HELLO, my name is nesqu!k: Arrite, Arrite, Arrite...

Pretty fun weekend... and it's not even over yet :D

So I just kinda hung out on Friday, slept through most of the day after going to Spanish in the morning. Spent the evening hanging out with friends and whatnot, engaging in our usual pass-time activities.

I was supposed to go to Lake Tahoe with the family this weekend, but given the predicted weather conditions (heavy storms) we decided against it for fear of getting stuck in the mountains. Good thing we didn't though; my aunt got a call from the hotel not to try going up, as the roads have been deemed "impassable" xD

I woke up at around 11am Saturday to find that I had a missed call from home... hmm, I wonder what they wanted? So I called back home to ask what was up, at which point my dad asked if I was coming home for the weekend. I thought about it for a bit, and figured, yeah, sure, why not, I wont really be doing anything here in Davis anyways. So I showered up, packed up my gear, and was home in Vallejo by 1pm.

Xavi was gonna go to his friend's surprise birthday party, and he wanted me to drop him off, so we took the van. Did I mention my parents finally went ahead and bought an new van (after years of my dad putting it off)?

Toyota Sienna LE in Light Green. It rides as smooth as it looks, that's for sure. It seats 8, has the same 3.5L V6 as the one in the current Gen6 Camry, and feels a lot more solid than our now 8-year-old Plymouth Voyager. Of course, it also cost 2x as much as the super-base model Voyager, but in my opinion it was well worth the ~$28,000 we payed for it. My parents, being very thoughtful with their spending, decided to buy it at Toyota Vallejo, so as to help stimulate Vallejo out of her bankruptcy, heh. Xavi jokingly refers to the Sienna as "the Van van", while the Voyager is just "the van", haha.

ANYWAY. First we went to the Springstowne Library to drop off some books and pick up a few new ones. After that, I dropped off Xavi, and headed over to the 99cent store to snag some 9v batteries for my garage door opener, as its current battery was on its way out. I slapped the Bob Marley CD I made last weekend for the van on the way there, as well as during my short test drive down Colombus parkway. It's almost sad to say that the van's 3.5L V6 actually feels faster than any of our other cars xP. That ok though, because my Camry still handles better :D

I brought my Canon Film SLR back home with me, along with the 7 rolls worth of pictures I had taken over the past month, so we went over to Costco to have the film digitized. Basically, you give them your film, they develop it, and run it through a special scanner that converts them into high-res digital pictures, and the put the files on a cd for you. Fun stuff.

In the meantime, I'd been meaning to get a new camera since my Casio Exilim gave out on me in the Philippines, and after many weeks of indecisiveness, I finally decided to get the Canon SD790IS that they had on display, at the advertised price of $164.99 (2 and a half years ago, I bought the Casio Exilim for $299.99), and hot damn, in comparison to how much we spent on the Casio, the Canon was definitely the best value. It can shoot up to 10mp, compared to the Exilim's 6mp, and it came with a 2gb SD card.

Hella clean...

...and a hella big screen.

Where am I gonna put my label on this one, haha

It takes some damn good pictures in low-light environments, thanks to the "Hi-ISO" setting

Not hella dark, blurry, or anything like that...

Just a little grainy, but I'm not complaining :)

Pretty good sense of depth of feild...

Riz didn't mind posing for a few test shots

Some neat little color effects as well, which I have yet to really test

Here's a cute shot of Riz's background on his PS3 account

So that was pretty much my Saturday :)

====================
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday

The plan was to go to the San Francisco Science museum to make up for our canceled Tahoe trip, so off we went, in the van...

...not to be confused with the Van van, as Xavi likes to call it. My mom didn't want to take the Sienna because we wanted it to stay clean, and it was raining like hell outside. That's always a mental block when you get a new car: you try to avoid driving it as much as possible for the first three months or so, haha.

Xavi and Riz we ready for an adventure

It was a pretty uneventful drive to San Francisco, but unfortunately we arrived at the museum to find that the parking lot was full, and even worse: admission for the day was all sold out :(

No worries though. There was no way we were gonna drive this far and get nothing done, so we visited the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in a while...
From the SF side

Exited on Vista point...

And from the Marin side

Amazing color clarity, even on a cloudy day

The city in the distance...

And another shot of the bridge

Xavi and Riz were enjoying the view

Riz was having fun with Mr. Binoculars, haha

Hella cute.

Mom and I

And myself

fresh haircut courtesy of Fresh X's Fresh Cuts (Xavi)

Mom and Dad

Xavi and his Fail Umbrella, haha

We were on our way back to the van when we decided...

...we wanted to take more pictures, haha

Afterward, we were back on the road, and hungry, so we found the nearby IN-N-OUT of Mill Valley

Hella crowded

...and the same internal setup as every other IN-N-OUT...

I'd want to be inside too, especially with weather like this

Luckily, we found some seats, and as we waited for the food, I took a few more pictures
Riz and Mom

Xavi and Me

After that it was back in the van, and back to Vallejo

Oh yeah, we stopped by Costco to pick up my pictures, and get some stuff for my apartment.

The digitized film pics didn't turn out so bad

Favorite shot of Wilson

Favorite shot of Kevin

Not bad at all. I can definitely feel the touch of old-school in the pictures.

After transferring all the photos from the 7 CDS for the 7 rolls of film (they really should start putting multiple rolls from the same client on one CD), it was dinner time

Man, my mom really does look younger

Played videogames for a little while, only to fall asleep on the couch from the food coma resulting from the IN-N-OUT earlier and the dinner that evening