I went to a Vietnamese restaurant earlier today to get some dinner. I ordered a filet mignon dish again, similar to the one I got the last time I went to a Vietnamese restaurant. The difference here is that the rice wasn’t tomato rice, but as an added bonus, I got a small bowl of phở broth. (But, if you know me well, you know that I don’t really like hot liquids anyway, so I gave the broth to my friend with whom I went to the restaurant.)

While I was waiting for my food, I looked through the placemat (that you can sort of see in the photo above), which had a rundown of all the animals in the Chinese zodiac. All my life, I thought I was a monkey (primarily because my parents told me I was) – and that would’ve been true, had I been born throughout a majority of 1992.

But, I happen to be born on January 28, 1992, which is earlier on in the year before the lunar calendar switched over to 1992. Thus, my birth year is technically counted as 1991, and my Chinese zodiac animal is actually the goat/sheep. (This is apparently the case for everyone who was born on or before February 3, 1992.)

Obviously, the zodiac is unable to actually assess the kind of person I am (and generally, I’ve never seen anything similar to horoscopes ever be able to describe me well in general). But, regardless, I find it intriguing that I had been misinformed my entire life about my Chinese zodiac sign.

(If you are in fact interested in knowing about my true personality, rather than looking to horoscopes, try instead to look up a description of INTJs on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – I am a very stereotypical INTJ who bears all the characteristics of the personality type.)

For reasons that I cannot reveal due to the top-secret nature of this trip, I am currently in Irvine for a few days, staying at Hotel Irvine. Although I can’t share exactly what’s going on here or what I’m doing, I can at least share some photos of the area.

Hotel Irvine has a special club in a few of their upper floors. We got our hotel rooms booked by the company responsible for sending us out here, and not everyone got an upper-floor hotel room, but for some reason, my roommate and I did. I’m not sure if it actually comes with all the special club benefits, but at least it has a nice view.

After we arrived in the afternoon, we met up with some of our friends and stopped by one of the restaurants inside the hotel for some lunch. This is a burger from the Eats Kitchen & Bakery:

After our meal, we stopped by a nearby convenience store so we could get a gallon of filtered drinking water and some candy. On our way back, we walked over a bridge and looked down into the San Diego Creek.

Now, because I’m originally from Illinois and grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs, I’m used to seeing tons of water all over the place. Even within my tiny village, there are ponds and lakes all over the place, and there’s a river cutting straight through the land. The neighboring cities have even more water, with huge conservation areas and lakes everywhere.

After moving to California and experiencing the moderate drought, I find myself confused every time I see a body of water on Google Maps, but proceed to see something like this when I actually go there in person:

Yes, that is the San Diego “Creek.” All that remains of it now is just a bunch of sand.

As we approached the hotel, we cut through Park Plaza, where I snapped a photo of Karen looking off into the distance between a row of palm trees.

I was out of town with one of my friends and I needed to work, so I set myself up on the floor with my laptop. Sunny proceeded to walk over to me, sit down in front of me, and stare at my laptop screen.

I guess he wants to be my secretary or something