whew! this past weekend was pretty busy...the holidays. so here's a breakdown:

friday - we had our christmas party for work. every year, we have a gathering at shutters in santa monica. they have this pretty big banquet room with great food. the first hour is open bar with hors d'oeuvres and they have a little raffle, some music, and caricaturists. so i got one done 'cuz i wasn't able to do mine last year, and the guy asks me what i like to do for fun. as i list off stuff, of course volleyball comes up, which he immediately picked up on 'cuz i guess it's can easy one to do (it took him half the time it took for him to do other people). so he has me jumping up to hit or something, and he makes the ball look like it bounced off my head, like a six-pack. i almost took offense, but then, what can you do? it's a caricature.
we went into lunch, and every year we have the same dj. when the time comes to make annoucements and speeches, he'll play little blurbs of disco or soundtrack songs, like the eye of the tiger or play that funky music, white boy. so he plays the latter when our institute's head guy comes up for a speech, and he, Dr. Morton, who's pushing 70 (i think) starts shaking his hips...that's a sight i will not forget. my friend and i left when the dj started the conga line.
friday night i went with our life group to see the two towers at the grove theaters. we got there early enough so that we had a good place in the line, but we had to forgo dinner. so some of us ended up getting hot dogs ($3.75!!). the theaters at the grove are pretty nice...and the movie was so good!! i had high expectations, and i wasn't disappointed! i didn't even feel the three hours pass...and i wanted more when the movie ended. a lot more violence, but i like that they didn't show much gore...they showed enough to make the point, but didn't overdo it with the details, gave us more of the big picture...at least, that's what i thought. maybe i'm just desensitized. they did such an excellent job in making this middle installment its own movie...i can't wait until next year!
on saturday, nari had her "thanksgiving in december." saw a lot of old faces and had a surprisingly good time talking to people. you know how usually at those large gatherings you spend most of your time in small talk? i actually had some significant conversations, which was really nice. then people started playing mafia...i didn't want to play, so i just watched, which is interesting. you see a lot of things, especially when you know who's mafia and who's not. afterwards, since i carpooled with kris and mel, we had a good talk about relationships and other things...pretty much concluding that they're really, really complicated. (sounds common sensical, but we had a good discussion about it)
sunday i hung out with michigan people that were in town...judy and i drove down to christie and darren hom's place in tustin and met up with john b., reggie, young, joel, the homs, rich and nina, han and his brother, han (hanju and hanyoung - but they both go by "han" - doesn't that get really confusing? every so often i got confused, and we only spent the evening there), and four women that i met that night - barbara, lena, erica, and jessica (what's up with the "a" endings?) we ended up playing cranium after dinner, and our team (young, rich, lena and i) totally blew everyone away. i remember playing cranium before, and it was the same deal...some teams will get stuck in an area, and others will get to the end so quickly that game loses a lot of its fun. especially when the competitive people are the ones losing. ;p for some reason, our team was just on. rich and young have this crazy connection - lena and i felt that we were riding on their coattails, though we had our moments. but gosh, people get ugly...i dunno how many times our team was called nerdy and geeky. and those comments were mostly from the joel the pastor! ;p
whoa, that was a novel...is it obvious that i'm at work and have no desire to do anything productive? our vacation schedule sucks...work monday, get tuesday to thursday off, and then work friday.