I had another study date with my classmate today for almost 5 hours – thank goodness for that. It’s really hard to get back into studying after having such a fun break from school. When I got home, I pretty much just caught up with Legend of Korra, lol. I gave it a chance because everyone keeps saying it’s a great show, and I’m glad I did.

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! I feel really thankful and I hope to bring these thoughts with me into the new year. January and beyond is supposed to be a really tough time for me, but hopefully I’ll be as ready as I can be!

This year for Black Friday, I didn’t end up doing any shopping. I might see if I like anything for Cyber Monday, but other than that I won’t be shopping. I find it sad that a lot of stores don’t really have much of a sale for Black Friday anymore. They’re pretty much deals you can find any time during the year. It’s more like a marketing strategy just get people to think they’re getting a Black Friday deal, when they’re really not. Anyway, instead, I ended up doing a video chat with a good friend of mine, Megan, who has been living in Japan and I haven’t really been able to talk to her in a long time. Later that night, I did a gaming session of Terraria with Mart and Ricky.

Thanksgiving Day: This year, my mom and I cooked traditional Thanksgiving food again. Normally I prepare ingredients and most of the dishes the night before, but this entire week I’ve been having a ton of fun & keeping myself busy every day of the week so I was dead tired and went to bed instead. I ended up waking up early on Thanksgiving day to do the cooking. Since I woke up early to cook, my mom was there to help me with a lot of it. She’s really fast at dicing and chopping ingredients, and doing the dishes, so that cut the time down by a lot. I made mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, roasted caramelized butternut squash, gravy, and stuffing, while my mom prepared the turkey. It was a lot more fun cooking this year since my mom and I did the cooking together!

I was expecting my cousin and their family to join us, but unfortunately they were all sick, so my mom packed some of our food to drop off at their house instead. My mom wanted to go to Express at the mall after dinner to get their 50% off sale, but it turns out that even though Express stores are supposed to open at 6pm on Thanksgiving day, our mall wasn’t open until midnight, so even though we were able to get into Macy’s, the connecting entrance to go into the mall (where Express was) was closed off. We ended up just going home. It’s ok, since didn’t mind the extra walking with my mom after dinner.

My brother also left for Vietnam in the evening as well, so it was nice having a family meal together before he left. He’ll be back in two weeks.

Overall, my Thanksgiving break was a lot of fun and really relaxing since we got a full week off from school! I haven’t had a real break since the quarter started.

Last Saturday: Ricky, Mart, Julie, and I checked out the new Jollibee that just opened up in our area for dinner. I love Filipino food, so that was exciting. Later that night, we went clubbing! We played it safe and took an Uber ride to the club, so we were all able to drink with no worries. It was a ton of fun!

I love EDM, and the DJ frequents Marquee in Vegas, apparently, so I loved the music. We got to meet a lot of strangers who were really friendly and funny. The most memorable person was this gal who was in her late thirties. She was going through a bad divorce apparently, and was there to have fun. She was super sweet – she even bought Julie and me drinks. I actually have her phone number haha. Mart also randomly ran into a friend he met when he first moved to America over a decade ago – crazy coincidence! There was this one guy going around asking for kisses since he wanted 24 kisses for his 24th birthday – too funny. We ended up meeting a lot of fun people, which was great. Towards the end of the night, the club dropped confetti and glow sticks!

Afterwards we weren’t ready for the fun to stop, so we took our drunk selves to Denny’s haha, which totally hit the spot. I had country fried steak w/ homefries. Yums. Julie and Mart pretty much K.O.’ed in my room when we got back to my house. I was the only one who walked Ricky out before he left for home, lol.

Last Sunday: I spent some time with Julie and Mart in the morning since they slept over at my place. Later that evening, I hung out with my friend Helen. A lot of dramatic things went down regarding her personal life (she was in tears when I opened my door to greet her…), but we ended up having a really good time catching up with each other and enjoying each other’s company. We kept it local, and tried this Mexican place really close to my house that I never tried before, and then went to an ice cream parlor. I even got to practice an optometry technique on her eyes for school back at my house haha. It was great seeing her before she moved out of town the next day.

Last Monday: On Monday, Mart and I were supposed to go on a train trip and go exploring. It failed miserably and I was super sad about that. At the very least, he tried to make it up to me and we went out to eat for both lunch and dinner! For lunch we had a Japanese fast food joint. At my request, we went hiking afterwards. We never found the hiking trail I wanted to go to, but ended up at a different one by accident instead. The scenery was pretty much all dry and dead, but the peacefulness and isolation of the location was very nice. For dinner, we went to a very fancy sushi restaurant. We had “omakase,” which is chef’s choice of nigiri (sushi). It was really expensive, but Mart didn’t want to tell me how much it cost him lol. I will say the sushi was so good we almost had tears in our eyes haha. Every bite was eaten in silence with internal reflection on how it tasted. There was no soy sauce or wasabi served. The sushi chef added a little bit of wasabi, soy sauce or salt or citrus to each piece himself, so we could enjoy the flavor of the fish properly. When we went home that night, we ended up watching the Jiro Dreams of Sushi movie LOL. It is a great movie for sushi enthusiasts.

Last Tuesday: On Tuesday, I actually went to work. I normally only work on Saturdays since I have grad school all week, but since I had the week off and saw an opening on the schedule, I worked about 5 hours. It was great seeing my coworkers again – I normally only see a few coworkers who only work on Saturdays with me. I miss working with them. Laster that evening, I had dinner with Mart and Steven at a Japanese curry house. It was so good!!! I had chicken katsu with curry, salad, fried rice wrapped in egg, and a potato croquette. So good. We had a great time catching up with our good friend Steven. We even went out for dessert afterwards and spent even more time just chatting in his car when the dessert place closed. We ended up not getting home until past midnight so we were pretty beat, but it was a great talk.

Last Wednesday: At noon, I met up with my classmate, also named Helen, who lives somewhat near me. We hit the books together and studied at Starbucks for a few hours. It was a very welcome study date because neither of us cracked open any of our study materials over the Thanksgiving break. After our study date, I met up with my old friend Madonna. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year, so it was a great feeling to see her again. We were never too close in high school, but we were in choir together and were friends. After so many years, we still end up on each other’s minds, so now and then we reach other to one another to hang out and catch up. She’s one of those good friends you could always pick up right where you left off. We had a tasty dinner (sushi burritos!!!), went to karaoke (in a private booth) for almost 3 hours, and talked for hours at a restaurant afterwards. We were really shy at the karaoke place at first, but we warmed up quickly and had such a good time.

I had a pretty amazing Thanksgiving break. It was a really welcome break from school. I’m really glad I planned out my break weeks in advance so that I could spend time with all of the people I consider very special and dear to me. I’m not ready for school to start again…but I can definitely say I had a good break. As you can see, I also ate a TON of food. I’m going to need to go on a diet when I go back to school this Monday haha.