Engaged.

Exactly seven days ago, Chuck proposed to me and I said yes! Thank you all for the well wishes. It's a very happy time for us both.

The planning is coming along swiftly and easily. We spent the day after our engagement basking in the sun. In the days after that, we created our guest list, asked my dear friend Molly to letterpress our invitations, decided that dahlias would be our flowers. We chose the man who would bring music and dancing to our reception.

We talked for hours and hours about our future, our hopes, our fears, our partnership. We cried and celebrated with our families.

Yesterday, we traveled up to Mill Valley and decided that we would get married there.

Today, we took a walk to our local Farmer's Market, bought a handful of lillies, delphiniums, and anemones. I attempted my very first centerpiece, to gauge how crazy we are to think we'd enjoy arranging our wedding flowers ourselves.

It was a bit of a disaster, but the disaster was inspiring. I have a feeling there will be a new centerpiece every Sunday until I get to my wedding dahlias.

We're not having a long engagement. I guess we don't see any reason to hold it off. We can't wait to be married.

Philippine street foods.

I loved reading Jen Laceda's little blog post on popular street foods in the Philippines. Ah, memories! I was a very picky eater when I was a kid though, so I grew up around this stuff but ate very little of it. I liked beef barbecue, and loved eating the yolk out of the peculiar balut.

A couple of important things missing from this list are sago at gulaman and dirty ice cream. Any day that included either of those things was a very happy day for me.

And now that I'm properly mired in childhood snack nostalgia, what of my favorite fruit in the whole world, the mangosteen? I haven't had this since I was eight years old! Same with pugo (quail) eggs, which I devoured during long bus rides to the beach with my family.

Yum.

Mill Valley textures.

The new guy in the cube next to me keeps staring at me.

Dedicated to Pembrook Hazlitt Wordsworth.

A little while ago, my boyfriend and I watched the film Notorious, a docudrama about the late rap star Christopher Wallace. Being thoroughly unfamiliar with "the hip hops," we felt so educated and inspired by the film that we immediately staged our own jam session, wherein one of us did "the beatbox" and the other attempted to freestyle our Silicon Valley-based trials and tribulations. The results of these efforts were so pathetic that we decided we needed to start our hit album on paper (or, more accurately, TextEdit). Our output from this exercise was slightly more comprehensible, but equally unfit for MTV. Nonetheless, we were very proud of all the odes we composed during that hour or so that the two of us fancied ourselves rap artists.

I'll share the one I made for my fish because I have no shame:

Ode #1

Got a little fish, his name was Merty

And boy the little thing, he was a big flirty

But Merty gone and died, and now I got Pemby

I love you Pemby, you're my little baby

I wish that you'd eat, cause you're a little skinny

You're the size of my pinky, you're just an inny minny

Do you like me? Your answer's a maybe

But I love you Pemby, you're my pretty baby

Now you think it's sad that I made a little rap

And you hate that I'm always, a rap a tap tap

On your little bowl, I know that it's rude-y

But your still my Pemby, my lovely little baby