year ends and old friends

So apparently New Year’s Eve is the biggest party day of the year. I wouldn’t really know, I’m not really all that much of a party person. I don’t think I’ve been to an actual New Year’s party in my lifetime. This year was pretty low key too.

My parents were in town, so I ended up playing golf with my dad. He is quite the outdoorsman, he foraged for nuts and bashed them open with his clubs while waiting to tee off. After playing golf I had an early dinner with my mom and dad before they drove back home.

Sort of at the last minute Jason and Gid decided to head over. We decided to go see the fireworks at the Tower Bridge. I used to work nearby, so I knew a really good spot from which to watch the fireworks. When we got there we found out that the fireworks had been cancelled, there had been a shooting in one of the bars nearby. Man what is this world coming to? Since I had the camera and the tripod all ready, I took some pictures from the spot. Man, this picture would’ve been much better with fireworks in it…

So we decided to go eat. Just minutes into the New Year and I’m already being a fatty. Awesome. Thank goodness for fobby Chinese places like Yummy Juice Cafe. It was open until 2:30 that night.

While at Yummy Juice Cafe we tried to figure out something to do. Somehow we ended up hanging out in a barren farm. Yup, that’s Davis for you… Actually the idea was to go stargazing, but the conditions weren’t great for it. The moon was pretty bright, and there was a fair amount of cloud cover. I got lucky and was able to get this shot of Orion, one of the few constellations I know…

I’m thankful for friends that are willing to sit around in sub freezing temperatures while I play around with my camera. At least for Jason he got a moonlight shot of his BMW for waiting.

Gid and Jason ended up crashing at my place, and in the morning we went to go grab lunch with Osmond. Over the years that I’ve known Osmond, our times hanging out have always been the same, basically us being fatties. It reminds me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Afterwards we tried to burn off some calories by shooting around. We played 21, which I probably haven’t played since high school. Back then we would sometimes toughen the rules by requiring all the tips to be one handed. I was kinda saddened to find out that none of us old geezers were able to pull off a one handed tip anymore. We ended up playing HORSE, a much more geezer friendly game.

We randomly decided to cobble together a meal from the stuff I had in my fridge. Lately I’ve been cooking more and trying to eat healthy, so my fridge was actually decently stocked with healthy stuff, so the meal ended up coming out pretty good. The first dinner of the new year was a nice healthy start. We had pan seared salmon, brown rice with quinoa, roasted asparagus, sauteed mushrooms, sauteed cabbage and doenjang jjigae (a Korean soup made from fermented soybean paste.)

Random Korean pop culture lesson: Rice and doenjang jjigae is one of the cheapest meals in Korea. Doenjang girl is a sorta derogative slang term in Korean, if you call someone that it means they cheap out on essentials like food (by eating only doenjang jjigae at home) to pretend to be rich and flaunt a luxurious lifestyle by buying expensive handbags and drinking expensive Starbucks coffee (which is kind of a luxury item in Korea.) A lot of the famous Gangnam Style music video is a parody of this sort of lifestyle.

So anyways, back to New Years. It was good times, with friends and family. As I get older I realize more and more how thankful I am for my friends and family.