Happy Memorial Day!

We spent Memorial Day in Portland, OR this year with the Banerjees and the Schneiders. We had a great time shopping tax-free, seeing the Gorge and Multnomah Falls, and eating TON of good food. I recommend Oba! for dinner and Papa Hadyn for dessert. Will be posting pictures soon.

On the wedding front, we have been shopping for wedding rings, bridesmaid dresses, wedding shoes, and hotels. We're having fun, but there always seems to be more to do. We're going to LA this weekend, so we'll have more wedding planning. I need to learn more about these Filipino wedding traditions!

Wedding Alert! Bad Oracle!

I just wanted to warn people that I found out this week that there is going to be a big Oracle convention in San Francisco during our wedding weekend. I suggest that you book your hotels early because they will fill up fast. I am trying to block off rooms for you at a few hotels. The Hilton in Chinatown is the closest hotel to the Empress of China where we are having the reception and will offer us rooms at $279/night if we book at least 10 rooms. If you think you would be interested, please email me or Edwin ASAP so that we can try and reserve a room for you. This would probably be easiest for anyone that would like to stay as close as possible to the reception. Here is the link to their website if you want to see what these rooms look like:
http://www.sanfranciscohiltonhotel.com/?cid=goo

I am also working on some lower priced options and will announce them on the wedding website as soon as I can.

Bike to Work Day and Bay to Breakers

It's been a pretty busy and stressful week at work. I'm really looking forward to the weekend. I just wish that it wasn't supposed to rain all weekend. Supposed to work on invitations this weekend with Show. Booked the organist too.

Bay to Breakers is this weekend. For those not in the Bay Area, this is kind of a fun walk/run from Justin Herman Plaza to Ocean Beach. People get dressed up in costumes (or run around naked) for the 7 mile course. I do like doing the walk, but I don't like the walk in the rain. It gets really wet and cold. Oh well, I'm not really signed up for it anyways. We'll see if I motivate.

Today was the first time I rode my bike to work today. It only took 15 min to ride to work and coincidentally, it was also Bike to Work day. I'm told that there were free give aways for participants, but I didn't see any. I just thought that there were a lot of people riding their bikes to work. The ride home was a lot harder. It was really windy and it made it seem a lot longer. This is definitely the shortest and cheapest option. I'm not riding tomorrow though because Edwin said it was going to rain.

Wedding Menu Finalized

So we finalized the menu today. Glad we got that done. I just hope that we'll be able to eat some of it! LOL. If you want to see what's on the menu, check out our wedding website.

Last week, I also did some initial drafts for the invitations and programs. I spent 2 hours at Papyrus studying invitations and programs- I felt like I was back in school. (Now if I could only find where I put my notes...) Next on my To Do list is to finalize the organist, research area hotels, and finding bridesmaid dresses. We have started looking at registries, but we haven't finalized anything yet. So much to do!

So, to recap this weekend, we went to Nirav and Bhavana's baby shower on Saturday in Fremont. It was a beautifully warm weekend. (It's almost like summer here! So strange for this time of year in SF.) Congrats to Jen and Vic on their new baby David! You can see their pics on their blog. Vic is going to be one of our emcees at the reception so I can't wait to meet David.

Here are some pics from the Napa Diabetes ride last week:

The dog didn't eat my homework- my computer died!

So I'm here is Seattle right now for work. As most of you know, I come up here about once a month. Most of the time, I love coming up here. However, this time, my computer died and I feel completely paralyzed!

5 reasons you have to admit your computer is dead:

1. You get the C: prompt
2. You can't open any files
3. The background on your desktop changes (and you didn't change it!)
4. You computer tells you that you have a Trojan virus (do not open files from IM unless you know that the person on the other end is truly your friend- it came from a friend's IM address, but they didn't send it to me...)
5. You push the power button and nothing happens so you have to remove the battery and unplug
6. You start getting weird popups
7. Your screen starts to meltdown etch-a-sketch style

Getting any work done is proving challenging when you work for a company that is web-based. Anyway, if you don't see any posts for a while, it's because my computer died. :(

Fun in Windsor and the Napa Diabetes Ride

So this past weekend we had a lot of events. We went up to Sacramento on Saturday to celebrate Gianna's first birthday (daughter of my cousins Barry and Gigi.) Then, we spent the night in Santa Rosa with Greg and had dinner in Windsor. After dinner, Greg took us to probably one of the coolest candy stores I have ever been in. It was called Powell's Candy Shoppe in downtown Windsor. As you can see in the pictures above, we had a lot of fun watching "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and Edwin dressing up a the dread pirate Roberts.

There were all the old candy favorites that you don't see anymore. The coolest display was the one in a converted card catalog. Remember those? It also had a soda fountain with all the old soft drinks that in those old fashioned bottles. Really fun. I think we must have spent at least an hour just "reminiscing."

We also did the Napa Diabetes ride on Sunday. I'll post pictures up later, but it was a gorgeous day for a ride. There were about 35 of us on Team Vino Velo. I did the 10 mile with Kaori, Maika, and Jamie's dad. Edwin did the 50 mile. Our ride was only about 1 hour. Maybe next year I'll do the 25 mile ride... :)

Good stuff in Waikiki

We had a really great recommendation by the front desk in Waikiki for a Japanese restaurant. Here are some good eats:

Menchenko-Tei
2255 Kuhio Ave.
808-924-8366

Kaka'ako Kitchen in the Ward Center

Here's a funny pic of Maika from yesterday at our place. This just cracks me up! She is just too cute.

Fun in the sun!

So we're back from Hawaii today. We flew back on the red-eye, so work today was a little painful, but at least we got to go on vacation. Not a whole lot to report, but we did eat and eat and eat. While we were there, they had a Spam Fest. Unfortunately, we missed the Spam Fest because we were snorkeling in Hanuama bay. I'll post pics up soon.

The month of May is going to be busy. We are doing the Tour de Cure on Sunday. My parents are coming next weekend for a week and then we go to Portland for Memorial Day with the Schneiders and Banerjees. At least I don't think we'll have to worry too much about wedding stuff since we got most of the stuff taken care of. Put in a deposit for the reception the day we left for Waikiki.