Tofu-isms

I realized I haven't had the chance to document Tofu's childhood "months" too much, so this post is dedicated to her. She will be hitting puberty very soon so we had her spayed on Monday. Here are some random notes on Tofu.

- She just loves to lick. I wonder if she'll ever grow out of it? Fingers, toes, faces, legs, anything she can stick her tongue out at, she will lick. The funniest is that when she first met Angel, she licked his face even though he clearly did not enjoy it.

- She is such a picky eater. She rarely ever finishes her meal if we only give her dry food. Only when we mix it with some wet food will she eat heartily. It is probably for this reason that she didn't grow that much and is still small.

- She has a funny bark. When we first got her, she had two distinct barks. One was extremely high pitched and annoying, the other was very low and sounded like a boy going through puberty. Now she kind of has a medium bark that combines the awkwardness of the first two. She often barks after Lulu does when a person walks down the hallway.

- Her peeing and pooing is unpredictable. Unlike Lulu who goes to the bathroom like clockwork, you never know if Tofu needs to go once, twice or three times. She's had more accidents in the house than my previous pups (I think?) and it's getting a little annoying.

- She will eat anything. Some of the more notorious items she has chewed up: two pairs of Havaianas flip-flops, the Apple remote control, my blue nail clipper holder, the entire COUCH, clothes, cat poop, cat litter, shoelaces... the list goes on.

- She comes more often if you call out "Lulu" than "Tofu".

- She only has tear stains on one eye, even after two full bottles of Angel Eyes.

When we leave her in the house to go to work, she tears it up. Literally. The following pictures are all from ONE INCIDENT, where we left her at home with Lulu for 2 hours.







So You Think You Can DANCE DANce dance...

We spent the last couple of days marathoning "So You Think You Can Dance" to catch up. This season I only have a couple of favorites, and many more unfavorites. These are the most memorable dance routines in my mind so far.



My favorite dancer throughout the season is Will. His power, grace and just the sheer beauty of his body is awe-inspiring. The Adam & Eve dance was one of my favorites, even though I thought Jessica was a little bit shaky in it.



The Bollywood dance was very surprising and almost pleasant. I don't like Joshua or Katee but even I have to admit this was a great routine and showed their versatility. Their accuracy in this routine was incredible also.



So I've disliked Katee ever since the "Top 20" auditions moment where she sold out her friend to be on the show. Ever since that scene on the stage where she couldn't stop crying, I just couldn't stand seeing her face. I didn't mind so much to focus on her body as she dances since she is such a technical and precise dancer, but something about that face... Only when she was paired up with Will did I start softening up to her.



This routing with Will and Katee was very cute and deceptingly difficult. Their fancy footwork in, on and around the boat was impressive.


Twitch is my second favorite (which bummed me out that both Will and Twitch were in the bottom two last week), and I really enjoyed this number between him and Katee. The dancing as spectacular, as always, but even moreso I enjoyed the theatrics of this one. I'm always a sucker for "passionate fight scenes" and this one translated into a contemporary dance was just stunning.



And lastly, my biggest unfavorite was Comfort. I felt that in all of her solos she was unoriginal and repeated the same 5 moves from her playbook over and over again. However, I did enjoy this performance with Twitch when she finally came out of her slump and delivered an exhilirating performance. This routine showcased both Twitch and Comfort's strengths and was really fun to watch.

I am so bummed that Will got kicked off the show so early, I was really rooting for him to win the whole thing. I am not motivated to watch the rest of the season. I am a little bit curious to see how far Katee makes it or to see who gets kicked off next. I really think Joshua or Mark should have taken Will's place last week to take the boot. Boo.

Weekend Recap: Family Time in the OC

This weekend started out like any other weekend, after eating a hearty breakfast of pancakes (tag-teamed with Yona), Steve and I headed out to the dog park to give the doggies some exercise. Lulu had been having stomach troubles, so we didn't stay too long. After a couple of "accidents" at the park, we rushed home to give her a bath.

After cleaning up the house a bit, S, Yona and I got ready to spend the rest of the day in the O.C. with Uncle R & Aunt L. We headed down to South Coast Plaza to pick up some goodies for R since she was still recovering from her surgery. We did a little bit of shopping and bought some baked goods at Vie de France. We were planning to get to G & R's by 5pm but smart little me left my credit card at Barney's so S had to run back to go get it.

We got to Rosanna's and presented her with some of her "feel better" gifts... two giant balloons from the carousel at SCP and a Korres skin brightening mask. Then we headed down to Irvine to try out some Taiwanese food at Chef Chen's, at R recommendation. G ordered like a pro, although after a couple of minutes I finally realized he had a cheat sheet -- a takeout menu with dishes circled by R. My favorite dish of the night was the roast beef sandwich... served kind of "burrito style" with a hot, fried wrap. The pork leg shank was really good too -- but I immediately felt guilty after eating some. S really liked the kung pao shrimp which tasted very fresh and Uncle R ate almost the entire steamed fish by himself.


After the restaurant, we all headed down to Laguna Niguel to catch the sunset. We drove to the Montage Hotel and walked around the outside gardens, looking out into the ocean. Even though we missed the sunset, it was still very beautiful outside. I was particularly impressed with the manicured gardens and sitting areas while S was preoccupied with the abundance of bunny rabbits hopping around the property. Uncle R took a series of pictures of everyone, as usual.




After the beach, we headed back up to Irvine to get some frozen yogurt at Yogurtland. I was surprised to hear that this yogurt hot spot is popping up all over the place. The cookies and cream yogurt is good with extra oreo on top, but I also really liked the Strawberry tart yogurt. The brownie bites were a little bit mushy, like the mochi, and I felt it wasn't the right texture to eat with frozen yogurt.

So we were all quite full when we headed back to G and R's place to hang out and chit chat for a bit. Finally we left at about 10:30PM and I slept all the way back to LA. It was kind of like being a kid and exhausted after a day at Disneyland and sleeping on the car ride back!

So today we woke up pretty late and S picked up some duck liver pate from Le Marmiton in Santa Monica. We ate it with the baguettes we picked up from South Coast Plaza -- it was so good! We also heated up some of the croissants from Vie de France. It was a great brunch. After stuffing ourselves silly, we headed to Beverly Hills to check out couches at Crate and Barrel. I think it's coming to the end of the life of our couch and it's time to buy a sofabed. After all, it seems familial company is neverending here at our house. :D

So after a few hours of shopping we came home and watched back-to-back episodes of Denise Richards' reality show, It's Complicated. We ordered Papa John's pizza for dinner and ate pretty much the whole order (two pizzas). After dinner, we headed out to Trader Joe's to do some grocery shopping for the week. We're going to aim to cook lunch/dinner every day next week -- we've been eating pretty unhealthily lately. After buying some "healthy" food and planning out these "healthy" meals, I felt the urge to go running and burn off some of that thick Papa John's pizza crust I dipped in the garlic butter sauce, so I did a lap around the country club. I can't believe how out of shape I am -- I was burning read and soaked in sweat by the time I was done, and I didn't even run that much! I started a "workout" journal again and I'm going to try to keep tabs on my exercise activity. I just realized that this past year I undid about 2 years of working out... if you add up my gym membership and private training sessions that's about $7,000 that went to waste. =/

It's time to go to bed... it's late and I am waking up early tomorrow to drop Tofu off at the vet to get spayed. Poor girl will have her surgery tomorrow and stay overnight so I won't see her again until really late on Tuesday.

Differences

Now that I've settled into my new neighborhood, I'm starting to notice the differences between the Beverly Hills and Brentwood environments.

- Although both neighborhoods have bad drivers, the drivers on this side of the 405 seem more rushed and are explicitly rude, while the ones in Beverly Hills were ignorant of traffic rules and just horrible drivers.

- People seem to be more active in Brentwood. Although I'd run into the occasional jogger in Beverly Hills, there was definitely a lack of "sporting equipment" lying around the old apartment building. There are a lot of professional cyclists in my neighborhood and all of our neighbors seem to be pretty active. Today I took a peek in our neighbor's SUV trunk and saw golf clubs, a football, a soccer ball and a boogie board.

- There are a lot of dogs in Brentwood. There are a lot of babies in Beverly Hills.

- It's hotter in Brentwood. Even though I now live on a shady, tree-lined street, the weather was still noticeably cooler in Beverly Hills.

Yona's New Room