Thursday:
1. we woke up early and went to Napa valley with mom...
2. lunch was at the Ugly Corner sandwich place...
3. i drank wine! i think i like white wine better just because it tastes sweeter than the red wine.
4. wine barrels are pretty cool...they smell pretty good too. the whole entire vineyard smelled like grapes....sweet and humid smell.
5. then...we went to a tiny outlet instead of going back home directly because mom wanted to avoid the traffic on the highway. my thighs sore and charlie's feet hurt from Wednesday's walk in SF... we were so exhausted, but we still tried to entertain my mom. sigh. one of the things that i cannot stand my mom is when she starts to get overly nervous. when she starts to panic, the people around her are in big trouble, because she will become extremely unreasonable and grumpy. :-/. it's not fun to deal with it.

Friday:
1. we went to Yosemite Park...Charlie was the driver again... I felt really bad that he has been driving since Sunday. poor guy. it is not easy to be a guy for sure.
2. the mountain curvy roads were pretty interesting...very curvy... 20 mph. (I drove downhill when we were on our way back)
3. Yosemite's waterfalls and rocks are extremely BEAUTIFUL... AMAZING. you wonder how things formed, and "the power of the glaciers years and years ago." if you ever get a chance to go, you should not hesitate to go... :)
4. We stopped a little bit for bathroom break and "lunch break." I swallowed down a sandwich and charlie ate a bit of mom's "oily rice" (yeah, for those non-chinese people, you probably don't know what it is, but feel free to ask. it's made of sticky rice instead of the regular rice.) he only ate a little bit, and he began to drive again. later, when mom and i were walking along the lower yosemite falls trail, we were saying how he must be starving to death since he only ate a little tiny bit. my mom assumed that he didn't like the food while i tried to use "dieting" to explain his lack of appetite. it was not until we got out of Yosemite, stopped at Taco Bell's, and mom being in the bathrom did i find out that he was just too shy to ask for more of the "oily rice." It made me laugh so hard that all that time he was starving because he thought i finished all of the food. Silly guy. There is always enough food to go around...

Saturday:
1. i didn't wake up until 10am! WOOOHOOOOOO. finally got to sleep in. charlie and i finished the left over "oily rice" that mom made on Friday. YUMMY.
2. we went to the standford shopping center to visit the COACH store where mom works at and picked a bag for charlie's mom. sigh. my mom... she likes me to guess what she wants... i am very bad at doing that. originally, she suggested that we get a table and drink some coffee together, but neither charlie nor i felt like drinking coffee that afternoon... so we didn't end up going there until when charlie was in the SONY store. then, mom was like, "i want to drink some coffee, let's go." so she got her wish granted... she could have just told me that she wanted coffee when we first stopped there (yes, we actually went into the coffee shop when she suggested it, but we came out empty handedly.)
3. afterwards, charlie and i went to half moon bay to look at the pacific ocean and the shoreline. :). it was quite beautiful despite the clouds looming above our heads. mm... we made doggies and birds w/ our hands and took pictures of the shadows.
4. then we went to bestbuy... charlie tried soooo hard to get rid of his $20.00 coupon that was going to expire that day, but in vain. he couldn't find anything to get despite the painful effort. haha. poor kid. in a sense, it is kind of sad that he couldn't find anything useful in best buy (probably just bad timing)... but in another sense, you can see how he's a fairly reasonable and rational person. what's the point of getting anything if there isn't really anything you need? it would be wasteful even though there was the coupon.

to be continued...

(going to taiwan today, won't be back until june 1)