferior to the DIRTY SANCHEZ!! (He’s the one wearing a mirkin, fyi.)

At one point during the match Dirty Sanchez started holding his butt and then one of the other luchadores pulled his pants down to reveal…a bunch of chocolate pudding!!! (I hope!) Then they mashed his teammate’s face into his dirty crack. OMG, it was awesome.

We are enjoying the luchadores and buxoticas! (all my pictures of the buxoticas, aka burlesque dancers, were crappy, sorry! but they weren’t as entertaining as the luchadores anyways.)

Next fight: Los Pollos Locos and El Presidente.

And the mini Secret Service and mini Chicken fight. Yes, those are midgets.

The best part of the evening was when the luchadores would fly out of the ring into the audience. Mostly on the right hand side of the stage. Kinda made me want to seat down there for all the extra excitement and danger. Of course, had I brought my nice camera I would have probably thought differently.

Ok, so this guy on the left, the one without a mask (don’t know why), was a huge crowd pleaser because everytime he did something interesting they played “No Te Metas Con Mi Cucu” and he danced. He would go over to his opponents and try to caress them and it would make them mad. Here’s another example of one of his “moves”.

Well, that was really fun. Can’t wait to go back for more!
LuchaVaVoom!!

apropos of nothing

just some fun pictures, yah know.

i sometimes think i’m lactose intolerant but really i just don’t like to drink milk very much.

i am a really good blimp spotter. “i always spot ‘em first.” that’s my motto.

dot loves you.

halloween was a long time ago

but not so long ago as 2007! these pictures were taken with my small pointandshoot digital camera that annoyingly inserts the date into the image and unfortunately is not quite up to speed regarding what year it is. of course, i’m not one to talk considering i’m talking about halloween 2008 when it’s now 7 days into 2009.

that’s me up there in the white dress with my friend marie dressed up as calaveras. we both decided on the same costumes totally independently of each other (which also happened to me in college with my roommate rebecca. we came back from separate shopping trips with cleopatra costumes. bizarre!). anyways, marie and i had different interpretations of the same costume, so i think we looked pretty fucking awesome as a pair.

here are miguel’s sister olga and her boyfriend jeremy as ghostbusters. they got the costumes because they had attended an 80s themed halloween party earlier in the week. way better than neon spandex, right?

here’s a lovely herb, bob villa (or al borland depending on whether your family watches pbs or the stations with commercials), and two lame-os who didn’t dress up.

this is dinka, the sweetest mastiff ever. she’s wearing a wifebeater that says “more qualified than sarah palin”. it’s more of a political commentary than a costume, but still better that the above lame-os.

marie and i were the only ones who managed to make the 2 mile trek to the west hollywood halloween carnival where we ran into mario (with luigi, not pictured), who looks disturbingly like an ex-boyfriend from high school. and yes, that’s a real mustache!

and here’s my favorite costume from the weho parade! bob’s big boy! it’s like he was born to play that role!

 

ok, this is a really sad blog post with some pretty bad pictures, but halloween is my favorite holiday.  also, i am planning on trying to convince miguel to wear his costume to the raggamuffins festival in long beach this year.  HA!

i love the griffith observatory

omg, you guys have to check out jitlada thai on sunset in hollywood.  best mussels ever.  and that curry can do no wrong.  

afterwards, it’s nice to drive up to griffith observatory but i suggest you skip the planetarium show.  worst narrator in the whole world.  seriously, she was so annoying i couldn’t even concentrate on what the hell she was talking about. but the rest of the place is pretty damn cool.  especially if you’ve seen rebel without a cause.  the grif obs is my favorite place to take out of town guests.