Nine-Ten-Oh Seven

Hi Everyone!

My multimonthly update... Overall, things are excellent. I'm now into my second year of residency, and while the schedule has gotten a bit easier, the work is harder because we are now in charge of the ER and moving the patients though. It was hard in the beginning but it has gotten better and now I feel better about being the senior on shift. Anyway, life otherwise is great. Spending lots of time with Amy, Harsha and Jeff's birthday, got to visit my brother in Portland and friends in Seattle. Lots of good times...

For Harsha's birthday we decided to take a guys only trip to Joshua Tree. It was hot but also starkly beautiful...

Sitting around the campfire we made.. I decided to overlook the kindling harvested from the bushes by the Castellanos brothers. Later, there would be the "kangaroo rat" incident and then we had to put out the fire before turning in.. (hey, you don't want to be irresponsible with fire in a national park!)

Climbing around the rocks... we took a good picture of just the dudes..

Classic Joshua Tree Cover picture...

For Harsha's birthday dinner, we went to Palms Thai. It's famous for the Thai Elvis.. Amy got him to take a picture with all of us. Later we returned home and had a little Bday party with some karaoke. Harsha's birthday cake...

I went up to San Jose in July for a visit...

Dinner at Maruichi with friends. Good noodles, but I still say Halu Ramen's the best.. Afterwards we went to trampoline place where just jump around til you're ill. I got tired pretty fast but it was actually really fun :)

Viet and I at Kristin's going away BBQ in SF. A beautiful sunny day though it was really windy by the bay. Later we had dinner at this great Eritraean (like Ethiopian) restaurant. We also finally met Amiel, Barbara's Fiancee!

Amy came down to visit at the beginning of August...

We went to the Malibu Getty, which was really neat and had lots of cool Greek stuff. I think I went there as a little kid too but it looks all different now. Afterwards we went for a walk along the beach and I caught a tiger shark.. all right, all right, these guys caught a baby one and they let me hold it :)

We also went by the Quik-E-Mart to take a picture with Apu and get some pink sprinkled donuts and Squishees..

Jeff's birthday - we took him out to Cafe Laurent (french) along with Emily and Anne. Harsha is conspicuously absent because of being called in to fix a ruptured globe (or something like that :)

Later that night we surprised Jeff and took him to Gaylord's Indian Restaurant.. lots of laughs all night over the name.. man, these guys are juvenile :) A little ice cream cake -- it says happy Jeff day on it because we couldnt' fit all the letters...


One of my friends from high school got married recently.. and our friend, Lindsey flew out from North Carolina. It was fun to hang out with the old dudes and we even had a chance to have dinner all together a couple days before the big day so it was really nice to catch up on old times.

Did you know there was a really cool stairway at 16th and Moraga in the inner sunset? Me neither, but we went to check it out and it was really cool.. we got a good view of the city from up there... a beautiful two days in SF..

After seeing friends in SF, we left the next morning and started our drive up to Portland..

We stopped at Redwoods National Park and had a subway sandwich for lunch. I am NOT taking a dump.. merely squatting on the log bridge .. we also found some really sweet blackberries and ate them right from the bush. They were everywhere in Oregon/Washington and are apparently quite the weed up there.

One of the stops along the Oregon coast... we just turned randomly at this one place and found a nearly deserted beach. The sand was peppery black and white and there were these cool cliffs and washed up driftwood.. very cool. I also got a shot of some birds overhead just as the sun was going down...
We arrived at our park/campsite with enough time to watch the sunset over the ocean.. very pretty (I mean Amy).. the sunset's nice too!
This is our yurt... we were lucky cause they tend to sell out but one opened up the day we were there. It was actually quite big and comfortable with electricity and small space heater, bed and couch. Really the way to go when "roughing it".On our long drive up the coast, we stopped at the famous Oregon coast sand dunes.. they are these giant hills of sand that shift and move as the winds blow. This is a picture of me running down the dune -- before I fall down and roll down part of the hill and get sand in my mouth, hair, ears and clothes. It was super super fine sand too so it took days to get it all out... still it was worth it!

One of the public fountain/pools in Oregon.. I like how people just went and swam in the water, though the ER part of me was worried about someone just getting swept over an edge..My brother, Joe, and I at the top of the OHSU tram.. we could see his new condo during the ride up. Joe and Michelle just moved into a new place closer to downtown, which is pretty nice. I like that they can take public transport almost everywhere now.Amy and her penguin fetish.. we went to the Portland Zoo to hear a free concert and went to the penguin house. Too bad those guys were sleeping.. we just saw a couple flippers.. but later we did see some tigers out at dusk.. it was sweet!On our drive back down we made a stop at Crater Lake.. it took a while to get there but when we did, it was spectacular. Imagine crystal blue waters contained in an old volcanic crater lined with old pines and cubed rock formations. Ridiculous (in a good way :)Sunset from the rim of the crater. These clouds would form right as they came over the crater edge and we watched as the sun went down. It was pretty amazing. After that we went to one of the campgrounds and slept in the car for the night.

We also had a chance to drive up to Seattle for a couple days where we visited my friends Stephanie and Franklin plus Rebekka and Hugo. We also had some good Japanese food and went to the Science Fiction Museum (pretty cool...)

The Vesuvian Nik... fooling around at Gasworks Park in Seattle, a really cool park that used to be an oil refinery.
This is Steph's cat, Opus.. on this trip we discovered that Amy was allergic to cats and maybe I am a bit too.. they knew just who to home in on though and were hard to resist cause they were so cute...This is Rebekka and Hugo.. don't let the picture fool you, they're quite the pacifists. Hugo had just gotten into paintball recently and they got their own guns... scarily realistic looking ones too.
We also found this playground in Seattle with this crazy spinning device. By shifting your weight you could get it to turn round and round and make you really dizzy.. it was way cool! We decided we're going to get one for our house some day :)

Amy then came down to LA again (we were lucky this month to get to see each other so often) to run the Disney 1/2 Marathon...
What's Disneyland with out a few mouse ears? This is Sabrina's house testing out the Mickey hat...

We woke up at 4am to get to the race.. man, that was early.. and people pay to do this kind of thing! This is intense Amy while running ... she's so cute when she's exhausted and sweaty :) Amy got a time of 2:16 (without even that much training).. she did great! It was a hundred degrees out.. I helped Amy cool down after the race.. hey, gotta avoid hyperthermia! Trust me I'm a doctor :)The victorious and their medals!
I'll finish off with an image from Sprinkles, the famous cupcake place on Rodeo Drive. Their Red Velvet is quite good, an occasional luxury to be indulged :) Hope everyone is well, take care! Drop me a line if you get a chance!