i’m alive!!! i survived the surgery!!! my recovery hasn’t been too horrible. the procedure went well despite some complications—it was only supposed to be 45 minutes and it turned into 2.5 hours…giving my parents quite the scare in the waiting room. my lil’ incident in hong kong had actually caused a fairly large gall stone to slip out and lodge itself in the bile duct, making it difficult to remove the gall bladder initially. what perfect timing…that gall stone could have started up an infection and caused some serious damage. so my surgery came at the perfect time, removing what we were trying to avoid. it took me a really…

had a pretty great weekend considering that i had no plans as of last Thursday. friday night, i hung out with brad…catching up over drinks and dinner at the pink door down in the market. saturday, i went hiking at mount si with eric, jon & felix..what a great hike and a perfect day for it too; however, while up there, i realized had little time to get back to seattle to go to the symphony where one just cannot be late. so i literally bolted down the mountain, making it in about 1.5 hours and eric rushed me back to my apartment where i somehow changed from grungy hiking…

it can be so tragic to meet someone so incredibly wonderful but then realize that time and life events are not on your side. but then, to actually know them and have met them and to have them in your life can be all worth it…i hope. i had a great night tonight. jon convinced me to start taking salsa lessons with him so we headed over to century ballroom this evening for our first salsa class…which was fairly advanced in my opinion for the very first class in a beginner salsa class. but it was tons of fun. afterwards, he and i caught up over dinner at la spiga…

feeling much better now. wow, i was very sick for quite awhile last week. oh my health. first my eye, then my gall bladder, then my stomach, and next week, the surgery. i’m just falling apart. had a great weekend. hung out with james a lot and went to the fremont fair where i saw the annual solstice parade, which is just such a beautiful, liberating event. one of my webdevs, javier, invited a few of us over to his place for an authentic mexican dinner and to also meet his new wife–what a fantastic meal that was. on sunday, i went jogging in the aboretum for the first time–it…

i’m oh so very tired right now and want to go home. still trying to recover from the jet lag of a 15 hour time difference. the trip home was difficult as i was still rather sick. i haven’t been able to keep any food down for the past 4 days…today’s the first day in which i’m starting to feel a little bit better. the tokyo airport was really neat. you can rent a “day room” for $5/hour in which you get a nice clean shower and a bed. too bad i wasn’t there long enough to try to take advantage of that. i need to get my new mp3…

oh…so much to say about things that have happened in the past few days. Well, for starters, we went to China and Macau..I’ll talk about that. On Friday, we went on an organized trip to Macau. The ferry boat ride there was absolutely gut-wrenching….1.5 hours of hearing people throw up. When we got there, we were disappointed to see that the weather wasn’t that far different than in HK, where the “red signal had been raised” (translation: “a ton of rain”—it’s typhoon season here). The entire day we were there, it was a torrential downpour. Our first stop was the Macau Museum where we could look at the history of…

i swear i’m going to gain fifty pounds on this trip with all the delicious chinese food i’ve been eating. last night, we had dinner with my grandmother and all her banker friends at this amazing restaurant….it was course after course…don’t know how i made it through. The meal consisted of: shark’s fin soup, braised abalone, crab, fried rice, pig’s skin, some sort of fish, duck’s feet, vegetables, soup noodles and all sorts of dessert. and then today, my “ma-ma” (chinese for grandmother on the father’s side) took us to the Luk Yu Tea House, which is this famous 100+ yr. old dim sum/tea house…wow, the dum sum there was…

i’m in hong kong now, sitting at the “log-in cafe” in some random shopping mall. it’s really amazing how the internet access in hong kong has changed since the last time i was here (2 years ago). Back then, it was pretty hard to find a computer to get internet access to–and even then, it was expensive. now, almost every store, shopping mall, street corner has some sort of internet podium that you can use for free….like, surf the internet while shopping. and they just limit your amount of use to like 15-20 minutes….not bad at all. I’ve only been here for about 2 days so far…and all I’ve been…