Living in the Lap of Luxury

Since we obviously get our money's worth at my apartment (you know, my rent for half a bedroom is almost as much as the rent on our old house. Cool.), we have super-responsive maintenance workers, just like you'd expect.

Our apartment even comes with a skylight.

That gaping piece of happiness used to just be a bulge in our ceiling, that we reported to the management right after we moved in about 7 months ago. It never really posed a problem, until it started raining like all hell had broke loose this week.

Then things got fun.

Two emergency maintenance calls, an angry email, and a note left in the manager's office later, we got someone (the next day) to come up, put a cat litter bucket (replacing our pot) under the leak. By then, the paint/stucco on the ceiling had completely ripped off. He said he'd be back later, cause he had to work on the roof. Cool.

The push pin in the picture is my attempt at at least some prevention- I tacked a piece of plastic completely over the hole so at least it would help a little if it got worse. We moved the TV and Tivo to the other side of the living room while we wait for our ceiling to be..... intact?

Thank goodness I'm moving into a University apartment next year.

Birthday Girl!

Jehan turned 20 last week, so I threw her a birthday party at my apartment. Apparently the girl is ridiculously popular, so my apartment was PACKED! I dunno... maybe 40 or so people were there at a time, in our tiny apartment?



A bunch of my coworkers... they're out of control.
We made lots of goodies for the birthday girl, and one of our friends brought a cake. People from RSS showed up too, since Jehan works with me and is in RSS too.



Things are finally settled for housing next year, too. I'm going to move with Jehan, Jeraldy, and Jehan's current roommate Roxie into a furnished apartment owned by the university. My job at the desk gets me priority housing, which is why I can get into housing again after moving off campus. At least this year I won't have to find a subletter for the apartment!

Coming soon: I ordered a camera charger from Amazon, so I should be back in business soon. I've almost finished Kelli's baby shower gift, so pictures of that will be up soon. I'm coming home to give it to her next weekend (President's Day) so I'd better hurry and get it done!

Feelin' Kinda Classy

I realized that a lot of my blogging silence is due to the fact that 99.9% of the time, my camera is either dead or too far out of my lazy reach. So enjoy my large boring block of text... cause I still cant find my camera charger.

Alright, let's see here:
School-wise, I went with RSS to a taping of America's Funniest Videos. We use it as a fundraiser, since they pay you to come watch. A little sad, but I'll go with it. This is the second time I've been, and hopefully the last... since they use the exact same jokes every time, and I get bored quickly of responding enthusiastically to the "applause" sign.

Raquel was down here this last weekend for a wedding, which was really exciting. I went to Disneyland with her family on Sunday (the first time I've been since living down here....) And on Monday, I drove to Anaheim again to pick her up and bring her to UCLA for a few hours, to see my apartment and meet a few of my friends. It was pretty late, so I had to give her the whirlwind tour- no more than about 5 minutes with each friend. Which probably was safer... that way she didn't have time to start telling stories.

In my kitchen... A friend of mine from work has been bugging me since last quarter to cook for him. When I asked what he wanted, I never got more than one word: "meat". And so I cooked him meat. As the title suggests, I was feelin pretty classy, so we rolled on over to Costco to pick up a few steaks, and I settled in my large platter of beef front and center on the fridge shelf I share with my vegetarian roomie. I really like irony. Anyway, I called Brent and told him I had never cooked any meat more complicated than hamburger, and he needed to take pity on me. A crash course in spices later (cumin? what?) I had a pretty sweet marinade: Worchestshire sauce, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, black pepper, and cumin. I also learned the broiler serves a purpose other than storage. Andrew didn't want anything green touching his steak, so I compromised and chose red potatoes- not a real veggie, right? (Susan, I promise I'll take a picture of our freezer. I buy veggies. Just not fresh ones... baby steps man, baby steps.) I'm still full.

Oh and I'm working... that's the only reason I'm up at this ungodly hour.

Middle of nowhere

This last weekend was retreat for RSS, so about 40 people drove up to the middle of nowhere in the snow to "bond". Sad thing was.... it looked exactly like Magalia. So I wasn't quite as amazed as the others, but whatever. It was still a ton of fun, and we played a bunch of games and went "hiking", which just turned into an excuse for a snowball fight.

It was pretty amazing overall... We all want to go back pretty much every weekend. My mountain skills were put to use, too... Turns out I was the only one with the faintest clue how to get a car out that was stuck in ice.


On another note, my impulse buying strikes again... This is my newest toy. I got it Friday, and have been playing with it ever since.


The internet works really well, and it comes with some really cool applications, so I'm still figuring out how everything works on it.

I'm back!

I'm back in the land of fast internet! Thankfully, Susan has been faithfully documenting all of my updates... car... tattoo... presents... I didn't miss anything! Here's some of the stuff we were up to over break that Susan was NOT around for...

We all went over to Raquel's house before Christmas to be cute and festive and bake cookies. Very few of said cookies actually looked good enough to eat... but that's beside the point.

We also trekked to Kory's house for an intense game of pictionary...

This would be one of the losing teams... not us.

But mostly, we just ate a ton of Hula's and watched a lot of movies. The usual.

Curses!!!

Bank of America and I are not friends.

Jenny came into the apartment today, holding a note that had been taped to our door saying we had three days to pay rent or vacate. Seeing as we've paid rent on time every month... This was not a very welcome note.
As it turns out, B of A put a hold on our account without telling us, I guess because everyone's rent checks were such a large deposit, which made our rent check bounce. I called the bank today to see why it didn't clear, and that's when they told me about the hold. The lady on the phone though even said that she didn't know why our check didn't clear, since it was obvious we had the money. She ended up refunding us the returned check fee, and suggested we get a verification letter from the bank to tell our landlord that it wasn't our fault the check bounced. We had the added fun of running back and forth between here and the bank, since our rent would only now be accepted as a cashiers check, since it had already bounced once... So now we're just waiting for them to fax the oopsies letter to our branch, so we can show it to our landlord since she agreed to waive our late fees if we could show that B of A took responsibility. This was all hours before our final that we had planned to study all day for, mind you.

I hate to say it, but in comparison, our Christmas spirit is pretty non-existent. We have a super cute baby tree though! I think everyone's waiting to do the legit decorating when they go home. Which for me will be on Saturday... I'm stoked, and looking forward to shoveling Hula's in my face pretty much every day. That's what being home's all about, right?

Finals week

I haven't fallen off the face of the planet... I just feel guilty going out and actually doing something exciting when finals are so close. My first one is in biochem on Sunday, followed by genetics Monday and physics Thursday. So ah... if I'm updating anything before then, it's because I'm not studying when I should be!