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Just got back from an awesome fun weekend in Sarasota, Florida.. Lynn and Hao got married, and it was a magnificent time.. Flew out on Friday — sheesh, Florida is kind of further than I thought, it takes like the whole day to traverse the whole SFO-ATL-SRQ trip.. I left the house at like 6:30am and didn’t get to my hotel until around 9pm… 12 hours, door to door. Someone should really get working on that transporter-type machinery quickly.

I’ve never been to Sarasota before, and I can now see why the snowbirds all retire there. It’s gorgeous. Saturday was spent on Siesta beach. The sand at Siesta Key is.. awesome. Hong has a great pic of it.. Supposedly, it’s made up mainly of quartz (99% according to a Harvard Geologic study), so it’s super fine, and incredibly white — which means that it reflects most of the sun, making it cool to walk on. It’s pretty awesome, and with the consistency of flour, it feels like you’re walking around on a comfy mushy surface. If I were designing a beach, I’d seriously just load up on that stuff, it’s awesome.

Sunday, incidentally, was my birthday.. so it was actually kind of cool to be able to spend it with a bunch of my friends in a sunny locale. My friend Dusty owns a golf course in Sarasota, so AJ and I played 9 holes in the morning. The last round of golf I played was last February in Vegas, so yah.. I was a little rusty (not that I’m actually any good when not rusty), but it was still fun. I think I came pretty close to hitting a baby alligator on the 7th hole. He was sunbathing just to the left of the tee box, and since Dusty pointed it out right before I hit, I guess I was thinking about it, and… the ball decided to shank off the heel of the driver and into the pond… Good thing momma alligator didn’t see that. The rest of the day was spent basking in the hot Sarasota sun by the hotel pool with Audris, frolicking in the ocean, and throwing the ol’ pigskin around with Korby and Mcc.

The wedding itself was in the backyard of the Crowley mansion, which is situated right on the water. Halfway through the ceremony, I felt the temperature drop, so I was looking around for the rain to come, but it never did, so the weather cooperated fully. Lynn and Hao have spent the past few years in various places all around the world, so this wedding was one of the most global crowds that I’ve seen… I really wonder how many cumulative miles were traversed for the event, but people hailed from San Francisco, New York, Zurich, Holland, London, China, and Chicago, amongst others… Pretty cool. Though I had aspirations of taking a ton of awesome pictures throughout the whole event, the frequency of my picture taking seemed to vary inversely with the amount of alcohol I consumed, so, I don’t have many pics of the dancey-general-goodtimery that I had near the end of the wedding.

Lynn’s mom was in charge of the music, and she found this live band that was really, really good. I actually haven’t been to many weddings with a live band before, and I was impressed that they were able to play music that appealed to a wide cross section of ages. Lynn’s grandma had a ton of friends there that were super good at dancing, so it was awesome to see them cut the rug to the many swing songs that the band played. I mean, the band didn’t play any live d’nb or anything approaching that, but I do think they did a good job of keeping the energy up and fun. Good work, wedding band.

Anyway.. my pics are here, mcc’s pics are here (he took some great ones), hong’s are here and korby’s pics are available good as well, but he doesn’t like me linking to them cuz then his veil of google secrecy is blown. That said, his picture set is the foil to mine, since his picture taking frequency actually increases with the amount of alcohol consumed.

Good times.

We went to Mer’s studio today, where Bailey was a model for the day. She did well, even though when it was time for the shoot, she all of a sudden shed her crazy Bailey persona for another one.. shy, scared Bailey.. But, after some treats, she was more like cute, confused Bailey, which I guess works too.

oh.. recovering from so much eating and general goodtimery this weekend… here’s what went down..

bbq’d turkey, honey baked ham, and all of the fixin’s (well, except for mashed potatoes for some reason, but that was ok. oh, and no GBC either.. harumph)

steph, amit, marcy and me joined 20,000 screaming teenage girls for ’so you think you can dance’ at the oakland coliseum…

and.. we got a christmas tree. and decorated it. wooo.

and then, marcy and i went to the devil makes three show at the independent… awesome.

and then finished up the weekend at bi rite creamery… yum.

happy holidays.

Pius is halfway around the world right now (in Kathmandu)… yet, we both are nerdy enough to take pictures of our desks and annotate them. So far away… yet so close.

Click through to flickr see the annotations…

I am fantasy football. And, together with James and maybe Steph, we are a fantasy football team. Hehe.

Happy Halloweeeeeen.

Sweet. Tonight was the lunar eclipse. So frikkin’ cool. It was a little foggy, and it took me a little while to figure out how to really take pics of the moon properly… But, about 5 minutes before it hit total, the entire sky cleared up.. and I was able to get a few decent shots of the moon as it got eclipsed by the earth.. I started out with a large aperture, but then figured out that it was a lot better at f/8.0, and a pretty fast shutter, like around 1/30..

I put together a little montage of my best shots, but it’s not at good as this one.. But, for my first lunar eclipse shoot, I think it’s pretty decent…

All the pics are here.

Ok, I guess I should get to sleep now.

Sunnia and Mike got married last weekend up in Tahoe, and it was awesome. They got married on 07/07/07, which hopefully will be easy to remember… It’s apparently the most popular day of the year to get married this year. I wonder if next year’s 08/08/08 will be as popular. I’m guess not, since it’s a Friday. 09/09/09 is a Wednesday, but I think that’ll be super popular for Chinese peeps, cuz “9″ rhymes with “a long time” in Chinese. And wouldn’t it be neat to be married on a day that rhymes with “long time/long time/long time”? Hmm. Maybe I’ll just book a venue now, all I need is.. hmm.. someone to marry. Well, I guess I’d have a few years.

Anyway.. I was the best man at Masnick’s wedding, which was my first wedding party. So, that was pretty neat. I was tasked with a bunch of tasks, including setting up the chupah, carrying the rings, etc. etc.. The wind atop of Heavenly was not cooperating with my chupah construction, and it was doing its best to blow that thing off the mountain. But, armed with ropes and a few sandbags, we managed to get that thing secured.. somewhat. Apparently, it almost fell over when we all went back to prepare for our entrance, and thanks to Andy, it was saved. (Thanks Andy)

Even though it was hectic at times, the wedding went off perfectly. Sure there were fiascos: a huge fire threatened Tahoe, the hotel “lost” all of the reservations that were made for the wedding, some placecards decided to go missing for awhile, the chupah almost blew off the mountain, but all in all, it went off pretty well.

We rented a house up in Tahoe for a bunch of our friends, and we supposedly broke some stuff. Grrr. What the F? I didn’t notice anything broken at all, so I’m curious to see what we “broke” on the bill that they are apparently sending. Grr.

Anyway.. congrats to Mike and Sunnia!!

More pics from Paul, Korby, and Meredith.

This past weekend was action packed.. It was Dana’s birthday on Friday, and since it coincided with the monthly critical mass ride, a bunch of us got together and joined up. I hopped on my fixie (cuz I’m so hipster) and joined up, and Dave gave us all mustaches, just because. This was my second critical mass, and this ride was pretty fun as well.. Around 500 bicyclists took over the city streets as we wound our way through downtown, the mission (beep! beep! it’s the hipster highway!), and eventually all the way down to the 280. Fun fun fun.

Saturday my baseball team, the SuperStars, opened the season with a 3-0 victory over the Tsunami.. Brandon pitched a spectacular complete game, earning him the shut-out. I went 0-2 at bat, with a K(looking) and a 1-3 groundout. Hmm. Time to hit the batting cages. Anyway, it’s awesome to start the season with a win — hope we can keep that going.. Yay baseball..

Then, Sunday morning, Andy, Jason, Jeff and I headed up to Sears Point for some karting action.. It was novice day, so there were tons of little kids driving around. Like little 8 year olds and stuff. Honestly, they fit into their karts a lot better than we did. Then again, I’m big and fat, so that doesn’t help.

Sunday afternoon, Stephanie organized an oystering picnic up at Tomales Bay. It was a gorgeously sunny day, albeit a tad windy, but I love shucking and eating oysters on the bay.

So yah… April has blasted onto the scene with a flurry of activity. I honestly can’t believe that we’re in April already though… Time flies…

I turned 31 this weekend. Woohoo. Ashley’s birthday was the day before mine, so we decided to have a joint celebratory party on Saturday.. After dinner at Lulu, we headed down to Shine for the main festivities.

It was an evening filled with fabulous drunkgiggery (yes, I just made up that word).. My friends are the bestest evar. It was SUPER crowded due to the Angels of Bass party, but Trip hooked us up with our very own VIP booth, complete with a fully stocked mini-fridge. Red Bull, Vodka, and Fernet. Woo. Check out the whole set of pictures here — hmm.. I need to get a diffuser or something for that flash.

On Sunday, I celebrated with my family down in the boro. Everyone chipped in to cook up a delicious dinner with all of my favorites.. my grandma’s potato salad, kalbi, clams and oysters, meatloaf muffins, brussels sprouts, and some new dishes that my dad made up that were super tasty as well.

Yah, there was way too much food.. but so tasty. Food coma for sure.

I can’t believe another year has passed already… yikes.