not all of the girls could make it out to this year’s Alpha Kappa Psi Christmas formal on Saturday, but it was nonetheless memorable.  To sum up my night in one picture, it’d be this one:

To making memories: here, now, and in the future.

Sarah, Ye Rin, Cheryl, Carmela

As I sit here at my desk streaming Christmas music from 96.5, I am sucking on what is the first of many candy canes this season.  Today, to say the least, carries the makings of a VERY good day.

• it SNOWED in some parts of the Bay Area and up in the Santa Cruz mountains
• slept in instead of abusing myself and waking up extra early to continue studying for my final
• took my World Geography final – my ONLY final exam; should have studied the Middle East a bit more, but oh well!
• visited the SCU Law Records Office, where I worked for 3 years of my college career. dropped off some Ferraro Roche chocolates and some Christmas cheer, gahhh i love those ladies!
• petitioned to graduate – i can’t believe it is almost over!
• started conniving some travels for next year! Boston? Vegas? YES PLEASE
• will finish my LAST paper tonight while proctoring a law school final exam
• can start packing for my Colorado ski trip adventure!!!

Sorry to exploit you Mommy, but you provide the BEST humor. I love you!

SO, my mother just bought an iPhone, her first smartphone to say the least.  She didn’t get the phone because she actually uses the phone a lot, but mainly because of ONE iPHONE APP: Shazam.  Shazam, if you do not know, is a free app that can listen to any song for 20 or so seconds, analyze it, and tell you WHAT song it is, WHO sang it, and on WHICH cd it was on. You can also look up the biography of the artist(s) and their discography.  Anyways, back to my funny story.  So I just taught my mom how to use the t9 function on her cellphone a year back, which helped her send texts faster than typing multiple times to get to each letter (seriously, who texts that way anymore?!).  That in itself was a strenuous coaching lesson, but she soon got the hang of it.  That phone had keys.  The iPhone does not.  Now, I don’t know what it is about touchscreens, but they are just SO FREAKIN’ HARD to get the hang of.  Even after owning an iPhone of my own for over 4 months, I still have difficulties typing out texts and emails without having to go back and edit spelling errors due to touchscreen difficulties. Poor Mommy.  It’s even harder for her.

The following is a recent skype convo with her:

[6:34:54 PM] mommy: hey how do you type fast with iphone?
[6:35:05 PM] mommy: It’s not very smart.
[6:35:21 PM] Cheryl: iphone isnt smart? the auto correct saves my life
[6:35:45 PM] Cheryl: haha, otherwise i would sound drunk 200% of the time because its so hard to text on that thing and i always have typos
[6:38:36 PM] mommy: The auto correct is AWFUL.  So, I was texting Dad, trying to tell him that it’s the 4th qtr (basketball), and it changed “qtr” to “WTF” for me automatically!  So, I was thinking, “Hey, WTF?!?!”

i literally laughed out loud in the middle of proctoring a law school final exam.

My obaachan (“grandmother”) is one of the greenest people I know…not one of the recycling crazies that have hopped on the GO GREEN movement with full-steam ahead, but one who is just naturally conscientious of the materials she uses and proactively thinks of MANY ways to reuse things.  In some ways, she reminds me of how the native americans found unique ways to use every part of the animal they killed – she too finds the most out-of-the-box ways to produce functionality out of the most typical household objects.  My Uncle Kenji actually wrote an article about my obaachan in the Nichi Bei Times, what was the oldest Japanese-American newspaper (recently shut down, but will reopen as a nonprofit), and I thought I’d share it during my rant on GREEN.

By KENJI G. TAGUMA

Nichi Bei Times

February 20, 2008

I used to think that my mom was the cheapest person in the world. I cringed with embarrassment at the thought of taking greatly overused paper bags for my school lunch — you know, crinkled up to make the most abused dollar bill look crisp.

Then I started to realize that she just didn’t want to live beyond our means, a not-so-wealthy family of seven living in the countryside of West Sacramento. There were just too many mouths to feed in a single-income household, particularly when that single income depends on the seasonal harvest of tomatoes.    Perhaps her living through the scarcity of wartime Japan also informed mom’s desire to reuse just about any and everything.   All the times we had to carefully unwrap our Christmas presents, in the hopes of reusing the wrapping for yet another year. Today, to not be able to tear right into presents would spoil the fun for the three-year-olds.

Other items she saved: tofu containers, meat trays, wooden chopsticks, desiccant packages, boxes, paper bags, or the reused Clorox bottle hanging on the clothesline outside, used to store clothes pins.  Also, she uses pie foil pans to hold the water for many plants.  Too many to list, much less remember.

In discussing this with staff, I’ve come to realize that a lot of things my mom does, at near age 77, allows her to do her part to reuse and thus save the environment in her own way.

She always discards eggshells in a special basket under the kitchen sink. I didn’t know what she really did with them, or the coffee grounds kept near the same area, but now I understand due to a Website that my brother Mark informed me about (www.backwoodshome. com/articles/ nyerges44. html).

Through the Website, I learned that eggshells are 93 percent calcium carbonate and contain “about 1 percent nitrogen, about a half-percent phosphoric acid, and other trace elements that make them a practical fertilizer.”

My eldest sister Carol in Nagoya, Japan chimed in with her own eggshell tip: “I use the thin lining of the shell to put on my face to take out dirt which clogs the pores on my nose,” she wrote via e-mail. “You should see it when I peel it when it gets a little hard, there are a lot of dirty stuff on it!”

What about the coffee grinds? The same site provides some insight:  “Coffee grounds can be particularly useful in the garden, or, at the very least, added to your compost pile. Used coffee grounds contain about two percent nitrogen, about a third of a percent of phosphoric acid, and varying amounts of potash… Analysis of coffee grounds shows that they contain many minerals, including trace minerals, carbohydrates, sugars, some vitamins, and some caffeine. They are particularly useful on those plants for which you would purchase and apply an ‘acid food.’ such as blueberries, evergreens, azaleas, roses, camellias, avocados, and certain fruit trees.”

One thing that has provided my nieces and nephews hours of cheap fun are all of the kamaboko (fish cake) blocks that my mother saved. I still don’t see how we could have eaten that much kamaboko.

Nevertheless, those boards helped to build many wooden houses, and some awfully tall high-rises, which would come crashing down if one lacks engineering acumen.

According to my sister-in-law Alice in Mountain View, Calif., the kamaboko blocks even found their way to the San Jose Betsuin Japanese language school. “One year she gave us close to 200 kamaboko boards,” said Alice. “We spray-painted them shiny black, and brought them to Japanese school for all the kids to use for their cultural projects. (We used them for the base of the hina-ningyo displays and also the base of the koinobori).”   Alice recalled other reuse habits as well. “My favorite from mom — cut the top half off paper milk cartons and use the remaining as coasters for bottles,” she said.   Ah, I remember, like for the shoyu, rum and cooking oil bottles that had the propensity to dribble little streams of residue.  “She made pillow cases from rice sacks and used old newspaper to wrap veggies to give away,” Alice added.

I don’t think mom ever bought any chopsticks, really. She saves all of our chopsticks after we eat at a restaurant, and even takes the chopstick wrappers home to use as bookmarks!  “Those chopsticks she brings home (the cheaper ones) are used as kindling to start their fires,” reminded my sister Sharon. “I still collect those Styrofoam containers for mom to use for our bentos. Mom still rinses out Ziploc bags and plastic wrap to re-use, which I do too… she hangs the bags on the side of refrigerator for quick drying.”

One recent discovery added to mom’s reuse repertoire.. .She makes a lot of her coveted futomaki sushi every month for church, or on other occasions. Along the way, she came across a nifty packaging idea: using boxes from plastic wrap or aluminum foil to pack her beloved sushi rolls. How simple, yet ingenious! Her friends even donate their expended foil and wrap boxes.

So there you have it. My mother is no longer just the “cheap” daughter of a family of seven kids who tries to save pennies wherever she can by finding clever ways of reusing.  She has epitomized, to me, the cultural concept of not being “mottainai” (wasteful).   By coming up with ways to help reduce her carbon footprint — intentional or not — she has proven herself to be quite an environmentalist.

Man, I love my obaachan.  Though we don’t always understand each other, she always finds a way to inspire me. Anyways, so what instigated all of this thought?  Well, I was reading an article on how putting a brick in your toilet to help displace some water can help you save approximately 11,000 gallons of water per year!  If you don’t have a brick, then use a water-filled fifth! (I know you must have an empty bottle around…if not, you’ll have one soon )  Read more here!  It’s a great GREEN article!

* I guess this really only applies to Santa Clara University kids who have the whole week off. YEE!

taken from Yahoo!

Life can be segmented into phases. Phases that define the mood and moments we are experiencing at the time. Obsessions and cravings that come and go with time.

Tonight I put on a scarf for the first time this season to prevent the nippy weather from intruding as I walked to the Alpha Kappa Psi Kappa Pledge Class date auction (okay, it’s 57 degrees outside and I consider that nippy. What can I say, I’m a California girl born and raised).  I have a whole drawer in my closet dedicated to scarves. Yes, I really have that many of them.  From flashy neons to earthy reds and browns, I have quite the collection of scarves thanks to my scarf phase I began at the start of college.  For awhile my eyes were peeled for cute scarves at the mall and at little boutiques. Do I really NEED all of these scarves? Probably not, because Cali doesn’t really get to the point where wearing scarves is a necessity.  I have some scarves I like more than others; one of my all-time favorites is the one my friend Addi made me early on freshman year – it’s SO SOFT!  I think one of the reasons I like it so much is because I know a lot of care went into it; it’s a pretty nice scarf.

But that is not the scarf I donned tonight. No, the first scarf I picked up out of my scarf drawer was red, maroon, and orange stripped scarf I purchased in London when my British Life and Business class got an amazing tour of the magnificent Arsenal Futbol Stadium (I sat in the seat David Beckham sits in! and the head coach!).  It made me so nostalgic for the London days of one year ago when I wore scarves and gloves everyday not because I wanted to look fashionable (although, I did feel more like a Londoner doing so) but because it was so cold it was a necessity (for me, anyhow. i get cold easily, and London was COLD for me).  Someday I wish to return to London, maybe perhaps even to live there again.  Is this just another phase for me, to want to go back and relive London, or will I always be a Cali girl? Who knows.

Slightly disappointed in myself for not keeping this blog up to date.  There has been a plethora of happenings since my last post, and now I can’t even document them because I have forgotten what I wanted to post!  Anywho, it’s mid-October now, and I’m wondering how time had passed so fast.  Summer “vacation” is finally over (although you cannot call it a pure vacation because I was working 40 hour weeks, going to school, and juggling a social life at the same time).  School is now back in session – actually, it is basically half over since it is the start of week 5 of 10.

SENIOR YEAR

The last year of college has begun, and I am having mixed feelings.  Part of me is trying to enjoy every second of it (as illustrated in my overzealous first two weeks of long nights and memorable moments, quotes, and friends).  Another part of me is just itching to get out of here, to go explore the “real world”.  Time after time my alumni friends have told me “you’re so lucky to still be in school” and I know I am.  Being in school is actually fun and relaxing.  You get to see and hang out with people your own age, get to sit and just listen to lectures for hours on end, and learn about things that actually interest you (given that you have chosen majors and minors that you enjoy, like i did – Marketing and International Business).  A lot of my friends who have recently graduated are still looking for jobs, and as I sit in school, I hope that I do not end up like that (sorry if you’re reading this unemployed buddies I’m rooting for ya!) Yet, there is a certain urge to just be out there in the workforce; to be able to go to work, put in my time, and to come home WITHOUT thinking about all of the homework that still awaits me. UGH.

This quarter could have been my last.  (I have now decided to stay one more quarter to pursue more classes that interest me but I never had the chance to take) I finished up my marketing major last Spring quarter, and now I am working towards finishing up my International Business minor (World Geography and Cross-cultural Psychology – TWO OF THE MOST INTERESTING CLASSES EVER!)  I am also taking my third religion (before my second religion course – oh the joys of going to a religious college), and taking my Capstone class (aka Senior thesis-type class that all seniors in the Business School must take to graduate).  My courses this quarter are making me very anxious to get a job OUTSIDE of NorCal, where I have prolonged my stay by 4 years already by choosing to go to Santa Clara University 15 minutes from home).  My interests that I’d love to explore are the Public Relations and Advertising/Branding industries, and the main hubs for this industry are Los Angeles, New York, and London – all places that I love (minus LA solely because of traffic).  My world geography class has strengthened my love for travel and I earnestly hope that whatever job I end up landing has some opportunities to travel.  Alas, I am still trying to work out all of my goals, and until further notice, I cannot positively say this is what I want to pursue (although I am getting closer to figuring it all out).

CALIFORNIA LOVING

What I love about California the most is the weather.  I don’t think there really is any place like California.  It’s not TOO hot, although it definitely has it’s warm days (I was inside the office safe from the smoldering heat anyways ) The fall and winters are generally dry, and if it were to rain I know EXACTLY how much rain we’re going to get and how long the rain is going to last. For example, last week we had our first severe storm.  It lasted ONE day! One, horribly wet, blustery, miserable day but still – ONE DAY. Haha.  We don’t get snow, except for in the mountains (and even then not so much), and in the winter I can still survive with just two layers – no gloves and scarves necessary like when I lived in London.   So why do I want to leave? Well, the answer simply is that everyone should.  It gives you more perspective on life outside your sunny California bubble.  Living in London for 4 months taught me that.  I want to see the world.  I haven’t forgotten that one of the top things I want to do before I die is to visit all 7 continents.  But this goes back to me getting a job after graduating from college.

Side note: yesterday (10/17 at 5:04pm) was the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake that shook the Bay, even collapsing the Bay Bridge.  I know many of you out-of-state’rs are deathly afraid of earthquakes, but I personally think that they are a wonderful (although serious and definitely can be scary) touch to what makes California special.

SENTIMENTALS

Ok, cheesy, I know.  I just watched Ghosts from Girlfriends Past, and there was one quote that really stood out to me.  This is because I have recently experienced this (maybe still am).

“Someone once told me that the power in all relationships lies with whoever cares less, and he was right. But power isn’t happiness, and I think that maybe happiness comes from caring more about people rather than less”

Alright, I think I’ll end on this note This is a long post, but also long awaited. Til next time, you stay classy Santa Clara.

Where were you when it happened?

It was 8 years ago today that the terrorists attacks occurred.   For the 2,973 innocent victims lost in New York, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon, this post is for you.

God Bless America

I was walking to the Orchestra room to drop off my violin before heading to my 8th grade homeroom class when my friend Steven Quistad came up to me and asked me if I had heard what happened earlier that morning.  I actually didn’t really know what the World Trade Center was, except that it was in New York. As we entered our first class, coverage was already playing on our classroom television and we all went to our seats, sitting and watching in utter silence and disbelief.

Being from the West Coast, I didn’t personally know anyone who was killed or hurt in the attacks, but as news of people from the Bay Area who were either on the planes or visiting there when it happened started coming in, it became more and more surreal.  It’s crazy to think that these people thought what they were doing was justified.  It’s crazy to watch the videos and to think this is just like what you see in movies…but it wasn’t a movie at all – it was REAL.
My thoughts and love go out to those affected by the events 8 years ago.

Wow, I haven’t blogged in awhile! So much has happened in the last month (I tend to keep saying this, I know…but really, a lot HAS happened!).  I don’t know where to begin!

I went on my first trip to Napa.  It was pretty awesome.  Went with James, and his cousin’s are pretty well established in Napa.  His cousin runs the Napa Opera House (we got to see Bruce Hornsby for FREE), and his cousin’s wife runs the Luna Winery.  James’ cousin got us a private tour of Mondavi, which was pretty awesome.  My third winery tour! Hehe. Drank lots of good wine that weekend, and overall had an amazing time in Napa. Good trip.

Been going to a bunch of Giants games too.  Went to the Giants vs Dodgers game with James, Mike Ford, and Shane last time the Dodgers were in town, and boy was that interesting (i talked about this in an earlier post).  Also went to a game with the homegirls (Shally, Tina, Olivia, Kimmie), and it’s always nice seeing their lovely faces   Preston took me to the Giants day game on Labor Day, and that was also pretty fly.  His baby cousin is SO FREAKING cute! I want a fat asian baby just like that when I have kids. Haha.  Afterwards went shopping on Haight and bought yet another pair of shoes… hehehe…

Went to Dave and Busters with the SCU girlies (Ye Rin, Steph Ma, Jaymie, Jocey) and James, and that was a blast too! Haha, this place really makes me feel like a kid again.  I have SO many tickets in my room, it’s a bit ridic.

Gina flew down to visit me from Seattle, and I haven’t seen this girl in….what? THREE YEARS?! Holy moly, that’s a long time!  James lent us his SF home for me, G, and Jess Yano to party up in.  Spent the next day in SF, and the day after that beaching it up at the lovely Santa Cruz.

Summer school has also finally ended (good riddance!) I now know that online classes are NOT my style. Ai ya. NEVER AGAIN. I do love Professor laGuardia though.

I FINALLY bought pots, pans, tv stand, knives, PLATES + BOWLS.  I finally feel like I’m moved in completely and am finally making a home out of Safeway Apartments.  It’s basically been my home for 2 years now, but now it’s really MY home. (some of you will know what i mean by this..)

My last “official” week at Symantec is this week. Sad panda.  In the works of getting extended, but if it’s not done in time, then maybe I have next week off? Nope.  All the other interns have ended and returned to school.  It’s been lonely in that sense, but luckily my team is so freakin’ awesome and so accepting. LOVE IT!

Ok, this is a long post. I’ll end it with an explanation on WHY 09/09/09 is so darn special!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090908/sc_livescience/why090909issospecial

Haha, so my HR Intern buddy Michelle created this video regarding why you should work at Symantec.  I’m featured in it so I thought I might as well share it on my blog.  Plus, Michelle would love that I’m helping her getting word out. (love ya, girl)

“I LOVE working for Symantec!”