Weekend with My Daddy!

A couple weekends ago my daddy flew out to hang with me. We had fun 🙂

My dad’s a big Dodgers fan, so Saturday we went to a Dodgers game. They played the Padres. They won (thanks to two of their worst hitters of the season who decided to get the Dodger’s only two hits of the game at the bottom of the 9th for the win).

It was a good day for a ball game, nice and sunny. They even had a local children’s Taiko drumming group perform before the game because it was Nisei (which means second generation Japanese) week.

I tried to take a picture of my daddy in front of the Think Blue sign, but it’s kinda hard to see. If you get real close to the monitor and squint your eyes you can kinda see some blue in between the trees.

After the game we just hung out. I showed him around one of the areas I go to often and we stopped to eat at Famous Daves, which if you aren’t familiar is a BBQ restaurant. I ate broccoli. And corn. Not a very vegetarian friendly place, but that’s ok.

Sunday was really laid back. The church I’m attending had a service in the park so we went to that and hung out there for a little while then watched movies until it was time for me to drop him off.

Even though it was a short trip, I’m glad my daddy got a chance to come visit! I had a good time,  hopefully he did too 🙂

Food and Friends

I love my friends, I love my food, why not combine the two?

For the past few weeks, a few of my girlfriends and I have been having our ladies night. This week it was my turn to host so since I love food, I wanted to cook something for them. What ended up happening was even better: we cooked everything together!

We made kale with tomatoes and falafel sandwiches. The kale recipe was one that I got on the Whole Foods Market website and wrote about a little while ago in this post. Calina, in the pink, was in charge of preparing the veggies and chopping the tomatoes (which she would have done faster if she could chop and talk at the same time).  Shawnte was in charge of the falafel. They came out really good (once I let her use more oil). We used a falafel recipe from Allrecipes.com, with just a couple alterations.  We replaced the bread crumbs with ground up oatmeal and replaced the egg with 1 tbsp of flaxseed meal combined with 2 tbsp of water. To get a good consistency for the falafel, we had to add more oatmeal than the amount of breadcrumbs the recipe called for, maybe about  1 1/2 cups, but I didn’t measure.

To top the meal off we had whole wheat pita bread, garlic hummus, both from Trader Joes, and sparkling cider.

Calina wasn’t thrilled with the falafel, but really like the kale. And Shawte really liked the falafel, so overall I’d say the meal came out good. More importantly though, we had a great time cooking together, so it was a great night!

Natsumi is Coming! Natsumi is Coming!

In less than twenty-four hours, my soon-to-be 13 year old sister Natsumi will be taking her very first solo flight to come see me. I’m so excited! There’s so much that I want to do with her, so many places that I want to take her. I was tempted to plan out her entire trip here, but I stopped myself, remembering that it is her trip and as such, she should have input on what we do while she’s out here.

I thought now would be a good time, since she’s on the cusp of teenager-dom, for us to have some sister-to-sister bonding time. I’m thankful to be in the position to have her here, even if it is for a short period of time. Little does she, or my other younger siblings know (I’m the eldest), they are a lot of my inspiration to succeed. And I don’t mean that in the “want to show them what can be done through hard work and dedication” kinda way. I’ve always known that they can accomplish whatever they set their minds to, I just want to be able to help them achieve their goals. They may take completely different paths than I did so my example of going to college and working within a large company may not be relevant. Or it may. Either way, I’ve reached a point where I can help them on their own respective journeys. And that’s what makes me happy.