My short break to catch up on work and relax is over. I did a whole lot of catching up on work and not so much relaxing. I also worked a bit more ahead of time to try and get things wrapped up for my upcoming absence, which begins now – I made it to our staff gathering.

I’m not quite able to say exactly why we’re having a staff gathering, because the reason for it hasn’t been publicly announced yet, but I can say that we’re at Venice Beach to do some activities together. I like getting to places early, and I wanted some time to explore the area and get some vlog footage in, so I arrived at the hotel in time for a late lunch. I walked over to a poke place and got myself some salmon.

Yes, I am using coffee stirrers as chopsticks because I forgot to get utensils from the restaurant, and no, this is not the first time that has happened. Luckily, I’ve been using chopsticks my entire life, so I’m able to pick up any two long pieces of anything and effectively use them to eat my meal.

Later that night, we went to a rooftop bar (but it was next to impossible to take any photos because it was pitch black dark outside and my phone doesn’t really have the best low light compensation. After freezing for about an hour or so, we went to a restaurant … where I proceeded to eat more sushi. I ordered an albacore poke dish with some fries on the side – fries that literally came with three different kinds of dipping sauces.

We have some meetings to attend tomorrow, but after that, we have some pretty exciting activities lined up; the vlog will be coming out whenever I manage to find a slot of free time to actually get some editing done.

We went to a place called Tofu Ya for dinner. It’s a place for 순두부찌개, but because I don’t like hot liquids, I got my rice-and-meat plate like usual.

Our waitress was an older woman who I think was the owner of the restaurant (or someone related) simply because of the way she acted and spoke. She was a very traditional Korean-style older lady, and she opened up a bit and was more comical when interacting with us because we went with three Korean-ethnic people in our group.

When it was time to pay for our food, the waitress said that we could only use one credit card, and the rest had to be paid in cash (this is also a very traditional Korean thing to do – I’ve historically seen older Korean business owners favor a bit more extra income by saving on credit card transaction fees rather than make it convenient for the customer). After psalm, one of our players, started struggling with the bill, she came up to him…

… and handed him a literal calculator. lol

Our Heroes of the Storm team’s boot camp for the playoffs to qualify for BlizzCon started yesterday, and this year, it seems like I’m going to be the one tending to all the tournaments and conventions. We’re at the Red Bull studio in Santa Monica, CA, and I’ll be around this area for a while.

I get a short break after this boot camp for about a week, then we’re right back at it with a staff meet-up, likely another boot camp before BlizzCon, TwitchCon preparation for our exhibitor booth and our panel, the actual TwitchCon convention, BlizzCon Opening Week, and finally, BlizzCon.

My latest blog post was a failed attempt at making some homemade nigiri. As you can probably imagine, the reason I did that is because I love sushi, but I didn’t want to pay the relatively high price of buying sushi in California.

I have to eat out anyway while I’m out here, so I decided to take the opportunity to eat some real sushi. For lunch, I had a poke bowl, and for dinner, I had some triple salmon combo thing that came with cooked salmon, raw salmon, and salmon eggs.

A lot of what is happening at the boot camp is confidential, so I can’t really share many details of what’s going on, but I’ll definitely be posting more food photos while I’m here (because I’m pretty sure I don’t need to keep the type of food I’m eating secret).