Where to begin?

I'm going to go pretty quickly through about 2 months of updates. Sorry I can't write in my usual flourish, there's just too much time to cover...

Break was fun, spent about 4 weeks in California, mostly hanging out with my old high school friends. Some of them I haven't seen in more than a year's time, like Dana. Thankfully they haven't changed much, except perhaps more mellow and less jittery and ADHD as I remember them from our high school years. I was always the quiet, reserved one, but now I'm probably just as energetic as they are. Now we just like to sit around Dana's fireplace on at his house on Ravensbury like a group of old geezers and just talk about anything.

Got my car (the old purple Volvo) broken into while I was visiting Quincy at Berkeley one day, and his laptop was stolen from it. But he got it back about a week later when someone claimed they had it later, when they traded it for their old laptop. Daniel, Quincy, and I originally thought an Asian guy had broken in the car, because the window was broken and there was a can of tea inside among the broken glass. Then Quincy confirmed the tea can was actually his. Haha... and to think we actually thought an ASIAN had broken into my car... lolz

Ate a ton of good food over break... just thinking about it makes me resent the Sid servery food even more... Crab, dim sum, even caviar and Cristal champagne (both from Costco haha) on Christmas day. What a life.

Got a lot of cool gifts on Christmas too. Besides lots of money (Which I am quickly using up these days... more on that later), I got some nice clothes, my favorite pecan pralines from my grandparents in Texas, and a nice watch (a Seiko "Kinetic", which doesn't require batteries and just powers itself by using my motion to turn an induction generator inside) from my parents, who said that I should be wearing a real watch now that I'm working for a bank :) Not to say I don't sometimes miss those dorky Casio digitals for less than $20 I used to always get, back in my "engineering days".

A friend from Singapore, Tyler Tan, also visited over break. He stayed in San Francisco and came down to Palo Alto to visit once. Always good to see an old foreign friend from my days abroad.

Also met up with Michelle Jin, a friend from 5th floor Sid back at Rice who also lives in the Bay Area. She's an incredibly nice person, as in I have never seen her angry... ever... and I don't know when I ever will. How she does it I don't know, but we seem to get along well.

Went skiing with Natalee and Quincy, too. We actually took a bus up to Tahoe, and skied at Squaw just for the day. Pretty convenient set-up actually. Snow wasn't very good though, still icy.

Now I'm back at Rice doing my usual... but for the last semester. And it looks like I will be going abroad once more before I graduate... YES!!! This time it's a 10-day tour of Vietnam and Taiwan with the Rice INNOVATE program, right after spring break. I'm doing it with about 6 other Rice students. Finally, another chance for a globe-trotting adventure, my favorite, even if it is a quick one. I haven't been to either Vietnam or Taiwan before, so it should be exciting.

Oh and Subhash is back from his NS in Singapore, and he's living in our suite. It's great having him back; he even cut my hair for me today, military style with just some shears haha. Jay and I are helping him get back into the Elec routine... he seems to be handling it fine.

As far as coursework goes, the majority of my classes are now Econ. All part of the Financial Computation and Modeling minor degree that I'm trying to get. These classes, I must honestly say, are not terribly interesting. So we'll see... I was hoping for an awesome end to my 8 semesters of Rice. Will have to fix this...

Oh and last weekend we hosted an ELEC crawl. That was the first real party with alcohol I ever had to host, and I must say it went pretty well considering, besides running out of beer quickly.

I'm sure a lot more could pop into my head that I need to explain, but I need to get some other work done now. Just needed to note this all down before I forgot.

Oh and these are the latest questions I've been thinking about to myself: Would I give up the rest of my life to see what the world is like 500 years in the future? And would I sell my body (either actual body parts or just servitude/slavery of some type) for knowledge? Just ordinary questions to ponder...

Signing out.