There’s a Starbucks inside my local Albertson’s, and while I was out with a friend doing some grocery shopping, we decided to try out one of the new seasonal items on the menu. Mango came along with us, and my friend asked for a puppuccino for Mango.

As you can see from the blur on the photo, Mango was pretty excited for his puppuccino, and somehow knew it was for him. I think Starbucks mistakenly thinks one size fits all for puppuccinos … the cup we got was literally about the volume of Mango’s entire head.

Hardly a surprise, but my week in Chicago is over, and I’m headed back to California.

I actually got trolled by this flight – I ended up riding a Boeing 787 Dreamliner for the first time, but they actually use Panasonic Internet instead of Gogo Inflight Internet, which meant I wasn’t able to take advantage of the fact that T-Mobile One gives me free wifi all flight. It was something like $19 for Internet for the whole flight, and I didn’t really feel like paying for it, so I instead decided to sleep the whole flight. I guess that also meant I completely forgot to take photos until we landed.

Luckily, California is nothing like Illinois in terms of storms, and we were actually able to land after taking a more logical path to the airport. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, refer to my blog post from August 21 where I showed the route we took to try and land while avoiding midwestern storms.)

Of course, there’s nothing that says “home sweet home” like the repulsive odor of cigarette smoke in Los Angeles International Airport. I walked my way out to the ride service area so I could get an Uber to take me back to my apartment 50+ miles away in Corona on the other side of the Santa Ana mountains.

Back when I was still a resident of Illinois and spent a ton of my time at the family business, there was a martial arts academy conveniently next door where I would train and help others train. I moved away from Illinois in November 2016 and went to California, and a few months after that, the martial arts academy actually moved as well (although, not as far as I did).

The owners found a decent spot a few miles away that had much more space and a lot of windows so passersby can look in and see what’s going on.

I think the new location and new setup are more-or-less decent, but what I was impressed with was the wall art. What I was more impressed about was the fact that one of the owners actually painted those on the wall himself, with the aid of his students. The juxtapositioning could’ve been done a bit better, but overall, in person, the art is actually pretty incredible.

Curious to see what the school looked like at the old location? Luckily for you, I have this convenient video we filmed, where I have unrealistically short hair and the artist is actually the one doing the kicks.

If you’ve known me for a long time (and by a long time, I mean several years), you might know that I had a tradition called the Annual Buffalo Wild Wings Winter Trip. It started completely randomly when we realized we had gone to Buffalo Wild Wings in the middle of the winter, surrounded by snow, for two years in a row. It was also more significant back then because all of my friends and I were off at different universities trying to earn our undergraduate degrees, and this was the time when we all came back for academic break.

After we graduated with our Bachelor’s degrees and we went different paths – some got employed while others went to different graduate schools for Master’s degrees – the tradition sort of died down. The tradition then proceeded to completely die after I moved to California, because I was the main one who organized the trips and vlogged them.

I don’t know if this counts, but seeing as I’m back in Illinois for a week, Ed and I decided to go to Buffalo Wild Wings. We didn’t vlog this trip, and we didn’t see our old server Adam who was our waiter for a few years in a row (who ended up moving out-of-state), but we still got our boneless chicken.

Ed proceeded to look at the second photograph, see his own face, and say “what a beautiful boy.”