3 More Days Until My 21st Birthday

Holy crap, can you believe it?! I'll be turning 21 in just three days. THREE DAYS!! Yikes! I sure can't believe it. I still feel like I'm 18....but nope.....three years later and I'm basically 21 now, haha.

Today was a pretty good day. Got to help trace a laaaaarge banner for a Greenpeace campaign at their warehouse not too far from the office. Also got to paint a couple smaller banners to be shipped out to a nice handful of activists. We (the other interns and I) were pretty much helping out at the warehouse from 10 in the morning to about 1:20 in the afternoon. One awesome Greenpeacer, David Pinsky, bought pizza for everyone for lunch which was awesome and delicious.

We got back to the office at around 1:30pm, settled back down and starting calling activists for our newest toolkit for our Seafood Campaign to get Chicken of the Sea to go sustainable. It's a really exciting toolkit and one of these days I'll explain what it is. I'm actually going to write a short post about it as well as linking to it for people to download which will be posted on the official Greenpeace blog, whoo! So stay tuned for that! :D

After two hours of calling awesome activists and getting them motivated to rock the new toolkit, it was 4:30 and time to wrap up for the day. My supervisor/"boss", Jess, came over to me and asked if she could "steal me for a moment". Of course, I said yes and followed her into our main conference rooms. The first thing I saw were the cupcakes on the table, next were some of the awesome Greenepacers, and suddenly I knew what was about to happen. They started to sing Happy Birthday and it was clear at that point that Jess told everyone that my birthday was on Monday (which is something I told her a while back when I asked to have Monday off for my birthday).

It was pretty amazing and as the Happy Birthday song was being sung, more and more people sprinted to join in when they heard it. I couldn't stop smiling and laughing. It was seriously a fantastic moment and it really shows how amazing these people are. Interning here is truly an unforgettable experience.

The cupcakes were super delicious as well and we shared them among anyone who wanted a piece. The simple and brief surprise Happy Birthday event became the highlight of my day today. It left me in a really fantastic mood and just thinking about it brings a big smile to my face~

For the rest of the night, I'm just chilling in the front room of my flat, instant messaging my best friend, texting my mom, and watching a bit of the Granada series of Sherlock Holmes before popping in my Sherlock Holmes game to play~ My flatmates Rachel and Anna have some friends over. One, Corina, I know from the GP warehouse and her friend whom I briefly met earlier today; I made a better acquaintance with him not too long ago. Corina and her friend are actually leaving now so I'm going to step away from blog typing to say goodbye~

And now I'm back, but for you it's as if I didn't leave at all, ohoho~

One cool thing is that Corina made me something awesome!

It's a headband made out of a bike tube and it's just fantastically brilliant!! I've seen this before on her own head some time ago and complimented on how cool it looked. She told me what it was made out of and that she herself made. Awesome right?! Well, seems like she decided to make me one too and it sort of become a "So I heard it's your birthday soon. Happy Birthday, I made you this". I flipped out, hugged her and of course said thank you. Totally an awesome gift and I guess now I look a bit like a hippy street biker, haha! Aaah yeaaa!

But that's basically all I have to say for today. I'll be going home tomorrow morning with my big bro. Turns out mom had to have her gallbladder surgically removed some days ago and since she can't come up for my birthday, I'll be coming down to her~ I was also able to not only get Monday off work for my birthday, but also Tuesday and Wednesday just to give me some extra time to spend some time with my family at home and the later with my brother as we head back some time on Wednesday.

So this will be a fun sort of a vacation. Being so close to going home for a while made me realize just how homesick I've been without even knowing. Go figure, haha.

Anyway, time to wrap up this blog post since I've exhausted all that I could say. Time to finish watching this episode of Sherlock Holmes, pack for my trip back home, and then play some games before going to bed (it's too loud in this flat to sleep anyway, but I'm not complaining; I never mind playing video games late at night, haha).

Until the next post, folks~

~Sara

Roughly a Month Left Here in San Francisco!

Okay, okay, okay, I get it, I've been sucking at  updating this blog lately. Honestly, I just haven't had anything too eventful and worth while to post about. It's been a pretty slow week of internship work and my weekends have been filled with staying at home during rainy days, sleeping, and playing video games.

Which reminds me. I got a new video game for the Xbox  360. Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper.

Back and Front cover~

Overall, it's a fun game. My only complaints are that every single voice acting is horrible minus John Watson, the voices will cut out from time to time, the graphics aren't "the best" and are a bit glitchy (but this is a 2009 game which puts it into the "older" years in gamer years, but I'm not that bothered by this), and the camera or view point flips out quite frequently (it'll just spin in circles even though you're touching nothing on the controller and it won't stop unless you stop the spinning yourself). Regardless, it's entertaining, the little puzzles you have to solve are fun, the deductions you get to make based on the facts and clues really make you feel like Sherlock Holmes, and it's fun getting all those achievements (especially the ones that you can easily miss) because I'm a gamer geek like that and love trying to get a perfect achievement score.

So that's what I've been playing these past two weekends (and even some weekday nights)~

Other than that, I've just been going to Greenpeace every weekday and doing my internship and then going to Tae Kwon Do afterward every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

By the way! Can you believe that I've been living in San Francisco for 2 whole months now?! Crazy, right?! I have just a little over a month left of this internship and then I'm packing up to go back home (and then go back to school, haha).

Speaking of school. I've got the word (or the email) from two universities about a week ago. I got accepted into UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine so yay for that! Still aiming for UCLA, but if I got into these two schools that means I've got a good chance with UCLA, right? Let's hope so, haha. If not, I have two other really good options, so no loss there. And who knows, maybe I'll end up not going to LA to school but somewhere else (depending on where I get accepted, obviously, haha). Ah well, guess we'll just have to continue to wait and see~! But there's some pretty awesome news right there.

This week was fun though! Well, mainly Tuesday and Wednesday. My big bro's best buddy since forever, Reza, was visiting his parents in Fremont and decided to come up Tuesday night to take me out to dinner. Reza, as most of us all know, is basically my other big bro seeing how I've known him since I was about four years old, haha. It was awesome that he visited and we ate Thai food at Pagan Thai which is right smack next to my flat. We talked quite a bit and Reza wouldn't stop raving about how awesome my flat is, haha. Silly Reza.

He went home later that night and then yesterday, I got to see him again. Only this time, Ali and Monica came up as well. Ali made a reservation at Wayfare Tavern, a restaurant by Tyler Florence. It was sort of an early birthday dinner for me and also just a really good excuse to eat at this awesome place.

{Not my picture. Just found it online to show you what it looks like on the outside}

Saying we ordered too much food is actually an understatement, haha. We ordered about four to five starters and then we have four big portioned entrees with two side dishes. It was bad enough that we had even ordered that much food, but worse that we actually ate pretty much all of it. And that's not counting two desserts and then cookies right after. Yeah, we ate all that too (I ended up finishing off the cookies, haha).

I forgot to take my camera with me to take pictures of the food and honestly, I was too lazy to use my camera, so sorry! All you need to know was that everything I ate was delicious. We all pretty much had a smorgasbord, sharing everything among the four of us. It was awesome.

Again, this isn't my picture, but here's one of the entrees we had. 

I ordered this Organic Fried Chicken (which is shown in the picture above) which was obviously shared with Ali, Monica and Reza. Our other entrees were a large grass fed burger with egg and a bunch of other stuff, lamb shank, and 28 day aged steak. Our sides were winter greens and baked mac and cheese. While I'm at it, I might as well tell you that for starters we had salt roasted bone marrow, roots and greens salad (something like that haha), beets salad, a starter size of wild mushroom pappardelle pasta, and then we had popovers breads too~ 


{If you want to look at some delicious photos of almost all of the delicious foods we ate, go here: it's food photo heaven.}


And then there was also dessert~ Now for my dessert, I did whip out my phone to take a picture because it was something that couldn't go pictureless (plus I wanted to text it to my mom to show her, haha).

Mmm, Chocolate Creme Pie (and it says Happy Birthday, yay~)

Also for dessert, I want to say we also had Strawberry Rhubarb Shortcake Biscuit & Sorbet......I think....I can't remember. I was too wrapped up in my delicious chocolate creme pie of awesome.

After all that, we were given about four or five ginger, sugar cookies (something like that) with a bit of salt on them which just made the flavor pop out like WOAH! I ended up eating I think three of them even though my stomach was ready to burst. And let me tell you, we were all super stuffed! Who wouldn't be after eating all that food, haha?!

So that's pretty much what went down during my absence. I keep saying that I'll be more diligent on updating my blog and this time, I actually mean it. With just a month left, I gotta get out there and exploooooore and update, update, update for ya'll!

I'll be heading home this weekend and will be taking Monday through Wednesday off work to stay in town for a bit before heading back to SF. So that's going to be really fun and the closer Saturday morning gets (which is when Ali will pick me up to drive back to Ventura), the more homesick I'm realizing I've been for the past several weeks, pfff.

Anyway, I'm tired. Came back from Tae Kwon Do not that long ago so I'm sweaty and in need of shower. Dinner tonight consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwhich, mozzarella sticks and a salad.

So yeah, that's all I have for now. Going to take that shower and maybe play some Sherlock Holmes until sleepy time. I've actually been doing good at going to bed at a decent time so that I'll be getting nine hours of sleep. Aaah yeaa~ (That doesn't stay true for the weekends however, haha).

With that, I bid you all a good night and until the next blog update (I promise this time, it won't be another two weeks; no really, I'm serious this time, things will start to happen that I can blog about, I can feel it!)

~Sara

Oops, I Did It Again: 2 Weeks Since Last Update

Heh...heh...heh....

Sorry, I promise to try and be more diligent with blog updates. I need to get back into the habit of posting more frequently so that I don't have to bunch so many events together.

Onward then!

So something I have yet to tell you is that I participated in my first ever flash mob two Saturdays ago on March 3rd! I was in a group of people who did simple dance moves while singing a tune inside a Lucky Supermarket in protest of Chicken of the Sea's destructive fishing methods.

To learn more about the flash mob and just the overall Chicken of the Sea Day of Action, go here~ It's a short article so be sure to read it either now or after this post, haha.

To sum it up, it was really awesome and quite the experience. The best part was when the store manager spoke over the intercom demanding that "someone call 911" which is completely ridiculous and just hilarious! Because by the time the cops even came (if they ever did) we were clearly all long gone because the manager announced that AFTER we were done with our song and dance haha.

Then Sunday, Ali came over to hang out. He brought Bradley Wiggins, his adorable Westie as well~ We went hiking around near Buena Vista Park. There was a "dog run" which Bradley had a ton of fun with as well as just climbing up to the very top of the hill, haha. We all had a good time and by the end of the day we were seriously worn out (especially Mister Bradley Puppy who ran all over the place, haha).

Run Bradley Wiggins, Run~

Anyway, fast forward about a week and I took a day off on Friday since I was heading to Bakersfield for my awesome sister-in-law's (Monica) baby shower this last Saturday.

I got off about 30 minutes early on Thursday, caught the bus, then caught a BART train to the SFO airport where I proceeded to fly on a plane on my own for the first time~ It was super awesome and getting to the airport and going through all the airport routine was fairly easy. I felt all independent and cool the whole time, haha.

The plane ride was comfortable which tends to be a hit or miss, pfff. It was said to be a full flight, but luckily it wasn't and no one sat next to me other then this cute looking guy who took the window seat. So there was an empty seat between us, therefore room and comfort aaaah yeaaah~

I ended up just reading and listening to music the whole flight. Also finished The Help that night which is a FANTASTIC novel. Such a great read! I left it with my mom for her to read and also enjoy. Thanks to my Aunt Tammy for buying me this novel~~

Saturday, my parents and I drove to Monica's parents' house for the baby shower. Monica's sister, Laura, and I were in charge of working with the cake baker/maker/person to design the cake which we did like...I dunno....some months ago or so.

AND IT TURNED OUT BEAUTIFUL AND AMAZING AS EXPECTED~!!

Here are a few shots of this super awesome and adorable cake~

The baby shower was a great success and everyone had a ton of fun. Monica, Ali and their baby to come got a looooot of stuff! So yay for that~!

So that was this past Saturday. Sunday I rode with Ali and Monica back to Sacramento where I stayed the night. Then this morning, Ali dropped me off at Greenpeace and stopped by my flat to drop off a desk and night-table he didn't use or want a anymore.

Which look great in my room by the way~ (Thanks again bro!)

Apologies for a blurry/not so clear image; you get the point haha

On a final note, I made pasta for dinner tonight (again, but different pasta this time, pff). Mmm, delicious fettucine alfreado~

With that, I'll wrap up this post with a good ol' thanks for being patient with me and see you next update~
(I swear it won't be another two weeks djfakfhafha!!)

Love you all~!

~Sara