Monthly Archives: December 2005

Except for two minor incidents (which are bound to happen), our Christmas trip to DC was great. It was a very multi-cultural family reunion. Most everyone was Vietnamese, of course, but we had the great pleasure of meeting my Uncle Bob’s new wife Pati and her children Daniela (age 11) and Martha (age 9), who are all from Mexico. The kids enjoyed learning Vietnamese, and we all must have learned a dozen fun words in Spanish including peanut, which is “cacahuete.” We spent much of our 4-day trip eating a lot of good food and playing a Vietnamese card game which involves gambling and encourages lying and cheating. Among my favorite Christmas gifts were a painstakingly and beautifully hand-stitched pillow from my 98-year-old Omi in Germany and a midnight blue velour jogging suit from Clinton.

As if we needed more change in our lives, Clinton and I have started down the very exciting road to home ownership. I bought a book called The Everything Homebuying Book, which is awesome and very helpful. We picked a nice realtor named Joellen, and we will start looking at houses with her as soon as we’re pre-approved for a mortgage. I’ve already sent her a composite spreadsheet of our exact dream home characteristics (Must have, Would Like to Have, Don’t Want) so that she can get an advanced picture of what we are looking for. After many careful considerations, I narrowed the search down to a handful of specific neighborhoods within two zip codes in the southwestern part of Durham. The other night, I drove around to feel out some neighborhoods that I like.

My biggest goal for the year 2006 is for us to own our own home and never have to go to the laundromat ever again! Goal #2 is to get a large brown dog named Charlie.

Among my many New Years resolutions are doing more yoga and drinking more green tea.

Tomorrow night for New Year’s Eve, Clinton and I plan to attend the 15th annual First Night festivities in Raleigh, which feature bluegrass music, ethnic dance performances and theater acts.

Best wishes to everyone for the New Year, including much happiness, health, good fortune and, of course, adventure.

So, I just finished a week and a half at the new job. I’m still learning everyone’s name and figuring out how to get around the building. There are three hundred employees at the North Carolina headquarters office of FHI! I’ll be really happy when I eventually understand everything that’s going on. Until then, I’m scheduled to go to as many meetings as possible around the building so I can learn by osmosis. I’m also assigned to four different projects right now that leave me dizzy at the end of the day, though they’re fascinating and great work experiences for me.

For the first time in my life, I work with entirely competent people. It’s been sort of like being a part of a think tank of geniuses. FHI is full of my heroes – amazing, deep-thinking and caring people who know everything about reproductive health and HIV and who work to make the world a better place every day.

For the time being, I share an office with Kavita, an Indian-American woman the same age as me, who works on HIV clinical trial projects in China. We’re still deciding how best to decorate. I now have a lamp, a clock, a Buddha statue, a plant and some picture frames, so my very plain desk area looks a lot better.

In other news, I just got a major haircut! My medium-length brown hair was getting so boring. Now I have a very short haircut with bangs and lots of caramel brown highlights. I’ll send a picture as soon as I take a good one.

This past week I finally met a challenging opponent for my favorite game, Balderdash! Her name is Autumn Winters, the wife of Clinton’s friend Jason Morningstar. She is a librarian with a very sweet North Carolina accent and is a very good Balderdash player.

Last Friday night Clinton and I had our usual date night. This time we ate dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and then saw KING KONG! If you haven’t seen it already, stop what you’re doing and find the movie listings RIGHT NOW.

Tomorrow after work, we’re driving up to Washington DC for a Vietnamese Christmas family reunion! Happy Holidays, everybody!

Thanksgiving in Spokane was great. Our family went on a fun-filled window-shopping-and-gingerbread-latte-sipping outing at the Plaza in Coeurd’Alene, spent 45 minutes on a waiting list to get Hudson’s hamburgers (most likely the best hamburger west of the Mississippi), saw the new Harry Potter movie and played Perfect Dark Zero on my brother’s Xbox 360 until the wee hours of the night – an insanely violent video game in which we snuck around on snow-covered pagodas and blasted bad guys’ brains out with plasma machine guns.

All that video-game playing stirred up the child in me. This past weekend when Clinton and I were browsing in the Apple Store, I felt an overwhelming desire to buy a video game of my own. I now own NeverWinter Nights and am nearly a 6th class rogue! Yes, very, very nerdy, I know. Unfortunately, it has infected Clinton also. We recently made ANOTHER late night foray to the Apple Store to get a second copy, and these days we are playing until 1AM every night in multiplayer mode.

The best news of the week: yesterday I accepted a position at Family Health International in Research Triangle Park, NC. Hooray! Starting this coming Monday, I will work in monitoring and evaluation, in the division of Contraceptive and Reproductive Health Technologies and Research Utilization. I’ll be sure to let you know how my first week goes.

Helpful Hint from Crystal: As appetizing as the product “Grandma Utz’s Handcooked Bar-B-Q Potato Chips” may sound, the chips actually taste vaguely like pork rinds (which can be a good thing, if you like pork rinds) and eating them leaves you feeling quite ill and even hung over the next day. Turns out they are CHOCK FULL OF PURE LARD. Take my advice and steer clear.

Have a great day!