for a quick update on non-Panamanian stuff we’ve been up to.

Last weekend, I was sick and literally spent the entirety of Saturday in bed.  This was not very exciting.  But the weekend before that, we hopped down to SoCal for a quick trip home.  We spent 3 short but action-packed days doing fun stuff like this…

Watch a friend get married…

Congratulations Vi!  Not only was her wedding GORGEOUS and romantic and wonderful, but she was wearing an awesome dress.  This may make me sound shallow and frivolous, but I’m always a little disappointed when I go to a wedding and don’t love the bride’s dress.  This was not an issue with Vi- the girl has style.  And her dress had pockets.  POCKETS: making good dresses even better since the beginning of time.

We got to see old friends (like Helaine, who I am stealing all these pictures from.  Thanks/Sorry!)…

And the highlight of the night- I got to be part of an “Asian Party Face” (aka “look at me, i’m intimdating and i don’t smile at bitches”) group photo.  (Some explanation in case you didn’t go to high school with a bunch of nerdy Asian kids who refused to smile in pictures until they were past their self-conscious teenage taking themselves too seriously phase.)  Seriously, after all those years of AP/IB classes, this definitely makes my life feel more complete.

Earlier that day, we made the trek to Little Saigon to eat some Banh Mi deliciousness.  Mary came with us and found more evidence of my family’s not-so-secret obsession with personalized license plate.  ::sigh::

6 sandwiches for $10?  Joy.  Eating out of a stolen shopping cart in the middle of a parking lot?  Even better.

Watching my mom share the fruit she bought at the magic fruit store and try and tell this random women who only spoke Vietnamese where to buy the best cherries?  Priceless.

But the best thing of all was finally noticing that Mike was wearing THESE sunglasses all weekend and remember just what a giant dork he really is.  (Note: I like dorks.)

With a buttload of families to see during the holidays, Christmas can be complicated.  Thankfully, it starts out simply, just the way it should.  With cinnamon rolls.

That’s the wreckage of what was left over from my annual Christmas Cinnabun.  Some families leave homemade cookies out for Santa and wake up to the smell of homemade pastries wafting through the house.  My family makes a Christmas Eve run to the mall for white flour and trans fats.  Deeee-licious.  (This year we did supplement with some hippie cinnamon rolls that I brought from home- Sin Dawgs by Dave’s Killer Bread.  With their organic whole wheat flour and hefty dose of flax seeds, they may look healthy, but holy crap are they delicious.  Cinnabuns still hold a sentimental place in my heart, but if you have any way to get a hold of Sin Dawgs, do it.)\

Once we had ingested enough sugar, we moved on to presents. My mom definitely made out the best this year, scoring a swanky TAG watch from my dad.  Of course, she was even happier to open OUR presents-

A head scarf for her upcoming trip to Egypt.

And a Bumpit!

Okay, so she still has to master the art of the Bumpit- we’ll work on that.  My dad, however, totally dug it and has asked her to where it basically every time they leave the house.  This is ENDLESSLY amusing for me.

After we opened presents, my lazy family watched The Hangover while I slaved away in the kitchen.

Jimmy and Amy joined us.

Trust me, the food was better than their faces imply.  I’m just a horrific photographer.

After we ate, we were supposed to go visit Mike’s mom for a Christmas gift exchange.  Unfortunately, her father-in-law ended up having to go to the hospital.  He’s a nice guy, so Mike and Amy and I headed over to say hi.

They had their own Christmas feast.

We hung out, chatted, and I made some progress on Amy’s already-belated-birthday-knitting gift:

And that was Christmas Day.

One more celebration to go!

It’s 9:30 pm on Wednesday night and I’m frantically cleaning the house.  Why on earth am I cleaning when I should be glued to the tv watching So You Think You Can Dance?  Because we have visitors coming.  And these visitors are like big time, major VIP visitors- my mom, dad and brother are flying up tomorrow!

I am super stoked to see them- it’s their first time coming up to visit us so I have a lot to show them.  So far, I know that we’re going to hit the standards- Pike Place Market, the Locks, and maybe an arboretum or something as well.  We’re also planning on driving out to Whidbey Island on Saturday to hit the farmer’s market and do some picnicking at Deception Pass.  We’re blessed with great weather this weekend, so the 5 of us will have lots of pretty things to look at while we are stuffed inside the Mini.  (Yeah, we haven’t completely ruled out the idea of renting a car that day.)

Time spent with my family is always an adventure- we’re definitely a collection of characters.  Between my super-bubbly obsessively clean mother, my dad and his slight penchant for exaggeration (yeah I wonder where I got that from) and my ridiculously laid back brother (who probably just wants to play video games with Mike all weekend), I’m sure I’ll end the weekend with plenty of stories to share.

To give you a small taste of what spurs people in my family to action, remember the sparkly gangsta’ Hello Kitty bag I was obsessed with when Ben was in town?

Guess what showed up on my doorstep on Monday?  Dopeness!  As Barrie said when I told her about it, “Dude, I need to be part of your family.”

Obviously, my attraction to all things sparkly is genetic.

I love my parents.  I really do.  But whenever I spend more than 7 minutes with them, I am immediately reminded that they are crazy.  Usually I laugh.  Then I remember that this is probably a sign that one day I’ll be crazy too.  I mean, come on, I’m pretty sure that most people who know me will tell you I’m already halfway there.

First off, I’m always telling my dad that he needs a hobby.  The good news is that it seems like he’s found one and is taking it pretty seriously.  The bad news is that it consists of hording toiletries.

Now don’t go and get all worried that my dad is wasting his retirement on toothpaste and razors.  The whole point of this hobby is that everything you see here was completely free.  You see, he recently discovered this site and has been making the rounds at local CVS drugstores, combining coupons and collecting script he receives for certain purchases and amassing this half of a walk-in closet full of stuff.

The scariest thing is that he only started this 7 weeks ago.  Every Sunday morning he prints out a shopping list, clips coupons out of the newspaper and then makes the rounds to 4 different stores to collect his booty.

::sigh::

My mom, on the other hand, is just as crazy in her own right.  On Saturday afternoon she joined me for a hike in one of my favorite places in Southern California- Peter’s Canyon.

Peters Canyon is a great place for an easy hike if you live in Orange County.  It’s never crowded and has a couple of different trails ranging from three to seven miles.  It’s hiker and mountain bike friendly.  And it’s really pretty.  On a gorgeous day like Saturday, it made me really happy.

See the little dog at the bottom of the picture?  That’s Lucy, my parents’ Maltepoo, and definitely their favorite child.  We couldn’t go hiking without bringing Lucy, but bringing her out into the wilderness (which butts up to a fair share of McMansions) definitely showcases the fact that my mom may be a little TOO worried about her dog.

Not only is my mom carrying Lucy in this picture, she was also strategically positioning her hat to make sure that she didn’t get sunburnt.  Huh?  My mom carried her about 2 miles of our 4 mile hike because she was worried she might be tired.

The other weird thing about Lucy is that even though she’s a girl, she went through a phase where she would pee like a male dog- leg up style.  This concerned my mother so much that she tried to “train” Lucy to pee like a girl.  It didn’t quite work, but it definitely changed something:

Yeah, now she pees like she is doing an Eagle pose in yoga or something.  It’s bizarre.  Almost as bizarre as the fact that my mom tried to teach her the right way to pee.

I shouldn’t really judge weird peeing habits though.  This is a picture my mom took right after I went to pop a squat behind a storage building while we were hiking.  Hey, when you gotta go you gotta go.

If nothing else, I’m a lady.  A lady who one day will hoard freebies and worry about my dog getting sunburnt.  The upside of this scenario is that by then I will have a dog.

You know sometimes you have a moment where you are forced to realize that you have basically become your parent(s)?  This happened to me yesterday.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I really do have a lot in common with my mom.  We are both outgoing, we both talk wayyyyy too much, we are both a wee bit germaphobic (although my mom somehow combines that with actually being neat, whereas I am a total slob who is only reigned in by Mike’s love of things looking organized), and we both LOVE Splenda.  But I feel like these things are normal.  There are other, more ominous behavior patterns that we share that actually make me shudder.

So yesterday when we were talking and she told me that she hurt herself while WATCHING Michael Phelps win his butterfly event a couple of weeks ago, I laughed.  Then I shuddered.  Who the hell gets so excited watching something on television that they fall off a couch and hurt themself?

Oh yeah, that is totally something I would do.

Thankfully (and here’s another sign that we are the same person), she then took pictures of her injury and sent them to me:

Awesome.

She also sent me this picture, which has nothing to do with anything, but says a lot about my family:

My robotectomy, or “arm removal,” as my bff Mary calls it, was definitely the highlight of my trip back to Orange County this weekend, but I also was lucky enough to be able to see some of my favorite people back home.

On Wednesday, I hung out with my knitters, including Robert, aka Snarky Snark Snark:

I love all the knitters, but for some reason I only got a picture with Robert that night. Maybe it was because he gave me a present. I love presents.

On Friday, Mike and I had lunch with Mike’s Mom and I visited my favorite ex-coworkers.

Nancy (who smiles a lot):

warren (who hates pictures):

and Kris (these are the worst pictures I’ve ever seen of Kris. But I’d have better pictures of him if he’d put down his stupid Sidekick):

I also got to hang out with Mary, Derrick and Josie on Saturday. We had a loser-tastic Saturday night that consisted of watching the John Edwards interview Mary had Tivo-ed, ordering in Chinese rood and watching the Olympics (get it?):

And of course, I spent plenty of time with two of my favorite people ever, my parents:

You can see how happy my dad was to see me again:

I saw a bunch of other people I totally dig too this weekend, but these are the people I got pictures of. The rest of you will just have to come visit me if you want to make the blog

Welcome to the adventures of Aubrey and Michael. We plan on using this blog to keep our family and friends back in California amidst on our new adventure here in Seattle Washington!