Easter Weekend in Downtown L.A.

Pet turtles were being blessed, an organized pillow fight was staged in Pershing Square, AND, a giant Slip 'n' Slide blocked off 4th Street. Yet somehow, I didn't get any pictures of those.
Luckily other people did. But I found other things to amuse me in Downtown Los Angeles.

Dim sum @ Empress Pavilion



"shopping" in Chinatown



Jewelry district



Phillipe's - The Original - Home of the French Dipped Sandwich



Pork sandwich



Grand Central Market



Place where you can buy tacos and Chinese food.



Millennium Biltmore







Bradbury Building (aka Blade Runner bldg)

In Sepia

Angkor Wat

What I Did During My Xmas Break

Before:

After:

It turns out that refinishing hardwood floors wasn't as simple as following directions. After a few days, the color continued to change. And the parts that had shown the most excessive wear still look distinctly different. What to do? Too late now, now that the final coats have been applied.

The process took about 8 hours in total, over the course of several days. First I had to scrub the floor clean because it was heinously dirty. At first I was scrubbing by hand (bristle brush and scour pads and Simple Green... a magic formula!) then I figured to use an industrial floor polisher which saved a tremendous amount of time.


Then I sanded the floor by hand with 120 grit sand paper. (Probably should've used a machine in this case but was too lazy to go buy one or rent one and plus have major fear of sanding a hole in the floor). Then I sanded the floor with 220 grit sand paper. And swept up and vacuumed up all the bits of dust.


Then I used "golden mahogany" wood stain by Varathane (purchased at Home Depot). You have to wipe it on with a clean cloth, let it absorb for a minute (max 3 min) and then wipe off the "excess" so that there isn't an unbalanced amount of stain in some parts.


Since most of the original stain was not stripped off, the blended color looked quite nice. It was the worn out parts of the wood (where no stain was left) that the color absorbed differently and still looks different. In hindsight, I perhaps should have coated those parts with polyurethane before staining, but who knows if that would have helped. I'm no professional!

After the stain dried for 24 hours (I cheated, it was only 22, and in cold weather no less), I applied three coats of semi-glossy polyurethane approx every two hours using a lifesaving applicator brush (attached to a broomstick). And voila! (I say lifesaving because it was the only part of the process where I was not on my hands and knees breaking my back).

After 3 days, you can begin using the floor with "normal wear."

After one week, the worn out parts were pretty apparent. But I rationalized - still a lot better than what it was "before." And from a distance, you can hardly tell!

Jenny Can Bake, So Can You!

Before:

After:

Frosted ginger cookies. Recipe from December 2006 issue of Sunset Magazine.

This was the first time I attempted to bake cookies in my entire life! And it was a moderate success! I think I will start baking like a mad woman. And I don't even like eating cookies! (Just baking them, apparently.)

First good read this year

Just finished reading this novel (in two days) and believe it's the first good read for me this year (not that I've read that many books this year... although HP must count for three, right?)

The title of the book caught my attention, as certainly old, beat-up "Concise" Chinese-English dictionaries floated around my house as I was growing up.

The story is about a 23-year old girl who goes by Z (short for Zhuang) who leaves her rural China town to study English in London for one year. Loneliness drives her to move in and fall in love with a 44-year old Englishman, a bisexual vegetarian artist who has been a noncommittal drifter all his life.

The brief, 1-4 page chapters are written in first person, in "bad" English which gets progressively better, coinciding both with Z's acquisition of the English language as well as process of learning about love, heartache, independence, through cultural and language barriers.

Each chapter begins with a word and its dictionary definition, which also anchors and guides the story.

The jacket cover says that the author drew on her own experiences moving to London from China in 2002.

I laughed, I cried. Actually no, I chuckled, and felt sad. In a sense this is a classic coming-of-age tale, just with different circumstances. The characters feel very real, including the man, who she simply refers to as "you," as if she has been writing a long letter to him.

A bummer for me is that I actually thought of writing a novel in "bad" English years ago, and never got around to it. I think it makes for an interesting literary device. Of course it'd be much harder for me to make my "bad" English seem authentic... but perhaps I will still try...

On Buttons (Pack Ratting, Part II)

Last night I spent a good half hour sorting through piles of little zip baggies of miscellaneous buttons. You know, those extra buttons that some of your clothes come with, in case you need spare buttons in the rare instance that you actually wear your items long enough for the buttons to pop off. Sure, once in while, a button can get snagged in the wash, and it'll be either a button you critically need for either functional (i.e., pants button) or aesthetic (i.e., third button down your shirt) reasons. But really, how often do you need such buttons to justify having overgrown piles of spare buttons?

I was thinking about this last night, as I stared at the buttons and struggled to figure out which blouse or coat or pants they were for. It's not too hard figuring out a shiny silver button or a lime green one, but what about the endless supply of clear or white buttons? In some cases I was smart enough to include the clothing tag inside the baggy. Which helped, for the most part. And then came the sudden realization that perhaps some of these buttons have outlived the article of clothing they were intended for. Gasp!

9 & Company, Size 4, Clearance $25.98.
My mind drew a blank. ?

Even more perplexing, a plain envelope where I hand wrote: "white peasant blouse."

White peasant blouse? That didn't even ring a bell. I took the button out and inspected it and it didn't even look familiar. Then I went into my closet and flipped through articles of clothing (through what little budge room I could get in a jam-packed closet). Nothing closely resembled something that would complement the small round white satin button.

I racked my brain, when slowly, a vague memory starting seeping back.... of the 11th grade. National Honor Society. We had to buy all white outfits to stand guard for the 12th graders graduation. Yep, thirteen and a half years have gone by, the blouse long gone, long forgotten, yet the little button still remains.

I stuffed it with the rest of the buttons in a large ziplock bag and stuffed the whole thing in my closet.

All things 2007

2007 Albums I've Listened To, by release date

The Shins - Wincing the Night Away (01/23)
Elvis Perkins - Ash Wednesday (02/20)
Albert Hammond Jr. - Yours to Keep (03/06)
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (03/06)
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black (03/13)
Bright Eyes - Cassadaga (04/10)
Patti Smith - Twelve (04/24)
Elliott Smith - New Moon (05/07)
Travis - The Boy With No Name (05/08)
Rufus Wainwright - Release the Stars (05/15)
Wilco - Sky Blue Sky (05/15)
Interpol - Our Love to Admire (07/10)
Radiohead - In Rainwbows (10/10)
Neil Young - Chrome Dreams II (10/23)

2007 Ticketed Concerts I Attended, by date

My Morning Jacket @ The Wiltern (01/06)
Mountain Goats @ El Rey (03/11)
Joshua Radin @ El Rey (04/21)
Arcade Fire @ Greek (05/29)
Morrissey @ Hollywood Bowl (06/08)
The Decemberists @ Hollywood Bowl (07/07)
Peter Bjorn & John @ Henry Fonda (07/31)
Wilco @ Santa Barbara County Bowl (08/26)
Wilco @ Greek (08/29)
Arcade Fire @ Hollywood Bowl (09/20)
Air @ Greek (09/21)
Bright Eyes @ Hollywood Bowl (09/29)
Neil Young @ NOKIA (11/02)
Travis @ The Wiltern (11/21)**

2007 Movies I've Seen, by release date

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (05/25)
Knocked Up (06/01)
Ratatouille (06/29)
Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix (07/11)
The Simpsons Movie (07/27)
The Bourne Ultimatum (08/03)
Superbad (08/17)
The Darjeeling Limited (10/05)
No Country for Old Men (11/09)
Persepolis (12/25)


**have tickets to