I spent this past weekend in SoCal. Decided to fly down for Kristina-izzle's birthday party. Weekend went by super fast and somehow I managed to squeeze in a decent amount of OCI research. Speaking of which, I need to hurry up and finish the research process so I can start the actual application process. Whatever. I'm working on it.

Anyway, flew in on Friday. Umma and James dropped me off pretty much right after work because they had to go somewhere. This meant that I spent a lot of time getting reacquainted with the San Jose airport. It's actually beginning to look pretty nice. Like real airport-looking. Not that I looked around much. I situated myself in one of those comfortable seats that Southwest set up, plugged in my phone and played a lot of Monkey Island. In a perfect world I would have finished it by the time I was in Irvine so I could rub it in my lovely boyfriend's face. Unfortunately, I have yet to finish it as I've been working on OCI stuff.

I got to Irvine a little after nine. Chris and Mia picked me up and we went straight to Second Spin. I used to be intimidated by this place, but they had like absolutely none of the CDs I wanted. I found this lame and sadly mourn the loss of the Tower Records that was once down the street and the Virgin Megastore in the other direction. So sad. Anyway, we went there and then we drove out to Fountain Valley and got extremely healthy carne asada fries fom Alertos for dinner. Played a lot of Monkey Island when we got back. Good times.

Saturday we woke up super early. Well, by early I mean 8 am on a weekend. I don't know why. It just kind of happened. We eventually decided to leave and went to Wing Stop in Lake Forest for lunch. Mia decided to be a cocky Asian person and get their Atomic wings even though the guy there warned her several times that this might not be a good idea. Man they were hot. Even when you coated them in Ranch Dressing. Mia could only finish two. There were two left, so Chris and I decided to have another dumb competition and see who could finish their wing first. We assumed that I would win seeing as Chris has always been weak when it came to spicy foods. We were wrong. Not only did he win, but he was the only one who didn't die afterwards. Good times. Their lemon herb wings, or whatever Chris chose, were really good.



I also checked Twitter right as we were finishing our meal and found out that the Kogi truck had just set up shop in Costa Mesa. Too bad they didn't post anything about that before! We so would have gone.

After that we went to the Spectrum to get Kristina birthday gifts. This resulted in us looking at puppies in the puppy store. They were really cute. Not as cute as Bruce, though.

We got back and I did some research for OCI. We got ready and drove to Taps in Brea for Kristina's birthday party.





We were actually one of the first people there even though we got there right at 7:30. It was fun seeing a lot of the UCI group again and catching up. The food was also super good. Kristina set up some three course meal thing for us. So I got gumbo, fillet mignon and crème brule. So good. It also came with some cream ale thing. Good stuff.



We drove back and I think pretty much Chris played some Monkey Island and I did some research when we got back.

We got up early on Sunday to go to a morning showing of Food, Inc. Before that, we stopped by Newport Beach to get cupcakes at Sprinkles for breakfast. Good stuff. Mia didn't want to see Food, Inc., so she saw 500 Days of Summer. Food Inc was very good. It's a documentary about a lot of the sketchy practices of the food industry. It kind of covered a lot of stuff that I had read about in Omnivore's Dilemma, but it's definitely a must-see movie. Kind of made me not want to eat meat anymore. We'll ignore the fact that I have eaten meat several times since seeing the movie. It'd be hard to do anything until school starts anyway. Will just reduce meat consumption for now and see where that goes.

We ate at Avanti Cafe afterwards, which is this little vegetarian cafe in Costa Mesa that I have always wanted to try. They were like real vegetarian, not “fake meat” vegetarian. Didn't quite expect that, but the caprese salad I had was very good.

We went back and I packed and got ready. Hung out for a couple of hours. Ate artichokes together, got Red Mango, and then Chris dropped me off at the airport.

That's about it for the weekend. This week's been going by super fast and I cannot believe that I'm almost done with my summer externship. This summer went by way too quickly. Not done yet. Got Korea next! Woot.