Ericaland

I’d like to enter this, but I can’t think of any good and realistic ideas. I wish my origami skills were up to making a katamari, but I don’t think they are. Any thoughts crafty friends?

I had a bad cold for a couple weeks right after the wedding, and I’ve got another bad cold again. The Internet tells me that lack of sleep increases the chance of catching a cold. Maybe I need to start getting to bed at 10:30 instead of somewhere close to midnight.

I don’t like being sick because I don’t like feeling like crap, but I also don’t like being sick because I end up spending a lot of time alone. There’s at least a couple of days of WFH in order to avoid infecting coworkers, which means me sitting on our futon for most of the day. Around 6:30 in the evening I start feeling like a lonely wife waiting for her husband to come home.

My cold has allowed me to make a good amount of progress on a vest I started knitting, then ignored for the longest time. I’ve been knitting and listening to This American Life. I feel like a kid again whenever I listen to radio programs because I would listen to CBC radio with my dad on Saturday mornings through most of my childhood.

Anyway, off to bed to catch up on some sleep.

Since it’s a lazy Saturday in which the only productive things I have done so far are learning how to french braid my hair, buy a chocolate bar from the corner store across the street from my apartment and get a chai latte and muffin from cafe 504 across the street from the corner store (chai + muffin = crumbly, sugary happiness), I thought I should write something here.

Wedding has come and gone and I’ve settled back into a normal-like life routine. Even though I don’t have to worry about wedding related stuff anymore, I still feel a little overwhelmed sometimes. There’s so much I want to do, that I don’t feel like I’m making significant progress on much. I’ve got a Sinatra app that’s needs a lot of work, a sweater that I’ve been knitting off and on for at least 4 months and a list of fencing skills I wish I could improve. I also want to make myself prepare bento lunches every weekday on top of cooking most nights and relearn how to drive (this is hard because we hardly drive anywhere, not even to to the grocery store).

So drinking chai and eating baked goods isn’t really helping me make any headway on these things, but I’m okay with trying to get things done most days, freaking out occasionally then complaining and spending a lazy Saturday full of more sugar and caffeine than normal.

I am excited about being able to french braid my hair decently with some more practice, and maybe even figure out a couple other styles. This girl’s how to hairstyle videos are the best I’ve seen so far on youtube. They’re all in Japanese, but still more understandable than ones I’ve seen in English. After months of complaining about my long hair, I thought about growing it longer today so that I could put it in a chestnut updo.

I’ve been switching between worrying and panicking.

We decided on wedding vows tonight. The two templates we had were both pretty cheesy. If it were up to me to write them, it would probably go like:

Do you Jeremy want to put up with Erica whining every morning for the rest of your life? Here, put on these expensive rings. Erica, you’re not allowed to lose this ring. Remember the one Jeremy gave you that you lost and your sister found a year later while cleaning the bathroom then phoned you about it because you were living in Vancouver? Seriously, don’t lose it. Okay you’re married I guess.

It’s not going to be like that. The cake will be good though.

After I somehow make it through the week and the stressed out stomach feeling goes away, I’m gonna call Jeremy Mr. Erica Kwan for a while.

I’ve been occupied with trying to nail down the guest list for the wedding, and it’s almost, almost done. None of my Dad’s side of the family is coming and one friend from back home is coming. My aunt, uncle and cousins on my mother’s side are coming, but several lengthy conversations were required to get a definite answer as to whether or not my cousins could make it.

Trying to get a group of people to do a simple task is very hard. I understand that traveling isn’t something everyone can do, but rsvp’ing in time should be. I’ve learned through this, who cares about me, really. It’s been both happy and sad.

I’ll be happy when this is done and over. In the meantime, I’ve decided to work on being more outgoing. That means talking to people and in front of people even. Soon I’ll be an actual grownup.

Right now, I would like a picture of a monkey riding a bear drawn by Bryan Lee O’Malley.

I get a trip to Vegas instead.

I woke up this morning thinking I would deal with more wedding stuff, do some footwork in our backyard and possibly do a lot of laundry. Instead I ended up trying to write a ruby gem.

I have a lot of stuff going on these days, the constant wedding planning, work, trying to improve my fencing skills after years of not really getting any better and just dealing with being a grownup in a foreign country (I miss having only one bank account). But I feel like even all of this stuff isn’t really an excuse for not poking around more with ruby.

So I spent the day digging around areas that I don’t really expose myself to all that much at work, which was nice. It also meant ignoring Jeremy for most of the day, which sucked. However, I wrote some silliness and posted it on the github. It can be found here.

It’s not really done, hopefully I’ll get around to making it better, for uh, my benefit.

To Vancouver next weekend. It’s been a really long time since I’ve been back there. I remember dragging Jeremy down Robson St. on Friday nights, when it was usually raining heavily, trying to get into Gyoza King, then generally failing and heading over to Hon’s.

I think I’ll attempt to have hot pot when I’m there.

I met with Brenda on Friday post-work for wedding related discussions. It went well and I headed home around 8 pm. About 4 blocks from home on my last leg of walking around the lake, I looked across the street and saw three guys running quickly into an apartment parking garage. It seemed a little suspicious, but I thought maybe they were just trying to catch up to a friend. About 2 seconds later I hear really terrible screaming and I start debating in my head whether I should call 911. Shortly after that I hear a man yelling for help, and then I decided to call.

So while continuing to stare across the street and trying my best to talk to the 911 operator, I notice the same three guys that had run into of the parking garage, run out of the parking garage. They were across the street, but they were directly across the street from me. At this point my brain just sort of stopped working all that well. All I could remember thinking was, “I should probably not be here” and “hopefully me talking to this 911 operator is going to keep bad things from happening to me”.

After a couple seconds of blanking out, I realized that the three guys had jumped in a car and driven away in the general direction of MY APARTMENT. A distressed man came running after and I could hear him yelling that he’d been robbed. At this point I felt a little better because he didn’t look injured. The terrible screaming from before had made me think that someone had been stabbed.

The robbed man somehow magically managed to flag down a cop car before I could cross the street and tell him I had called 911, so by the time I reached him, he was busy talking to a policeman. I told the 911 operator that everything seemed under control, hung up and walked home still pretty scared.

The good thing was that a cop just happened be close by and several other people besides me had tried to help the guy had been robbed.

The bad thing was, that even though I was talking to a 911 operator, she was trying to connect me to the emergency Oakland police line, and I was on hold the entire time. This doesn’t make me feel safe at all.

Also, you’d think I’d be able to run away if I saw people who most likely committed a crime running in my general direction.

Completely unrelated to this, we’ve found a venue and set a wedding date. I hope to get save the dates out soon.

So there was a riot in downtown Oakland on Wednesday. I was walking home around 8:30 that night by myself after hanging out with knitting friends after work. I had no idea about what had been going on and later I learned that they had shut Lake Merritt BART down for several hours and had reopened it not long before I had arrived there. The first part of my commute home passes on the edge of downtown, so I started to feel really nervous when I saw at least two cop cars at every intersection and more helicopters in the sky than I’ve ever seen before. I lost count at around 10. I saw some people mulling around and yelling at some policemen standing at corner, but other than that nothing eventful happened on the rest of the way home.

I’ve discussed what’s happened with a few people and I still can’t understand why people would trash their home city and I’m angry at people from outside the city who would come and trash the place where I live. How does scaring people and damaging people’s property help at all?

The only nice thing from all of this stupidness was a friend of mine berating me for not calling her Wednesday night. She said “why didn’t you ask me to pick you up?”. I think someone is a pretty good friend if they’re willing to drive close to a riot and come get you.

The rest of the week consisted of me not getting all that much sleep and feeling half awake. The apartment is looking slightly better though, we have new rugs and there are no more boxes in the living/dining area. I may even take pictures of the place soon.