"The Pursuit of Happiness"

On the spur of the moment, a friend asked me to go to Ft Worth with him to eat Vietnamese food. So I said yes, thinking he may just say it to appease my hungry heart. But, out of the blue, yesterday afternoon, he told me we were going to Ft Worth right then I just had enough time to print a quick direction to the place, and voila, there we went.

He's about my granddad's age, and he's been so good to me, so basically I looked to him as a father figure (He said he would give me away at my wedding, but more to that later, he talked as if I were getting marred next week ). Well, he thought he knew Ft Worth like the back of his hand, so he didn't really look at the direction I had. As a result of that, he drove in circle for two hours. Finally, I suggested we stopping at a nail shop to ask for direction, as I thought I may find some Vietnamese there. I was right. With a new direction from a good-hearted lady in the nail shop, we managed to get there, but that place is closed on Sunday. That was my luck . So we stopped to another nail shop to ask, and we got directed to Haltom city. We stopped at the third nail shop for direction again in Haltom, and finally we made it there, a little restaurant called Phở 95 in a huge Vietnamese shopping center. Three hours of driving around, without maps, and we made it. Yay!

When we entered the restaurant, everybody just turned their heads and looked at us. I looked tiny standing next to him, a 6 ft tall guy who was all dressed up with his oversized leather jacket, a traditional cowboy hat, and a well-polished pair of black boots. He actually looked like my bodyguard.

We had a good time there. Unsurprisingly, I enjoyed my steamy bowel of "phở" tremendously. My friend enjoyed his plate of "cơm tấm thịt nướng" also; he said he would take his wife there to eat later.

Later in the day, I watched the ball dropped in New York's Times Square; it was a spectacular show. At midnight, I meant to find my dog and give her a big New Year hug (everybody else was sleeping), but I was preoccupied with something else and totally forgot about it until this morning. Is it a bad sign to forget to do something on the first day of the year?

Anyway, that's what I did on the last day of 2006. I'm thrilled with everything so far; my "pursuit of happiness" journey for this year has just started.