Garage Sale'ing

My friend Marisa and I have been wanting to go garage sale'ing for awhile now. Every time I say that, people ask what that is. It's when... you go to garage sales. She was envious of the furniture fix-up piece I had to make into Khaleesi's litter box, and wanted to find one too, and I just like garage sales. So this Saturday we got up before dawn to get coffee and drive around and scope out garage sales in Riverside.

Well we both saw a side of Riverside that we never knew existed. Literally! We were in the craziest neighborhoods that neither of us had been to before, and were dumbfounded. When I say crazy I mean jaw-dropping properties of mansions and themed houses, and then the adorable dated charming Wood Streets-type of Riverside of tiny, unique houses with arches and ivy, and streets lined with willows that create a drapery as far as you can see. It was beautiful.

And then we passed this gem... that we HAD to get out and take a picture with. There are no words!

We both wanted that buffalo.

On Saturday evening I went to downtown with my coworker Becky and her friends. It was our first time hanging out outside of work, and she is super awesome so I was not disappointed! We went to the back patio "club" (?) of Mario's Place, called V26 and had a grand ol' time. Except of course, for this photobombing couple. We had had our strategic picture planned, so we weren't very happy about this. Hence our faces!

It took all weekend to recover from the early call time of garage sale'ing, but I'm back to my normal levels of fatigue and tiredness now... I thinkkkzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Designated School Official

In my first job working with international students, I was authorized to be a Designated School Official, or DSO, which means I went through training and an application and was approved to have the authority to create and sign certain U.S. immigration documents that international students need and use. When you are no longer employed with these places, your account will deactivate, which had happened to me when I left jobs with DSO duties.

Now in my new job, they needed me to be DSO, and quickly to help with their backlog and heavy spring workload. I had assumed that since I had been DSO before all they would do is a quick background check in the meantime and then re-activate my account, so I'd probably be up to speed within the week.

Wrong! It took forever. Way longer than  normal or anticipated, and I think my boss was very eager to have me take a lot of this off her plate. It took a little over a month, so when it finally happened, she was overjoyed. She celebrated by calling me into her office while she was meeting with a student, to have me sign a student's document, for the first time with them. And then yes, this happened.

We explained the situation to the student so he wasn't freaking out thinking I was doing something illegal or that I didn't know what I was doing. Although you can see he doesn't appear to be sweating it much. Ha. I told him to frame that signature and give it to his grandchildren one day.

But the story gets better.

Today, she walked into my office to present me with a FRAMED copy of this picture. She had outlined it and wrote "DSO" and put it in a wooden frame for me, which is now in my office. And I don't even have my diploma in here!

Kathleen Class of 2014

Welp welp, she's graduated! She's a UCR alumni after last Sunday evening. It was one of the better graduations I've attended, since grandma couldn't stand the heat so we got out of the kitchen... per se. We watched the ceremony from a lecture hall where it was being live-streamed. It was the best. Air conditioned, quiet, got to come and go as we pleased... and can I say that events like this are just already more bearable with technology... we got to text and snapchat jokes back and forth during it all.

What is that line...?! Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, eh?

Anyway... Congrats Kittens!

Second-Hand Make-Over

Remember when I helped out with that yard sale and inherited tons of stuff and it even jumpstarted my gardening endeavors? Well the thrifty tendencies didn't end there.

My office had actually relocated to where we are now semi-recently, from what I understand, and not even all of the offices here are in use yet, and are being used for storage. Since we are making a few more hires, they were clearing out offices they planned to use, which meant that almost all of their decorations and trinkets came out of the woodworks for awhile, since they haven't yet had the time or energy to decide how to utilize them with the current space, especially given that we don't have many display cases or panels here. My coworkers told me that I should go through them all and find stuff to decorate my office with, since otherwise they'll just be sitting in boxes for the foreseeable future... and I did... and I love it! All of these things are old, original, and actually from the part of the world they represent.

Look at this beautiful Egyptian picture, it is done on some sort of reed or papyrus or bamboo base and I am in love with it

Then, you may look at this and see the windmills and assume that it's Dutch, but I actually think it's Swedish. There was another one in the set and it had a Swedish dala horse on it.

Here is a collection of small trinkets... two Japanese fans, a wooden African box, and a little Japanese curtain divider thing (there has to be a real name for those). That crystal ball was my birthday gift from Cousin Bobby, the Mask of the Sichuan Opera is mine from a Chinese tour group that came to San Diego when I worked at Embassy there, and that pregnant Statue of Liberty (ironically from a company called California Cryobank) was included in my hodge-podge birthday package sent from my old coworkers in New York. Lulz.

And here is my CROWN JEWEL. Atop that Japanese linen is a Centennial plate of RIVERSIDE depicting our history and historic sites. I want to put it in a glowing golden orb and make students look at it every time they come in my office... but I'll also settle for a small plastic display stand.

And now here's something that should make us all cringe. On Monday nights I go to a meeting in a room that has what I assume is supposed to be a handpainted backdrop of Paris, or some familiar French sites. I assume this because of the "Cafe", the "Chocolatier", the "Hotel Fleurs de Lys" and the rendition of the Eiffel Tower rising in the background.

However, according to the FLAG, this place doesn't even EXIST because my searches proved to find no national flag with three horizontal stripes in the order of blue, red, and white!

I'm sorry to be chaamp, but this is the biggest eyesore I've seen since Lorde came on the music scene. So far both weeks I've ended up with seats facing this mural, and my eyes are constantly twitching as this ghastly error. Sketching and painting, especially a mural this nice, is not a quick after-thought... there were blueprints, thought, sketches, paint bought and decided on, meticulous brush strokes... but no one could be bothered to look up what the French flag actually looked liked?!

FYI, it looks like this.

And I'm not just indignant because I lived in France... this kinda thing always annoys me! But you can ask lots of my friends, I love knowing geography, capitals, and flags... just ask Jayna about Josh Evans' flag game that we would play at the Triple Crown in midtown Manhattan at our monthly happy hours. I would be irritated if they messed up any flag! Why not take the time to look it up when you're painting a mural on a wall?!

I know, I know, I'm being a prissy and pretentious little brat. So I'll try to recreate the emotion. How would you feel if you saw THIS:

...anything yet?

Okay, lesson learned: go early on Monday nights and sit with my BACK to the mural!

Would You Rather...?

No one on God's green earth is better at Would You Rather questions than Reginald. It actually used to be topics of dinner conversations in the dining commons in college... we would sit around in Ortega and Ronnie would ask everyone the absolute craziest Would You Rather's... it didn't even become about answering the questions so much as just hearing what he would come up with next.

Ronnie surprise Gchatted me yesterday with one, and I was surprised cause we hadn't played that game in awhile, but he did not let me down. Here's how it went:

RONNIE: Would you rather be EXTREMELY beautiful, with men validating your existence every day of your life, and you're dripping with diamonds, ice, platinum, and live in a ginormous mansion that can also levitate and fly all over the world, as you also have the power of fire--BUT you're always chasing the one man who will never fully love you (BUT he love your body) OR you can live in a small cottage in a magical forest where an aurora appears every night with a man who loves you heart and soul (and vice versa) but you can only eat bread and tea everyday but as a consolation prize you have a cat that can roll backwards and sometimes it barks once a month and you also have a pen that has unlimited ink AND you KIND of have the power of water which is mostly just soap bubbles and a little bit of fog (good for cleaning the dishes) but bad for self-defense!
 ME: THE AURORA COTTAGE. SO OBVIOUSLY
 RONNIE: WHAT?! really!! the other option is so much more glamorous!!!
 ME: I won't need to clean dishes if im in a cottage. we'll have no running water. and i want a cat that can roll backwards
 RONNIE: i mean that is pretty awesome. but what about the power of fire! and the unattainability of the ICEPRINCE!?
 ME: that sounds awful! i don't need the power of fire. didn't you see FROZEN. clearly the power of ice and snow is way better
 RONNIE: What about the GINORMOUS MANSION that flies you all over the world?!?!?
 ME: well i definitely would miss that. but i might just take it to the aurora cottage to see the cat that can roll backwards!
 RONNIE: omg! you're obsessed with that cat
 ME: You know I'm a cat person! JUST LIKE HOLLY GOLIGHTLY
 RONNIE: Well I guess I should have told you about how you'll also be witnessing the cat who rolls backwards and barks once a month give birth to a venus fly trap

So there you go. What would YOU rather do?!

And The Emmy Goes To...

In some weird Sisterhood of the Traveling Sisters coincidence, Jayna and I were both unemployed and then re-employed around about the same time. The difference with the re-employment being that Jayna's new job is way cooler than mine... she is a TV star!

You can go here and skip to 28:30 for a snippet of what I mean...

Jayna works for the City of Raleigh's Transit Division and goes to city council meetings and ends up on their public broadcast, and all I get is a blurb on our staff website!

I keep telling Jayna that this City of Raleigh work is great experience for when she decides to come and work for the City of Riverside. (P.S. I just saw how there was a sign language interpreter there... maybe I'll just come work for you.)

I'm nominating you for an Emmy girl!

May Flowers... in June

I was working late on Friday, which turned out to be great, because my mom was on the campus with Kathleen taking some graduation pictures and I went to join... aka to help pose them, give them hip non-parental advice for pictures, and then star in a few of my own. I mean, why not?

Staging

Giving directions

My own ideas

Props

The Grad and The Fab

Kathleen was talking about how to decorate her graduation hat. I cracked myself up when I suggested that she write "I'd rather be graduating from Harvard" hahaha.

After the pictures, I went out to visit my friend who was bartending at her work. We had a drink and she told me about how her family was having a gigantic yard sale the next morning to raise funds for her mom to get a diabetic alert dog and told me I should swing by. So I did, I was over there at 7am the next morning and ended up staying almost all day. The sale was huge, they had announced it asking for people to donate things for them to sell and it was massive. Some people would even just give extra money when they saw it was to raise money for a dog. All of us who were helping out kept finding things we liked ourselves and getting huge piles of our stuff. When I took on two small garden boxes, I became inspired to try a hand at some gardening and planting. By 3p when I was leaving (sunburnt and sore) I went to Home Depot and picked up potting soil, plants, seeds, flowers, another big and cute gardening box with a chalkboard on the outside, and then the 99 cent store to pick up a can to make a pot like I had seen at the Quatro de Mayo bridal shower.

In the end I have one box of already-bloomed flowers, one box of planted California poppies and cosmos, one box of planted beefsteak tomatoes and green onions, sweet basil and cilantro, one small inside-greenhouse of tomatoes, one small inside-greenhouse of green onions, and one small indoor cactus with flowers whose names I forget.

You are all welcome to start making bets on how long I can keep these all alive for. I'll be sure to update you on their slow and inevitable deaths by me...