Starbucks will give you a cup on doggie safe whip cream for free if you ask for a puppacino. We did and brought it home for our puppy who loved it! Our pup is now a huge Starbucks fan!

Leanne and I picked up the newest member of our family, our first fur baby: Miles! We named him Miles because he’s going to run many many miles with us.

For Leanne and I, this is really our first puppy. I had a puppy as a kid, but being a 5 year old with the puppy, I didn’t really get much experience raising him. As such, Leanne and I thought that we would be able to go hiking with the puppy the day after we got him. Oh, how naive we were!

The day we got Miles we brought him home. Since it was a long car ride, we did have to stop a few times to let him out. On one of the stops, a gust of wind nearly blew him over! Then he had trouble getting up a very very small hill. It’s going to be a little while before we go for long hikes with him 🤭

Goodbye 20’s, hello 30’s!

To be honest, I’m actually extremely excited for my 30’s. I’ve had some great experiences in my 20’s, but some of the best experiences of my 20’s were honestly toward the end of my 20’s. Twenties were some hard years. I finished college and started medical school. Going through medical school was honestly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. There were some fun times, but mostly it was studying, exams, and stress. Being in a big city can ironically be very isolating as well.

However, once I started my Internal Medicine residency, I started to have a lot more fun. I moved to West Virginia, rented a beautiful apartment there for cheap (cost of living in WV is incredibly low), made very close friends, and finally, finally, got to start doing what I spent all of high school, college, and medical school working toward. Residency is also where I met the love of my life Leanne, who is now my wife.

The end of my 20’s were rocked by me moving to California, getting married, landing an awesome job I love at the VA, and having the time and space to think, reflect, work on myself, work on my hobbies, read, relax, and just learn more about myself.

All this to say, I’m ecstatic to be entering my 30’s because I think it’ll be the biggest growth decade for me yet. Now I finally have a stable job and income, time and space to grow and learn, and the chance to settle down a bit with Leanne. Not to mention, we are getting a puppy!

My 30th birthday was awesome! Leanne and I, being in California and in the middle of a pandemic, had to celebrate without other family, but we made the most of it!

It’s tradition in Leanne’s part of China to have noodles for your birthday. The long noodle symbolizes long life. The dish must also have eggs, but we aren’t sure why. Still tastes great though! We started the day off with a ramen noodle brunch.

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Next stop, Sacramento Zoo! Leanne made reservations ahead of time and we went to the zoo to look at the animals. This was a throwback to one of our first dates in California when I took Leanne to the zoo. It was also the perfect California day, about 72 degrees and sunny with clear skies. Perfect!

After the zoo, we picked up some food and drove to a drive-in movie theater in Sacramento! Got the Subaru parked with a front row seat to the big screen. We put the back seats down, threw some blankets down, got comfy and waited til it got dark and for the movie to start.

After the movie, we were exhausted, but not too exhausted to eat some of the amazing cheesecake Leanne made from scratch! My favorite!!

(We couldn’t help but start chowing down into the cheesecake before we realized we should have taken the picture first, whoops!)

All in all, it was a perfect way to kick off what I think will be my best decade yet!

Leanne and I have found a new hobby that incorporates exercise, being outside, and making our yard look beautiful.

California soil just grows things so easily! It seems like anything we plant just grows really well. Leanne put some cut up potatoes outside as fertilizer and guess what we saw sprouting in the yard not long after? Potatoes!

Leanne is on an away rotation at UC Davis in Sacramento. Since she’s stuck there anyway, we figured why not enjoy both of our free weekends and see the city!

What better way is there to see the city than on an electric scooter! We rented these scooters and zipped all around the city, from the Capitol building, across the famous Sacramento Bridge, to the ballpark, and back. Also during the day had great food, coffees/chais, explored shops, bookstores, and old historic Sacramento neighborhoods.

After eating some delicious vegan food (there are so many vegan restaurants here!) and a couple episodes of Dexter, we called it a night.

Sunday we got up bright and early so we could check out Folsom, CA. We were greeted with a very cute olde tyme city with an extremely lively downtown. All the shops and restaurants were open, there was live music on the streets, and the weather was sunny and beautiful.

We walked around, ate a quinoa burger, got dairy free pibeapple froyo, then headed to the Johnny Cash walking/biking trail! The trail itself was ok, but what was interesting is what it lead to, which was Folsom Prison. Apparently it’s California’s second oldest prison and is still open and active. It’s also famous for being the site where Johnny Cash recorded his hit live album “At Folsom Prison.”

The weekend got over too fast, but don’t they always?

Leanne got us a Couples Adventure Challenge book for Christmas that has fun challenges for couples to do that we would otherwise never do. Our first challenge? Go to a thrift store, spend no more than $15 for each of us to pick out an outfit of our choosing for each other (minimum 3 articles of clothing), then give each other a new name for the rest of the day. That wouldn’t be so bad if not for the next part, which was to go to a public place in our new outfits!!!

Our next stop was Scandia Family Fun Center near our house, which has mini-golf, laser tag, and an arcade. And because of the challenge, we had to go in our new outfits with our new names!

Of course the place is packed! At first we were both really self conscious and I didn’t want to even get out of the car! We pushed ourselves through though and only got positive remarks! I can’t tell if this is due to the general kindness and good of humanity or it’s just generally accepted that you can wear whatever you want to in California. As time went on, we got more comfortable, then we stopped noticing or caring and so did everyone else. Overall I think it was a really great challenge that taught me a lot about myself, and I’ll never forget the beautiful day I had with my lovely wife Boomqueefa.

In an effort to become healthier, Leanne and I have taken up a whole food plant based diet which involves eating only whole foods and only plant based products. Because we both love almond milk and most of the almond milks in the stores have some gums and different ingredients, we decided to try to make our own. Who knew it was as simple as blending almond flour and water together! And it’s so delicious!

We have been on the whole food plant based diet for almost a week now and really feel great!

Mom came to visit us from Florida all the way to sunny California. Instead of just taking it easy, we decided to get her into shape and go hiking! We took her to Napa Valley where they have beautiful mountains to hike that overlook vast green rolling hills filled with grape vines for wineries as far as the eye can see. We hiked 8 miles with about 1000 feet of elevation and Mom handled it like a champ!

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Leanne is on a rotation in San Jose, CA right in the heart of Silicon Valley. San Jose is so beautiful and lively! We walked around the downtown San Jose area where there were tons of fun restaurants and alleys with incredible street art. In Japantown there were grocery stores filled with authentic Japanese groceries that brought me right back to Tokyo!

Perhaps the most fun part of San Jose though was the huge mall and Santana Row. First, the huge mall is filled with some of the ritziest stores I’ve seen. Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc. Some of the funnest stores ever like Lego, Disney, and Uniqlo. And also, some of the best restaurants ever like this amazing ramen place we went to and, one of my favorites, The Cheesecake Factory.

Santana Row is right next to the mall and is a street filled with restaurants and shops. Leanne loved the taro bubble tea she got there and I loved seeing a store just filled with products from tech startups! Universal translator like on Star Trek? Check. Projector that projects an Android tablet onto any surface that you can actually interact with so you feel like you’re in Minority Report? Yep they had that too! We were definitely in Silicon Valley!