Randomosity on Fridays: Be Gone June Gloom!

Welcome to June, everyone! I hope you all had a great Memorial Day weekend! I didn't do any BBQ-ing, but there is some of that in my near future with G and Luce - right in time for the SoCal heat hitting this weekend (finally!). Seriously, I can't believe I'm still toting a jacket around everywhere.

APA Month is over, but I'd like to continue bringing up APA-related things from time to time (I mean, c'mon, I am Asian American), so I hope it will continue to be informative and maybe even fun!

Speaking of fun, here's my Friday 5 with the theme of What Rocks About Summer.

1. Fun times with friends and family! This can happen any time of the year, but there's something freeing about summer. That's when all my family vacations are set, I can tell you that. Plus, it's when I can bother my sister all the time without feeling guilty.

2.  Summer clothes! Don't get me wrong. I love coats and jackets (you can tell by how many I own), but there's nothing like throwing on a T-shirt or tank and not having to worry about getting cold. Also, flip-flops and sunglasses and cute, cute summer dresses! What's not to love?

3. Concerts! Actually, it's just this summer that my sister went kind of crazy and wanted to go see a bunch of people. Some of the concerts aren't actually in the summer, but you know, it feels like it! It's part of the spirit! We kicked it off with OK Go in May. Next up is MGMT in July! Muse and Vampire Weekend in September! Excited!!!

4. ICY DESSERTS! This one is in ALL CAPS because I am a food monster when it comes to desserts, especially icy desserts. I love ice cream and frozen yogurt and shaved ice. How I love ice cream and shaved ice, and I'm not talking about snow-cone type shaved ice that's just covered in fruity syrup. No. I'm talking about honest to goodness Taiwanese style shaved ice. I know, other Asians have this dessert too, and really, who knows where it originated from way back when, but the Taiwanese have this category in the bag. No one does shaved ice like we do. There's all sorts of toppings (which is a misnomer because actually, those things are under the ice) and you top it all off with some delicious condensed milk (or brown sugar, but I prefer the condensed milk). There's also different types of shaved ice, BUT I will save the details of this for another post. For now, you can drool over this picture of pazookies.

5. Beach/Swimming! I actually haven't been to the beach out here in a long time. It's mostly because if you want to go to the beach, everyone else wants to go to the beach too, and super crowded beaches are not exactly fun times. Still, there's something so essentially summer (or maybe Californian?) about chillaxing at the beach on a bright, warm, beautiful day.

Barring that, there's swimming (not in the ocean, mind you, in a pool). Exercise and I are not exactly friends, but I'm cool with swimming. It's fun exercise! It's exercise that doesn't feel like it's trying to kill you (unless you're really hardcore about it, I suppose). Plus, you have the added benefit of cooling off without sending more bad emissions into the ozone through overuse of the A/C. Oh and no sweating = no grossness. Win-win, guys.

All right, who else is ready for summer? Who else is so over this June gloom? Happy Friday everyone!

(where I'd like to be right now)

P.S. Summer is also about reading for fun back when I still had summer vacation. Oh man, I sound old. I just read all the time now, anything and everything I want. It's not like I need more books on my TBR list, which grows faster than I can move through it (curse being a slow reader!), but I want to read Jandy Nelson's The Sky is Everywhere.

Especially after Tahereh's gushing review of it. She loved it so much, she's holding a book giveaway contest of The Sky is Everywhere on her blog here. Check it out!