Messages from abroad, not massages from a broad

There’s that old saying that some people live to work and other work to live.  Well, I live for the weekend because the weekdays are just painfully boring.  Lately, there have been a lot of people shifting jobs/positions and it’s gotten to the point where I’m the last one standing in terms of the old WebCT regime.  There’s still Kathy and CY but they get to work remotely from home and they are in a unique situation.  I guess I am also in a bit of a unique situation but it also feels kinda weird to be the only active person in Support working in an office.  Damn you Andrea for leaving me here by myself!  ;)  Anyway, I think this whole situation is making me feel like something has got to drastically change in the next few months or I’m gonna end up disgruntled and resenting everything and everyone.  :)  To make things more crummy, summer hours are over so that means I’m back to full 9 hour days again.  Ugh!  I know I know, I’m just bitching and moaning.

Anyway, the weekends have been the lone bright spot over the last few weeks.  If it’s not poker, it’s dim sum, and shopping, and drinking.  A couple weeks ago, a few of us met up one afternoon for some dim sum.  This is the first time I had gone to a Chinese restaurant out here.  We went to China Garden in Rosslyn, which is a bit of a business area and a relatively low Asian population.  The minute we walked into the restaurant, I noticed something totally different.  There was a crew of young girls pushing carts.  It was a little surprising since I was expecting to see old ladies or FOBs with broken English like most of them are in Vancouver.  Well these ladies were young, but they weren’t anything special.  They were fugly!  So it was hardly an advantage, although they did speak perfect English.  It made things easier when trying to name certain dishes.  Overall, the food was OK.  A lot of it sucked, but that was kind of expected.  The sui mai was horrible and almost all of the shrimp based items were crap.  They must use expired shrimp or some really lousy grade shrimp because it all tasted funny.  We also had bright red chicken feet.  I’m pushing to go to another place in Rockville because that’s where all the Chinese people are.  I assume with a higher concentration of Asians, there must be better Chinese cooks out there.  Stay tuned.

Kickball’s been a nice social event and we switched to playing on Wednesday night which is wayyyy better than playing on Mondays.  Well, our spring league ended a few weeks back and they finally threw a season ending bash for everyone this past weekend.  The deal was $15, all you can drink between 630 and 830.  We got there about 30 minutes late and I quickly resorted to double-fisting.  Two hours later, I was done.  I couldn’t think or walk straight, but some how I manged to get home on my own.  I think I may have peed at the metro station behind a pillar, but I’m not sure if it was real or just a dream.  God I hope it was a dream!  Anyway, fun times!

I am now a plant owner!  I think my Dad would be the most proud about this bit of news.  I was at IKEA yesterday and I bought a Massangeana Cane.  I later found out that I bought the perfect plant.  I went home to read up on how to care for this plant and apparently it doesn’t need a damn thing.  It can be neglected and it will live.  Several sites said that you should also let the soil go nearly bone dry before you water it.  Over water it and it’s roots will start to rot.  It’s pretty sweet.  I can go on vacation for two weeks and it’ll probably survive fine.

Anyway, there hasn’t been anything too exciting going on here lately, hence my lack of updates.  I’m back to Vancouver a couple times next month, followed by a East Caribbean cruise at the end of September.  So I’m really looking forward to surviving the next few weeks at work.  Then I’ll be in a happy place.  Over and out!

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to head out to New Jersey to attend the Live Earth concert. 
Jon Lal was nice enough to drive our bums there.  Thanks Jon!  I purposely stayed up as long as I could so that the 4-5 hour long journey would not be so painful in the car.  My plan worked cause I slept through most of it, only to wake up to whine about how hot I felt and to eat breakfast.  A couple of hours in, we stopped by the McDonalds and as we approached the lineup, a manager and perhaps a junior/assistant manager started arguing.  The older one, was tough on the eyes.  She was toothless, fugly, and in a real bitch!  She was pretty rude to the customers in front of me and I didn’t want to piss her off because I’m sure she would have yelled at me too.  I’m sure the customers were asking stupid questions, but she was, in my opinion, being unprofessional even for McDonald’s standards.  Funny enough, this isn’t the first time I’d seen a Manager fight with an employee in front of customers.  We saw the same thing at a crappy KFC a few weeks back.  I didn’t know this kind of insubordination was so common out here.  Anyway, breakfast sucked! My orange juice was warm and powdery tasting!  And the toothless wonder kept walking past our table to clean tables.

Before I knew it, we had arrived at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in New Jersey.
We parked the car and since we were early, we wandered around the fair that was being held adjacent to the stadium.  It totally reminded me of the PNE, except way sadder and crappier.  Considering there were about a hundred thousand people attending the concert, nobody was at the fair and admission was free with our concert ticket too.  Anand’s curiosity of funnel cake got the best of him and he shelled out $5 for what amounted to a giant plate of twisted donut dough covered in icing sugar.  It was pretty good, but I wasn’t in the mood for something greasy and doughy at that time.  I was more interested in winning the Toshiba 42" Plasma that someone was giving away.  It was a free draw and you had to be present during the draw to claim the prize.  So Nakisa, Anand and I hung around for an hour to wait for the draw.  About 15 min before the draw, the guy started throwing free bags and tshirts into the crowd.  I out-jumped some other guy for a tshirt.  Picture an opening ball toss at a basketball game.  I batted the shirt away from the guy and bobbled it with my other hand, but I managed to corral it in.  I think I heard someone say ‘nice catch!’ but in the excitement  and adrenaline rush, I might have been hearing things.  We throw a nerf ball around at work, and I have to think that all of that practice came in handy.  Well the draw came and went and none of us won!  Boooooo…!!!

So we headed to the stadium to settle into our seats.  One of the first things I noticed was the icky disgusting gum stuck on the edge of my seat. 

It wasn’t underneath or anything!  This was basically on the outer top lip of the seat.  I had to sit around/straddle this old piece of gum for the whole show!  At first I really liked our seats.  We were on the other end of the stadium and in the first level balcony, so we were pretty far away.  It was shady and the stage didn’t look too small to me.
Here’s Anand (Andy), Nakisa, Christine, Jon.  Well, the concert started about 30 min after we got in and after a couple of beers, the sun found it’s way directly over us.  We were at the mercy of our little star.  I roughly calculated that the next 4 hours were brutal.  It was so hot!  I made the best of it by tanning the back of my forearms.  I didn’t burn despite just one application of sunblock.  I switched between my free Live Earth bandanna and my cap to protect my noggin and face.

Here’s what the stadium and stage looked like from our point of view.  Actually, it’s zoomed in, but it’ll give you an idea of what the place looked like.  That’s Alicia Keys jamming with Keith Urban in that photo.  Overall, the concert was great!  We paid for $100 seats and the show lasted a total of 8 hours.  It is honestly a bit grueling to sit through a show that long.  I’ve done a 5 hour concert before and I thought that was long.  I think that 8 hours of anything is a long time; especially work!  Despite the length of the show, it was still worth it and I had a good time.  I had not seen most of the acts before too.  John Mayer was the only performer that I had seen live before.  Ludacris, Kanye West, Alicia Keys and Bon Jovi were my favourites.  I was disappointed that The Police didn’t sing Every Breath You Take.  Melissa Ethridge was a preaching babbling lunatic.  Her performance was a total bore.  During those boring times, there was this one chick in our section that ’stuck out’ amongst the crowd.  Here’s a picture of her below. Click on the image and you’ll figure out why she caught everyone’s attention.  She was fighting with her boyfriend and she glued herself to the railing whilst showing everyone her sweet dance moves.  Bon Jovi was the shit!  He had his hometown crowd eating out of his hands.  I always think that it’s loads of fun when the entire stadium is singing along.  You can watch footage of it on msn.com.

We stayed overnight at a La Quinta Inn about 15 min away from Giants Stadium.  It was clean and cheap and that’s all that mattered.  We were dead tired.  I actually went to bed before 2am for once.  We headed home the next morning, stopping for lunch at IHOP and making a detoured trip to Philadelphia to eat philly cheesesteaks.  Beer was pretty cheap there too.  We didn’t do anything touristy there.  We just wanted to eat and drink. Here’s Andy enjoying a bite of his sandwich.  Philly cheesesteaks are totally overrated.  Mind you, we didn’t try them from a super duper famous place.  We ended up on Market Street and tried them out at two palces; Brownies and another place called Sonny’s.  Neither of their cheesesteaks blew me away.  It’s basically, thinly sliced beef, with onions and cheesewhiz.  You have to get it with cheesewhiz, otherwise it’s not a true philly cheesesteak.  Go figure!  Maybe we just went to lousy joints, but I cannot imagine them being that much better.

We headed home and after waiting through numerous lines to pay highway tolls, we finally made it back.  The highways here are littered with tollbooths.  It’s ridiculous.  It bottlenecks traffic for 30 minutes at a time, just so everyone can pay $2-5.  It’s a total pain in the ass!  Anyway, that’s about all I have to say right now.  I’ll be heading home this weekend for James and Christina’s wedding.  I hope to see most of you this weekend!  Peace!