Tom and I had a little date night tonight. Our planned destinations were Vietnamese Soy Cafe and Intelligentsia but plans changed a bit.

Soy Cafe is a little hard to spot. I forgot that I had seen it before until I saw it again. Turns out it is right next to Hyperion Tavern, a bar that I love to go to sometimes for Rock Band Night (Wednesdays 10pm-2am), which is also very difficult to find the first time because it has no signs.

Anywho, Soy Cafe was closed for a while but just re-opened about three weeks ago. This was my first time there, but I’ve been trying to eat here ever since Jesse mentioned it like a year ago. I wanted some kind of noodle dish like I saw in pictures on Yelp but right now their menu is limited to spring rolls, banh mi (Viet baguette sandwiches) and drinks but Huy, the guy running the one-man show tonight, told us that he was going to add noodles back onto the menu soon (chicken and a vegan option).

The restaurant is a lot smaller than I expected. The only seating is at the counter and I think the place probably seats around eight people at most. The decor is pretty cool though, very clean and decorated with sort of a modern coffee and tea theme. When you sit down, it feels like you’re sitting in someone’s kitchen, and from where I was sitting, I could see some of where Huy did his thang.

We ordered spring rolls which were carefully constructed and wrapped very tightly. Sometimes when I eat spring rolls, stuff tends to fall out while I’m eating and it gets all over my hands but these were awesome and the sauce was really good and not all gooey or overly sweet. I had a banh mi with jambon, Viet ham, pate and a special kind of mayo and all the other little things that go into banh mi and Tom had a vegan (they always have a vegan option) banh mi that had “meat” that was sort of like pork skin with a sauce that tasted kind of like hoisin sauce. They were so good and flavorful! Very well crafted as well. You could tell from the way the sandwich looked (and from seeing him put it together in the back kitchen area) that the sandwich wasn’t just a bunch of stuff thrown together, and all the veggies were very fresh. The baguette, which Huy says is what makes the sandwich, was not too hard and didn’t fall apart.

We stayed a while longer and talked to Huy. He drives like two hours just to get to the restaurant! So craze. He’s a really friendly and talkative guy who lives a very interesting life as a musician/singer and restaurateur (I think he co-owns the place with friends but not sure).

We wanted to go for a little coffee and dessert afterward at Intelligentsia but when we walked up to it at the late hour of 8:45 p.m., it was closed. I have heard so many good things about this place and Tom loves it so I was pretty disappointed. We settled instead for Moroccan/Algerian/something like that Casbah Cafe. We got some kind of little lemony chocolate cake thing that came with a little thing of cream. It was really, really tasty. Not too rich or too sweet. Unfortunately, the cuppa mocha we got blew. There wasn’t much of a coffee flavor in it, so that was a little deceiving. The place was a little overdecorated and tried too hard and Tom thought even the people were trying a bit too hard to converse with each other. It looked kind of cool but may have been a little much. Our favorite part about the place, though, was the page boy who served us coffee. He was friendly.

I am posting from my phone with the Blackberry WordPress app! Actually, I’ve already written a few posts using the app. It’s pretty cool because I can type while I’m offline and, say, waiting somewhere to pick my pink man up, save the scribble-age, and then upload it when I get on wifi. I do currently have a 30-day trial of a data plan but I dunno if it’s a good idea for me to keep it because I am poor and have enough distractions in my life. Anyway, aside from the broken English in the instructions and stuff this app is awesome and works on wifi as well as data and offline if you want to save your posts for later. It also has pretty much all the posting features except maybe the tweeting function but I’m sure they’ll fix that later. I don’t use it anyway.

By the way, blogging with your thumbs has proven to be quite a strain x_x!

Happy Thanksgiving yo! I’m very thankful for everyone in my life and all the great experiences I’ve had this past year. What I am not thankful for is the fact that KOST 103.5 plays holiday music before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving seems to get overlooked and all people care about is holiday shopping. Lame. Couldn’t they wait till the day after Thanksgiving while all the people are shopping and shoving each other? It might cheer them up a little and make them less hostile. That’s just my theory.

This is the best album cover. Ever.

I saw it at Amoeba and wanted to take a picture and tweet it but then decided that finding a better one online was worth the wait. I couldn’t have found a better blog post to describe it.

I am a couple months late on this bit of news. Apparently, UCLA’s Undie Run has been canceled, though I am sure this will not stop drunken college kids from running around in their underwear and (my favorite part of the run to see) tripping over road bump/cement block things under the tunnel. I feel bad for the people it happens to because there’s not much clothing shielding you from major scrape-age, but really, that area is fully lit and if you see a bunch of other people avoiding these areas, it only makes sense that you probably should too. This isn’t one of those incidents where you should stray from the crowd and try to break free and be your own half naked person. Good luck to those of you who shall be attempting it next month.

As a follow-up to my previous wondering of how people call/text phone numbers that are spelled out on a typical alphanumeric keypad (i.e., awesome=2934663) on new phones that have a QWERTY keypad, I learned a new trick a couple weeks ago that totally answered my question! Well, for my phone, at least. I might be the last person to know this, but on Blackberries, when you are typing out a number that has a word in it like 1-800-COLLECT (I don’t think you would ever be dialing this from your cellphone. I also don’t think this service is around anymore but I don’t care enough to find out. BTW, Carrot Top just popped into my head.), you type in the number part like normal and then you can hold down either the ALT key or the capitalizing key and type the letters you need (C-O-L-L-E-C-T). When you hit call, your supersmart phone will convert those letters into the numbers they are supposed to be. This totally blew my mind. And I hope someone else out there just learned something new because I don’t really want to be the last person to know this bit of info.

By the way, got my Curve on Halloween! AND I LOVE IT :] And I think Ugly Betty and I have the same color Curve. Teehee.

Mom: Hey, you really should bring a couple lemons back with you to your apartment.
Me: Okay.
Mom: Yeah, lemons are really good for you. Make lemon tea with ginger and honey…
Me: Okay.
Mom: …It’ll help you lose weight so you’re not so fat.
Me: Sigh.

She finds a way to work that into the conversation no matter what and with anyone who will listen.

I just put toothpaste on a stubborn rust stain in our bathtub and it totally came out! I also read on Lifehacker that it (baking soda toothpaste) works on Sharpie marks on your walls. Oh, the wonders of toothpaste!

My love for ze public library has been renewed today. But let me start from the beginning and tell you why I needed to go to the library.

My friends back home and I have formed a book club called the Twenty Somethings and Unemployed (TS&UE) Book Club. We meet once a month to discuss a book and just to catch up and such. We successfully completed our first assignment which was the Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom earlier this month. I had already read it but I love to re-read books I enjoy and I always catch things I either forgot or did not get the first time anyway. Our exercise after reading the book was to come up with a list of five people we would like to meet in heaven. Most of us had some trouble thinking of people, but basically everyone agreed that they would want to meet their soulmate and/or a past lover up there. I find that meeting your soulmate is only ideal since your soul is up there meeting these five people. Why wouldn’t your soulmate be waiting for you? Anyway, this is a great book. It totally pulls on the heart strings and never ceases to make me bawl like a baby even though I know what’s going to happen.

So onto the library part… My friendlies from home had checked out the Five People You Meet in Heaven from the local library and that made me remember that the library is a wonderful place. Luckily I had my own copy of the book (which I lent to a friend over a year ago who refused to give it back so I had to storm over to said friend’s house and take it by force. To my dismay, it was covered in stains and bent all over the place. I cried a little.) but I kept a mental note that I should visit a library for the next book.

It has been so long since I read for fun that I forgot all about libraries that aren’t attached to a school. I mean, I have read some books for fun since being out of school but they were books I already owned for classes because I always fell behind and didn’t get to finish them during school. Thus, I read the interesting ones afterward to make myself feel slightly more accomplished.

I wanted to go to the library sooner but I had to find my library card at home, which, I found out this past weekend, is lost. I made time to go today so I could check out our next book (Chocolat by Joanne Harris) but first, I needed a card. Since my card was lost and I did not want to pay the $3.00 fine for lost cards (Yes, I am that stingy!), I signed up for a new one. I was scared they would find out I was already a cardholder because of the address on my license so I found a way around it and hoped they would not suspect a thing. It turns out, the public library, where they lend out books, DVDs and CDs for FREE and allow you FREE internet access is not that big on background checks. They took my pay stub with my apartment address and student ID with no questions asked. $3.00 charge averted. The new cards are quite snazzy, by the way. They even give you a keytag! Though I would still prefer the old green one with the word “Library” going across the front.

So long has it been since I really hung out in a library where the people around me weren’t frustrated students studying for tests and the books surrounding me weren’t research books that I had some trouble figuring out how to find my book. Maybe the library’s high techness is far beyond me…or MAYBE they have taken it too far. The last time I looked up a book at a public library, they were still using those computers with green and black screens (Don’t be alarmed, they had other computers for intrawebz that had more than two colors). This method worked fine! I tried to use the computers they have now to find my book but it came back without call numbers or anything. Maybe I am too old school.. It didn’t even give me the result for the book I wanted, so I had to go the old fashioned way and just look for it myself by genre and then last name. It took me three tries to find it because the names weren’t alphabetized right. Sigh.

Of course, when I go to a library I can’t just go and get one book (if this is a school library it’s because I have no choice but to leave with several). I came back with two others that were on that shelf near the registers that go along with some kind of theme of the month or something. One was Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts (because Martha Stewart can make something useful and artful out of a pile of poo if she had too) and the other was No Impact Man by Colin Beavan (because I have been reading all this press stuff about his movie and it never came up that he also wrote a book). I am so excited to read them! Snort.

So if this economy has got you down and you are a big fan of the written word… you have probably already been going to the library and think I am the last person on earth to figure this whole “free books” thing out. But seriously, stop buying books and filling up space in your house! Unless you constantly need to refer to these books then go buy them pre-loved! Otherwise, go to your local library. They even have wifi there nowadays so go ahead and make it an event!

Yes, I am fully aware that my post has made going to the library just a little bit less cool.

So I have a Blackberry Pearl but it has failed on me and I am now trading it in for the older generation Curve which came out at the same time as my Pearl. I love all the features that the Pearl had to offer and having wifi! But alas, something was wrong with the phone’s mic and it could not do what it was conceived to do, which is to make phone calls. Well, I was able to make them but not calls in which the other party could hear me at all. It was very frustrating and involved some shouting and a little crying in my heart. I looked it up on the Crackberry forums, a very good resource for Blackberry users and those in the market for a Blackberry, and apparently the mic being shoddy is not an uncommon occurrence, but it is not like it happens to every other person who gets one either. I figured something would go wrong with the phone I received because nothing I ever get is completely technologically sound. Let us just say I have a little thing called a curse when it comes to electronics. I am especially sad to let go because I already started adding apps. Wah.

So, instead of risking another bad microphone, I am going to try the Curve, also because I went to the Sprint store with my friend last week and held the Curve and the Pearl in my hands and the Curve just felt so nice. It’s like a size that is harder for you to drop, if that makes sense. I always feel like the Pearl is going to slip out of my hands and plunge to its death/injury.

The Suretype keys of the Pearl take some getting used to but it is actually not that hard once you get the hang of it. The QWERTY keyboard on the Curve is pretty cool because the keys are separate and not cramped together, making it easier to not press the wrong key, but overall this didn’t make a big difference when I was deciding between them because I don’t imagine it being much easier to type on a QWERTY keyboard with my thumbs when I normally type with all my fingers. What I keep wondering, though, with all these new phones, is how you are supposed to dial those numbers that make out a word like 1-800-GOOG-411 or when you need to text Google or ChaCha. I suppose you just have to do it by memory.

Well, if you are in the market for a Blackberry but you want something a little smaller that does all the same things as the bigger guys, I think this phone would be a good idea.

Anywho, goodbye dear Pearl. You are being shipped off to Hong Kong today. Don’t think I didn’t care for you during the week that you were in my hands. I hope they repair you and send you off to another who will give you a good home. I am sorry you were involved in my co-workers’ teasing because I chose not to buy you a data plan.