San Jose recently placed a ban on plastic bags at all stores (not including flower or produce plastic bags) and it’s caused a little… frustration.

My frustration is not trying to remember to bring one of the bazillion canvas bags we own – it might be an extra step to remember and if we don’t then we’re happy to pay the $.10 for a paper bag (they’re useful at times) but obviously we’d like to remember the canvas bags and avoid paying extra.

No, my frustration is with the lack of organization this new ban has shed a light on.

For example I was at Target the other day and had brought in two canvas bags for my anticipated purchase (which by the way is a whole ‘nother topic) and stood in line at the cash register.

This line took at least twice as long as it used to. I watched as the person ahead of me, buying possibly what was their standard weekly or half-month supply of food and toiletries. The cashier had to use Target-branded canvas bags for the goods. She pulled a bag open and proceeded to fill it, however, having to re-adjust the bag a few times to make sure it stayed open. This is where the timing is all off.

See, with the plastic bags (and similar at grocery stores) they were always hinged on metal rods letting the cashier or bagger partially open the bag and put the items in swiftly and easily.

Well yes, these Target-branded canvas bags were on a metal stand too, but the cashier was not leaving half the bag on it to use it as support. That’s problem number one.

The second problem – everyone is bringing in different sized bags. So if there was a metal structure for support, it’d have to be different sizes. Which could easily be developed… but until then, the different sizes still cause delays. If you go to Trader Joe’s there’s a wall of bags to choose from, all ranging in sizes and material structure. Which is great for aesthetic or reasons like keeping food colder longer (insulated); but not for counter-space/filling fast and efficiently.

Granted, this is not a problem for everyone. There are more deft cashiers/baggers that seem to have a grasp on eye-hand coordination and organizational skills. To those of you, I salute you! You will make this process much more streamlined.

And because I love to go off on tangents… this reminds me of another topic.

Bagging groceries.

When did the art of bagging groceries fall by the wayside? I remember back in the day I had heard about COMPETITIONS for grocery baggers. There was a method for not only quick packing but appropriately using the space and taking consideration for the items that go into the bags.

Hopefully everyone knows you don’t put a bag of flour on top of a carton of eggs and if you have soda or heavy bottles, double-bag. (Speaking of course, about plastic bags.)

There are so many times I’ve had to rearrange the items in bags AT THE COUNTER because the bagger could care less what they were doing.

Please don’t smoosh my tomatoes. Take some care with these items!

Do managers not train for things like this anymore? Do the cashier/baggers pass the bagging test (if there were such a thing) and then stop caring beyond that? Le sigh.

First world problems, am I right?

A new year = a new batch of goals to accomplish!

Well, some of them I’ve carried over from previous years. For example, I still want to learn how to surf and I figure the best time for me to do that will be in September when we go to Hawaii (an awesome wedding gift from my aunt and cousin and their husbands!)

You can see my little list on the sidebar on my website.

However, I have some more in-depth goals that I haven’t put on the list yet.

Blogging
Yeah right – that’ll be the day, you laugh. You mock me. I see you mocking! But really, I do want to blog more, however my focus might not be here on my personal blog. It’ll be over at The San Jose Blog and SJ Metblogs. Anything about Santa Clara County will be on The San Jose Blog, and anything in the Greater Bay Area will be on SJ Metblogs. I love living in San Jose, there’s just so much to do and the community is great. So I’ve made it a point to get out more, experience, and ultimately share all the wonderful things I encounter. Equally important – social media. Tweet tweet! I’m kicking up my community tweets a few notches as well.

Photography
Yowsa, I’ve been out of it for awhile. Granted, I accidentally drowned my old laptop (thankfully files survived) but I was without Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop for several months. I’d shoot some photos, but never get to see them because I insist on shooting RAW and didn’t have a program to view them with (on Adam’s PC laptop). Now I’m back in business with a new Mac and ready to get back into photography.

Reading
I have a pile of books I want to read. I’ve started Mindy Kaling’s book and the next one up is Steve Jobs biography. We also now have a Kindle so every now and then I pick that up and read Rock Star’s Girl (a fun read!) But ultimately, I need to read more OFTEN. I’m a geek so I’m often reading plenty of blogs and online news etc.. but picking up a book doesn’t happen as often as I would truly like it to.

So that’s just some of my goals… I’m sure I will think of more as time goes on!

Happy New Year everyone, here’s to accomplishing new goals!

First up:

Adam & The Storm Troopers!

Second:

Hubby & Wifey!

So the hats – I really wanted them but Adam wasn’t too into the idea of walking around wearing them all day at the park. So we just took the photo instead. Then I pouted a little bit every time we walked past a couple wearing the hats.

While Adam and I were in socal for our “mini-moon” we took a day out to go to Disneyland and California Adventure. We only arrived at the CA park around 4pm so we mostly wandered around seeing what kind of rides there were. We did make sure to ride the Tower of Terror – but I will save that experience, and the photo, for another post.

One thing Adam mentioned a few times to me was some performance (water+music+lights) called the World of Color was going to start around 7/8pm. We ended up buying some meals under the name of “picnic lunches” and because we did, we received tickets to the show. This was a good move seeing as how we got to stand really close to the water’s edge while the show went on. Otherwise, if we hadn’t, we would have probably watched from the side and it just wouldn’t have been the same.

You may have seen the water show at the big fountain in front of the Bellagio in Las Vegas — well, that is nothing compared to what Disney put together for the World of Color.

I took some pics and videos – of course they don’t do it justice, but man was it cool. One thing about spending the day at Disneyland, and this is coming from someone who isn’t a fanatic but a general fan who has enjoyed the movies for ages. During the course of the show I started to tear up a little bit. Yah, I’m sappy – but it was during the Little Mermaid part and that’s one of my favorite Disney movies… just makes you remember your childhood and all those happy days.

One of the awesome effects the show has is when they use the mist from the water. It creates a “screen” and they project movie clips onto it – pretty sweet deal!

I did some cooking, well, some prep-cooking today with Smitten Kitchen’s Spinach & Cheese Strata. It looks SUPER YUM – and I added some sausage with it.
Anyway, it took me a bit to prep it. Turned out we didn’t have a 3qt dish, so we now have 1 1/2 strata’s ready for baking. MMM… leftovers. Nom.

I did what the recipe said.

Then I had to run off and get ready for a meeting. Did that, drove to said meeting. And while driving I noticed something weird about my pinky-nail. It was missing.

You see, for the wedding, I got acrylics. They look “perfect” for a few weeks and was a better bet for me instead of just a traditional nail polish-manicure.

Well the pinkie was missing its acrylic friend.
I have no idea where it is.

Odds are, I knocked my hand against the wall and it went flying. That’s what I am going with ok? I later texted Adam saying I pulled a “Monica” and there might be something extra crunchie in our stratas. OH WELL.

He said he’s not afraid.

One of the things I have wanted for *years* at my future-someday wedding was a photobooth. During our search, both a friend of ours and our wedding coordinator suggested The Laugh Box. They had a really awesome setup – in our case, a kind of non-booth – because it was outdoors and in a possibly breezy area, they set up just a background screen. They had two people on hand, one to take the photos and another to print out the strips of photos for guests. Dexter, the head cheese for The Laugh Box was great! I had been a little back and forth on the idea of having a live photographer take the photobooth photos – but in the end I think it turned out really well. If someone blinked or something didn’t quite work – he’d re-take the photo and the good one would appear in the printed strip.

Being that it was our wedding, we didn’t get to be in too many photos – had a bunch of running around to do, but I was happy to have made it in at least a couple!

We recently received all of the photos and man, I love looking at them. Everyone looks like they had a great time!

Here’s another slideshow for you to check out!

(…and in true Jenguin-NaBloPoMo format, here it is Day 2 and I almost forgot to blog. Almost!)

What happened in the last two months?

Went on a mini-moon in San Diego

I won’t be discussing the reasons behind the second one – again, if you know me personally, you understand and as I have heard over and over, you are very happy with my decision. That story is over. What I will talk about is my future. I’m taking charge and finding my path, working on things I’m passionate about. Everything is still in starting-stages since it’s only been a little over a week since Adam and I got back from our mini-moon. Once some things are a little more final, I’ll blog. Let’s just say right now, my intentions are social media, web design, little bit of graphic design, more community involvement here in the South Bay and improving my writing/blogging. (Just continue to ignore my grammar errors as you have so graciously done all these years, hah.)

This post, the first for NaBloPoMo (figured it’s a good day to start back up) – is going to be short. There’s a lot to post about the wedding; but I’m not completely organized with photos and such.

Off to organize and get some work done!

]]> http://www.jenguin.com/2011/11/annnd-were-back/feed/ 0 http://www.jenguin.com/2011/09/spring-awakening/ http://www.jenguin.com/2011/09/spring-awakening/#comments Fri, 09 Sep 2011 02:42:26 +0000 Jennifer http://www.jenguin.com/?p=2672 Last night I attended the Opening Night for Spring Awakening at the San Jose Repertory Theatre. I attended not only to work the press table and help with patron video reviews (as part of my job) but also because after hearing so much about this wild rock-musical I just had to see it. I have to admit though, the first thing that got me interested in watching this show was the fact that it was going to be choreographed by Sonya Tayeh (of So You Think You Can Dance fame.) I’m a fan, what can I say?!

The show was AMAZING. I’m not fully skilled in proper theatre/musical critic language – so really my opinions consist of “awesomes”, “amazings”, and perhaps a few “radicals” thrown in there for good measure.

I’m a musical fan, but I don’t get out to see much new ones. More recently I’ve only seen Avenue Q (twice!) and Wicked (OMG). Spring Awakening is way more raw than any of those shows. Here’s the description –

COMING OF AGE IN A SOCIETY CLOAKED IN TABOOS
Caught between their sexual urges and society’s contradictory teachings, a group of teenagers reveals their alluringly melancholy story of self-discovery and coming-of-age anxiety as seen through the eyes of young teenagers. Set in repressive 19th-century Germany, these students attempt to reckon with the thrilling, complicated and confusing time of their sexual awakening. This haunting and provocative rock-musical is a powerful celebration of youth and rebellion in a daring fusion of morality, sexuality and rock & roll.

The singing was amazing and I loved the songs – so much that as soon as I can, I’m gonna get a soundtrack to listen to.

So while manning the press table with my colleague Elisabeth, I immediately froze as I saw Sonya Tayeh walk from the elevator out to her friends sitting outside the Rep. She was clearly nervous about the show and running around. She came back in and I literally walked right passed her. I didn’t dare stop her because a) I’m a chicken-shit but more so b) she seemed to be in a big hurry (show was literally about to start) and I kept thinking she probably didn’t want to be bugged by some goofy fan.

No worries. I got to see her in all her awesome mohawked-glory!

It was time for us to get into the show and we did with seconds to spare. The Rep’s Artistic Director Rick Lombardo got on stage to greet the audience and announce there was a special guest. I thought he was going to mention Sonya, but he actually mentioned that Tony Award winning playwright Steven Sater was in the house! He’s the writer and lyricist of the show! So that was pretty cool.

Ok like I said above, the show was amazing. But what happened later.. hehee!

The show ended and I made a dash for the entrance where my other colleague Danny was set up with his video camera ready to take patron reviews about the show. We’ve done this for a previous show and have continued the process into this new season.

So I grab the mic and proceeded to catch a few people and ask them if they enjoyed the show, etc. Then, Elisabeth decided to see if Sonya would be interested in giving an opinion. The message was relayed and I saw Sonya’s friend (?) run off to get her.

“OMG I am going to interview her?!” I’m such a dork – my body went numb and I swear my arm (holding the mic) started to shake. Haha. Danny kept laughing at me.

Sonya made her way down the stairs, stopping to talk to Steven Sater, some fans, Rep employees/head-cheeses and then she made her way to me. She was full of smiles and apologized for the delay – I of course said no worries, she’s in high demand!

I asked her a few questions along the lines of what did she think of the opening night performance, how does she feel about the difference between choreography for a theatre production versus something like So You Think You Can Dance, and asked about her experience here in San Jose. By the way she said she loved the coffee shop down the street (Philz Coffee!)

I didn’t want to take up too much of her time so we ended the short interview and I thanked her and took my moment and told her I was a big fan and it was great to meet her. Shook her hand and she was on her way. She was super nice (not surprised) and friendly and loved the performance.

What a great experience! And check it out — a pic of me interviewing Sonya! (Taken by Elisabeth!)

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