On the weekend I visited Balboa Park because I heard rumors of cherry blossoms…

And it was true! The cherry blossoms were so pretty, and I had fun with my camera’s macro setting. I tried to get a picture with a bee in it, but the bees kept flying at me instead of holding still and so I had to run away.

And there were remote control boats in the lake! I wanted to try, but it was like a big deal and they had a whole area roped off just for the boat guys.

And here are the boat guys. I like how they all have a little boat stand… you can sorta see them at this size or you can also click photo to see larger on flickr.

This sign is super cute–”Ramp is for baby ducks.” And you can sorta see their little ramp right behind that sign. I guess they can’t get up the curb without it so they have to know where their ramp is. Aww.

And of course, no trip to Balboa Park is complete without the obligatory cute dog photo. I think the guy said he was a husky/australian shepherd mix, soo cute. I also saw a teeny chihuahua baby that I couldn’t get a good picture of because my camera has no actual zoom, only “digital zoom” which doesn’t really zoom, it just pixellates! Hopefully sometime this year I can get a more serious camera

Now I want to visit the Balboa Park in San Diego, which is the famous one. But it seems like many cities in CA have their own Balboa Parks!

All the gamers out there have probably already gotten excited about/bought/played this PS3 game awhile ago, but anyone who hasn’t yet should definitely try it. I just got my hands on a copy of this recently, and it is really fun.

For me though, what makes it so fun to play is the creativity in the style and graphics. This is, of course, coming from someone who buys stuff in the grocery store almost solely on how the packaging looks, so beware! (Actually though, I’m usually right.) Anyway, the graphics in this game are so cute and handmade looking.

Plus it appeals to me because of the fact that one of the main objectives is to find and collect stickers and outfits and things like that. When you get a sticker, you can stick it on anything in the game–even your character’s own face. I accidently figured that out by stamping a picture of a shoe on my boyfriend’s character… then he started frantically searching to see if there’s a “clean my character” button, which, fortunately, there is.

There’s a whole part of the game where you can actually build whole levels (type “Little big planet” into youtube to see some of the amazing levels people have made with this game, including some funny stylized versions of Mario and more) but I haven’t really played around with that enough to figure it out yet!

In the picture above, you can see my little character, dressed up like a cat with pink sunglasses. Just like my cat in real life! And you can also sorta see my boyfriend’s character, the little purple dude with the blue helmet in the corner, stamping leaves all over the house.

I forgot to mention this a week ago, but I just got to go on an awesome trip to Japan and China. My sister is living in Japan, so it was so nice to visit her. Here are a couple pictures from the trip, if you’d like to see more I uploaded all my favorites to my little vacation-website located here, or click on the thumbnails to see em bigger on flickr.