Apparently I’ve Been Busy Lately
Hello hello everyone! I am alive and well. So where the heck do I begin? If anyone’s noticed, I’ve been procrastinating quite a bit and I haven’t updated this blog in quite some time. Part of it is because I’ve been out of town on a couple of occasions since August. In a nutshell:
- I’ve been to two weddings
- I spent two weeks in Vancouver
- I attended the Justin Timberlake concert in Vancouver (go Timbaland!)
- Watched my first ever Major League Baseball game
- Went on a one week cruise to the East Caribbean
It’s been a pretty fun filled September. I’m already looking forward to my next vacation. Before my cruise vacation, I was already looking ahead to the future, so I booked a flight to Barcelona for the US Thanksgiving long weekend. I’m gonna hang out in Spain with Gladys for a few days. I was contemplating a trip to Toronto that same weekend, but considering a flight to TO cost the same as a flight to Barcelona, I thought I would go somewhere I had never gone before. Plus I’ve been itching to make it out to Europe.
Anyway, that’s the future. I was having a fabulous time in Vancouver; half working and half vacationing. I think I picked a great time to go. The weather was fairly decent and most of my friends were in town. I had a blast! I even got to go to this year’s Nibbles & Bites event in Richmond. Too bad it sucked donkey dick this year. The restaurant participation was terrible this year. There were literally half the participants compared to previous years. I don’t think I’ve missed one of these over the past 10 years and this was by far the worse one. Not only were there fewer restaurants/food to choose from, they raised the price of the tickets to $1 each. For those that don’t know, N&B is an annual gathering of local restaurants at Thompson Community Centre (Richmond) where people go to sample various cuisine. It’s typically awesome, but not this year. Half the vendors?!? Come on… thumbs down!
I extended my Vancouver stay just so that I could watch the Justin Timberlake concert. For all you haters, I have to admit that I think he’s quite talented, albeit a little fem/girlie. The guy can sing, and he’s had two of the best SNL episodes in recent years. His acting isn’t anything spectacular but he’s obviously more talented and entertaining than a lot of the other celebrities (cough Lindsay Lohan cough) out there. Anyway, enough defending of that decision. The concert itself was nothing special. Considering his success and clout, I was surprised that the performance and production of the concert was not more spectacular. They had all of these annoying screens that went up and down, and most of the time, they partially blocked the stage. It was kinda neat, but mostly dumb. Whoever designed that stage should retire from that profession. It was a friggin long show too, and by the end of it, I was kinda bored. Timbaland made an appearance, which made things way better. Apparently he didn’t make it out to the Seattle show a few days later. Boy, was Allan and Jen pissed about that.
Mike and Mel’s wedding was a lot of fun. There was good company and great food. So all in all, it was a pretty awesome day. I was able to use my new camera (a Canon is850) for the first time. I didn’t really know how to use it that well, but managed to get some half decent shots. Remy Martin’s VSOP is a lot better than I had anticipated. My cousin Steve’s wedding was great too. He finally got married to Carol after dating over a decade. Andy Woo, get cracking. I hope you saved enough some money from buying that rear projection TV. You should have bought a LCD/plasma. Anyway, it was good to see my aunts, uncles and cousins. I have seen them less and less over the last few years. It takes weddings to bring us all together now.
Upon my return to DC, my company’s event committee held a Nationals baseball night. Free baseball! How could I refuse? Since I had never gone to one before, it was a perfect function to attend. It was a pretty good game. The Nats kicked the crap out of the Mets and contributed in NY missing the playoffs despite a huge lead earlier this season. I saw a couple home runs, a stolen base, some fireworks, and I even had a ballpark hot dog and beer. If my memory serves me correct, I think the final score was 10-4 with the Nats coming from behind to pull out a win. I had a pretty good time, so I hope to watch another game next season when the team moves to the new stadium. On a related note, I’m more stoked about the new NHL season. A bunch of us transplanted Canadians have already purchased tickets to the Caps/Canucks game on October 26th. We shelled out $85 to get lower bowl seats along the goal line. Awesome seats at an awesome price. The same seats in Vancouver would cost at least $20 more. Go Canucks! I really like the new jerseys too!
I just came back from a cruise to the Bahamas. I had a superb time! I don’t think I have been away from a computer/internet for a week in a long long time. Strangely, it was the best feeling ever. It was probably a huge factor in my enjoyment of this trip because I was really relaxed and disconnected with the real world. It’s basically what a vacation should be. We ate and ate and ate. Sadly, the food sucked monkey balls, but that still didn’t stop us from chowing down a few times each day. I like to think that I was just sampling the food to try and find the best stuff to eat. The 24 hour soft serve ice cream machines were great and I liked the pizza too. We discovered that the room service food offerings were pretty decent too. The nightly dinner we had in the dining room was alright. I don’t have too many complaints about it. Don’t get me wrong, the food still sucked, but I always looked forward to having a nice and proper ’sit-down’ meal. Being served is better than standing in line for the buffet. We gambled a lot on the boat. There wasn’t a whole lot to do or anything that was overly interesting on our boat, so we spent a lot of time playing various versions of blackjack and slots. Surprisingly, most of us had pretty good fortunes there. I think we won more times than we lost and the slot machines seemed to be nice and loose. I managed to win $500 playing bingo too! Woohoo! I posted up a slew of pictures on Facebook. Check it out if you’re interested. I also attended an art auction on the boat. I bid $9000 for a tiny Renoir piece. Really, I did. The auctioneer did tell us ahead of time that he’d tell us when we got closer to the actual price he’d let it go for though, so it was just bidding for fun. I could go on and on about the cruise cause it’s fairly fresh in my mind, but I’ll save the stories for another day. Let’s just say that I had a great time and hanging out with Hank, Lina, James, Karen (not so much her.. :) j/k), and Chris was a lot of fun!
We’ll end it at that. Take care til next time! Over and out!
