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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.

September 2007

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That's right, we went to Disneyland! But that's not the best part of it all. For an entire week, the local forcast has called for the first rainfall of the season. All week long, the news has warned Southern Califonians of a storm-watch, dumping heavy rainfall Friday through Saturday. And you know how much So Cal people fear water falling from the sky! So we knew that most people have had plenty of opportunity to change their weekend plans and avoid Disneyland on Friday. Also knowing a little bit about the local weather, I knew that there was not enough winds to drive the storm inland by Friday. So we took a chance went on Friday. Take a look at the pictures from our trip to Disneyland! It turned out to be a glorious day (not a cloud in the sky), with just the right amount of people and the temperature was not too hot. We got into the Indiana Jones ride (one of the most popular ride at Disneyland) in under 15 minutes!!! The longest ride we stood in line for was the Dumbo ride which was only 30 minutes. A typical wait for any Disney ride would have been an hour, sometimes two. We not only had enough time to go on all of the major rides, we also got to go over to California Adventures for the first time. Enjoy our pics from the happiest place on Earth. :-)

The famous Haunted House all decked out for the upcoming holidays. The theme is The Nightmare Before Christmas. I wonder if they changed the theme after Christmas...

The Haunted House is my second favorite ride at Disneyland, the first being the Pirates of the Caribbean.

I hate roller coasters because I'm a wimp. But I love theme rides where I can fully enjoy myself without fear. The Haunted House is just simply a fun ride with lots of things to see and no scary drops at all. The line for this ride usually lasts about two hours long. But on that day, we got into the ride in under 30 minutes! Can't beat that!

The display at Future Land. I must admit that Future Land at Disneyland is rather dated. But I guess that's the charm of it.

The picture on the right is of us on Space Mountain. It is actually one of the faster roller coaster rides at Disneyland. You're zooming through the dark (with a starry background) at high speeds. Luckily there's not really a direct drop, each drop is more of a very sharp turn. Otherwise I would have refused to get on. I went on it because Mr. BAW really likes the ride.

This picture was taken by those automatic machines. Can you see us in the second row? Yeah, I was cluching for dear life while the 8 year old kid in the front row was bored by the ride. That's how big of a wimp I am!


I love Disney's versions of the famous Blue Boy and Pinkie!	The real deal...


It's the Small World Castle!	Night scene at California Adventures. Yup, it's a big orange...

That's us goofing around in one of the many "Hat Shops" in Disneyland. We found these Mickey Bride and Groom hats and thought we'd try them out for fun.

I hope you've enjoyed pictures from Disneyland. We're heading for Vegas next weekend. Don't worry, we won't be wearing any bride or groom outfits there. :-) But stay tune for more pictures.

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After 5 1/2 years, I've finally gotten around to making a Shutterfly picture book of Toby. All because my friend Kim sent me information about a free picture book offer from Dogster.com. Toby's been a dogster member for a while now, here's his dogster page.

So what's in the Toby Picture Book? Tons of pictures of Toby of course. But I took the time to categorized the pictures from puppyhood to more recent, Toby's favorite hobbies (sleep, digging, hunting dangerous stuffed animals, etc), and of course pictures from his favorite holiday...Christmas! Hopefully, Toby will get to see Santa again this year. Santa (our friendly neighborhood fire department) visits our neighborhood every year. :-)

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This is so crazy adorable, even if you don't knit! What will people think of next? Wouldn't these cupcakes make adorable treats at a baby shower? These adorable cupcakes were made by this talented lady at veganyumyum.com. I guess she used a product called marzipan to make the topping. She's even got complete instructions posted here. I don't know if marzipan taste good, but it sure looks cute as cupcake toppings. Hm...I wonder if she can make some Cherry Blossoms cupcakes for me...

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Since booking our site, we've kick started some more wedding planning activities. We started looking into purchasing our wedding rings. I've pretty much decided to go with the standard platinum 2mm band to match my solitare engagement ring. This, after warnings by a jeweler that mixing different metal bands will cause one metal to lose it's quality over time. And I do plan on wearing both my band and engagement ring together. So platinum it will be for me.

However, when we looked into men's wedding bands we discovered that there is an alternative to the traditional white gold and platinum. This alternative is palladium (picture to the left.) Many jewelers claim that it wears like platinum but cost much less and weighs much less than platinum. Palladium is also hypo-allergenic and stronger than platinum. We went into a store to take a look at the metal in person and honestly, we couldn't see a difference between the white gold and the palladium band. The platinum band was very heavy for a 5mm width (the one we wanted). We were told that the white gold band will require refinishing over time since the coating that makes it white will wear off with time. So it appears for now that palladium is the way to go for Mr. BAW. We'll do some more research and I'll let you know which metal we will go with.

Now that we know where our reception will be, I also started to look into different decorating ideas. Since our theme is Cherry Blossoms, I would like to go with some simple Asian touches like these lanterns. My idea is to hang lanterns of various shades of reds and pinks directly over the dance floor. This way, it won't be overwhelming but will go well with our theme. I just don't know if we need to light the lanterns. Candles will be out of the question since they will be hanging from the ceiling, but do I use electrical lights? Or maybe not even bother with lights, just the paper lanterns will look cute too? I don't know...I can't tell from this picture if the lanterns are lit or not.

I've also designed our save-the-date cards. I was told not to reveal the design until we send it all out. But I will say that it will be business card magnets. I found this site that makes cheap business card magnets. All I have to do is upload a design. So I'll likely do that instead of making my own with blank magnets.

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Well it's official! We plopped down a deposit and booked our wedding and reception site. After searching various places and options, we went with UCLA's Faculty Center. That's right, 4 years after I graduated from UCLA, we're going back to get married on campus.

Why UCLA? Well, first of all, the cost of having the wedding and reception there is at least 50% more affordable than most places we've looked at, with a very attentive coordinator and great overall package. Secondly, UCLA is a beautiful campus so getting great wedding pictures will be easy. Thirdly, we will have many out-of-town guests and UCLA and Westwood Village will be a fun place to hang out for folks who have never visited LA before. We will also take care of all-day parking for our guests so people can do some sight-seeing around town before the wedding. And lastly, it will be sentimental for me since I spent 7 years of grad school there. Plus, two of my bridesmaids also went to UCLA.

So there you have it, September 6, 2008 at UCLA! 365 days to go...

With my mom at my PhD hooding ceremony in 2003.

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Mr. BAW's best friend a.k.a. GIMKU (...don't ask) visited us all the way from Michigan a few weeks ago. We drove down to beautiful San Diego and UCSD to meet up with him and do some sight-seeing. This is my first time meeting GIMKU so I didn't know quite what to expect. He's Mr. BAW's best friend and neighbor from childhood. He will also be one of our groomsman at our up-coming wedding. After meeting him, it's confirmed that Toby and I like All of Mr. BAW's friends.

So happily, we all had a wonderful time in San Diego, even Toby. The weather was hot and the beaches were full of people. Luckily UCSD was much cooler with nice grassy areas and shades for Toby to enjoy after our walks. Enjoy my pictures from our day in SD.

I can't believe it's September already! We're starting to look into planning our honeymoon. We've decided on Italy for our honeymoon. We'll be spending two weeks there. So now it's just deciding which Italian cities we want to visit. :-) GO SC!!


Beautiful coastline.	There was a band playing and all!

Adorable shops line the streets.	It was so hot that people flocked to the water.


UCSD's woodland park.	GIMKU...need I say more?	UCSD had lots of interesting art.