HELL YEAH BABY!  First time surfing baby!  The coops and I hit up Santa Cruz for some lessons and some gooooo wave surfing baby.  Quite the friggin’ awesome.  Rode 2 pretty big waves, with the last one being insanely long!  Felt like nothing before, except maybe owning an insanely steep snowboarding hill haha.

Daaaamn that was awesome.

1) I WANT AN HTC TOUCH HD.  OR AN XPERIA X1.  OR A T-MO G1.  OR A BLACKBERRY STORM.

2) New Macbook Pro leaks?  Dock on the TRACKPAD!  Pretty cool, kinda unsure of how its gonna actually play out.

3) Sweeeeeeeeeet (Look underneath).  The stuff they have in here is actually really useful for helping you to decide. Why doesn’t Canada have something like this? Then again, we don’t have Arnold either – for better or worse lol.
 

4) HEROES was FRICKIN’ INTENSE.

So… many of you know that I come from quite a small church in Markham, ON.  In all honesty, we’re quite lax and dare I say, not-at-all inspired/motivated people.  So two Sundays ago, my parents and I attended this baptist church called, North Valley Baptist Church.  We parked on the street and the FIRST thing I saw: a big African-American man fully-suited (a REALLY nice suit to boot) with tie and everything.  So I thought, whoa, must be chairperson or something.  As we near the entrance of the church, my parents and I, were fully shocked.  Groups of every sort of people – kids, teens, adults, seniors, of all ethincities – fully suited up and dressed as formal as you can be.  So naturally, my parents and I felt entirely out of place – we stuttered and decided to go in anyway.

We entered the sanctuary and we were totally in AWE (and VERY intimidated – picture below).  We found a seat amongst a thousand people and opened a really cool bulletin (on par with Creekside quality).  The chairperson started to lead through the service.  Each session was a jaw-dropping experience.  Let me list some of the ‘features’ of this traditional baptist church:

• MASSIVE choir
• 4 bright-shining, eye-hurting pearl white grand pianos. (2 full-sized, 2 smaller)
• 4 pianists (and a rotation with another 2 depending on the songs the choirs sang)
• Miniature orchestra, complete with a harp
• Four-man acapella group (with an ! asian!)
• Loudest sounding singspiration ever, complete with beautiful solos, orchestral pieces etc.
• One of the most insane hardcore sermons I’ve ever seen (imagine P. Andrew sermons x 10)
• Baptisms every week (2 people during the Sunday I went)
• Alter calls every week (5-ish people accepting Christ the Sunday I went)
• Services for hispanic, filipino, and soon, an indian service)
• Mornign, afternoon, evening and Wednesday services
• Lower deck, fully-packed with people
• Upper deck, half-packed with people

I must say, Hollywood is definitely something. Keep in mind, this was a normal business day. Like seriously, back in Toronto, if you see a car shop on the street, you imagine its full of ricers or old broken-down family cars. In LA? You see this:

Aston Martin V12 Vanquish – Check
Bentleys – Double Check
Ferraris – Double Check
Lamborghini – Check
Porsches – Double Check
BMWs – 6-Series Check
Benzes – A Buncha’ Checks!

And you know, you start cruising down the streets and these things randomly pop up (that’s an angel on the hood of the right car btw – i.e. Rolls Royce):

Jag-fest! Of course, there’s much more (visit my Facebook album – BRABUS S-series!), but you’ll probably get desensitized by the end.

Finally, can’t leave Hollywood without a picture of it!

Oh yeah, and I own Chuck Norris. Good Game Chuckie.

Our road to Los Angeles looked like this:

An hour later, we ran into this:

And… yeah. Oh! Here’s something a little different:

So to keep things interesting, I’ll post another Scion.

August 27th, 2008.

As a visit to San Francisco, the ‘rents and I decided that some tours would be nice. Unfortunately, the traffic there made us miss out on some rather good opportunities, so instead, we hit up an advertized lunch cruise. This cruise sported a very personalized service (since there were only 6 groups of 2/3), some decent food, and a good ol’ history lesson on Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, and the islands surrounding San Fran. Afterwards, we took some advice to go travel up a “couple” blocks to visit Chinatown and some other parts of downtown San Fran. The catch was (and we found this out while we were travelling), “couple” meant a dozen, and the streets looked like THIS.

After our shoes were douzed with fire extinguishing chairs, we decided to DRIVE around. So we visited a couple other tourist attractions including Pier 39! I was told Bern was there on the same day haha. We visited the Aquarium at the Bay and shot pictures like THIS.

We also hit up a romantic restaurant overlooking the bay (it feels different when you’re with your parents) called Neptune’s Palace. I must say this: BEST CLAM CHOWDER EVER. Just be ready to play 52-pick-up with your wallet – only there’s no pick-up.

A couple souvenir shops and attractions later, we extinguished some feet fires and headed home.

Oh yeah, and a funky car and an AWESOME car

August 25th, 2008.

Early in the morning before the sun was out, the parents and I began our quest for the silicon.  We weren’t sure what silicon was composed of (you’d THINK it was a pure element), but regardless, our journey started at 4 a.m.  A quick mindless trip to the airport and I prepared myself for the first challenge that Mr. Silicon gave me: Customs.  Yes, I forgot about the I-94 form and headed straight to the customs officer only to be sent back.  It was alright though – it just involved running back all the way to the airline peeps to grab the form.  I filled it out, gave a quick answer to the customs officer and off we went!

As we hit Detroit to transfer, I learned my first important lesson: medium-sized drinks are to Americans (no offense my Red and Blue friends), what the frickin’ Pacific Ocean is to Canadians.  Of course, I appended that lesson with: Order Small Drinks.

We arrived at the San Francisco Airport after a 3 hour flight, even though it seemed like 6 hours (Full Disclosure: it WAS 6 hours including the time zone change), picked up our van and headed out to San Jose.  We arrived at our crappy little inn and promptly took a nap.  We visited the apartment and we were greeted with THIS (main building, not mine lol).

And THIS (my actual place).

Yeah, I’m paying a lot to be in such a nice place.  But hey, it was tough finding a good place that was close to work.

Btw: That top picture is for you Jamie.  Haha semiconductors for teh win.