Weekend Update

Saturday
I managed to sleep-in for a little bit, which felt nice. I got my car washed (even nicer) and had lunch with my dad. After lunch, my dad asked if I could take him to Target so he could pick up some stuff before I dropped him off at home. I never pass down a trip to Target, so I said yes. When we got there, my dad asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I told him a few things, including a Nintendo DS. He asked if I wanted it now, or wait until Christmas and unwrap it. I thought it was silly to wait for something I knew I was getting just so I could unwrap it, so I said I would take it now.

Me, with my early Christmas presents. I picked a blue DS.

After I dropped my dad off at his house, I went home and got ready to go to my friend Aranne's family's holiday party. As I mentioned in a previous post, Aranne is my childhood friend and I hadn't seen her since our high school graduation 10 years ago. We reconnected again through Facebook and I was excited to see her again in person. When I got to the party, there were a handful of other people there that I knew when I was younger too, mainly Aranne's family. Aranne looked exactly the same. I also met her nice husband, Dan. Geoff knows Aranne too, but wasn't able to come with me since he had to go to his company's holiday party. Aranne and I talked for a couple hours, catching up, and then I had to leave to meet Geoff at his party. As I was leaving, she took me over to a table for me to pick out a party gift. It had to be the best party gift I've ever been given (and I'm not just saying that because I know she might be reading this!). She and her sister-in-law made card organizers for everyone to take home. They're these small spiral notebooks that have a page and pocket inside for every month of the year. Every page also has a numbered list per month. The purpose is that you write the person's name by the number of the day of their birthday according to the corresponding month. And however many names you have written down for each month, you put the equal number of cards for those people. That way, when a person's birthday comes up, you just pull a card from the pocket and mail it to them. You can use it for anniversaries too. It's such a neat idea! Aranne and her sister-in-law made so many of them and they all had different prints on them. It was hard for me to choose one. I picked the one you see in the picture because it had bright, cheery colors. After receiving my gift, Aranne and I took pictures, hugged and said our goodbyes. It made me really happy to see her and I hope we'll get to visit again.


Me and Aranne. I tried to find a pic of us when we were in middle school or high school to put along side this, but my mom has them with all of our pictures in Houston (much to Aranne's relief, I'm guessing).


The cute card organizer Aranne made.

After I left, I headed out to Irvine to meet Geoff at his company's holiday party. It was almost over when I got there, so we didn't stay very long. On the way back to Geoff's, we stopped to get some munchies, went home and watched one of my favorite holiday movies, "Love Actually." Geoff had never seen it before and he really liked it.

Sunday
The morning was so busy, I'm not entirely sure what I did. I think I helped Geoff clean-up his place. Brad, Geoff and I went to grab lunch at Steelhead Brewery, where there was this really obnoxious guy there bossing around his poor pregnant wife. I wanted to smack him. After lunch and a quick trip to the store, we all got ready to see an evening show of "Wicked" in L.A. If you've never seen it, go now. It's leaving L.A. in five weeks. It's such a good musical, one of my favorites. The songs and plot are amazing. This was like my 4th time seeing it and this time was the best performance out of all the ones I saw.

"I think I'll try defying gravity..."