vegas weekend 4.23-4.25 :)

This past weekend, for a friend's 21st birthday, a few of us went down to Vegas to celebrate with her!  This was our crew in a few of my favorite pictures out of 150+  (can you spot me?  hint-  I'm in every picture hahah).  We visited a club each night (XS and Tao) and it was fun because one of our girls was close to a promoter, so we automatically got onto guestlists and never had to wait :)

 For the first time, I really understood the meaning of "getting free drinks".  I've never actively tried to get anyone to buy me drinks, and I don't frequent bars or clubs alone or without some guy friends, so I didn't know what it was like.  On our all-girls trip, we practically spent no money and we got invited to tables and drinks all night.  Yay for free stuff!  Hahaha.

For the weekend, we stayed at the Trump tower  :D !!  We split a suite, and we had booked the room early, so we each only paid $40 to stay in this baller suite for the entire weekend!  (It was also complete with a kitchen, a second huge sofa bed, 3 showers, and a bathroom/makeup room as big as the living room!)  It was complimentary valet as well, which was cool for my car (I drove us all there and back)  :]

I did have to spend the whole next day working for my professor, and I do now have to disappear off the face of the earth in order to study for my midterms coming up next week, but it was a great weekend :)

4.5-hours of monopoly with who?

Last night, after hitting the bar (F.O.) with W, I pulled out the Monopoly box from under his bed and started to play with him.  Our gameplay attracted the rest of his apartmentmates.  Apparently, W and I had been "playing by the wrong rules all along", Brian announced indignantly, so we started a new game, with the rest of the audience.  And with that, yes, we played Monopoly vigorously and in an intense-cutthroat manner for nearly 5 hours until 3 in the morning.  We actually didn't even notice the time pass.  In the end, we were rather ruthlessly destroyed by Alex, who was ironically the one person who had never ever played Monopoly in any form in her life.

Although I want to say I enjoyed a rare night with everyone home, it is hard to describe how I actually felt with Alex being around.  Initially when we first met, it was weirdness, because she was such a close friend of my boyfriend's - and somehow we weren't able to talk to each other very much.  Then, it was some competition, because T, who she now dates, used to have a thing for/with me.  Also, I think we are both the kind of girl that's not the type to get buddy-buddy with people right away, and so it's hard for us to get past this awkward "I-acknowledge-you-but-don't-know-what-to-say-to-you-now" phase.  And lately, it's just... I don't even know.  (Although last night I was rather pissed at her because she was playing Monopoly so stringently against everyone even tho she was already in the lead and didn't have to suck the fun out of the game.)

Alex and I are the only two girls who spend the most time over at the guys' place (because our boyfriends are apartmentmates).  She actually lives an hour away, but will come to spend every weekend here, without fail.  It is sad, but the guys other than T have very poor impressions of her, saying she is annoying or loud when she laughs or too PDA or whatever else there is... It makes me wonder what kind of an impression I leave on them too, being another girl that's always around.  I live on the same floor as they do, so I technically could be around a lot more, although I'm not because I make sure I have time for my own friends/work.  W and I don't go crazy with affection around them, and I try to talk to everybody else in a non-intrusive way so as not to make them uncomfortable with me.  I feel like I'm more conscious of all this because I hear how they feel about Alex, and I hope that they are okay with me and not as bothered by my presence.

Maybe it's the way I was brought up.  It's always been important to me (sometimes too important) how I come across to people...   *shrug*  =/

breakfast drives my day...

Look?!  It's a live Pikachu!!  The nerd in me could not resist looking up this picture (searched for a good 5 minutes through IM convos to find the link) after seeing a fat squirrel on campus yesterday in a similar pose.  Yah, I'm a dork  -__-

So, as the days get colder and colder, it's been harder and harder to get up at 7 in the mornings.  All my 8 am morning classes happen to be important, and I've been pretty good about making all of them  =]  But while I used to be able to get out of bed at 7, I now get up at 7:15-20, leaving me only 20 minutes or so to get ready and go catch the shuttle to school.

I got up later than usual this morning, which led me to skip breakfast today.  I try my best to get a decent breakfast in me every morning, otherwise I get quite faint and it's hard to concentrate.  My metabolism has gotten used to kicking in early.  As soon as I got to class, I was starving and that was not good considering I had about 2 hours of consecutive class to sit through.  I managed to get through the first hour, then was defeated by my poor rumbling tummy, and hightailed it back home to grab food before coming back for the afternoon classes.  Sigh, such weak willpower.

But, speaking of willpower, I managed to keep myself from making a tempting stop for boba on my way home earlier this evening.  Gotta keep off the pounds despite getting to wear more layers for winter...

i ♥ my mommy.

So for whatever reason, I just had a random flashback about this one time my whole family and I were playing badminton on our front lawn. (This is going to sound so mean, but my mom is all okay and she laughs at it too.) My mom and my dad are pretty competitive about it because they both used to play it a lot when they were younger. So they would be yelling taunts at each other in Chinese, equivalent to things like "suck on that!" or "yeah that's right biotch!". And then my dad made this one lob that went up and far, and my mom was running over to hit it back, yelling some obnoxious comment about how that was an easy shot.

She was running and running and she was gonna get it....
....But the mailbox on the lawn got in her way.

Pretty much she ran smack into it. But don't worry, she was okay! We laughed at it for days... and just now when I thought about it, I still burst out in fond laughter. Sigh I love my mom.

Note to self: mom also hollered at some French lady in Canada. on accident.