Kansas beat Duke tonight!!!!! Heh heh!!!!! Yay!!!! Next up: Arizona...



work is killing me.



wade from kansas is coming to seattle this weekend. random. i haven't seen him in YEARS. i first met this guy when i was maybe 11 or 12 because he worked for my parents. fast forward 13 years. we're actually friends now. funny the people that you stay in touch with throughout life.



omg, i forgot to mention: CONGRATULATIONS LINDA SIU!!! i can't believe that girl is engaged now.



argh, i really need to get a freakin' emissions test for my car. it's the one thing that's prevented me from easily mailing in my annual check to renew my tabs. and the fact that the closest emissions testing station is, like, in the middle of nowhere doesn't help. argh.



i miss singing.

WAHOO!!! Adrien Brody won Best Actor for The Pianist...how exciting! Ever since I saw that film in Paris, I've been cheering it on. If you look at my desktop wallpaper right now, you'll see Adrien on there playing the piano--it's been like that for a couple of months now. Wow. How satisfying to see such a brilliant performance rewarded like so. Yay Adrien!



Weekend was pretty ho-hum...but I welcomed it so...as I've been away for the last 3 weekends in a row. Friday, Pierre and I went to see Bowling for Columbine---I'll have to agree with everyone I've talked to that it's good. If you haven't seen it yet, go. Although Michael Moore is usually quite blunt and direct with his statements (as many of you may've witnessed with his acceptance speech for Best Documentary at the Oscars), he's very good at stepping back here and leaving a bunch of open questions for the audience to ponder. On Saturday--oh what a beautiful day it was--I went to see Aaron Copland's Exhuberant Symphony No. 3 with Fred at Benaroya. Damn. Great performance. It left us breathless. We also got to see Hilary Hahn, a young 22 yr. old violinist perform a Meyer concerto. Her accomplishments were impressive: already a Sony Classical recording artist, she had her professional debut at the age of 11 with the Baltimore Symphony.

this is funny



while i had a great time at whistler, it wasn't the powder heaven that i was expecting it to be. All the snow went up top, creating a crazy snowstorm with winds so strong that it closed most of the peak lifts. saturday was okay but we couldn't go any higher than the top of the gondola. and sunday...well, i'll admit that after 3 straight days of snowboarding the weekend before and the experience on saturday made me lose my motivation and energy to get up early for fresh tracks. that said, by the time we went up to seventh heaven, we had to jet down because the winds were knocking us over and visibility was next to nothing. a bit scary. regardless, i still had a really fun time with all the people I went with.



otherwise, i've just been bogged down at work. ugh. this project is on a tight, super aggressive schedule and it just overwhelms me. very exciting--but it overwhelms me. i just can't wait to take a nice vacation in the summer...although my sense of travel has been augmented by the suggestion of war lately...



just found out that Wil is definitely heading into Iraq next month. :-( I wonder if Aaron is still in Kuwait....

i had an AMAZING time up at whistler last weekend...the weather was just perfect and we hit powder almost everywhere we went. The most memorable time was on Sunday, going through the backcountry of Creekside with Jigna, Matt, Sri and Noemi---it was just a winter wonderland! [sigh] Check out some of the pictures I took. I got a chance to meet Tito, Pierre's best friend from Montreal--really great guy. Anyhow, loved it so much that I'm going back up AGAIN this weekend. Check out the snow report though--it's sick:



New snow: 11 in.

24 hours: 19 in.

48 hours: 47 in.

7 days: 61 in.



Powder powder--here we come!



This whole "freedom fries" and "freedom toast" thing---it's stupid. I can't think of anything more ridiculous. This is an amusing article: English Sans French



Jeff B. was in a helicopter crash last week---read about the pilot!

Forecast for Whistler next 3 days:



Friday..Cloudy. 60 Percent Chance Of Flurries. Alpine High Minus 15. Snowfall Accumulation 1 To 3 Cm. Freezing Level.. Surface.

Saturday..Mainly Cloudy. 60 Percent Chance Of Flurries.

Snowfall Accumulation 3 To 5 Cm. Freezing Level Surface.

Sunday.. Snow. Snowfall Accumulation 25 To 35 Cm. Freezing Level 800 Metres.



wahoo! we are going to get DUMPED on this weekend. i can't wait! leaving in 5 hours.... big group again: me, pierre, his friend tito, matt, jigna, sri, noemi, hemant, sindya and some of sri's college friends.

this is crazy. no, it's ridiculous.

120,190 -- my new high score on bejeweled. For the last year, I've been obsessively playing this game that I downloaded onto my palm...and was challenged about a year ago to get over 100,000...a task I deemed nearly impossible. Last week, I just went on a streak and that's what I ended up with. Wahoo! Sadly, it's nowhere close to the All-Time high for the Timed game as posted on the Astraware site of 40,943,880. How in the WORLD do they do that?



las vegas was a lot of fun--took lots of pictures which'll i'll post later. it's been YEARS since i've been back...and i was sad to see a lot of the major arcade areas in hotels replaced by more slot machines. saw a total of 10 hotels: Mandalay Bay (where we stayed), Paris (Rabah felt so at home), Bally's, Caesar's Palace, Monte Carlo (where we saw Lance Burton), Excalibur, New York New York (where we rode the Manhattan Express, Venetian (gorgeous), Treasure Island, and the Mirage. It was a crazy weekend full of Nascar fans (huge race) and boxing fans (for the Ruiz vs. Jones fight). gambled a bit but not too much...overall, lost a little bit--but i guess that's what you pay for "entertainment" if you call it that. i want to go back when the weather is nicer...never got a chance to indulge in the 11 acres of pool area at the hotel....



i saw how to lose a guy in 10 days with betina last week...and i'll admit: i loved it! not oscar-worthy...but oh so fun.



cartoon tributes to mr. rogers...how sad.



last friday, got a chance to see rockapella perform at work (our music team's been rocking this week with fun performances!)...ah...how it took me back to the days of a cappella...



this is just not right. about a year ago, i traveled to napa valley and got a very cool corkscrew from the robert mondavi store...only to have it snatched from me at the airport! how upsetting to know that california has profitted from that...but I guess there's nothing better they can do with all of this stuff. i wish they had a more efficient way of handling confiscated items.



Interesting story on the decline of literacy due to SMS text messaging. I know myself that my grammar has shot down the tube simply from writing emails and Instant Messaging. my blog alone is full of horrible grammatical mistakes (i.e. lowercase letters, random 'dot-dot-dots..")