2010

Archive for the year 2010

The Houston Trip

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Ching under Family, Travel, Videos.

I’m sorry in advance for bombarding you with blog posts both here and on FOODIES. I’m trying to get the blogs caught up. We’ve been so busy lately that the blogs have been almost a month behind.

This post is about the Houston trip, also known as Richard and Amy’s wedding or the road trip when we ate at Cracker Barrel not once but twice! Don’t look at me. I blame Jenni for that one.

I hope you all enjoyed browsing the wedding photos we took. Richard and Amy had a very beautiful wedding. I think it was the most unique (and probably longest) wedding I had ever attended to date. Every single aspect of the wedding was meaningful, though.

I love they had a harpist. It really set the tone from the beginning. The bridesmaids dresses were perfect. Great choice. I also loved that the bridesmaids carried lanterns (see photo at the left) instead of bouquets. That was so unique! The only thing that I was bummed about was that I couldn’t see what was happening from where we were sitting. I think if we’d have sat closer to the front, I might have taken twice as many photos at the wedding (as opposed to only three hundred or so). LOL. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Oh, I also loved that Amy sang during the ceremony. She is so talented. That was one of the most unique parts of their wedding. There wedding was just so interesting and different, but I wouldn’t have expected anything less from Richard.

The wedding started a little late and was standing room only, so the dessert reception started late also. I think it was almost 11:00 PM before it began, but the hotel shuttle service ended at 10:30 PM. Luckily, we ran into Casey (an old friend who we hadn’t seen in years). I told mom and Jenni that Casey didn’t mind giving all of us a ride back to the hotel after the reception since he was going to get a room at the same place anyway. Jenni was in a bad mood, though. I think mom was just worn out. So they both took the shuttle back to the hotel prior to the start of the night’s festivities.

It was great to catch up with Casey. We found out that he just got back to the mainland after a year of living in Hawaii. He currently lives with his Soulution bandmates in Austin, Texas. Casey said they have regular gigs at clubs around town and at Carlos Santana’s restaurant, Maria Maria. Sounds like they’re doing pretty well. Brian and I have decided that we’re going to have to drive down to Austin to see them perform before they move on to another town. 😉

The wedding reception was so much fun. Mom and Jenni totally missed out. I’m so glad we got to stay. (Thanks, Casey!)

Richard and Amy had the best first dance ever. I didn’t get to capture the whole thing and the video I took is crappy, but you get the picture. They started with “At Last” which was your typical slow dance and then, as the first song ended, the music seamlessly transitioned into “Stand By Me” so that Richard and Amy could show off their awesome Bachata dance moves.

They also did this amazing Rueda with five other couples or so. It wasn’t even set up or anything. It flowed so smoothly. The music was playing and then these couples showed up on the dance floor and they just started salsa dancing in a circle. There was even a couple that joined the circle after they’d already began. It was so much fun to watch. I wish that I could have captured it on video.

I think Brian and I were chatting outside with Jeff, Mike and Casey when they did the bouquet and garter toss because we totally missed those. It was a lot of fun catching up, though. We hadn’t seen these guys in ages. We stayed pretty late and Brian got wrangled into helping pack up. They needed guys for some lifting. It was probably 2:00 AM by the time we got back to our hotel.

Again, I’m so glad that we ran into Casey and he didn’t mind giving us a ride back to the hotel. We would have missed out on the fun reception stuff like the toasts and cake cutting and all of that amazing dancing.

I’m sorry it’s taken me two weeks to write about the wedding. I don’t mean to slack on my blogging duties, but we’ve just been so busy lately. We’ve had something going every weekend. We’ve also had so many trips this year. We had the Dallas trip in September, the Houston trip in October, we have Scottsdale/Arizona next month, and then I think we’re going to be in Las Vegas in late December so that we can be there for New Year’s Eve. We started this year out of town and then almost every single month we’ve had some sort of trip come up. It’s truly been one heck of a year.

So even though we didn’t have a major trip this year, we’ve had several smaller trips that were probably just as damaging to our bank account. LOL.

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Dinner Conversation #1285

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Ching under Family, Movies.

FATHER-IN-LAW: [to Brian] Has Ching ever seen Morons from Outer Space?

CHING: No, but I’ve seen morons from Earth.

Alright. I wasn’t serious. It was just the perfect set up and I couldn’t resist.

Thanks for having us over for dinner last night, Mom and Dad B. It was delicious! We’ll have to do that again some time. 🙂

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Shower Conversation #467

Posted on October 16, 2010 by Ching under Life.

BRIAN: You’re so uptight, I could shove a lump of coal in your ass and turn it into diamonds.

CHING: Really? Then why haven’t we done that yet? We could be rich by now!

Whenever we get a house, we’re going to need an extra large shower with dual shower heads. This way we can have more crazy shower conversations to share with you.

Looks like it’s going to be a beautiful weekend.

Have fun,
Ching

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Side by Side Corollas

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Ching under Family, Life, Travel.

We left for Houston at 3 AM on Saturday morning, October 2. It was actually a compromise because I originally wanted to leave at midnight and Brian wanted to leave at 6 AM. Since we couldn’t agree, we decided to compromise and split the difference. This worked out great ’cause then Jenni didn’t have to take Friday night off at her second job. She gets off work shortly after Liquid closes at 2 AM. So then we could take off as soon as she gets home from work and she can just sleep on the way down there, which is exactly what she did.

It worked out perfect because this was the same weekend that they started re-paving the asphalt in our apartment complex. Usually the truck is parked in one of the parking stalls in front of our townhouse, while Bebot is in the garage. The truck needed to be off the street for the re-paving so we put it inside our garage. We took Bebot and parked him inside mom and dad’s garage, and then the four of us (Mom, Jenni, Brian and I) took mom’s Highlander. It has horrible gas mileage (compared to Bebot), but at least it’s roomier. At least we only had to pay for gas on the way to Houston. Mom took care of gas on the return trip.

Believe it or not, I did most of the driving. I think Brian only drove a couple of hours each way. Mom didn’t drive, though she did stay awake to chat with me and keep me awake. Jenni just slept mostly. I did the rest of the driving. Go me.

I drove through Dallas both times. We timed it just right, though, so that we didn’t have to fight rush hour traffic. There was still a lot of cars, though. We knew we were in Dallas when the bottlenecks and bumper-to-bumper traffic started.

Anyway, it’s time to hit the sack because I’m getting sleepy. I will write more about our Houston roadtrip next time.

xoxo,
Ching