Coupled Confessions

On Sunday, Dan bought me a new car. It’s a shiny, brand-spanking-new, 2010 Honda Fit Sport, fully loaded, in blue! I’ve wanted a Fit since I first started seeing them on the road in 2007, and as much as my sportscar-loving male friends laughed and made fun of me whenever I said this, I’ve stood by it as my “dream car.” (Lucky for Dan, my dream car was not a Porsche or something ridiculous like that….)

It’s adorable and I love it… but I’m also a little apprehensive — okay, make that utterly terrified — of driving it.

If you know my history with cars, you’ll know that I have had three vehicles in my lifetime, and they’ve always been over ten years old at the time of ownership. You’ll also know that two of those three cars met their untimely demise with me behind the steering wheel. (Although I do want to point out that one of those casualties was not my fault — I was rear-ended at an intersection by an elderly woman who shouldn’t even have been driving because she had her license revoked. My first car, and it was totaled.) It’s been almost ten years since my last car accident, but I was able to avoid driving all throughout college, and although I had a car for a little over a year since moving out to California, I was happy to give it up when we moved to Berkeley and I no longer had a need for one because I could walk and BART virtually everywhere I needed to go by myself. Dan’s car is a manual, and I was perfectly happy not being able to (or allowed to) drive it.

To be honest, if I could get through life without ever having to drive at all, I wouldn’t be happier. I totally perpetuate the stereotype of the Asian female bad driver, and I couldn’t agree more that the roads would be safer without me. But alas, Dan put down his foot and insisted that I really need to get into the habit of driving again, since it will be necessary sooner or later and I can’t run away from it forever.

So I’m very excited about my new ride, although I hesitated to announce it to the world right away, simply because I knew people would expect me to start driving it everywhere, and the thought of me being entrusted with a brand new car makes my stomach turn. (I have so far only driven it when the salesman at the dealer forced me to test-drive it to make sure I liked it and was comfortable with it.) But I suppose if I’m going to have a car that I’m going to be comfortable in and is easy to drive, this is the one — it drives very smoothly, and the visibility is better than any car I’ve ever been in. Someday, I will be comfortable driving again and I envision a bright future where I’ll be able to go everywhere in my little blue Fit. But for now, I am taking baby steps….

As we mentioned earlier, we had the opportunity to take some Japanese-style wedding portraits in kimono while we were in Honolulu. I’d grown up seeing various cousins’ wedding photos from Japan, and my relatives always urged us to take some, but we never had the opportunity until this summer. Masako Formals in Honolulu is a bridal boutique that specializes in wedding dresses, tuxedos, and other formalwear, but they also offer photography packages in which you can take portraits in traditional Japanese wedding kimonos. It includes the kimono rental (in my case both shiromuku and iro-uchikake), makeup and hair for the bride, and dressing assistance. They did a wonderful job, and both Dan and I were very impressed! Here are some of the photos!

(See the full set on Flickr)

The female staff were especially taken with Dan during the photoshoot, squealing that he looked like Tom Cruise (I perosnally don’t see it!), and were snapping a bunch of personal photos on their cell phones… lol. You can see us featured on their blog as well. A huge thanks to our friend Yumi who referred us to Masako Formals! とってもいい記念になりました♪ ありがとう！:D

On Monday, Dan and I celebrated our two year wedding anniversary! We of course both had to work since it was a Monday, but we went to dinner at the world renowned Chez Panisse. Located in the “Gourmet Ghetto” of Berkeley and founded by the famous Alice Waters, it is credited as the birthplace of California cuisine. It frequently makes it into the ranks of the top 50 restaurants in the world, and reservations fill up very quickly. Dan and I were lucky to get a reservation in 8:45… pretty late for dinner, but Chez Panisse was well worth the wait!

Dan surprised me with flowers before dinner!

Pretty anniversary flowers.

Chez Panisse! The mecca for foodies in the Bay Area.

The dinner course for the evening.

Olive tapenade before the dinner.

Candlelight dinner. Note the pretty etching on the glass!

The first course.

Taku river sockeye salmon carpaccio with cucumber and anise hyssop

The carpaccio transported me to heaven.

The hubby loved the carpaccio, too! Patiently waiting for the main course...

Wolfe Ranch quail grilled over fig branches with sweet corn pudding and pepperonata

Chez Panisse's dessert drink menu... everything sounds so good!

Pêche Melba: Peaches in raspberry sauce with vanilla ice cream.

A delicious dessert to end an unforgettable dinner!

They gave us cocoa-covered toasted almonds with candied blood orange peel to munch on before we left. These were really good too! (I only remembered to take the photo when we were almost done with it... oops!)

Happy 2 Years hubby! ♥

It’s been an amazing two years, and although this puts a cap on our status as “newlyweds,” we’re very excited for the many more years to come and all the anniversaries that we’ll get to celebrate with each passing year. We are constantly reminded that it is thanks to our family and friends and all their love and support that we are who we are today, and we feel humbled and so grateful for having all of you as such an important, ever-present, and precious presence in our lives. We can’t wait to build more amazing memories together with each other, as well as with you!

© 2008 Lilia Photography

Today marks one year since we started our blog. 365 days and 111 blog posts later, we’re still regularly blogging! (Well, at least I am… haha*)

photo courtesy of Sofya E

Some stats: Over the past year, we’ve had 5,938 visits. Our most popular blog post by far in terms of hits was the Celebrity Doppelganger post (What the random?), while the most commented post was the one about our S’mores Cupcakes. Maybe we should blog more often about celebrity lookalikes and baked goodies….

One thing we noticed is that the number of visitors is super disproportionate to the number of comments we receive. I will often hear, “Oh, I read your blog about this and that” from friends but am always surprised to hear it because we receive so few comments and I feel like nobody is reading this darn thing. If you stop by, let us know by leaving us some love!

Regardless, thank you to everyone who keeps up with our blog! We would not be as happy as we are without family and friends like you.

On Saturday, I attended my very first WordCamp! My coworker Estella has been before and strongly recommended it, so our boss graciously paid for our registration costs and so that we could go and learn more about all things WordPress. WordPress is currently the most popular blog software in use, but it is more than just blogging software — it is an open source content management system powered by PHP and MySQL. It’s very powerful, highly customizable, and has a rich plugin architecture that allow for users and developers alike to extend its functionality far beyond the features native to the base install. I am relatively new to WordPress, only having worked with it for two and a half years, but I’ve increasingly become a fan and the more I learn about it, the more impressed I am and the more I love it. We run a lot of our clients’ blogs on WordPress at our company, and I’ve begun to use a lot WordPress as the CMS for many of my own freelance clients as well because it makes it so easy for them to update and add content on their own. I’m hoping to revamp my portfolio site within the coming year, and I am already set on running it with WordPress. WordPress sites are everywhere — in fact, 8.5% of websites on the Internet today are powered by WordPress (including a handful of notable government sites!). This blog that you are reading right now is run on WordPress!

Anyway, I can go on and on for hours singing the praises of WordPress, but I will save you the geeky lovefest and focus on the conference:

WordCamp San Francisco 2010 was held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF. WordCamps are held all over the country and the world and there are more and more every year as they are informal and community-organized — they can be put together anywhere, as long as there are enough WordPress enthusiasts to make it happen. But the San Francisco WordCamp is the flagship, since it is organized every year under the direction of WordPress co-founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg. Hundreds of WordPress users, developers, designers and enthusiasts descended upon San Francisco yesterday to hear from a great lineup of speakers at sessions that run throughout the day. Each of the sessions I chose to sit through were very interesting and informative, but the highlight was definitely the “The State of the Word” keynote delivered by Matt Mullenweg, in which he highlighted some amazing new features that are going to be made available with WordPress 3.0, to be released soon. Some notable changes are that WordPress will merge with WordPress MU, custom menu functionalities, the ability to create custom content types, and the new default theme (the first in 5 years!), pithily named Twenty Ten.

(CC) Eva Blue

(CC) Eva Blue

Matt is an amazing speaker, and it was truly an honor to get to hear him speak. All the sessions were great, but it would have been worth paying for and going to WordCamp just to hear Matt’s keynote. It blows my mind (and kind of depresses me at the same time) that this brilliant genius is a year younger than me and is behind such a force behind this open source empire, and that his efforts have done so much for the web world. If you ever have an opportunity to hear Matt speak, he is so smart, natural, witty, personable and just seems like an all-around nice guy (not to mention he’s pretty cute!). The guy is incredibly solid and such an inspiration to all developers.

Here’s an interview with Matt on Tekzilla from last June in which he discusses some of the history and vision of WordPress. (Please note that there have been a few updates to WordPress since.)

Here’s a video from yesterday, in which he discusses the platform’s future.

A huge thanks to Estella for recommending that we attend WordCamp, and to her and Brent for driving me over to the conference! I had a great time and definitely look forward to attending future WordCamps.