Jon, where have you been?

Well another month in San Clemente has passed. At times it has been slow and at others I have felt like there is not enough time to get everything I need to get done done. The beginning of this week felt my work was in a lull, but has now picked up again since I am on to new projects. My older projects have not been finished, but there are newer more exciting projects to work on. Also, the likelihood of my older projects getting used is very low. I am excited in one sense to move on, but in another sense I feel like weeks of my work are worthless. Granted I did learn some new and cool stuff along the way, but I still don't have much to show for it.

Speaking of things other than work, I have had quite an exciting past month. I started rock climbing again. I used to climb a little bit in high school, but I never did much throughout college. Eric started climbing more and more since I have been gone, so when I went back to Seattle I bought some shoes and have been going with him and Kagan and Sandra and others each time I go back to Seattle. I forgot how much fun it is to rock climb.

Besides rock climbing I have been doing quite a bit of boogie boarding and surfing down here. I still can't do either very well, but it is just fun to get out in the water. I figure that I might as well take advantage of it while I am here in San Clemente. Apparently this area has some of the best surfing in the world. I would be a fool to not at least try it out.

If rock climbing and surfing were not enough physical activity, I decided to buy a road bike the weekend that Kagan, Hue, Sandra and Eric came down. I had Kagan help me find a bike and he did a nice job helping me out. It is a new KHS bike that I bought from the cyclery in town. This is my first ever road bike so I am still getting used to everything. Clicking in and out of the pedals has been accident free except for once when I had to start riding again while on a hill. I didn't have enough power to get going, so I just tipped over. Getting up was difficult because the foot which was under the bike was still clipped in. It was a little embarassing. Anyways, I am super excited to ride my bike around here more. I am thinking about riding my bike up the Pacific Coast Highway to some of the smaller towns along the coast. Also, since Eric is getting a bike too I am hoping that when I get back to Seattle this summer, he Kagan and I can go on a bike trip somewhere. We were throwing around the idea of riding a part of the Oregon coast.

By far the best thing about this month was the visit from Sandra, Eric, Kagan and Hue. I knew that Eric, Kagan and Hue were coming, but Sandra and them decided to keep it a secret that she was coming down, so I was totally shocked when I pulled up and saw Sandra with the three of them. It was great. I did not expect at all to see Sandra. I was happy, but at the same time I didn't know what I was going to do about seats for everyone. There were plenty of seats in the car, but I was a total dumb ass in the morning and forgot to check whether Anthony took the surfboard out of the backseat. I didn't realize until I was in Long Beach, so it was far too late to turn around. We managed to squeeze everyone in because they didn't mind getting cozy. I felt stupid for a little while, but then I got over it.

The weekend was great. The first day was spent getting settled in and we went to the beach for a little while. In the evening we went to a Thai restaurant in downtown and then headed to Ole's for a little foosball action. Then it was time to head home and get ready for a big day at the beach.

On Saturday we all had our gear and wetsuits, so we headed out for some more wave action after breakfast at the pier. Kagan, Sandra and Eric all picked up boogie boarding really quickly. I was rather impressed with their performance. One time Eric and I caught a big wave and rode it in together. It was a lot of fun. I can still remember catching the wave and looking over at him and screaming "yead dude!". It was such a California moment.

In the evening we had another nice dinner in downtown San Clemente. We met up with my brother's friend Tim and Alex who in live in San Diego. They were both really nice guys. After dinner we all headed up to Irvine to watch The Ring Two. It was an alright movie, but not having seen the first I can't whether or not it was worse. Although, I hear it was.

On Sunday, we went for a pleasant little hike in the hills behind my apartment in Talega. There were some paths, but we decided it would be funner to just hike around, so we left the path. We had to jump a barb wire fence, but that didn't stop us from finding a nice place to picnic. At one point we found an ant hill. I stopped near it and told Sandra and Hue to walk around it. I guess I stood next to it too long because only minutes later I felt a bite on my neck. I quickly brushed off what did it and then looked down. I looked down only to see hundreds of ants crawling all over me. I took off my shirt and brushed them all off, so no harm was done, but it was not nice to realize I was covered in ants. Anyways, after about an hour of hiking we parked ourselves on the side of a hill overlooking a little a small valley. We ate food, chatted and relaxed.

After our lunch it was pretty much time for me to drive everyone to the airport, so we went back to my apartment, gathered everything and then headed out. Rather than driving up I-5, which was packed because of everyone heading home on Easter Sunday, we chose to drive up Pacific Coast Highway. It was a really nice drive and a relaxing way to end the trip. I just hope we can do it all again soon.

As for the next few weeks I am not sure what is going to happen at work. I have a few little projects to do and I have some meetings with people. I just really want to do something that help the producers or will make it's way into the movie. I hope that I can come away from this job experiene having done something relevant. Besides trying to do some cool stuff at work I plan on starting to study Chinese again. I think I have lost a little since I left Beijing, but I think I can pick it up quickly again. I have some Tin Tin cartoons in Chinese and I started downloading some movies to watch on top of studying.

I have also started thinking about what I am going to do after I graduate from school. I definitely want to see if I can find work in the Seattle area. I am thinking about Google and Valve. I might try Microsoft and Avanade. I think those will all be tough jobs to get, but I would definitely like to give it a shot. The first two would be my top choices, but if all else fails I will try and find more LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) jobs.