my succulent obsession continues..

it's been barely a month since my last succulent purchase, but i saw these two mimicry plants and aloe plant at lowe's and i just had to have them.

below is the new pot sitting among my others plants, i may need to consolidate soon..

the meat at mastro's.

my brother's friend zai invited us to dinner at mastro's this past week. he recently move to spain, but was back in LA for a week or so, and wanted to go to mastro's because he apparently can't find good beef there. it's not my first time there, so i knew what to expect. the cocktails were good, and the quality of the meat is very good. but the sides.. well, other than the crab and black truffle gnocchi, i've never been terribly impressed.

someone ordered their shrimp cocktail, which came served over dry ice - very pretty.

heirloom tomato and burrata salad was the special salad for the evening. the tomatoes were good, the burrata was just okay. but i've been spoiled by mother dough.

shaanxi gourmet - this time with pictures!

i blogged about my love of shaanxi gourmet's awesome thick tsuh mien noodles back in december, but i don't venture to rosemead all that often, so it took me a few months to get back there. there were no pictures then, but there are now. this is the lamb noodle soup:

the vagrant @ allston yacht club.

we went the vagrancy project pop-up restaurant by chef miles thompson at the allston yacht club in echo park. it's a five-course $70 tasting. the mixologist for the project is nathan oliver, and james was probably most excited for the drinks.

nathan bottles a classic frisco, which is rittenhouse 100 rye, benedictine and lemon. i had the night's gin cocktail, which had white grapefruit and bay leaf.

cognoscenti coffee @ hotel normandie.

one of the hardest things about monday mornings is that proof bakery is closed, so i can't get my coffee fix. i mean, there are other places i could go, but nowhere is good enough to be really worth the inconvenience. except! the coffee people at proof, aka yeekai of cognoscenti, are doing a pop up in the lobby of hotel normandie in ktown right now (which you can see is undergoing lots of renovations right now), so we decided to get up extra early, so that we could get our monday morning cognescenti coffee fix.

levitated mass @ LACMA.

james's parents were in town on sunday, and his dad has wanted to visit the la brea tar pits for quite awhile now. sunday also happened to be the opening of LACMA's new outdoor installation levitated mass. so after brunch at tart, we parked at LACMA, walked over to check out the tar pits for a bit, then went to see LA's giant new rock.

toms sample sale vs. taiwanese breakfast.

my friend jenny wanted to stop by the annual TOMS sample sale up in valencia. it started at 6am on saturday, and we had to get her back to the LA convention center by 10.30am for her duties at dwell on design. we knew it would be crazy, but hoped we wouldn't have to stand in line for more than 2 hours, so we didn't leave LA until 6am. 

well, after 1.5 hours, we were only about half way down the line, and at that rate, we would have had to leave immediately once we got to the front of the line to get her back down to LA. and that would have been without eating anything! well, two taiwanese girls aren't going to let that happen, so we left and went to huge tree pastry in alhambra instead for some taiwanese breakfast, and got her to the convention center on time. i think we made the right decision, don't you?

screenplay and dwell on design 2012

our friends and neighbors over at oyler wu collaborative have been working very hard on screenplay, their installation for the dwell on design 2012 conference, for a couple months. we even helped out a couple times, and this was the final product at the conference itself:

dreamworks clam bake.. what?

we had a clam-bake-themed lunch at work today! yea i know, when i saw the announcement, i was like "whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...?" they were serving baked chicken and baked clams - which were HUGE by the way, two inches wide! and they also had two food trucks come on campus, the lobsta truck (serving lobster rolls, crab rolls, clam chowder, etc) and a rockin ice truck (serving hawaiian ice).

employees each got one free lobster or crab roll. i had a lobster, then paid for a crab. AND had one of their freshly squeezed lemonades. yum!

it's cool to be nice and be sweet and shred hard.

as seen outside proof bakery this morning:

a little atwater in the NY times, and the consequences.

the new york times travel section featured atwater village a couple weeks ago. they feature both golden road brewery and proof bakery. how awesome is that?!

proof bakery is where i go basically every single day to get my morning cappuccino and croissant since i discovered them back in january. their coffee is actually a pop-up called cognoscenti by architect-turned-barista yeekai lim. they use only the best small-batch coffee like handsome and four barrel, and yeekai and the other baristas are just awesome. talking to them this morning though, it sounds like they've had an influx of new customers lately because of the nytimes feature. while they have no problem with new customers, they've faced many who think their coffee is too expensive, or expect to be served completely customizable starbucks-style drinks - which is not what they're about - who then complain and are very rude to the employees.

father's day @ soowon galbi.

not much to report here. mike and i took our parents to soowon galbi for some korean barbeque on father's day. they really have the best meat! especially the prime rib, and galbi, and pork neck. i love pork neck! we basically got two orders of each of those, plus an order of beef tongue, veggies, and some galbi soup. awesome. simple. the waiter couldn't believe how much food we put away.

to the zoo!

we went to the LA Zoo today on a whim. we got there three hours before closing, and just checked stuff out. it was rather hot out, so we got tired pretty quickly and were ready to go by the time things started slowing down.

the highlight of the trip was getting banana split dippin' dots! i love those - such a guilty pleasure.

brave & my first beard papa.

saturay, we went to an asifa screening of pixar's new animated movie brave at the el capitan theatre in hollywood. it was pretty good, very good visually, and the story was definitely one of the more interesting takes on the mother-daughter relationship. definitely not what i was expecting. and a bit scarier than i expected too, the very young might have a problem with it.

afterwards, before peacing out of hollywood, we stopped at beard papa really quickly. i'd never had one of their cream puffs before, and we figured it would make a nice light snack between the early afternoon movie and dinner. i had a normal vanilla-filled puff and james had the vanilla filled eclair. yumm!

pigging @ UMAMIcatessen.

after being open for months, we finally made it to UMAMIcatessen in downtown.

how pinterest'ing!

i'm not a very active pinterest'er, but i do like it for a couple things. mainly, i pin spaces that i like - ideas for home, yard, kitchen, etc. that i would love to be able to do one day in my own home (if i'm ever lucky enough to own).

are you an omnomnomnivore?

i love this t-shirt design by flickr member fatheed! i'm totally an omnomnomnivore!

dreamworksland : everyday i'm shufflin'.

ah, dreamworks is on quite a high from its amazing weekend box office, both domestic and internationally, grossing $135.9 million worldwide it's opening weekend:

Family animated tentpole Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted landed at the top of the domestic box office with a stand-out $60.4 million opening, besting the $50 million scored by Ridley Scott's sci-fi epic Prometheus.

The DreamWorks Animation and Paramount threequel also ruled overseas -- where competition was fierce -- grossing a stellar $75.5 million from 28 markets for a worldwide opening of $135.9 million.

and this morning comes the announcement that my current project, me and my shadow, has been pushed back, or rather, swapped with mr. peabody and sherman for the spring 2014 slot (as well as peabody voice casting if you're interested).

DreamWorks Animation is so high on Mr. Peabody it is pushing up the release of the film from March 14, 2014 to Nov. 8, 2013. The movie swaps places with the studio's Me & My Shadow, another high-profile project that is a combination of CGI and hand-drawn animation.

not going to lie, i'm rather relieved we're going to have a few extra months to work on the film. writing a new pipeline to integrate a really old pipeline (2d animation) to the current cg pipeline is no easy feat.

goodmeats @ lindy&grundy and sunday dinner.

i'll admit that part of the reason we drove out to the fairfax area to have brunch at tart, was so that i could stop by lindy and grundy afterward. i've been dying to go but never seem to have the opportunity to, and reading their twitter updates just makes my mouth water. so we went! and the goal was just to be inspired by what they had in-shop to make our sunday dinner.

southern goodness @ tart.

we went to tart again for some southern breakfast-y goodness. james got the bottomless mimosa (again..) and i tried the "john daily" - which is sweet tea vodka, lemonade and sprite. super refreshing! perfect for the very warm day it was quickly becoming.

wine&oysters @ l&e.

decided to go get wine and oysters over at L&E oyster bar. they had ten oyster offerings.. we tried all of them, and then did repeats of the rocky pass (alaska) and northern cross (virginia). so good!

awesome kushiyaki @ honda-ya.

kimiko and i went out to have dinner a few weeks ago and she took me to this awesome izakaya in little tokyo i had never been to. i've been craving it since, so i convinced james to go with me the other night. we essentially did all-skewers. it was amazing!

pork belly.

squid legs

more succulents (from the SGV)!

we went back to the san gabriel nursery a couple weeks ago just to look at some plants. they have a great selection of succulents, which i love, as well as quite a few air plants, which i'm just fascinated by.

james got a pretty.

james pre-ordered the new subaru brz a couple months ago, and we went to look at and test drive it at the dealership after work yesterday. after much thinking and discussions, and long story short, he ended up driving it home and is the very happy owner of this bad boy:

oh yea, i got BANGS.

right after leaving my wonderful stylist.. so it doesn't look this nice anymore, and my hair is all straight and non-voluminous now, but i'm kind of digging them (outside of the eye-poking part). though, the major feedback i've gotten is that instead of looking like a fifteen-year-old, i now look about ten. yay, exactly what every girl wants to hear.

also, yes, i am trying to blog more again. the android instant upload of photos i take on my phone and integration with blogger as made it infinitely easier for me to make posts! (instead of uploading to flickr first, then getting the image url for the large images size format, etc etc).

baco mercat and 1642.

i've been itching to go back to baco mercat since our last (and first) trip, and finally on early sunday evening, we decided to just go.

it was a relatively small and light dinner.. but again, i just wanted to order EVERYTHING on the menu. it's insane. we had the hamachi crudo, ricotta stuffed fried squash blossoms, bazole soup, "the original" baco, and banana cream pudding for dessert. it was all so good!

rangers at angel stadium!

i saw yu darvish pitch for japan in the 2009 world baseball classic, so when i heard he finally crossed the pacific and was picked up by the texas rangers, i knew i had to try and go to a game this year. at the very beginning of the season, i made a bit of a gamble and just picked a random game where the rangers were playing the angels in anaheim, and hoped that darvish would be pitching. and it totally paid off!

auntie em's kitchen in eagle rock.

met a coworker from the south last week who swore by the biscuits and gravy at auntie em's kitchen in eagle rock, so of course we had to go try it. we'd been once before to buy cupcakes, but never for brunch.

sanford's got back problems.

about three weeks ago, the stinkpot started acting hesitant to go up and down stairs, or give high fives. after about a week he started yelping in pain occasionally when picked up.. and over a couple of days it got much, much worse to the point where he would be in pain when changing positions at all. everything was causing him pain, though we couldn't find the source of it, and he was shaking in fear all the time, so we took him to the emergency room. they took some xrays and he has what looks like two calcified discs in his spine/neck. and so they prescribed him two weeks of pain killers and six weeks of crate rest. poor thing.