Year: 2006

Home for Christmas.

We haven’t celebrated Christmas in Maryland for many years.

Jeremy and the kids picked me up in NYC. We stopped off at Central Park for hot dogs and playing time.

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Donald was at the house already.

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We put up our Christmas tree. It is decorated with the last string of lights and the last box of ornaments that we could find at Target.

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Here is our computer cluster. We have 4 laptops crowded right at the front door. I will leave it up to you to figure out why.

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Karin and Karen

I spent 24 hours in NYC without the kids! I walked all around and smiled at strangers. It’s odd since I don’t enjoy talking to them. I did a Singapore vs NYC smile back survey. The smile back % is about the same – 15%. I held one person’s gaze too long and he tried to ask me out. Yikes.

I lunched with my friend Karin. She is one week away from giving birth. We ate Korean food and talked until 3 pm. I rarely talk to a friend for hours. Karin teaches at West Point and is planning to go back to teaching on January 4th!

Karen, my college roommate, lives on the southern tip of Manhattan at Battery Park City. She is the COO of Broadway Technologies – she’s just started so she’s not on the website yet. She is so insanely successful at her work, it’s not even funny – but she is very modest about it claiming luck mostly – but I know her hard work and her savvy was not a small part of her success. The Statue of Liberty stands outside her apartment and we talked until I was too sleepy to keep my eyes open.

I had a wonderful day.

Back in New York

We left Austin on Monday morning, Vince cried on the way to the airport because he just didn’t want to leave. He had such a great time, it was really hard to go back to NY. On the plane back from Austin, poor Vince got airsick. Orange puke was all over the seat and the foot area. I apologized to the stewards, I cleaned up most of the vomit, but there was still stuff left on the floor. Of course, right after Vince puked, he felt much, much better. We limped home – it was a full day of travel – we got home about 9 pm.

Jeremy and I do travel quite a bit. This year, with Edda’s diagnosis, I felt like we cut back on a lot of travel, but Jeremy reminded me that we still had 2 trips from Singapore to the US. While in the US, we traveled between upstate NY and Washington DC by car both times. In the spring trip, we went to Puerto Rico and this trip we went to Austin, TX. I guess we have traveled less while living in Singapore – we’ve only wandered off the island once – to Indonesia. Edda really has been loving this trip – sometimes I take her to new places in Singapore, she freaks out and needs a lot of reassurance from us to make her calm again, but this trip, she has been all smiles and contentment. Vince has been a little more unsettled, more concerned about where we are going and when we are going home. He loves being with family, but this whole moving around is getting to him.

The Good New Times.

It was a good, but tiring weekend in LA. I drove down Thursday night and got to Ted’s place at around 1am. I found him and his roommate, James, playing Gears of War on Xbox 360, so of course I had to play for an hour or 2. Ted and I ended up talking a bit too – didn’t sleep until about 4am.

Friday, I woke up late, Ted had to get his new stereo install at the very same Circuit City that I had tried to buy Mom her original iPod nano. Anyways, they messed up the install, and now the stereo whines when the car revs. Grounding problem? New Amp? Dunno. But we went to the Circuit City no less than 3 times this weekend. 🙂

We hung out a bit with Nolan and Huong. They are always really good hosts to me. Never can seem to pay for my own dinner when we go out to eat. So thanks Nolan. Also Nolan was the keeper for my old Klein Attitude hardtail, affectionately known as, Bluesy. I got it back from him considering Nolan now has at least.. 5-10 bikes in his stable. 🙂 Well, now I’ve got 5 bikes in my stable, that I’m not quite sure what to do with, but we’ll think of something.

We did some time trialing also. This is good cause I signed up to to the time trialing portion of the Wildflower Tri with Yi-Ling and her friend Meera. 56 miles, racing. Yikes. Our team name? GunningForNotLast. 🙂 Ted and I raced on the way out to determine our handicap, and then raced on the way back, with Ted starting ahead of me based on the handicap. He beat me by 30 seconds… grrrr..

Also I went to catch a one-woman show. It was Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking. Basically a satire on how fucked up her life was, and it was pretty fucked up. 🙂 Best line of the night: “Dating your Ex is like the victory of hope, over experience.” 🙂 Oh yes, I forgot to say that I had my first celebrity spotting in LA. Leonard Maltin was not only at the play, but he also ate at the same pizza joint that Ted and I went to before the show. ha ha!

Not a lot of pics from the weekend, Here’s some of us hanging out in Old Pas. Ted, you’ve got a good eye, you should take up photography.

Oh yeah, also more confirmation that my Orange Jacket is cool. a random stranger came up to me at Ralph’s and told me that she liked my jacket. 🙂

And if TJ Houshmandzadeh outscores Chris Henry in tonight’s Cincy-Indy game, then I’m in the Fantasy Football Super Bowl! Woo hoo!

 
Ted hanging out at Mi Piace.
 
Huong, Nolan’s wife, also chilling out. 

On vacation from our vacation.

It’s a shame that once on vacation, I don’t blog, because lots of things happen when we are on vacation and I don’t want to forget about them all!

First, before I forget, I wanted to thank my secret pal for the oodles of wonderful gifts for me and the kids. I especially loved the yarn bras – I was just thinking of buying some for myself. Vince went crazy over the Spiderman motorcycle, that thing is amazing. Edda (who is pretty hard to shop for) seemed to enjoy My Little Pony.

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Thank you! Thank you!

So we made it to New York, and wore our winter jackets around.

Out for a walk.

As soon as we got over the worst of the jet lag, we flew to another time zone. Austin is only 1 hour off New York, not as bad as the 12 from Singapore. Austin is the best town in the US. I love it so much, it’s hip and cool and there are great places to eat and run. But most of all, it is the home of many of our friends! We got to spend most of the weekend hanging out with the Strickers who have been family friends of the Martins for over 40 years. Jeremy mom Katherine and Scott’s mom Rolleen became friends when Katherine was in high school and Scott and Jeremy grew up with each other in their lives and now our children are becoming great friends. It’s really nice to see.

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This is one of my favorite photos from this weekend, you can see all the Strickers and most of us going on the morning dog walk in their neighborhood. We didn’t do anything special, we just hung out at their house and played and ate and talked. The weather was wonderful.

I also had the wonderful chance to see Kate and Abby, who are my good friends from Singapore. Abby just turned 1 and is so cute and chubby and about a minute from being able to walk around. So cute!