Labor Day Weekend!

We are currently watching the scifi fan favorite, Judge Dredd!



What up Ho(e)s!

My family is having an impromptu summer BBQ. We are having some beef mom did in a marinade. Corn, garlic bread, and a yummy salad I made. I am loving this dressing I got. Anyways.

Tanner is in Hawai'i for his Cousin Kyle's second wedding reception. Kyle married Emi last week. Tanner and I went. It was a lovely ceremony. The wedding was in a super fancy, totally beautiful room in a renovated art deco hotel downtown. Emi has family in Hawai'i so they are going to have a second reception. Tanner is also visiting his life long friend Todd, and his wife Meagan and their daughter Emily. Todd is getting redeployed to Iraq in October, so it's a good visit.

Rhea and I are busy. We are leaving to drive to California to visit my grandparents on Monday. So there will be lots of photos coming!
I will try to get the photos of Tanner and I at the wedding we looked really nice.

Rhea and Scott went to an afternoon wedding today, for Rhea's friend/ former boss Breezy. They looked great, but didn't take ANY photos all dressed up before they came home.

LOVE CALLI

Posting Often

I think I really enjoy blogging and will end up posting often.

In case you didn't get my email, I am encouraging everyone to read the NAPAWF Blog, Warrior Prose, an interview I did is posted today. We are actually posting a week long series of interview with Asian Pacific Islander Women Leaders.

http://napawf.org/blog/

I will post soon about my internship, since I just realized that not everyone will know why I got to do this interview.

Boating Adventure

On our way out, beautiful Seattle. Thanks Scott and Rhea for driving.


exciting


The biggest boat Scott has ever been on! We played all day on Summit Lake outside Olympia.


I have no upper body strength and getting into the tube and the boat was hard.



ready!

body in the water


go go!


super intense tubing


Uncle Nick is a super driver



tired

go Scott!








go Tanner!






Such a nice looking bf


so delicate, Aunt Tonya getting ready to tube





We cooked breakfast! Eggs, bacon and peach/banana smoothies!

I didn't get all the good photos. Rhea and I took most of the photos so I just realized there aren't many of either of us. Tanner and Scott really burned their backs, but Rhea and I did good with keeping on our shirts and wearing sunscreen.

We all went swimming for a while, bobbing around in our life vests. The water was 70 something degrees, so it was really great. The weather was beautiful. We had lunch on the lake, hot dogs and corn, the boat has a grill!

Nick made ribs for dinner, very good ones. We were all pretty tired afterwards.

Um. I'm tired now. So that's all you get.

Favorite Songs - The Kids

An impromptu list of our favorite songs right now, maybe not all time favorites, becaue that would take too much thinking to come up with, inspired by the list of Obama and McCain's favorite songs http://www.nbc10.com/politics/17167549/detail.html

Tanner (Tanner can't think of any more right now):

Aenima - Tool

Born of a Broken Man - Rage Against the Machine

Hoppípolla - Sigur Ros

Under Pressure - Queen

Callista:

It's Never Too Late - Michael Franti

In the Aeroplane over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel

One Chance - Modest Mouse

Staring at the Sun - TV on the Radio

Hey - Pixies

Heartbeats - The Knife

Hips Don't Lie - Shakira

Scott (Scott doesn't have a very broad taste in music):

Putting Holes in Happiness - Marilyn Manson

Meet your Master - 9 Inch Nails

I Dreamed I Died - Devil Driver

When Worlds Collide - Powerman 5000

Cold - Static X

Get Pyscho - Disturbed

Rhea (Rhea really loves music and gets lots of songs from friends and online):

Lavinia - The Veils

Gulag Orkestar - Beirut

The Water - Feist

Time to Pretend - MGMT

Paper Plains - MIA

Bouncing off Clouds - Tori Amos

When Your Mind is Made Up - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova


Callista and Rhea LOVE LOVE LOVE

Kayne West's song Stronger, a Remix using Daft Punk's song Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

listen and watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZd1Js0QaOI

(even though Kanye is so cocky he is gross and drives us nuts)

Have a Great Friday Night!!!

Angry at NBC

So NBC totally screwed up coverage of the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
For starters, the US was literally the only country not to show it live. We watched it 12 hours after it had already occurred. NBC did this so that it wouldn't air in the morning, when they felt fewer people would watch, but in the prime time evening spot.

I've gotten some emails from friends, and from work, about various parts of the opening ceremony. NBC's coverage cut out a lot of material. That last element, where the Chinese medal winner ran around the bird's nest and then lit the flame was cut short. NBC was really the only network in the world to interrupt coverage to show commercials. The little girl who sang the ballad about China was cut short. The English and Chinese opera duo was cut short ( I was so jazzed that the English women sang in Chinese!).

One criticism found online is that so very few women were featured in the opening ceremony. China has made great strides in gender equality. They still have a long way to go. Well I read some posts on blogs by Chinese people in China and abroad. One of the things NBC cut was a female Chinese badminton player reading the oath of the competing athletes, obviously cut.

I really found many of the comments made by the NBC "journalists" to be politically motivated and unfair at times. They were melodramatic. One man was supposedly an expert on China, and obviously spoke Chinese. Yet the comments were stereotypical and I felt so angry, clearly an undergrad who only spend six months in China had a more balanced view of the nation.

The parade of nations was ordered by how many strokes it took to write the name in Chinese characters. I remember asking Tanner what was going on. It was obvious that some nations had much longer Chinese names then others. Justine sent me a link to an article. NBC altered the order of the parade of nations!!! They did this so the United States would come in at 11:30 pm in America, so that viewers wouldn't tune to another channel as soon as the US came in. In NBC footage you can actually see the US in the infield of the stadium, before you see them walk in together. How ridiculous.

So I just wanted to post that. I knew when I was watching it that things were off, but I'm really disappointed now that I know the scope of it.

8/8/08

I hosted an Olympic Opening Ceremony Party at my house. I got Chinese food from two restaurants, I tried to find lots of Sichuanese food. I decorated, with my Chinese keepsakes, I used the place mats that Aunt Kelly brought back from Hong Kong for me (thanks). Cheri (Tanner's mom) brought a lemonade cake for dessert, very good. I think everyone had fun. Thank you for coming everyone.



guests

the family cat is always fun


watching the opening ceremony, this is Shanae, we haven't seen her and her family in a long time, so that was fun


yummy!


blurry tween


Yummy


My uncle, Scott and my friend Justine, what a great combo!






Pretty decorations. I forgot to take a photo when the table was full of food. Sophia would have been proud though, the table was completely covered in food.


lemonade cake!






family chatting


A hint of the food

Thanks everyone for coming.

Next weekend......

Boating in Olympia with Nick and Tonya!

Baby!

Tanner's sister Julia is pregnant. We don't know the sex yet, it's too early. Everyone is excited, including my mom and sister.

Family Fun

Hey, so I think I can keep up this blog now.

Grandma and Grandpa, and Nick and Tonya came to visit! Here are some photos. We had a lovely day. We had lunch and caught up, then we played around at the Lake Forest Park Farmers Market.





Okay shave ice.





Rhea's fish eye. Grandma pointed out that we used to have a really hard time making funny faces for the camera. We all were sitting on their deck one time and Rhea and I could just not come through for them. Obviously we've grown up.





Yay for visits!

I'm throwing a Olympics Opening Ceremony Party on Friday. So I will post again on Saturday at least.