I used to have a hard time answering what my favorite restaurant was in Austin, but over the past few months, Uchiko has solidified itself as one I give. I usually like to get the tasting menu and getting surprised. That means the experience fluctuates and sometimes it’s better than others (but they’re all really good), but I really like not having to make decisions and getting a variety of tastes that I probably wouldn’t have if I chose dishes myself.

Chad, Nancy, Mark and I went to Uchiko today for the start of restaurant week and it was pretty good. I didn’t think about bringing my camera and taking any pics, so you get none. =) We went there at 5PM cause they were full on reservations and I didn’t want to end up waiting a million hours during “prime dinner time.” We ended up not having to wait long at all and they didn’t seem too packed. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were busier later though, just something to note for those of you who want to go there and may not have reservations (get there early instead!).

Mozilla has started to shed a bunch and I think we’ve entered into the “blowing the coat” phase that happens twice a year. I’ve been taking him outside and combing him almost every day and I get a good bit of fur every time. He cooperates pretty well though, so that’s good. I’ve seen photos of shibas blowing their coat that look all funky, but Mozilla still looks to have a pretty good coat (not patchy), so we’ll see if that sticks.

MY 5D MARK III IS SUPPOSED TO SHIP SOON. WE SO EXCITED.

Whenever I write a blog post while it’s raining, it reminds me of Sam. You can ask him about that sometime. While you’re at it, you can also ask him about the time he watched me as I slept in our Jester dorm and imagined what it would be like if I were a girl and we were watching the sun rise together. I never asked him how that story ended in his head, but I’m pretty sure it’s not pretty.

Speaking of sleep, here’s one of Mozilla sleeping next to my modem:

A few days ago, Mozilla ran out the front door for the first time (I blame Mark). Greg and I chased after him and despite the worry in me that he’d get run over by a car, I was fairly amused by how elated he looked. He ran across the street a few times and went as far as two houses down, but he came back and started sniffing a bush for long enough for me to sneak up on him and grab his leg. After learning how fun it was to run free, he snuck out again later as Greg was leaving, but Greg managed to corral him back into the house. Shiba inus are infamous for not having good recall and while he’s not bad when he’s in the backyard (I’ve been positively reinforcing him by giving him treats after calling him back), that doesn’t work at all when he’s out front, so I’m going to have to take more care with making sure he doesn’t sneak out.

Take this broken heart,
if it brings You praise,
Take this beaten soul,
shivering hands I will raise.

Hope Unstoppable,
Sing the morning sun,
Wake up oh sleeper,
the Daylight has come.
- Brave Saint Saturn

Chad, Nancy, Mark, Julie, Dean and I went to Kauai last week. TC was supposed to come, but he got all lame and bailed out. Sam had “school” or something and Viraj was Viraj.

Here are some pics!

I arrived early and stayed at a hotel for a night. In the morning as I waited for the rest to show up, here is where I chilled:

This is the upper floor of the house we rented:

We went on a crazy four mile hike (one way). On the way, Mark and Chad posed. Nancy’s prompt to Chad was “do something awesome like Mark.”

These girls had this awesome dog on the hike that followed us for a while:

This was the waterfall at the end (or middle… depending on how you think about it…)!

Mark and I swam in this… it was very cold.

This was the beach next to our house:

At a luau:

Visiting Pearl Harbor:

We kayaked then hiked to another waterfall:

Chad chilled back at the kayaks because he wore slippers:

Kayaking back:

Nancy and Julie commandeer my camera and I find this in the morning:

(Almost) passed out:

We drove out to this secluded beach and played ultimate in the rain:

Double bombed:

Haha:

We visited Waimea Canyon (pictures don’t do this justice):

Chad and I wore our horrible Singapore shirts to dinner:

More on flickr!

I’m in Hawaii! Today, I plan on not doing much at all. =)

I’ll post pics and videos later (though you can probably find a decent amount of pics on Facebook/Flickr). For now, I will leave you this:

Also, Oriana told me a while ago she threw away the copy of Twilight I got her from London (so what if it was infected with glitter?!). I am very disappointed, so I think I will be giving her some more copies from airports around the world…

=)

I’m heading to Hawaii for some fun/relaxation next Sunday so this week is probably going to be a busy one at work. I also, somewhat coincidentally, have a rather pleasant schedule of foodie events at the end of the week with stops planned at at least Foreign & Domestic and Uchiko. Yay!

I’ve had to keep an eye out on Mozilla this weekend as he got neutered on Thursday and I’m trying to not have to resort to the cone of shame. He’s been fairly good so far but seems to be rather reluctant to pee (does so much less frequently than before). I’ll probably give the vet a ring tomorrow to see if I should bring him in for a check-up.

Viraj is back from India, apparently, but did not return with a wife. We are all disappointed. On the plus side, he did his chip eating thing where he would only eat the part of the chip he didn’t touch. He had built up a small pile of chip pieces that were “tainted” with his fingers. I saw them, shook my head, and made him eat them. There’s that to be proud of, I guess. ;p

This was a rather peaceful and uneventful Valentine’s Day, which honestly isn’t a bad thing. There’s good and bad that goes along with being single, eh? =) Anyways, since my tentative significant other and I are not aware of each other yet (or at least not aware that we’re each others’ significance), I will get all mushy in other ways.

I really enjoy the fact that I have over a decade of my life in blog form and I’ve missed talking about major events in the past just because I figured “oh, I’ll remember it, I don’t need to tell the world about it.” While generally true, I do sometimes go back through my blog archive and think “oh darn, I didn’t mention anything about _?” One day I’ll come back and find this blog post and value that my past self took the time to jot all this down, so here it is.

December was a rough month for my family as my dad passed away suddenly after being in the hospital for about two weeks after a severe heart attack. I haven’t really mentioned this to the webs at large as I guess I’ve been processing all of this, and I’m not looking for a pity party. Anyways, along with this came a lot of drama, headache, and heartache, some expected and some not. Despite all the negatives though, what I will ultimately remember is the outpouring of love from all kinds of sources that my family and I were blessed with.

I don’t particularly want to get into a theological debate right now, but I want to take an aside before continuing. As an educated “intellectual” (if I can be so presumptuous to call myself one ;)), there are a lot of things about Christianity that don’t seem to make sense. This is further clouded by the fact that many “Christians” don’t act very Christ like at all. That said, without what I believe as a Christian, the world would seem so pointless and meaningless. I would be a slave of physics, ultimately doing whatever the atoms making up my body “decided” should be done. I don’t see the value in a concept like love if all there is to it is a bunch of atoms behaving a certain way to ultimately trigger certain chemical reactions in two larger blobs of atoms.

I’m convinced this “love” thing is special and I don’t think the type of special I’m talking about could exist in a world without meaning. I believe that there is a God that gives us meaning and his greatest gift to us was Love, which we, here on earth, sometimes manage to gift to each other and/or experience in peculiar ways. Maybe I’m a romantic, I don’t know. =p

Okay, with that said, I wanted to take Valentine’s Day as a chance to say thank you for the love that I have been gifted, consciously or otherwise. I’ll start off silly by being thankful for Mozilla. Dogs (and many pets, I guess) are a conduit for a very basic type of love, and while it’s taken me a while to fully realize this, getting Mozilla was a way for me to deal with all the negativity that December brought. Mozilla helped me combat that negativity by providing a very healthy positive type of stress that anyone who’s raised a puppy they love can understand. I don’t want to get all caught up in talk of fate or whatnot, but I consider myself extremely blessed to have happened upon such a perfect puppy for me. When I decided I would get a puppy and started searching, there was only one breeder that I found that had a litter at just the right time for me to get one almost immediately (it’s not uncommon for people to be on waitlists approaching months to get a shiba from a reputable breeder). Mozilla was the only one left of the litter because his breeder was considering keeping him unless she found the right home. It’s kind of silly I guess, but to me, Mozilla will always be a bit of a symbol of the love that everyone below showed during a rough time in my life.

To my job, who basically let me take the entirety of December off with no questions asked, thank you. Corporate entities are probably amongst some of the least “loving” things out there, but in the way it could, my job was there for me and I’m thankful for that…

To my friends, who were there for me and my family through the ups and downs of an emotional roller-coaster, you sat in silence with me, held me as my walls crumbled, fed me, did my dishes, made me laugh, checked in on me, sent me words of encouragement, and even trekked to Arkansas and back in a day with me. You did these things, big and small, and will never think anything more of it than it being your duty as a friend…

To friends of my family, you gave us food, visited, and probably did a ton of things I don’t even realize…

To my mother and sisters, who shared my pain and more, we show love to each other in quirky ways (or maybe it’s just the way I show it =)). We were hurt together but I would never wish for any other family…

Happy Valentine’s Day, may love find you all. =)

Well hello again. I was going to try to do a weekly blog update like I did a year or so ago, but I have already failed. I definitely want to blog more than the pitiful amount I did last year though, so here goes! I suppose when my thoughts are too deep, they don’t make it on the blog due to its public nature… Take that however you want for what that meant for 2011.

Anyways, Mozilla is growing and he’s 18 pounds now! He was naughty one day while I was at work (teething, anxious, and/or both) and made two holes in my wall. The worst of which is pictured…

So, now he has a crate that he will be spending his days in until at least he’s done teething. Other than that though he’s been a pretty good puppy and I really enjoy his personality. I will miss him when I go to Hawaii. =( Oh yes, I know, poor little Oliver has to go to Hawaii and will miss his dog. How unfortunate. =p

I’ve also been playing a heavier amount of Magic with the gang, reviving a near decade old hobby of mine. I ended up attending some tournaments and resurrecting my old DCI number, which was apparently amusing to the tournament organizers due to its small number of digits. Yeah, nerd cred! Wait…

I logged into my account and saw some of my records at tournaments as far back as 1999. I’m doing much better now than I did back then, but that’s probably more due to the fact that I played constructed then but didn’t have enough money to really have a “tier 1” competitive deck. That said, I haven’t done any constructed tournaments (just limited) recently. I’ve managed to at least recoupe my entry fees though and have gotten top 4 in the last three I’ve went to. Perhaps this is a new career option calling out to me… (joking). I spent some time today sorting through piles of cards that have accumulated on my tables…

I also watched Smash tonight and am perfectly prepared to have Mark call me a fruit-bag again. As Oriana has mentioned, I apparently have quite a bit of overlap in my TV watching habits to a girl in her early 20’s. =D

Oh, I have also started to send my Instagram pics to flickr, which can be found here. I’m sure they’ll still be mostly Mozilla for the foreseeable future.

Well, this was an uneventful weekend, so I’ll just drop some puppy photos.

[instapress url=http://instagr.am/p/jehlc/ size=400]

[instapress url=http://instagr.am/p/irnFq/ size=400]

[instapress url=http://instagr.am/p/ipPN6/ size=400]

I’m owiber on Instagram if you want to follow me, or view my photos on the web here.

I also threw together some short clips of Mozilla in a video here:

At work this past week, I got to pick up a quick short-term project that involved building something basically from scratch in one week. It was pretty fun, but the combination of Facebook and Internet Explorer is currently highly annoying me. Thumbs down!

See ya!

This was a good weekend.

To celebrate Oriana and my mom’s birthdays, we went to Uchiko on Saturday. They were 30 minutes late seating us, but definitely made up for it by either being extremely generous with a single omakase order (usually meant for a pair, but four of us were fed) or giving us one for free. Then they also threw in an appetizer or two and extra fried milk desserts which is probably my favorite dessert second only to the craziness that is Alinea. I think that experience has cemented Uchiko as my favorite restaurant in Austin.

Earlier that day, I took Mozilla over to meet Syndey where he chased her around the yard (she was kind of scared of him) until she threw up. Sydney is a big lab, so it was fairly comical.

On Sunday, I hooked up with the owners of one of Mozilla’s brothers, Texas, who just so happens is also in Austin. They came over and the puppies played for quite a while:

Olivia also has lots of good photos.

I took Mozilla to the vet at the end of last month and he had gained a pound since getting him (about a week’s time). I realized then I should take lots of pictures as he won’t stay a puppy for long. He’s actually really good with the camera and will usually just continue doing whatever he’s doing and occasionally looking at me as I snap photos. This puppy is pretty awesome.

Haha, fat looking puppy:

I went to The Domain along with some peeps primarily for Jonney and FiFi’s engagement (actual event and photos). I took the opportunity to socialize Mozilla a bit more and took him too. He was quite the popular little puppy there. I had one guy stop me and gave me his email so I could send him information (breeder, etc.). Here are some photos:

“How you doin’?”

Oh, and if you’re interested in Jonney and FiFi’s engagement photos, you’ll have to bug Sam and Kat. =p

Shiba inus are infamous for not recalling well. You can tell them to come and they may look at you but then there’s a good chance they’ll ignore you. Mozilla hasn’t been too bad at this so far, but last night when it was rainy and wet outside, I would wipe his feet every time he came back inside. He apparently isn’t much of a fan of this so he got progressively more stubborn about not coming in. Luckily he is a little guy and I just catch him and pick him up. =)

ANNNNNDDDD… Happy birthday, Oriana. =)