Wal*Mart traffic

Crazy line for Best Buy--this picture is taken from the middle of the line

We went to Target where the line wrapped completely around the building and ended just about where the entrance was. We decided to stick this one out. Angela got a $15 leather jacket, some holiday tees, and cheap DVDs **cough**New Moon**cough**. I didn’t want to be left out so I got some washcloths.

Black Friday equipment

When Sears finally opened, we got a free Christmas ornament, a jacket for $29 that normally sells for $150, and a snow man tie to go with my red pants!

Black Friday 2011 Loot

At Michael’s we got free Godiva chocolate bars, 70% off ribbon, plus we had a 25% off stackable coupon. At Joann we got a bunch of yarn.

Half Price Books gives out free $5 gift cards every year. We used a gift card from last year, our gift cards from this year, and a 40% off coupon to get a book for only $3 that retails new for $50.

The stores’ opening on Thanksgiving day really hosed us! It was way overcrowded and all the stores opened at the same times. Hopefully they don’t do that next year.

Angela's new laptop

1) We took a big Chau family vacation to Florida

2) Jon got his hands on a $99 HP Touchpad

3) We bought a condo and moved in

Our Florida vacation was heaps of sweltering fun.  I think we were able to see 90% of what there is to see in Florida in 10 days.  First, we flew into Tampa and drove to Sanibel Island (a family favorite) where we spent Jon’s birthday.  We mostly enjoyed the beach and collected a bunch of shells there.  Next stop was the Everglades where we made a quick stop to take a boat tour that featured a bunch of wild dolphins swimming along side the boat and a mosquito infested alligator swamp.  Then on the  way to Orlando we made a mini detour to Ft. Lauderdale to check out the university where my dad is getting his PhD.  Of course, once we got to Orlando we got our Disney time in.  We ended up spending 3 days in the parks.  It was my niece’s first time going so that was especially fun.  Our main objective during the trip was to see the Juno rocket launch from the Kennedy Space Center.  Luckily enough the launch was only delayed by an hour so we got our chance to see the rocket as it started it’s journey to Jupiter!  Our last travelling day wrapped up at Sea World which oddly enough turned out to be my favorite.  I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Shamu.

I don’t really have any comments about Jon’s TouchPad purchase, but I’m sure he’d be willing to write a special post raving about it if anyone’s interested

The move was the highlight of the summer for me.  After all of the house hunting, packing, moving, cleaning and unpacking I’m definitely glad things are winding down and have decided I never want to buy another piece of furniture again.  I was reminded what a blessing it is to have great friends and family.  We moved from the third floor to another taller third floor place and we had a lot of stuff.  There’s no way we could have done it ourselves and lots of people spent the majority of their Saturday helping us with the back breaking work.  A big thanks to all of those who came to help out!  Also, a special thanks to my Mom and Dad who took a couple of days off work to come to Seattle to help unpack, assemble, purchase, install, cook great food and clean!  Mom and Dad came and we got a lot done, but also had a fun visit.

Well now that we’re mostly settled in our new habitat and most of the boxes are cleared away it’s time for the fun times to begin.  Hope you all had a great summer and are doing well!

Our Black Friday loot!

Target Warm up
We went to Target a few days before Thanksgiving, just to scope out the store’s floorplan and to get some early buys. We ended up getting four pairs of jeans for $9 (50% off), 12 packages of various sorts of candy for about $1 each, and 20 pairs of socks for $18!!!

Warm up purchases at Target

Waiting in the Walmart line at the back of the store

Front of the line at Kohl's!

Maneuvering through the swarms at Target
As expected, there were swarms of people buzzing throughout Target. I think Target was the least organized store of the day. There was a line to check out, but no employees or even signs to indicate which side was the entrance. As a result, tons of people were unknowingly (and some knowingly) cutting in line (we almost did too, until we realized that there was a line). After checking out, the exit doors were locked. When we asked an employee, she said it wasn’t an exit; so we had to walk across the store to go to the other doors. As we passed by the original doors, we noticed that they had opened them and were then allowing people to exit.

Why are there all these people waiting at Sports Authority?!

Wild times at Michael's!

A casual stroll at Old Navy
Since we went to Old Navy hours after they opened, it was pretty empty. We bought jeans, pajama pants, and camis for 50-80% off. Piece of cake.

Quick freebie at Half Price Books
As we do every year, we line up at Half Price Books and they gave us each a $5 gift card. We didn’t bother to look at the books since we can use the gift cards another day, and we have much more important things to do!

Winding down at Jo-Ann
By 7am, everything was starting to die down. We went to Jo-Ann to get a spatula at 50% off and a gingerbread house making kit.

After Jo-Ann, we were pretty tired and were done for the day. We headed home and went straight to sleep. When we woke up, I noticed people were posting on Facebook about their shopping. WHAT!?!? People are still out there!? We had to get in some more deals, so we decided to do food.

Finishing off the day with Baja Fresh and Slurpees
We got a buy one, get one free deal at Baja Fresh. Woohoo! I love burritos! $7 for two big burritos and all the chips and salsa we could want. Then we headed over to 7-11 to get free Slurpees.

Baja Fresh buy one, get one

Free Slurpees!

Las Vegas!!

We decided to try some fancy hotels out since they are heavily subsidized by people who think they can beat statistics. Our first hotel was Palms Place and is now my favorite hotel ever! Just look at the pictures!

Relaxing on the couch

Proof that we're cool

Palms Place bathroom

At the Palms Place pool, they have seats _in_ the pool

'Do Not Disturb' signs? Pah! Here, it's all electronic!

On our last night there, we stayed at the Bellagio.

Our room at the Bellagio

Fancy bathroom at the Bellagio

Our window view of the fountain at the Bellagio

Night view from our room

Crazy plants

Raking in the free amenities!!

There’s a much larger Filipino population in Vegas than here, so I was excited to get some good fooood! We went to a Filipino buffet, but unfortunately we didn’t take a picture. But we did go to Jollibee (the equivalent of McDonald’s) twice!

In front of Jollibee

Posing next to the Jollibee bee

Our Jollibee food

Buko-pandan!!!

Lots of flavored tuna! Unfortunately they didn't have Spicy. =(

We visited the Atomic Testing Museum and the Mormon Fort Museum.

Atomic Testing Museum

Scared of the bomb

Mormon Fort Museum

We toured the Hoover Dam. The tours and everything were really well-organized, probably because so many people tour the place since they’ve seen it in the movies. The tour was grossly over-packed with “dam” jokes. All the engineering and thinking that went into it was pretty amazing. They said the upkeep of the dam was entirely self-sufficient from the energy generated there. They didn’t say whether tourism contributed, but I estimate that they give tours to about 500 people per hour…and they charged $10-30 per person.

It's huuuuge!

In front of the dam

Angela in front of an intake tower

Hoover Dam generators

We waited for a few minutes and then the tour began.  The first animals that we got to see were a family of ring tailed lemurs.  They were really cute and could jump from the ground to the tour guide’s shoulder so fluidly it was really amazing.  We also saw some special breeds of pheasant that they had.  Next it was the big item, kangaroos!  They had the kangaroos in an enclosed area and gave us each a little bread so that we could feed them.  They ate right out of our hands and were surprisingly friendly.  I always thought kangaroos were sort of mean, but these ones were pretty docile.  We even saw some mommys with little joeys in their pouch and we got to pet them and feed them too.  They also had rabbits and tortoises thrown into the mix.  The wallabies also shared the same enclosure as the kangaroos.  I never really knew what a wallaby was until I saw them.  They’re just like kangaroos, but more furry and chubbier looking. They also had these really strange animals in there, I never really got the full name something like Patagonian Capris or something, but I dubbed them guinea deers because they look like guinea pigs with little deer legs, so weird!  After the kangaroos they took us to see and feed a ton of other animals.  They had mules, donkeys, more chickens and goats in one area and we fed them these alfalfa pellets.  Then we headed over and saw this miniature horse, which I guess is different from a pony.  We also got to see an ostrich and two emus, but they didn’t let us feed them (probably because they’d peck our eyes out or something).  The last animals we got to feed were some alpaca llamas.  They were pretty gentle and the tour guide coaxed some of us to feed them from our mouths.  I tried it…wasn’t the best experience of my life, but I escaped unscathed.   When we went back to the starting point of the tour we all got to hold a baby joey and take pictures with it.  It was really neat and he was soooo cute.

After we were finished at the farm Jon took me to Outback Steak House just to complete the Aussie theme of my birthday.  We both had really good meals and I even got a free ice cream treat.

I’d say overall it was a grand adventure and a really fun birthday!  Too bad birthdays only come once a year

In front of BC Place

The line to the The Bay was ridiculously long

We waited in a HUGE line for about an hour to get into the store to buy official Olympics stuff.  As is the case with all touristy places, things were overpriced.

Angela in front of the Olympic torch

The Olympic logo lit up every time the Canadians got a medal

Not "Starbucks" but "Moonpennies"

Meticulously crafted hot chocolate

Posing in front of the ski jump thing

Angela was pretty nonchalant going down a pretty hard bobsled run

Angela’s always the one that remains calm while I freak out.

You see crazy stuff like this in Canada

Angela: "What would Shaun White do?"

All the onlookers were speechless at Angela’s snowboarding skills.  When asked how she knew it she said, “I just thought, ‘What would Shaun White do?’ and I just did what was natural.”

Snowboarding

Bronze was so disappointing

Proof that we were at the 2010 curling event!

Curling competitors at the opening

This is when the US was doing well

Click here to see a video of our US curling team in action! Apparently WordPress doesn’t have out-of-the-box ability to embed video, so you’ll have to download it to watch it.

Boo! 10-3

Our team got schooled.  Ended in the seventh in, even.  But all in all, going to the Olympics was really fun.  People were really friendly and there was a lot of energy in the air.

This was the evil carrot

1. While we were in Idaho for the holidays, we went to a Thai restaurant with family. One of the things we ordered was a soup with spiciness rating of 4 (out of 4). I like spicy food so I had Angela scoop me some of it. She asked me if there was anything specific in the soup that I wanted. I saw a baby carrot so I thought “ooh, I really feel like having a carrot.” I ate most of the soup and then got to the carrot. I bit down on it and thought it had a weird texture–kind of hollow with a chewy skin. It had such a weird texture that I spit it out to find that it wasn’t a carrot but a Thai pepper! My mouth was already burning but kept getting increasingly painful. The burning just wouldn’t go away even after drinking 4 glasses of water and eating two plates of rice. I started hyperventilating and I couldn’t see anything around me. I thought I was going to pass out! Or die!
2. 

   On the left is the mysterious cut I had when I woke up. On the right is the bite from ferret at Petco.

   All night last night, my finger was hurting. This morning I woke up to find that I had a cut about 1/4 inch wide on my finger and it was bleeding. What!? Where did that come from? Angela?
3. Today we went to Petco and saw they had a ferret. This one was particularly interested in us. I always stick my finger in the cage because the ferrets like to sniff you. This time was different. The ferret bit down on my finger hard and wouldn’t release it. I tried to shake her off to no avail. So then I tried to pull my finger out of the cage, and she still didn’t let go (even though her face was smashed against the cage). So I took my other finger and started tapping on her nose, which worked. Fifteen seconds and a bloody finger later, I finally had my finger back. Oh yea, and this bite was on the same finger that had the mysterious cut.

24 inches of pure High-def recipe enjoyment

About a week ago, we found a 24″ LCD full HD monitor for $170 with free shipping on the Dell Outlet website. Thanks to Twitter, I found a $20 coupon. So we got a humongous 24″ monitor for watching movies and viewing recipes while we’re cooking in the kitchen.

On Black Friday, we left for Old Navy at 2:20am. We bought 13 items including 50% off jeans. We got in the checkout line when there were four people in line and were out of the store in 20 minutes total. By the time we left the store, the checkout line had grown to about 30 people.

After Old Navy, I waited in line to get in to Target while Angela went to Kohl’s (which was already open) to buy a bunch of $3 board games and sweaters. Kohl’s gave us a $10 gift card for shopping there (woohoo!).

Our Black Friday treasures

Target was the best store of the day! As evidence, the line was about 1000 people long by the time the store opened. Since we knew that perfect execution would be critical at Target, we shmoozed with an employee and got a map of the store. We also found out that we didn’t have to waste time grabbing a cart at the entrance because there would be carts spread throughout the store. We planned our route and were able to beat the 50-100 people in front of us in line to the good stuff. We got one of the four piano keyboards they had stocked, a bunch of DVDs, and tons of clothes. As we were leaving the electronics area, there were swarms of shoppers like ants swarming around their kicked anthill. I wanted to snap a picture but was afraid of being trampled, so we fled screaming and clutching our prizes. Finally at checkout, they gave us a $10 gift card!

At Staples, I grabbed four $10 webcams that were normally $50. When people kept taking them, I had to try hard to resist not taking more. My heart sunk when an employee told me that they only allowed one webcam per customer. I decided to try to check out anyways and we were particularly nice to the employee. We found out that she was sick the past week and consequently missed all the Black Friday orientation meetings. And she let us buy our webcams! We also bought some other good stuff like speakers, a GPS, and 8GB USB drives.

We headed over to Half Price Books in hopes of randomly winning a $100 gift card. Unfortunately we didn’t win. But they did give us $10 in gift cards.

Ikea loot

Black Friday was a success! We got every item that we wanted to get that day. But wait! That’s not the end of the good deals! On Saturday, we stopped by Ikea and found a hidden clearance section! We bought 14 plates for 99 cents each (normally $4.99 each). And rubber gloves for 10 cents each.

What a great year for deals!

Monday morning we went to breakfast at this “hippy” place near Chinatown.  It was pretty good, they had these really good pesto potatoes.  After that we just walked around Market Square and Chinatown.  Supposedly, Victoria’s Chinatown is the first Chinatown to be built in Canada.  It seems like winter is downtime in Victoria and there weren’t many people there or many stores open.  After we finished up there we headed to Craigdorrach Castle, which is a mansion that a wealthy family built in the 1800′s.  I wouldn’t call it a “castle”, but it was pretty fancy and it was interesting seeing how people lived back then.  The furnishing are mostly from the original family that built the house, so that was pretty impressive.  Next time we visit Victoria, I’d really like to visit Hatley Park, which is the house built by the oldest son of that family.  The pictures make it look like somewhere Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice would live…After the Castle we headed home for a little break, but headed out again later in the afternoon.  We set off on foot from the time share and saw the Parlament Building, Empress Hotel and walked to Victoria’s downtown which has a lot of little shops and resturants.  We got fish and chips at this little place, they were pretty good.  After exploring a little we headed back to the hotel since it was getting pretty late.  We did a little FHE at the time share then we caught dinner at a Japanese place then went to watch “The Blind Side” (that football movie with Sandra Bullock).  It was a pretty inspiring movie.  Showed that some people still have good hearts and it’s always good to try to help others out when you can. 

Tuesday morning we headed out to catch the morning ferry back to the US of A.  We drove through Port Angeles a little, but then we headed to the center of Twilight-dom and drove to Forks, WA.  Home of the Cullen vampires etc.  Forks was as small and bleak as the books described…I think there were like 20 buildings in the whole town max.  We ate lunch in a little diner, checked out the local high school and some Twilight stores…that was about all there was to do there.  After Forks, we headed back home. 

Overall, the trip was pretty nice and relaxing.  Victoria was very quaint and peaceful and a perfect Christmas town.  Maybe next time we’re up North we’ll visit the National Park and Victoria’s other sites.

After brunch we headed to the Seattle Cherry Blossom festival.  They had some boothes set up at the Seattle Center talking about Japanese culture etc and they even had a judo demo going on while I was there.  We saw this really cook fountain that they have at the Seattle Center and the weather was warm enough to have kids playing in the water etc.  It was a lot of fun.  No doubt that fountain is a hot spot in the summer.

In the afternoon we hit the star attraction to our day.  Jon found out that there is a chocolate factory in Seattle.  It’s called Theo’s Chocolate and they make organic, fair trade chocolate and are one of 3 major chocolate maker’s in the US.  I didn’t know it, but lots of those other companies that we think of when we think of are only chocolate melters, meaning they buy chocolate from a maker, melt it down and stick some marshmellow goodness in the middle then slap their name on it.  Chocolate makers are the ones who get the cocoa beans, roast them, grind them and make the chocolate that everyone else uses.  It was a pretty good tour and it was cool seeing all the machines, but the best part of the tour was the FREE SAMPLES!  They let you sample as much as you’d like at the factory and store!  Theo’s is known for their original flavors and our favorite was the thai curry chocolate!  They also have things like bread crumb chocolate (they butter bagettes and toast them then shred them into crumbs and put them in the chocolate), fig and fennel chocolate and chipotle chocolates.  They also make these origin bars that have chocolate from different countries, meaning the cocoa beans are from only one place whereas most chocolate is mixed together by other manufacturers.  It was sort of neat seeing the difference between the different chocolates.  You can get Theo’s chocolate in most Whole Foods stores and other health stores.  It was really really fun!  I had a really fun day!  

We headed over to Red Robin for dinner where there were all these cops waiting outside.  Like 3 cop cars and we thought something bad was going down, but they were actually there for a charity event.  Very funny.  

Thanks, Jon-oh for a really good birthday!  I loved it!