Hello, world!

Welcome to my blog– No, too plain. Greetings, ladies and gentlemen– Nah, too formal. Hi everybodeee!!!- Um, let’s just get to business.

Today is January 1, 2010, Happy New Year and Happy New Decade. As you can see, starting a blog was one of my resolutions, so here we are. Instead of the long intro, and because I have a tendency to be rather verbose in writing, I’ll just skip to the entry. I’ll save the long intro in the “About” section of this blog.

In with the new
I counted down the seconds to 2010 with a couple hundred people at The Far Bar in Little Tokyo in a party organized by a friend of mine named Helen Hua, who seems to know a lot of people I know as well. I made a concerted effort to get my NYE party on outside the house, with folks I don’t see all the time. At first I was a little reluctant to go, not knowing too many people, so I consulted my trusty Facebook invite event list and found a NYE party invite sent by a DJ friend. The location…The Far Bar in Little Tokyo. It was a sign.

So taking advantage of the free Metro fares between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. New Year’s Eve, I got me a free excursion via Red and Gold Lines to the Little Tokyo/Arts District station, where the bar stood all but half a block away.

Arriving a little after 10 p.m., I greeted Gary Gabistan, a.k.a. Dj Un-G and Helen, and all of a sudden other folks I knew popped up – Jen Kuo, whom I haven’t seen since 2008, Mike Fong, one of my many cohorts who work for the City of Los Angeles, and Tom Soong, who I just hung out with on Tuesday with a couple other friends to partake in the Avatar IMAX 3-D experience. Then I also run into Rex Sampaga, who was there as part of a group of Filipino UCLA alumni. I guess it was a well-networked party after all.

About an hour and a half into the new decade, I joined Tom and some other friends of his and hop on the Gold Line (still free) to Chinatown for an eating trip that didn’t materialize as planned. Half an hour later, I found myself in Pasadena ready to join the others at a Denny’s near the Rose Parade route, but some last-minute schedule changes found Tom and I meeting another friend, Kenny Yee, at BCD Tofu House in Koreatown (a better choice than Denny’s for me…). It was the first time thre three of us hung out together since the Dodgers’ playoffs. And would ya know it, right as I enter BCD, I run into Troy Laureta and his sister Chessa, who are both new members of the St. Agatha Gospel Choir, where I sing in.

Small town, or what?

The night ended after a full stomach of spicy tofu soup, banchan, rice and conversation with a couple of Tom’s friends whom he also ran into by coincidence.

I go to work
While New Year’s Day was a day-off for most people, I had to work! Not a dayjob, mind you, but a freelanced gig this weekend in Anaheim. After 5 hours of sleep and an amazingly quick, traffic-free, 30-minute drive down the 5, I did some set-up work for Wig-Wag Trains, a hobby shop based in New Mexico, who took their entire store on the road to set up shop this weekend for the Great Train Expo, a model railroad show and swap-meet at the Anaheim Convention Center. Apparently, Wig-Wag travels to all the major model train shows in the West, and employs some local help to get them set up, so I figure I’d do it this weekend. They also give folks free passes to the show ($10 value) and pay in store credit, so I figured this hobbyist would be down.

I helped put up some N-scale model containers, trains, structure kits, scenery and paint items. Efficient use of display space was key. After 6 hours of work putting up inventory, along with a half dozen other folks, the convention center kicked everyone out at 7 p.m. Tomorrow, I get to return, help out a bit and enter model train geek mode for the rest of the weekend.

New Year’s Day has traditionally been a day of veging out. Guess not this year, which is a good thing. 2010 – not the same old thing, not bad so far.