Just arrived in Hong Kong after 17 hours of flight and 6 hours of sitting around in airports. Overall, flight wasn't too bad with knitting and 3 movies back to back (Anchorman: The Life of Ron Burgundy, The Notebook and First Daughter). I was fortunate to have asked to change my middle seat to an aisle or window seat. In addition to getting moved to an aisle seat, I was upgraded to Economy Plus in United, which just means I have more leg room--super nice for such a long flight. At one point in the flight, the captain came on and just said quickly "Welcome to Siberia", which I thought was funny. Sure enough, we were flying over Siberia.



After de-planing, I saw a Starbucks and got excited at the thought of getting an eggnog latte. Unfortuntely, seems like eggnog isn't popular in Hong Kong--they had 2 holiday drinks: Gingerbread Latate (which we have in Seattle) and Creme Brulee Latte. I tried the Creme Brulee since that's not offered in Seattle---yum!



So now I'm at the hotel and just want to chill for the rest of the evening.

My friend, Guy, who recently left Amazon just opened up his own dog boarding facility---Roscoe's Ranch--if you live in Seattle and have a dog, check it out.



I'm going crazy with the knitting. I'm knitting like a mad woman and stressing myself out. I wonder if I'll really finish all of this on the plane ride over.



Matt and I had dinner at Assaggio Ristorante on Saturday and it was ridiculously yummy. I highly recommend this place for Italian food. We started with an appetizer of goat cheese drizzled prawns--who knew?! My main entree was a tender lamb loin on top of risotto with lots of scrumptious black and white truffles. I finished off with a dessert of pistachio gelato and biscotti. Yum! The restaurant was intimate and the service was superb and patient. I think we closed off the restaurant too!



I leave for Hong Kong in less than 24 hours and haven't even taken out my suitcase for the trip yet to pack. Ack. I've been doing lots of prep work, though...excuses excuses... It seems abnormally warm over there, in the mid-70's everyday. I swear when I was there 3 years ago at the same time, I was bundled in a sweater and my poofy jacket everyday.



Scared of Santa photo gallery. Cute.

It's been a busy holiday season. There were holiday parties galore last week, starting with Jigna & Matt's very successful White Elephant party---I went home with one of those fun boxing puppets--mine is an Alien. I made a very potent eggnog for the first time--it was amazing how easy it was to make. Kind of disgusting once I realized the ingredients of eggnog--it's simply raw eggs, sugar, whipping cream & milk. Saturday night, I only had the energy to make it out to two parties--Jeanette's and LaToya's--which were both equally fun. Matt had a chance to meet a ton of my friends over the weekend, whew.



Over the weekend, I took a 2.5 hour knitting class with Phoebe and I LOVED it. I'm completely obsessed with making scarves for everyone I know now. I already finished my first scarf, which I gave to Matt. Not bad for a first scarf...next time, I'm going to make the number of stitches across shorter so it's not as wide...and so there's room to make it longer. Now I have something to pass the time while on the plane to Hong Kong next week. I already checked the TSA website to make sure that knitting needles are allowed as carry on---and they are!



I have a bellydancing holiday shindig tonight, of which I'm going to participate in the chorus of the student troupe (jumping in last minute since I couldn't attend previous rehearsals)--should be fun. A bit nervous as I've invited some friends to watch. I can't wait to get all dressed up--yay. That's the best part of tribal bellydance: the costumes: so colorful, rich & vibrant. Right after bellydancing, I'll have to run home and change into cocktail attire to attend two more holiday parties. Whew.



I saw The Lion King (the musical) at the Paramount last week with Jigna. Oh, it was magical, especially the opening scene--it sent shivers up my spine. I absolutely loved the re-creation of the animals. They had giraffes (a guy on stilts with arm stilts), an elephant, a cheetah, etc. The costuming was just spectacular..and of course, I've always loved the music. If you haven't seen this musical ever, I highly recommend it.

A podfolio---this person put up their online portfolio using flash and an iPod user design. Interesting.

Hmmm...so now have been playing around with bloglines a bit now that I have syndicated my blog. I feel so silly for not having checked out any of these blog readers earlier...it's actually quite cool.



If you are reading this and you use a blog reader of some sort, what do you use and why? I'm curious..

Do enough of y'all visit to really care about whether or not I syndicate my blog? I didn't think so....but I got my first request the other day from my friend, hemant. I hadn't ever really explored syndicating my blog but figured it wouldn't be a big deal. So here goes--I created an Atom feed--throw this into your readers: http://www.moohaha.org/ramblings/moohaha-atom.xml

Interesting. Microsoft finally jumped on the bandwagon and launched with their own weblogging service today, MSN Spaces, which comes with 10MB of free hosting service for photos. I went ahead and snatched the member name of "moohaha", of course :-) This service is aimed for the basic, non-technical user who just wants to share photos and send updates to friends and family. Hmm---there's a feature where the user can create "lists", whatever that may be. One of the default templates is to create a books list and name it whatever you like---but if there is an associated URL, the user has to manually input that URL next to the item. Major Amazon Associates opportunity for MSN perhaps?