Just wanted to say Happy Birthday to Decathanerd.

Apparently, when SFHalcyon showed up to our camping trip on 7/2, it was his birthday. Liam, ChewyDenise, Jeani, and Karl went out and got him a little cake at the local store and we sang happy birthday to him.

Sigh… we’re all getting old.

So I took 2 days off and had a 5 day weekend. CDMCC and I drove down to Mt. Shasta. The drive wasn’t too bad. It took ~8hrs, though being the driver, it felt a LOT shorter than driving from Berkeley to Monterey Park, which usually takes about 6hrs. We stayed at a place called Fowler’s Campground which has been ‘the place’ for the past 4 years. I went there 2 years ago, but was in Europe last year, so I missed it.

On our drive down, we saw the scariest accident ever. It was like straight out of a movie. A big rig crashes into a SUV (CDMCC thinks it’s a Lincoln Navigator) and the SUV literally flips multiple times. I counted 3, but it was already flipping by the time I saw it. This was on the I-5, about 50miles north of WA’s southern border. It was also during a left curve so we were facing directly into it. There was lumber all over the place and there was big rig that took multiple lanes, so I assumed it was the big rig that hit it.

Some interesting statistics from my Civic’s gasoline mileage:

32.2MPG
38.7MPG
34.8MPG
36.3MPG

I almost broke 40! Darn! I was so close too! I think my Civic’s is suppose to have 30MPG on city roads and 36MPG on freeways. Most of you probably know that Oregon doesn’t have any sales tax, but one interesting fact about Oregon is that all gas stations are full service. You won’t find one that allows self service. However, even with full service, the price per gallon was $2.87. Wow… Gasoline in CA was expensive! I’m not sure if it was because I pumped in the middle of nowhere, but it was priced at $3.31/gallon. This is referring to 87 octane. Price of 87 octane here in Washington is ~$2.97/gallon. Another interesting thing that came up was that we thought how sweet it would be to live in Oregon, but to work in Washington. No state income tax for work and no sales tax for stuff you purchase.

So the remainder of the drive was pretty calm. We arrived at the campsite around 1am and we woke Liam and ChewyDenise up. The rest of the crew showed up the next day which included Lorie and Jeani. Lorie’s roommate Gretchen and her brother Karl also came. We had loads of fun, doing stuff like cooking on top of the campfire, playing card games (asshole, the fool, kings, casino, war, golf, pyramid, race horse, and a couple others I don’t remember on the top of my head), swimming and jumping off waterfalls, sunbathing, making smores, chopping firewood, etc. SFHalcyon ended joining us a day later. We were totally not expecting him to show up, but he did arrive after hiking up Mt. Shasta.

I’ve uploaded all my pictures and videos to: 2006 July 4th Camping Trip. I’ll let the pictures and videos tell the rest of the story. Here are some selected pictures and videos I wanted to share. The videos may take some time to load since I didn’t bother re-encode them into a streamable format. You always have the option to download the video (link beneath the video player) and watch it locally.

Pictures:

Videos:

I will say that the water was a lot colder this year due to the extra snow and the water current was a lot stronger. I somehow managed to scratched myself and sprained my ankle due to the strong current. This was on top of the many bug bites I already received.

All in all, it was a really fun trip. We left around 8:30am on July 4th and we get back around 4:30pm. I was really tired, so I took a shower and went to sleep pretty early, missing all the fireworks.

Guess this may have been an reaction to U.S. Fed set for 17th rate rise: Most analysts expect the Fed to raise the overnight federal funds rate a quarter-percentage point to 5.25 percent, its highest level since March 2001, although a few have speculated about the potential for a half-percentage point move. Just 10 days ago, HSBC bumps their rate to 4.8%. Today, I received an email stating they’ve bumped it again to 5.05%.

But unfortunately, all my money there have been already been withdrawn as down payment for my condo and I don’t see it growing back fast any time soon.

So I just faxed in my signed mortgage application along with the my complete identity:

• last 2 statements from each of my bank account (12 pgs)
• last 2 statements from my brokerage account (22 pgs)
• last 2 paystubs (2 pgs)
• college transcript (2 pgs)
• last 2 years’ W-2 forms (1 pg)
• scan of driver’s license (1 pg)

Wow…

Maybe one day we can do all this through Information Cards. ;p

I thought these sushi race cars were so cute! (from FuzzyWuzzy) They’re even drifting!

Uh oh… Where did one go? He must’ve turned off his headlights (Initial D reference)

Also from 4chan, I saw a link to this video: Top Gear – The Carver. The Carver looks so fun! It’s sorta a car/motorcycle mesh. Apparently there’s these green and red lights that indicate how far you’ve tilted and your goal is to get as many red lights as possible.

Who knew 1lb of pasta was that much pasta? The only pasta I got before was the pasta that came in 20 bags of spaghetti at Costco, and I usually split that into 3 or 4 meals (not too sure how much those weighed). So today, I went to Safeway and they were having 10 box of pasta for $10. Each box was a pound each, so I got 2 boxes of fettuccine, 2 boxes of linguine, and 2 boxes of angel hair and left Safeway only paying $6 total. Haha. I had some lean ground beef I had to get rid of (probably 2 weeks old?).

Anyway, I opened a box of fettuccine and started cooking it. The box of fettuccine seemed pretty small and harmless so I poured the whole thing in. It wasn’t until I poured the pasta into my stir fry pan with meat and pasta sauce that I realized how much pasta there was. So I watched 16 Blocks as I was eating my pasta, and somehow managed to finished the whole thing (I don’t like keeping food overnight nor wasting food). However this has created a problem where 4 hours after I finished the pasta, my stomach still hurts. Ugh…

Who knew 1lb of pasta could be that much? I think I ate like 3 shares of what I’d normally eat. Did I mention my stomach’s still hurting?