Shameless!

If you're on Facebook and have the same demographic of friends that I do, you'll notice that 50% of the photos posted are of their children. Another 30% are of their vacation – with their children. The leftover 20% are of photos of their own childhood, or of their pets, or single adults partying with their alcoholic friends.

It's quite shameless how some parents like to flaunt photos of their kids assuming that all the world is just dying to see them. These are the same parents that plaster their car bumpers with those annoying Honor Student stickers (which I can easily print out of our laser printer). Sure, YOU might think you have the world's cutest kids, but then so does the next person and the person after that. So which one is it? Yours? Hers? His?? Fact is, none of them are because quite frankly, we all know who I think is the cutest. Sorry.

But unlike those other parents, you'll never see me parading my kids all over the net. Nope. Remember, my photos are not about my kids, but about my artistic journey toward photographic excellence. It's not about the subject, but rather it's all about composition, storytelling, and creative coloring and cropping. I can't help it if my favorite test subject just happens to be my daughter.

In my busy life, whenever I want to practice photography, it's all about convenience. We rarely get to travel. And at parties, my finger are always too covered with grease and cheese powder to pick up the camera. But Justine, everyday she's always in my line of sight. Hey, sometimes you just got to work with what you've got. Am I right?

Below are some photos from a recent wedding banquet where I was sharpening my photo skills. I guess shooting the bride and groom wasn't as convenient as shooting the kids. Oh well.

:)

She loves them...

She leaves them.

Why is it all the beautiful girls always have a weirdo brother? Never fails.

Correction. Make that two weirdo brothers.

I bet you've never seen fried rice look like that.

Forget the fried rice, I'd rather have a grape fruit rollup!

No longer Hopeless!

Today I received some photos of Grace and Owen's newest family addition from an anonymous source. I checked their blog, O, Grace, Faith & Hope, but no pictures!! What's up with that?? They probably didn't post them because of privacy issues. So please allow me!

If you're just now learning of the Lee family's adoption journey, you've come just in time. They are still in China right now so they still need lots of prayers with their daily challenges (like finding a real toilet and getting rid of that fish smell). I invite you to visit their blog right now and catch up on their exciting adventure before it's too late! Because once they come home, they'll be boring like the rest of us.

Congratulations Lee family!

Link: O, Grace, Faith & Hope

Cool outfit. Like one of those lion dance costumes.

Special delivery. Just like FedEx, you have to sign for it.

Hope and Faith, with lots of love!

The orphanage director explaining the No Return policy.

Welcome Kyle Devin

Kyle Devin Gunn

March 24, 2009, 5:35 p.m., 6 lbs. 1 oz.

Congratulations! And if you forgot who Burt was or didn't even know he was married, you can read about his nuptials here. That post still remains my most popular.

Sex Talk with Dr. Dan

For those of you who missed the last YFC meeting (Christine, Peggy, Veronica, Wayland, Wenna), boy did you miss a great meeting! In our continual study of the book, Men are Waffles. Women are Spaghetti, we talked about sex, and lots of it! Actually, Dr. Dan and his lovely wife did all the talking, we just sat in wide-eyed silence soaking it all in. It brought back memories of junior high learning about contraceptives.

Did you know?
Did you know that P.M.S. is actually a real thing and not some made up excuse? ...or at least Dr. Dan seems to think so. Even though there’s scientific evidence, I’m still not totally convinced. There are women I know who are a certain way year-round.

Did you know that the United States is the most sexually active nation in the whole world? Even more so than Sweden and France? And that the Japanese are the least active? I guess if you take your mind off of sex all the time, you can build some great TV’s and cars! No offense to my American-born Japanese readers (who are really American anyway). Just telling the facts.

Did you know that the average married couple has sex 98 times a year? Ninety-eight times! If my math is correct, that’s twice a week, every week, minus three weeks of vacation! Man, I need to start clearing off my calendar and play less Scrabble! The real eye-opener is when you think about it, if you’re only doing it 50 times, then there’s someone else doing it 146 times! Speaking of which...

After the lesson, Myron (aka Han Solo) quickly announced that Grace is expecting their fourth child in September! Maybe instead of being Han Solo, perhaps he should be known as Samson. All I can say to Myron is, “Don’t cut that hair!” And let’s not forget about Grace. With three kids and that breakneck schedule, she still makes time for Scrabble and reading my blog. Wow, I am indeed honored. Grace, you are truly amazing!

So back to the meeting. Dr. Dan delivered the lesson with utmost professionalism and a straight face. His Powerpoint was informative, complete with entertaining video clips from Everyone Loves Raymond that illustrates the sexual tension between husband and wife. We noticed that when discussing certain awkward topics, he tended to talk a little faster. Haha. At the end I commended Dr. Dan for his great seminar. His response was, “I can’t believe I said ‘ejaculation’ at church!”

See you at the next meeting!

Friday Fun - Bruce Lee plays Ping Pong

Friday Free Music

Did you see Kelly on American Idol this week? At first I couldn't recognize her. It's obvious she's grown up since the last time I saw her, but she's also grown out a bit too :o Click on the link, watch the videos of her live performances. Click on the orange bar for "Free Download" and enter the code "DOVE" for her latest single.

Also, free download of Taylor Swift's Love Song here.

Free Fries and Drink today only

Musical Monday - Mario Kart Love Song

You be my princess and I'll be your toad
I'll follow behind you on rainbow road
Protect you from red shells wherever we go
I promise.

No one will touch us if we pick up a star
If you spin out you can ride in my car
When we slide together we generate sparks
In our wheels and our hearts

Chorus:
The finish line
Is just around the bend
I'll pause this game
So our love will never end
Let's go again

The blue shell is coming so I'll go ahead
If you hang behind, it'll hit me instead
But never look back cause I'm down but not dead
I'll catch up to you

Don't worry about Bowser or DK
Eat this glowing mushroom
And they'll all fade away

Chorus (x2)

To the mushroom cup
And the flower cup
And the star cup
And the reverse cup

Great Buys at Stupid Prices

For those of you who live in the bay area, we recently discovered a cool new bargain store to shop at, Great Buys at Stupid Prices. It's located on Mission Blvd., across from China AA Buffet in Hayward.

If you like shopping at Costco, you'll like this store. What they sell is all the discontinued/returns/overstock/floor sample items from warehouse stores like Costco and Sam's Club, among others. Thanks to Costco's liberal return policy, now you know where all that stuff ends up. Here!

Like Costco, GBSP carries a little of everything. From plasmas to furniture to clothing to appliances, just like a mini Costco. Some of the boxes are dented, or taped back up. Most of the clothing is brand new. All of the TV's seem to working well. Best of all, their prices are about half of what was originally priced at Costco and NO SALES TAX! The price on the tag is the price you pay. Woohoo!

The best bargains are in the clothing section. Unlike Ross where there is a million one-of-kind items, here they are organized somewhat orderly, with most sizes available. Brands will consist of Tommy, Kenneth Cole, Nautilus, Calvin, etc. and of course Kirkland. To all my tennis fans, they have cans of Penn tennis balls for $1.49 final.

We consider this store an upscale Big Lots. For those of you who visit Karen down south, this place is just like GTM (with less food items).

Go to their website and join their email list for coupons. The current coupon is additional 25% off all winter wear. Our friend recently got a 100% Cashmere Kirkland sweater for $15 with the coupon.

A few words of warning: this store is in a real crappy part of town, so don't go alone late at night. And the return policy is only 7/14/30 days, depending on the item. Be sure to read their warranty page before buying big ticket items. Also there's no dressing rooms. Other than that, it's a great place to shop! Have a nice weekend!

Link: Stupid Prices



To my valued subscribers:
The last couple of days you may have gotten some emails for some older posts of mine. I don't know what's causing it. I think there is a glitch with my Feedburner service provider since they switched over to Google. Sorry for the confusion.

Our new Screaming Machine!

Thanks to your taxpayer dollars, we recently purchased a new Power Mac with upgraded twin 3.0 quad-core Xeon Intel chip. This machine is so fast, it's quite amazing at what it can do! With this machine, you can open a 100mb Photoshop files in seconds – and doing so while ripping video in the background too. Complicated Illustrator blends/shadows and Final Cut Pro movie rendering is a breeze. It can do so many tasks simultaneously, there's practically zero waiting for anything. This could make my job so much more efficient...

But it won't.

You see, this machine goes to the Major. The Major's Dual 2.5ghz G5 recently died (coolant leakage) so we needed a replacement. Instead of giving the new machine to the people that actually do the intense work (the designers), she decides to keep it for herself.

The Major only uses three programs: Safari, Entourage (Outlook) and Word. Her idea of multitasking is sipping tea while reading email, or twirling her shoe while talking on the phone. She says the new machine is faster because Word launches in 2 seconds (an improvement over the 6 seconds it took in her old machine). Unbelievable! This is like buying a Ferrari to go grocery shopping when you don't even know how to cook!

In any other company, this would be wasteful, idiotic, even comical. But around here, it makes perfect sense. We suggested the top-of-the-line 24" iMac at half the price, but she still wanted the 8-core processor. She's the boss. She gets the best. She even complained that at only 3ghz, it wasn't truly the top-of-the-line. Sheesh.

So instead of a screaming machine, all we have are screaming designers. Think about it: a $4700 computer for email and word processing... Your tax dollars at work. Literally. Oh, and it also serves as a snack tray to hold her bag of pretzels.

Unbelievable.