Tag: friends

So I’m thirty years old now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And there’s no better way to celebrate my 30th birthday than to go eat horribly unhealthy food and drink a lot of beer.  For months I’ve walked past Cypress Street Pint & Plate, and been curious to try them out.  A birthday gathering seemed like an appropriate enough reason to move forward with it.

I knew when I saw it on the menu that there was no other option – Sublime Burger.  Sublime is an excellent doughnut shop local to Atlanta, and like the namesake implies, this was a half-pound burger with two Sublime doughnuts as the buns.  Some might find the idea of sweet buns off-putting, but I had high hopes.  And were they ever met, because it was an absolutely fantastic burger in the end.  Only slightly sweet, and the burger itself was juicy and flavorful.  It obviously had to be a half-pound pre-cooked, because I made that thing disappear like it was the size of a McDonald’s hamburger.

But anyway, thanks to everyone who took the time to text me, call me, IM me or email me well wishes for my birthday.  It is genuinely appreciated.  And special thanks to those of my friends who came out to Cypress St. with me to partake in beer and unhealthy food with me.  Your company is a better gift than any tangible effects.

Anyway, a few photos were taken.

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Haha I forgot I wrote this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whenever I buy something for someone off of their registries, and the retailer always has a few lines to fill out for the complimentary card note, I never really quite know what to write.  For the amount of space that these cards give you, it’s not like I can be thorough with my words of encouragement and congratulation, really leaving me to write something boring and unoriginal.

But in the case of my friends Carolyn and Joe, there’s no such trepidation.  They already know how I feel about them, so there’s no need to put some corny congratulatory lines, when a classic wrestling quote would be more than sufficient.

Because when the day is over, very little is really better than having a good laugh, sometimes.

Photos: Carolyn & Joe’s Wedding

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One by one, I watch as my closest friends all get married while I haven’t had a substantial date in over a  year now.  Que sera, sera.

No matter.  It was a joyous occasion that I got to enjoy the dubious honor of being a groomsman to the wedding of two of my closest friends, having known the bride since the seventh grade, and the groom since the eighth.  Unlike the popular notion that weddings are a drag and that they’re all boring and superficial, on the contrary, I happen to like them very much, even more so if those getting married are my own friends.  It’s always fun to see friends and acquaintances dressed to the nines, and the festive atmosphere which leads to people often putting on their best behavior.  A little bit of class doesn’t hurt nobody, on occasion.

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Photos: Carolyn & Joe’s pre-show

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Holy Deer Park holy water, Batman!

The day before the wedding of two of my longest and closest friends was met with the typical shenanigans of a wedding rehearsal where planners and the priest met the idea of incorporating Filipino traditions with some of the most painfully obvious indifference and resistance I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  Regardless, it was a fun occasion and gathering of friends, and tons and tons of food afterward while we watched Duke choke yet another NCAA tournament and David Otunga flexing.

Also, a glimpse of the air-land-and-sea burger.  From Wendeez.

I never said I was a good photographer, but I’m still getting used to my usual array of candid crap with a decent camera.

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A preview picture

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Nothing says a happy wedding like trolloping around the cemetery for pictures of the wedding party.  Wonderful times.

This is one of approximately 200 photographs I took this past weekend.  They are all RAW files, and are immensely huge.  Needless to say, the days of mowing through 150+ jpegs shot with a sub-7.2MP point-and-shoot with ThumbsPlus are pretty much a distant memory.  That being said, I’m going to need a little bit of time before I post the entire set up, and I’m thinking I might break it apart between the pre-wedding, and the wedding itself.

Tonight, I decided to be responsible and do my taxes.  Best Buy digital software downloading doesn’t make it any easier, and I hate them forever even more as a result, but at least it’s done.  However, that’s one more night where I still haven’t seen the season finale of The Walking Dead, I’m going to miss RAW, and it looks unlikely that I’m going to play any ME3 either.  But still plenty of time to get this preview picture up.  The rest will come eventually, but soon, as I do not slack that hard.  With the bride and groom off for weeks, I feel no urgency to get them up.

The aftermath, in statistics

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One hour, 44 minutes, 25 seconds – my official time in the Atlanta chapter of the zombie run.  Yikes.

That’s 66 minutes and one second longer than it took me to finish the course in Maryland.  Sure, the mud played a gigantic inhibiting factor in the Georgia run, but who am I to kid that I probably couldn’t have done way better than that time, if I had actually tried, instead of dicking around with my friends?  To put it in perspective, literally only 29 people “survived” with slower times than I did.  522 people “survived,” and I ranked 493 out of those times.

The fastest survival time was 39:37:10, which was actually 1:13:80 slower than my Maryland time, to put in perspective just how grueling the mud made the Georgia run.  A 41-year old man bettered that time by five minutes, but had apparently lost all his flags, therefore not really “the winner.”

I don’t regret my course of actions during the run, and I still declare that I had more fun this time, screwing around with the zombies, but this is quite an eye-opener for me.  In contrast to the Maryland run, I was rarely winded, and my muscles often fatigued before my stamina did, and I know I could have easily crossed in under an hour if I actually put forth the effort, state of survival up for debate.

Upon completion of the Atlanta zombie run, a part of me would be content at never participating again.  But a competitive part of me wants a degree of redemption; I don’t have anything to prove, but I still kind of want to end on a really high note.

Somebody call my mama, these legs are registered weapons

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s right. Two-time! Two-time! Zombie run winnar!

So while I nurse my sore limbs and achy body parts, let me reminisce about the Atlanta chapter of the zombie run. Despite my trepidations going into the event, I can pretty easily say that I had a good of time as I did in Maryland, despite my reluctance up there too. If anything, I would venture to say that it was more fun than the first, for a myriad of reasoning.

Without much argument, the Atlanta zombie run was executed a million times better than the Maryland one. Granted, the Maryland zombie run back in October had the dubious task of being the inaugural event in which the bar was set, and all its failures and successes were what all the other chapters were to build off of, but the parking debacle and the tedious shuttling really, really hurt it badly. Whether it was superior planning or luck of the draw, Georgia’s venue for the event was far superior in the fact that there was plenty of on-site parking and no shuttles were necessary, and the local police appeared to be in cooperation and ready to deal with the traffic jams that never happened, probably because of the tornadoes or threat of them that ripped through the state the night before.

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