I Left My Heart In San Francisco

I spent the past 4 days on a road trip up North.  Talk about cramming in as much as you can in a short amount of time!  From a delicious dinner at La Mar, to wine tasting in Napa, to walking the Golden Gate Bridge, to salivating over crab at Pier 41, to hanging out with good friends and so much more, I can't say I'm refreshed and ready to get back to work, but as tired as I am today, it was all worth it!  I'll let my video do all the sharing.  Enjoy!

(P.S.  I LOVE iPhone apps - especially Splice which is FREE and allowed me to build this video during the drive back!)

LA County Fair

Junk food, farm animals, ferris wheels, and carnival games have a way of bringing you back to your childhood, and sometimes, it's nice to feel like a kid again.  I was pleasantly surprised by the LA County Fair as I had been to the OC Fair a couple times before and wasn't very impressed.  The LA County fair was a lot bigger, had legitimate toys you could win by playing the games, a variety of food, and adorable farm animals to pet.

In the petting area - I hear the sheep are very soft!

I had my eye on this prize from the moment I walked in, and I got to go home with it!

Little piglets sleeping together

A shooting game where you had to shoot off the entire red star - so close!

And of course, the obligatory junk food meal

Uncle Tommy

On Friday 8/31/2011, my Uncle went missing from the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Pasadena.  On Thursday, we were out on the streets of Pasadena posting up flyers in hopes that someone had spotted him and would call him in.  With a heavy heart, I went to bed Thursday night worried that he was wandering the streets of LA alone, lost without a clue of where he was and how he ended up there.  You see, my Uncle has Alzheimers.

My Uncle is a great man.  He has one of the biggest hearts of anyone I know.  I remember the night my cousins and I snuck out in the rain during our visit in Hawaii to go ice skating.  On our way there, we got into an accident taking a 360 from divider to divider on the freeway.  When my Uncle arrived on the scene, instead of yelling at us and asking why we snuck out, he cupped each of our chins and asked "Are you okay?" demonstrating that our safety was his first priority.  That is my Uncle.

I admit that I have not been around him much over the past few years, so when I saw him yesterday, it broke my heart.  By the grace of God, someone had found him on Thursday and took him into a nursing home in West Covina where they fed him and gave him a place to sleep.  By 6AM on Friday morning, he had left the home and began his journey again.  Though he may not have been fully aware of his surroundings nor remember much of anything anymore, I know that he just wanted to be back in the presence of his family and would walk until he found them.  We searched the street of West Covina in the early afternoon on Friday and luckily, the police found him in the afternoon, so I rushed to the police station along with my two cousins to pick him up.

When I saw him, I just wanted to give him a big hug.  He looked at me and smiled, but I couldn't tell whether he recognized me or not.  He looked content, relaxed, and bright-eyed, and perhaps doesn't even realize that he had been lost for the past two days.  But I knew, and could only imagine what he had gone through, and my heart ached for him and our family.  It wasn't until I was alone in my car did I allow myself to cry, and even now, writing this entry, I continue to cry.  Alzheimers is a horrible disease and I know too many people who have family members who have fallen victim to it.

Love In Vegas

This weekend, my girlfriend and I took a road trip to Vegas for a quick getaway.  We got in Friday night and had dinner at Julian Serrano at Aria because we were craving tapas.  We actually do not recommend this restaurant as the food was below par and the waiter was not very helpful.  He suggested that we could order one more dish, when in actuality, we ordered way too much!  I feel like I'm writing a Yelp! review.

Saturday, we hung by the pool, gambled a bit (we were both losers), window shopped, and had dinner at Mastro's before heading to Mirage to watch Love.  Love was actually the highlight of our trip as we both enjoy Cirque De Soleil shows.  I think that overall, the show was entertaining, but I would have liked to see more acrobatics than dancing.  I like the Beatles.

We stayed at Vdara - nice rooms, but no tables and valet parking only, which resulted in a madhouse of people lingering in the hotel lobby trying to leave at the mandated 11AM check-out time.  Don't think we'll stay there again!

 Mastro's (too bad we didn't get to sit in the tree because we were in a hurry)

 Being silly with my friend's broken sunglasses

At Love

Sun-kissed

A group of us headed out to Manhattan beach this weekend for a little bit of sun bathing and beach volleyball.  The sky and ocean were a perfect blue and the temperature was comfortably warm.  Moments like these fill my heart with gratitude for the city I live in and for the wonderful people in my life.