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Amy's Brain is 47% Female, 53% Male
Amy's brain is a healthy mix of male and female
You are both sensitive and savvy.
Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed.
But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve.

What Gender Is Your Brain?





Feel free to email me your comments, suggestions, and/or random thoughts.





 

July 2009
 

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Happy Friday!!  This is where Toby parks himself each morning when I leave for work.  So This is the image I'll leave you with as we come to the end of July.  :-)  Next week, we will hopefully find out the sex of our baby!  Have a wonderful weekend!


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The birds have the right idea, it was a great day to hit the beach.  We wanted to bring Toby out since it was such a nice day.  So we took him to Esplanade in Redondo Beach since he's not allowed on the sand anyway.  Esplanade is a nice walkway with an incredible beach view and the path leads us to a little grassy park area where a few local dogs hang out.  It's also only a few minutes from our home so I just brought Toby a little water and we're off.

It was a nice ~78 degrees at the beach with some scatter clouds to keep the sun epxosure to a managible amount.   Toby was stylish in his red bandana.  He met a few other hot dogs out strolling. 

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!



Toby, acting all cool and aloof, hanging on a bench.
Toby's facing the wrong way as usual!


The local dogs enjoying a little park play.
Toby hanging out with another Golden Retriever.


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Is this not one of the cutest things you've ever seen??!  This little pom-pom beanie is from the folks at Beanie Designs.  Go ahead, take a look, I dare you.  They've got so many adorable beanies for babies and newborns that you just wish you can become a baby and wear them all.  The cool part is that all their beanies come in all sizes from newborns to two-year olds. 

They've got beanies with ears, pom-poms, ear flaps, even a cupcake beanie, you name it!  They even make them in fruits and vegetables!  It's insane the creativity at this place.  But dispite all of the styles, this blue pom-pom is still my favorite.  The best part of this one is that it's made with organic cotton for extra softness and comfort.  Though this is labeled for baby boys, I think it'll work for a boy or a girl.  I love the blue for either sex. 

Hm...isn't Christmas coming up soon???!!!! This beanie is definitely going onto my Christmas list. :-)


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This is a rose from our front yard.  Besides our existing rose plants, we've been planting new ones.  The weather has been very warm lately, it got up to 80 degrees today in our area.  The roses love the warm weather and have started to blossom like crazy. 

For months, I've been searching for rose plants at places like Home Depot, Lowes, and Orchard.  But surprisingly, I have not been able to find any roses!  No one carries roses in pots.  I just assumed that everyone carries roses in their nursery.  But I was wrong, the places I visited all carried the seasonal flowers but no roses. 

But in the end, we did find potted roses to plant.  We found them at Trader Joes!  They seem to have a wonderful selection of small rose plants in a variety of colors.  Plus, they are very afforadable.  I picked up some orange and yellow roses. 

Once we bring them home, I plant them into the ground in our front yard.  Since the weather has been nice a warm, they've thrived and grew new flower buds in just days after planting.  I'm very pleased with the new colors they've added to our front yard.  And in about two weeks, our original little rose plant has grown huge, even the new leaves are much bigger than the original leaves!

Happy Summer and don't forget to give your pets plenty of water and bring them into the house if it's too hot in the afternoon.



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Being pregnant means eating healthy.  I've always been a food lover so I am a pretty well-rounded eater.  I love meats, vegetables, and fruits.  But these days I'm also careful about getting enough nutrition in the food that I love to eat.  It's easy to go to a grocery store and read the labels on packaged foods to get all the nutritional information about that food.  But what happens when you eat fresh foods like fruits and vegetables that don't come with labels? 

I discovered this cool site called Nutritional Data.  This site literally contains information about every piece of edible food you can imagine.  It gives you the nutritional information in a food label, just like those you see in the back of packaged foods.  Just type in the name of the food you're interested (such as apples) and they'll give you a variety of different forms of your food.  The choices may be cooked, raw, canned, dried, with skin, without skin, etc.  You can then select the exact form of your food to get the correct nutritional facts for that particular food. 

This is a sample label of fresh plums.  Plums are one of my favorite fruits in the world.  Since they are currently in season I've eating them like crazy.  So with the label, I know exactly what I'm eating.  I know I can't over-eat plums because they have pretty high Vitamin A content and too much Vitamin A is not good for the baby. 

I think I'll continue to use this website even after the baby's born.  I think the information will also help people who wants to loose a few pounds, which I'm sure I'll need to do after the baby is born.  And unlike some nutritional sites, they do have ethnic foods like chow mein!! :-)


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We're having a baby!!  Yups, I'm 15 weeks pregnant and our baby will be due on January 7, 2010.  We can't be more excited.

I am one of those lucky ones who didn't get morning sickness at all.  The only thing that made me a little nauseous were the prenatal vitamines.  But I take them before bed so all is well. 
We found out about the pregnancy in early May.  I had my first ultrasound at 8 weeks.  The first ultrasound was quite astounding because I was able to see a huge heart beating within this little peanut that was our baby!  I had read that once a heartbeat is detected that the risk of miscarriage drops dramatically.  So seeing the heart beating strongly at 8 weeks was quite reassuring. 

Due to my age, I was offered very comprehensive screening tests for chromosome birth defects.  We opted to wait on the decision to do an amniocentesis until we got results of the screening tests since the screening testing will be completed before I can do the amniocentesis (performed at 15-18 weeks) anyway.  The screening test we opted to do is the Integrated Prenatal Screenig.  We did end up waiting a little longer to announce our pregnancy because we wanted to wait for the results of the first trimester screening.   Thankfully, all the results thus far are very good.  

As part of our first trimester screening, we were given a high-resolution ultrasound and 3-D imaging.  This is a 3-D image of our baby at 14 weeks.  Can you see the baby's face with a little nose and mouth?  The baby has its right hand up to its mouth, already sucking on its fingers.  :-)  Since the baby's eyes are still fused shut, you can't see the eyes.  But you can also make out the baby's feet and toes.  I really think even at this point, the baby looks like Mr. BAW, especially the big toes! :-)  We did tell Toby that he's going to be a big brother.  He seems to be taking things in stride.


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Last week we took advantage of our 4th of July day off to take the much-tauted Warner Brothers' Studios Tour in Burbank.  Most people we spoke to who've been on the tour liked it much more than the touristy Universal Studios Tour.  But the WB Tour is quite expensive at $45 per ticket for a two-hour tour.  But since Mr. BAW is a huge fan of various WB productions including Looney Tunes, Batman, and TV shows such as Chuck we had to take the tour once. 

Unfortunately, it was Summer hiatus for filming television shows, the entire WB lot was practically empty except for the tour buses driving around the sets.  But even if they were filming, our friends told us that we wouldn't be able to get close enough to see anything.  Plus, there were only a few places during the tour we were allowed to take pictures.

Most of the locations we were taken to were outdoor sets.  We visited a typical New York City street where they filmed outdoor scene of Friends and Spiderman.  The street would sometimes double as Chicago where they filmed ER.  We saw a typical mid-Western residential neighborhood where various sitcoms such as Growing Pains were shot.  The only sound stages we got to go into were the sets of Chuck and Two and a Half Men.  Mr. BAW LOVES Chuck so to be able to walk into the backroom of the Buy More was the highlight of the tour for him.  He was also excited when we got to poke our heads into Chuck's living room and bedroom.  The tour ended with a visit to the small WB museum where we saw the real Batman outfit.


All-in-all, if you love movies and TV and you've never been on to a set, then you might enjoy various parts of this tour.  But for me, growing up in LA, I've had many movie/TV filming encounters.  They film on the USC and UCLA campuses all the time.  My friend El Dawg is a writer for various TV shows and have taken me into the Sony Studios and given me an excellent personal tour.  So my opinion is that the WB Studios Tour is over-priced for what you get.  I think out-of-town folks will actually enjoy the Universal Studios Tour more.



A typical NY street.  Everything you see is fake!
The "Seaver House" from Growing Pains.


The props rental warehouse.
The old Friend's set, now just on display.


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After 10 months, we finally have our wedding album.  We didn't go with the traditional wedding album with thick pages and heavy covers.  Instead I got all of the pictures our photographers took at our wedding and composed my own wedding book using an online publisher Blurb.com.  I selected their largest landscape format and chose a hard cover with a dust jacket.  I didn't want just an album of our formal portraits, as many official wedding albums do.  I wanted to document every detail of our relationship including our engagement photos.  The entire book came out to over 200 pages!  I also included text of our engagement, details of our reception such as food and vendors, and some of the goofy moments of our day.   The entire book was a labor of love.  It did take me a good portion of the past 10 months to work out all of the page layouts, selecting pictures, and editing countless times to finally be happy with the last version. 

The Blurb experience was decent, the editing software is easy to use.  There was a glitch with the delivery of the book (they delivered us the wrong book) but they quickly corrected the problem and was very apologetic of the mistake.  The book is very professional looking and I would recommend using their publishing service.  However, I do recommend going with the glossy pages as opposed to the matte pages.  Our wedding book came out to be ~$150, quite reasonable for a wedding book.









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I am proud to announce the launch of LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) built by my current employer Northrop Grumman.  It was quite an impressive feat by NG Aerospace Systems to design and build the satellite in under two years.  Though I did not work on the mission, I am still pretty proud of the NG team.

As the name indicates, LCROSS is heading to the Moon.  The mission is simple, send a rocket to crash into the Moon.  Why you ask?  The impact will cause tons of Moon surface material to eject into space.  Then scientists will be able to analyze the material to look for any signs of water.  Clever huh?  This is one of the first renewed efforts to study the Moon in hopes of one day returning to the Moon. 

Sadly, the next Moonwalk we can expect to see is when astronauts actually return to the Moon since the King of Pop has passed away. 

I do remember the 80's when Michael Jackson first performed his famous moonwalk dance.  It was like nothing anyone's ever seen before.  I guess it was like when Elvis performed his hip gyration moves, it was just extremely innovative.  Though Elvis was before my times, I am lucky to have been part of the "Michael Jackson" generation at the height of his music career. 

Listening to all of his music again on the news and radio brought back some crazy memories of my school years.  I can't believe it's been twenty years since I was in high school!  Crazy...

Where were you when you first saw Michael Jackson perform the Moonwalk?




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Don't be scammed.  We recently posted an item for sale on Craig's List and quickly discover the dangers of the web.  Within hours of posting an ad, a scam artist wrote to us.  How did we know this person is a scam artist?  We didn't really, except for the fact that I am an extremely jaded person and I am suspicious of everyone.  So before we gave out any of the requested personal information, I checked out the person's name on google.  Simple, right?  Well I discovered that this person has a long history of scams and other folks have posted warnings against him.  I discovered this website that tries to list the Craig's List scammers.   I found the person's name listed on this site, along with tons of other scam artists.  Needless to say, we've stopped corresponding with him.  We will also do a careful check on all people answering our ad.  I still believe that we will have a successful business exchange on Craig's List, but one must always be suspicious.   Shop safely and Happy July!