Messages from abroad, not massages from a broad

What is up with men playing the role of Edna Turnblad in Hairspray?  I don’t get it.  Travolta is a terrible singer.  I know he had a singing career in the 70s, but that was 30 years ago.  And even then, his vocals were pretty weak.  I mean, just because you are a ’singer’ and have some albums doesn’t mean you can sing (*cough* Britney Spears).  Honestly though, what the fuck is so special about having dudes dressed in drag to play large women?  This falls in line with America’s wonderment with Tyler Perry and his crappy ass movies: Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea’s Family Reunion and Madea’s Class Reunion (Crap, Crap II, and Crap III).  Considering the high level of homophobia in America, I’m really surprised that people embrace these films; enough to make them box office successes.  I guess the real question is, can these male actors really convey the character of a woman better than an actual woman?  I highly doubt it.  Travolta sucked in Hairspray!  I just think it’s kinda silly.

It’s 4am and I am procrastinating on my packing.  I’m heading out to Barcelona in about twelve hours and I’m feeling lazy.  It’s funny that I resorted to updating my blog considering I am typically too lazy to update this on a regular day.  Does that even make sense?  I’m procrastinating on a task with another task that I typically procrastinate on.  I am an idiot.  Actually, this reminds me of a comment that I heard someone make when I was walking to the Metro the other week.  I passed this couple walking on the sidewalk and the charming bloke wittily said "I’m so fucking hungry, I don’t think that I can fucking eat, I’m so hungry."  This totally struck me as odd because a) it didn’t make a lot of sense at the surface, and b) his girlfriend appeared to be genuinely amused by his comment.  I mean, I get it.  He was so hungry, he physically couldn’t muster the strength to eat, but come on?!?  Seriously?!?  I think it had more to do with the way he said it or maybe I was bothered that the woman was enjoying his "wittiness".  Whatever!  To each their own.

So I cracked open my paint supplies and decided to try my hand at painting.  I don’t think I’ve painted anything artistically since 7th Grade (the American way of saying Grade 7).  I still remember Art that year with Mr. Bone.  What a strange fellow he was.  He drove around in a blue station wagon with bright pink hub caps.  Ballsy and crazy at the same time.  Anyway, painting is friggin difficult.  I really need a lot more practice and I think I need to familiarize myself with my brushes before I can paint the way I want to.  The results are just not good enough for my own standards.  Come to think of it, I think I probably need to invest in some other painting tools, brushes, better paints and an arsenal of colours.  What I have now is seemingly inadequate.  Yes, I am blaming the tools and not my lack of talent.  :)  I managed to paint a weird looking bird on a saturated green background.  It will not see the light of day!  So that was painting #1.  If I ever become famous, then that will be worth millions!  haha.  I made myself laugh!

Well, time to pack.  I am off to Barcelona in about 12 hours, barring delays at the airport.  I’m only gone for a few days, so it’s a short trip.  I’ve had a lot of people ask me if I’m excited or not.  For some reason, I’m not.  Maybe cause I know I’m only missing 2 days of work or maybe because I will be back within a weeks time.  Before I sign off, I’m gonna list some new songs that I find worthy of a recommendation.  Some are questionable, I know:

Duran Duran - Nite Runner (Timbaland produced this album, give their songs a chance)
Duran Duran - Falling Down (JT co-wrote this song)
Duran Duran - Box Full O’ Honey
Duran Duran - Skin Divers
Chris Brown - With You
Chris Brown - You
Chris Brown - Down (ft Kanye West) (Kanye doesn’t disappoint)
Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love
Jennifer Lopez - Brave (I hate her voice too, but the whole arrangement is catchy)
Britney Spears - Radar (God I hate her, but this song is catchy enough to warrant a mention)
Backstreet Boys - Unmistakable (the piano part remind me of another song that I cannot place)
Alicia Keys - No one (my colleague Kwaun has been playing this song for over a month at work. i’m kinda sick of it now, but at one time, it was a fantastic song)
Ingrid Michaelson - The Way I Am
Silverchair - Straight Lines (not the same sound from the 90s band; they’ve totally re-invented themselves)

So after I returned from the cruise, I had become moderately more interested in paintings and other works of art.  I bought some art supplies and decided to try my hand at painting.  I haven’t done that yet, but I’m sure it will be (don’t laugh) magical when I do.  :)  So I found out that Peter Max was going to be making an appearance at the mall.  He’s pretty famous for his work and he’s been painting for at least 40 years. 
I called the store up and found out that with any purchase, you would get an additional sketch drawing, a picture with Max, and his coffee table book with personalized inscription (a value of $265 on his website).  I missed the morning appearance and decided to trek all the way out to Tyson’s Galleria to check out the event.  Tyson’s Galleria is far away and a pain in the ass to get to when you don’t have a car.  On paper, it doesn’t seem so bad.  Go to West Falls Church Metro station and take the bus to the mall.  Well, I was on the Metro, taking a nap, and this large woman sat in the empty seat next to me except she missed the seat and got mostly my arm and leg instead.  No sorry, or excuse me was uttered.  Wow!  Rude!  Anyway, I must have missed the bus for the hour because I wanted about 55 min for the next one.  What’s really stupid is that there are actually three buses on that route that goes to Tyson’s.  Whoever thought up the weekend schedule is a moron because all three are scheduled to come within a 5 min period.  So instead of spreading out the bus service, everyone gets pooled up at the bust stop for an hour and then the three buses swing by to pick everyone up.  Does anybody else see the inefficiency in that?  To make things worse, the bus drivers I encountered were fucking assholes and liars.  The first driver stopped at a mall and I asked him if it was Tyson’s Galleria, and he said, so I got off.  I walked into the mall only to find out that he had let me off at Tyson’s Corner.  To put it into perspective, it’s kinda like getting dropped off at Science World, only to find out that you need to be at GM Place.  WTF!!??!!  I made my way back out to the bus stop and saw the 3T pulling away.  I knew it was going past the Galleria but the mofo said he wasn’t.  He hesitated when he answered me and I knew he was lying too.  Prick!  So I ended up walking to the Galleria which was about 15 min away.  I left my apartment at 3pm and I didn’t get to Tyson’s Galleria until 6pm.  At that point in time, I thought ‘maybe I should really buy some art to make this trip worth the effort’.

Well, I got to the store at exactly 6pm, when the event was supposed to start.  There were a lot of people there.  And free Yellow Tail wine too!  I was quite impressed by the pieces that they had on the walls.  A lot of it was mixed media pieces and very few were full out acrylic on canvas.  The ones that were fully painted were really expensive.  I liked a lot of them, but I didn’t like the prices.  There were supposed to be about 200 items for sale, ranging from $2000-87000.  As tempted as I was to purchase one, I could bring myself to pay $2000 for a tiny little painted heart with a few other squiggles of paint.  I stared at a couple for a while, but I just couldn’t do it.  I thought that I could do the same thing.  I also thought that for $2000, I could buy another TV, or go home 3-4 times, or go on another extravagant vacation, or etc…  I like his work, but apparently not enough.  Peter Max was not what I expected.  I’ve seen a lot of images of him and it was always an artsy silhouette of his face or some dated photo from the 70s or 80s.  So I was quite surprised to see that he was really old frail looking guy and a bit perverted looking too.  Sorry Peter, if you’re reading this, I don’t mean any disrespect, but I saw you stop everything you were doing to talk to some beautiful chick and take a picture with her while there was a line of people waiting to meet you.  And I couldn’t help but notice that you spent a little bit more time drawing more detailed and nicer sketches for the (busty) women.  In fact, I think that’s quite all right with me.  I would probably do the same.  Well, suffice to say, it was a thrill to see you in person and I think that every website should update their photos of you cause it’s really deceiving.  Those pictures of you are 2 or 3 decades old!  Anyway, I vow to one day own a piece of your work!  So after mulling around and convincing myself not to buy a painting, I left after about an 75 minutes later.  It took me another two hours to get home.  Buses suck!

This week was Halloween.  We had a company event on Tuesday and I decided to dress up for once in my life and have a little fun.  I even joined the costume contest
but I didn’t win.  My peeps let me down during the judging period.  I guess they didn’t cheer loud enough.  I think it was a close event and it wasn’t particularly accurate since the woman with the device to measure applause was walking all over the place and obviously not getting a consistent reading.  Most people thought the costume was great though and I’m glad I did it.  For $22.30, you cannot go wrong with it.  The next night was actually Halloween, so Anand, Nakisa and I went out to Georgetown to soak in the festivities.  We were a tad early so we had dinner at Uno first.  I’ve decided that after trying deep dish pizza for a 3rd time, I will never order it again.  OK, maybe not never again, but at least not for a long time.  I’ve never eaten it and thought that it was anything special.  It’s only always been alright.  I get way more joy out of a regular pizza from Pizza Hut or even the craptacular $.99 pizza slices from Fresh Slice downtown Vancouver (Iraqi Spice anybody?).  To accommodate all the extra toppings and the weight of all of all of the ingredients in a deep dish, the crust is generally more doughy or thick.  I just don’t like it.  I like my crust crispy, oily and light and deep dish doesn’t provide that at all.  So we wrapped up dinner and walked around Georgetown.  Stupidly, the cops didn’t close out the streets yet and it was nearing 930 pm.  So everyone was crammed onto the tiny Georgetown sidewalks.  We were packed like sardines and I’d say that the whole experience was relatively disappointing.  I expected to see a lot more people dressed up, but only 10-15% of the people there were in costume.  And I had heard that there would be a lot of hoes dressed like hoes, but I only saw a handful of them in a 10-12 block walk.  Halloween was way more fun in NY.

I also went to the DC United playoff game this week.  Aaron, Brad and I got some decent seats near some obnoxious Chicago fans.  I’m pretty sure we weren’t like that at the Canucks game, because these guys were running around pointing and screaming directly at people.  One guy in particular was being a grade A dick.  The game was pretty good.  The United were down 2-0 at the half and they came back to tie it.  They also scored the go-ahead goal in extra time, but it was called back because the ref called a hand-ball infraction.  Unbelievable call!  That cost the United an advancement to the next round.  It was fun though; there was great beer and good peanuts in the mix.  Brad, you have me hooked on shelled peanuts now!

In terms of work, I’m going to try to move into a new department.  Let’s hope things work out.  If things don’t work out, I may be coming home earlier than I expected.  Haha.  We’ll see how things go.  Wish me luck.

We had the Canucks game planned for weeks and the day finally came around last night.  Joel had organized to have a group of us attend the game together.  To make it even better, we found out that the Washington Capitals and Connect2Canada (a network set up in Washington DC to keep local Canadians connected) was holding an event at a nearby bar.  So basically, an hour before the game, they were offering up an open bar for one hour prior to the start of the game.  Penn Quarter Sports Tavern appeared to be a Canadian run establishment.  They had a giant Canadian flag hanging outside.  Pretty cool.  Well, right away, I knew it would be a fun night.  I walked in and everyone was in a genuinely festive good move, smiling and saying hello to all of us.  Typical Canadians eh?  So there was free beer being poured and they were also handing out samples of Canadian Club.   I ordered a crab cake sandwich and some of the other guys tried out their poutine.  The sandwich wasn’t too bad, and the poutine wasn’t very geniune (shredded cheddar instead of cheese curds), but what do you expect from bar food really?  It was time to go and we were ready to pay for our food when we found out that the food was on the house too!  Wow!  Awesome!  I tipped our waitress and we headed out to the game.

The game was great.  We shelled out $85 for sweet lower bowl seats near the goal line.  We were about 10-12 rows up which were perfect.  I was hoping that a puck would fly over the boards and hit someone so I could grab a souvenir, but it didn’t happen.  Most of us were wearing our Canucks jerseys or Canucks t-shirts and like someone said, they worked like magnets.  There were a lot of Canucks fans and a lot of Canadians in attendance.  Every time one walked by, we exchanged friendly cheers.  We paid special attention to the females and there were quite a few cute ones.  Marty, what happened to you and that chick from Calgary?   Anybody spot us in the crowd?  We were a loud group and we had a great time.  It really helped that the Canucks won.  Pyatt’s first goal was lucksack bullshit, but the rest of the game was pretty good.  We plan on going to some more games; probably when another Canadian team comes into town.  I wanna go to Toronto so I can boo the shit out of them, but I don’t think anybody wants to waste their money to watch them either.  Ottawa or Montreal are starting to sound good though.  The account manager that set up our seats actually came by to say hi during the game.  Apparently he can get us cheaper seats next time around.  Good stuff!

Earlier today, I went to Rockville.  It was supposed to be the new Chinatown area from what I had heard.  It was quite nice and you could see that it was developing quickly.  They were actually holding some kind of grand opening event for the new downtown area.  I didn’t see any Asian markets nearby so I walked a few blocks away and finally found a Maxim Supermarket.  It was great!  This is the first time in 9 months that I had walked into an Asian market since I got here.  I picked up some great food and some other great stuff that I had been missing; real potstickers (not the bullcrap ones at Costco), chinese sausage, chinese pork and veg buns, sticky rice wrap, a steamer rack, and a big ceramic bowl.  I had so much other stuff to buy, but I figured I wouldn’t overdo it.  Next time, I’ll pick up some beef balls, pastries, and bbq pork. 

As I am typing this up, I needed a snack and I fished out a thing of yogurt that was passed it’s best before date by two weeks.  I opened it up and it smelled and looked okay.  I tasted it and it tasted fine.  In fact, it was pretty tasty.  Green tea mango from Lucerne.  I think I will get some more of it and not let it sit this long next time.  Let’s hope it doesn’t give me the shits.  I’ve also been watching the 40-Year-Old Virgin HD-DVD the last few hours.  Man, it has tonnes of extra footage.  The bonus material is ridiculously long.  I think I am nearing four hours of outtakes, raw footage, interviews, commentary, deleted scenes, audition videos, etc… It’s an impressive collection though.  Alright.  That’s it.  I’m done!!  There’s actually more meaning to that, but I’ll wait until a little later to expand on it.  Peace!

Thee weather here has been spectacular.  It’s barely rained and the weather’s been cool or warm.  The temperature is about 70-90 degrees (approximately 20-30 degress Celsius).  It’s been so nice, I haven’t minded walking around town lately.  I hear it’s been pissing rain back home.  That sucks!  It’s been pretty nice here.  I guess that’s one positive thing about this neck of the woods.  Case in point, last weekend, it was a beautifully gorgeous day and there was an event in my area called Taste of Bethesda.  Picture this: the annual Nibbles and Bites event in Richmond, but a venue that is 10x bigger, stretching across multiple blocks.  The city basically shut down all of the streets in the Woodmont Triangle area.  The best part about this is that it was basically in my back yard.  I saw the posters for it the day before and I dragged my ass out to check it out because the website listed a bunch of decent restaurants, including Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and Morton’s.  The concept was the same as N&B; buy tickets and exchange them for food.  Tickets were $1.25 a piece and none of the food offerings were supposed to be more than 3 tickets.  It seemed reasonable, but a lot of the items were priced at 3 tickets and a lot of the offerings were a rip off.  Ruth’s Chris and Morton’s were offering up tiny steak sandwiches and as much as I like them for their steaks, I just didn’t feel like getting a 1/4 sandwich for $3.75.   There was a local restaurant with a huge pan of paella.
Check out the picture below.  I started off with a crab cake sandwich.  It was pretty good.  I wish it was a little hotter, but it was pretty good.  Lately, I had been craving sausage rolls.  They don’t really sell them here.  I haven’t found them at Safeway, and I am too lazy to trek out to Giants to check if they carry them.  Anyway, I saw someone order these Irish Sausage Rolls and the 4 pieces they handed him looked so good.  So I ordered it too.  Well, I guess the guy earlier had ordered 2 orders, cause they only handed me two measly pieces.   Two tickets, for two bites.  I’ll give the restaurant credit though.  They were awesome!
Next up, I found a place that offered up a BBQ platter.  It was the best value in the whole event.  Ribs, pulled pork, drumstick, coleslaw and a biscuit.  It was pretty good too.  I bought some more tickets just to get a bottle of water and I was pretty full by then.  So I had 3 left over tickets and decided to get a cupcake.  Let’s preface this by saying that there’s a place just a couple buildings over from my apartment called Just Cakes.  I’ve always wanted to go in and take a look, but I always feared that I would walk out with too many sweets.   So this was a perfect time to try out their cupcakes.  I was going to get a regular cupcake for 2 tickets, but just as I got up to the booth, they had run out, so I bought a fancy 3 ticket one which was supposed to be a deluxe type of cupcake.  Wow!  It was fantastic!  Wes and Lisa, when you come visit, I’ll be sure to get you some from there.  A total ripoff for a cupcake, but it was damn good and a perfect way to end the afternoon.  If I’m still here next year, I cannot wait to attend the event again.

This weekend, a bunch of us went out to Buffalo Billiards.  It’s a huge ass sports bar near the office with a lot of pool tables, dart boards, and shuffleboard tables.  We decided to play shuffleboard.  It ’s not the one you play on the floor with the flat discs and  sticks/cues.  This one’s played on a long ass table with these weighted pucks that look like mini curling stones.  It’s pretty fun.  If you spot one in Vancouver, you should definitely give it a try.  In fact, someone should buy one of those instead of a pool table.  It takes up less room and is easy for anyone to play.  You just slide the pucks down the table and try to get it as close to the edge as possible.  The closer you get, the more points you score.  It’s actually very similar to curling, cause some of the rules are the same.  It’s neat cause the pucks glide down the table with ease.  I look forward to playing it again soon.

Last night we went out to lunch at Pho 75.  Service sucked ass, as expected, but the food was pretty good.  Their ice coffee was good too.  The menu was pretty basic.  In fact, the first 4 items sounded identical except for slight variations on one meat item.  We hit up the mall for a few hours, then we went to Dupont for some dinner.  We had our sites on the Afterwards Cafe, a restaurant in the back of Kramerbooks on Connecticut Ave.  The wait was too long so we went to a huge Italian restaurant called Buca di Bepo.  It was an hour long wait too, so we settled on fast food at Five Guys.  The burgers are pretty good and if you get french fries with your order, they’ll give you a generous amount.  After dinner, we chilld out Gazuza’s for some drinks and hookah.  I had never tried hookah before but I was curious to try it out.  They have one of those Hookah places on Davie I think.  Hookah is the flavoured tobacco water pipe thingy.  We ordered the double apple and it was surprisingly pretty nice.

I’m so glad hockey season is back.  I intend on winning as many of my hockey pools as possible and I’m really looking forward to watching the Canucks on October 26th out here.  There are over 20 of us going to the game that night so it should be pretty fun.  I just finished watching Saturday Night Live from last night and Bon Jovi was the host.  He sucked big time.  I think he was so bad, he was only in 4 skits.  Don’t quit your day job Jon.  Earlier today, I watched Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.  I had no idea what the movie was about, but it was quite entertaining.  I highly recommend it.  Anyway, no hi jinx or anything lately, at least nothing I can think of, so I’ll sign off for now.

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!

No.  I’ll start off with that statement.  It wasn’t that bad.  It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as horrible as people were making it out to be.  I guess part of it was my own doing.  I was scaring myself.  I had created this image of a tiny little town with dirt roads, rednecks and tumbleweed.  It was far from that though, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it was a decent town with lots of decent people.  Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of the stereotypical Southern bumpkins here, but almost all of them were very cordial.  What was the composition of the town?  Lexington is quite a big city.  I was driving through and I noticed a giant liquor store called Liquor
Barn.  It was so big, I had to take a picture of it.  Coincidentally, I later found out that the town I was heading to, Somerset, was a dry town.  That means it didn’t sell alcohol there.  Lame.  Hmmm… I think I saw one other Asian (and she might have been some old guy’s caretaker or maybe a girlfriend <shiver>) and about six African Americans out of the hundreds of people that I encountered here.  I guess that didn’t really surprise me.

This whole week has been a mental drain and it’s only been four days.  I’ve been going to bed early and getting about 7 hours of sleep each night and I still feel like I’ve been pulling all-nighters.  You should see me struggling to type this even.  Maybe it’s all the pizza and wings that I ate for dinner tonight.  That kicked my ass too.  I’m just exhausted.  It’s been crazy busy and I feel like I’m all alone at work.  It’s too much to get into right now, but I think I’ve been grumbling a lot more about the job more than I have the past few months.  ARrrgghhhh!  I hate working 11 hour days.  I’ve been reflecting on things a lot lately.  It’s not like the work has diminished or gotten easier.  Processes haven’t improved.  Things have somehow gotten more convoluted and the people supporting me have disappeared.  To make things worse I’ve been thrust into a role where responsibility and load have increased dramatically, but all I’m getting out of it is an influx of gray hairs.  I’m gonna start looking like Allan soon.  :)  Anyway, I’m just griping because I’m tired and exhausted.  I should be happier cause I’m going to be back in Vancouver for a two week stint. 

Ha.  Ok.  Enough of that.  I got way off track.  I was working at a call-centre this week.  It was in the middle of no where.  Literally.  If i wanted to get food, I had to drive 20-30 minutes away to get a bite.  This contributed to my four straight days without lunch and four straight late dinners.  The place was very nondescript.  There was no address on the building and no company name.  Even when I got into the door, there was nothing that showed me that I had arrived at the right place.  I just guessed that it was the building cause there was only one other one to choose from on that road.  The problem with this place was that it was infested with flies.  Fucking flies everywhere.  It was like there was cow dung smeared on the furniture.  They were everywhere.  And crickets.  Lots of fucking crickets.  By the end of today, I thought it was getting really annoying and a little disgusting.  Apparently they fired their cleaning crew last night.  I don’t blame them.  They are useless.

The call centre sure knew how to give their employees some incentive.  They whipped out two HDTV flatscreens and based on some metrics, two of them could take them home.  Pretty cool.  One of the managers there told me that they also had about 20 IPOD Nanos to give away too.  Pretty impressive.  I wonder why my company isn’t able to provide those kind of incentives…  extra work isn’t much of an incentive.  Ha! There I go again.. bitch bitch bitch!

Southern food sucks.  I was expecting some decent food here.  Not the case.  The coolest thing I saw was a Lee’s Chicken restaurant.  I hadn’t seen one of these since
high school.  My first dinner here, I went to Bob Evans.  That place is terrible.  I wanna say disgusting, so I will.  It was disgusting.  I ordered ribs.  I think there was more sauce on the plate than there was pork.  It came with these weird sweet corn griddle cakes.  Picture little pancakes with corn in the batter and garnished with dried green onions.  Don’t I paint a pretty picture?  Another night, the account manager was going to take me out for dinner.  We went to some place for pizza.  That’s when I parked my car and opened the door, only to hit some guy that was backing into the spot next to me.  He was definitely one of those badnews redneck kind of guys: scrawny, a hick-tache with a white wife beater and tattoos all over the place.  All I heard was ‘ya better get that fucking door off my truck’.  I just said sorry and walked away.  I didn’t really wanna stick around and have the guy build up his anger and take it out on me.  Later, I was a little miffed because I had just parked, grabbed my bag from the passenger seat and opened the door.  He must have seen that I had just parked so screw him for not approaching the spot with caution or letting me get out first.  Anyway, the guy ended up going to the same pizza place as us, and the account manager said ‘I don’t like the smoke. Let’s go some where else’.  I wonder if it was the smoke there or the type of people that were at the establishment.  They were all a little rough around the edges and a lot like the guy in the pickup truck.  We ended up eating at a steakhouse in the same complex.  The food kinda sucked there too.  My broccoli couldn’t have been more dry and salty.  The mashed potatoes had a huge ice cream size scoop of fluorescent yellow butter on top of it.  It was almost as big as the scoop of mashed potatoes.  That’s how gross it was.  So, what do I think of the food overall?  Two big thumbs down!!

I’m a little surprised that the chambermaid keeps leaving me new bars of soap each day even though I’m still using the same bar I started with.  I now have 4 unopened bars of soap on my counter asking me to take them.  The worse part is that the soap sucks so I don’t even really want them.  Why doesn’t she leave me tissue boxes or something I could really use.

Alright.  I’m gonna wrap this up.  I’ve rambled on way too much.  See ya’ll back in Vancouver.  Can you hear my new accent?

Delays, cancellations, delays, re-booking, delays, delays, delays, delays.  This is what actually happened to me.  This stupid flight should have ended hours ago.

Let’s put this into perspective.  Washington, DC to Lexington, KY is about 550 miles apart from one another.  Google Maps, calculates that it would take approximately 8.5 hrs to drive there.  A direct flight would probably be about 2 hours.  My first flight alone was delayed 2.5 hours.  Then my connecting flight was outright canceled.  United.com sent me a voice message to tell me that the delays affected my itinerary and re-scheduled my connecting flight to one the next morning at 730am.  So I waited 2 hours in the customer service line to see if they would hook me up with some accommodations and food.  It turns out, since my flights were delayed/canceled due to mother nature’s wrath, I didn’t qualify for any of those perks.  But the guy was able to get me onto an earlier flight.  Problem solved I thought.  I thought wrong.  It was supposed to leave at 7:44pm.  At the time I was typing this, it was pushed back 4 times, to where it currently states a departure of 10:26.  I’ve been in an airport for 15 hours now. 

I think we’re about to board soon. The lady at the desk is telling us that we have to walk outside, in the pissing rain, to the little plane.  Effing great!  I’m gonna wrap up this little update for now.  I hope they didn’t lose my luggage…… TTYL!

**UPDATE**

Well, I’m not surprised, they did lose my luggage!  Sweet!  I am so lucky.  3 am and I’m finally in Kentucky.  That goodness Mark lives here.  Thanks for letting me stay the night at your place Mark!  I get to drive around in a Chevy Equinox.  It’s a lot better than I thought it would be.  It’s actually a pretty nice drive.  Things are getting better I think.  Then again, could it get any worse?

Oh, I just opened the care pouch that United gave me when I filed my lost luggage papers.  It’s almost all H20 stuff.   Wow.  Good shit.  They win some points back for that. 

I’m headed to Somerset, Kentucky tomorrow morning.  I don’t really want to pass judgment before I’ve landed, but the place sounds like it’s in the middle of nowhere.  I actually land in Lexington, Kentucky, and according to Google Maps, Somerset is a 2 hr drive away.  That frickin blows.  I’m convinced that I’ll be one of a dozen Chinese guys in the whole town.  I get a feeling that it’ll be one of those places where everyone will walk past me on the street and turn around and stare at me.  Maybe a couple of them will curse me out and call me a jap/chink. Ha!  We’ll see.  Let’s put it this way, when I tell everyone where I’m going, they roll their eyes and they tell me ‘Sorry to hear that’.  At least there will probably be some good food there.  I’m expecting that their BBQ will be decent.

Today, I woke up early to get my Maryland driver’s license.  I wanted some official ID that stated my address here, so I figured I’d exchange my BC

driver’s license.  Plus I always hated the BC driver’s license.  To this day, I contend that the background image is the ugliest picture in the world.  It’s not representative of Beautiful BC at all.  Anyway, I was reading up on the exchange requirements on the www and for out-of-country transitions, I was supposed to take a 3-hour drug and alcohol seminar as well as take a knowledge and driver’s skills test.  But my buddy Gurp had his exchanged last weekend and he said it was pretty straight forward and I guess the Maryland Vehicle Association (MVA) was too lazy to enforce the seminar and knowledge test.  Lucky for me.  I’ll give them credit for a slick operation though.  There must have been 200 people in the MVA office, and I was only there for an hour, plus I walked out of there with my new identification.  It was even warm.  I knew they were supposed to take away my BC ID, and they did, but some how, Gurp managed to keep his.  He is one lucky bastard.  He is luckier than me.  I shit you not.  He pays rent and gets his cheques returned to him cause his rental place is full of idiots.  This didn’t happen once.  This happened twice!!  He’s had a slew of other fortunate encounters, but I won’t get into any more of it.

Last week, I went to Melissa and Victor’s wedding.  It was a pretty good day and I had a great time.  One of the memorable moments was when Melissa was about to walk down the aisle.  She was standing at the back of the church with her parents, waiting at the door for the music or the right moment.  Everyone was looking at her and there were some late comers.  The door opened behind Melissa and in walked this woman with the shortest little dress.  It was awesome.  My eyes quickly diverted off of Melissa (sorry Mel!) and onto the mystery girl.  I looked around and I wasn’t the only one.  Anyway, she wore that dress all day and to the reception too.  Woohoo!  The rest of the wedding was quite fun.  There was even a garter and bouquet toss.  I don’t even remember when the last time someone did that.  Good times.  I have a couple more weddings to attend this year. 

There’s not much else going on here other than the shit for work.  It’s a bit of a mess, but with time, I’m sure it’ll be fine.  Too bad busy season is kicking into high gear, and that might be the biggest obstacle to overcome.  I’ll wrap up with some completely random things:

• Check envelopes before you throw them out.  I threw away an envelope and I didn’t realize my birth certificate was in it.  It wasn’t until a few hours later when I walked past the garbage can and noticed that the card had slipped into the clear address window.  Fuck, that was stupid AND a mighty close call!
• We were eating lunch at Chipotles when Brant walked in and was in line waiting for food.  We exchanged baseball signals and fooled around with various forms of bullshit sign language from across the room.  I went back to eating and that’s when I noticed that the table next to us was also signing, but for real.  I guess one of them was mute.  I felt like a donkey’s ass.
• Go see Superbad.  It’s hilarious!  Despite it being a Friday night, I went to watch the late show and it was totally worth it! I didn’t even fall asleep.
• I tried to sign up for some kind of health insurance, but maybe I didn’t fill out the form properly, because my application was declined.  No reason was given.  WTF?!?  I’m supposedly less than 3 months away from being allowed to sign up again under the policy with work.  We’ll see how that goes.
• My 2 week vacation in Vancouver at the end of the month has turned into a 50/50 work/vacation trip.  The good thing is that I get to work from Vancouver and save some vacation days, the bad thing is that I am working.  This is probably a good thing since I would have been too stressed out about work if I left it untouched for two weeks.  This means that I might actually come home for Christmas too.  Although I’m entertaining the idea of going to NY.  Although that really depends on the following…
• Should I go to Toronto or NY for Thanksgiving?  It’s a four-day long weekend, so it’s a perfect stretch for a quick trip to one of those places.  Give me some feedback peeps!

Alright, that’s all for now.  Wish me luck in Hicksville!

I crumbled on Monday and ordered an HD-DVD drive for my XBOX 360.  A week earlier, I borrowed a friend’s drive to check it out and see how big a difference it  made compared to DVDs.  There’s nothing like it.  This totally reminded me of the time when DVD players came out.  Probably around 8 years ago when they were $1000, I bought one from Futureshop, with one purpose, to test it out and return it.  My biggest fear was that they wouldn’t let me return it, but that wasn’t gonna stop me.  So that’s exactly what I did.  I bought one for $1000 and rented a couple DVDs.  It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen at the time.  I returned it a week later and from that point on, I pretty much stopped buying VHS.  HD-DVD is just as revolutionary as the DVD.  So on August 1st, bestbuy.com had a price drop AND a sale.  None of the nearby stores had any in stock so I had them send me one from their warehouse.  Four days later, it showed up at the office.  I still love getting packages there.  AJ, one of the Facilities guys, says that it’s my own little mail room because I get a tonne of mail there.  Later that night, I brought it home and hooked it up, and boy was I disappointed.  It was broken!  The stupid tray wouldn’t open unless you titled it forward and then when you closed, it wouldn’t close properly.  If you shook it around you could hear pieces rattling around inside.  What a pisser that was. 

So the next plan was to exchange it at a store or return it through mail and wait for them to send me another one.  To avoid the wait time and the possibility of them sending me another damaged drive, I decided to hunt one down at a local store.  Like before, there weren’t any available in the closest 6-7 stores.  I did find a couple stores in Virginia that had stock and neither were near a Metro train station.  I didn’t have anything else better to do so I dragged Anand out on Saturday to Potomac Yards Center (PYC) to exchange my drive.  I did some research on how to get there and it seemed rather straight forward.  Ride the train to Pentagon City and catch the 9A bus to PYC.  Well, this all looked and sounded fine in my head, but I am a public transit moron because it was all wrong.  First of all, Pentagon City station is not the same as Pentagon station.  So not only did we get off at the wrong station, we compounded the problem by standing at a bus stop, that wasn’t really a bus stop.  It looked like a bus stop and there were plenty of people waiting for buses, but not transit buses, shuttle buses.  After 35 minutes in the sun, we figured out that we were in the wrong place.   I am an idiot.  We got back on the train and got off the right train station and found the proper bus station.  We were looking for the 9A and it was supposed to show up every 30 min on the hour.  However, the station had an LED sign scrolling an RSS feed of the upcoming buses.  It said that there weren’t any 9A buses for 50 min.  Wow, this was really turning into a gong show.  I was a little bit in disbelief because it didn’t seem right, even for a weekend.   We saw about a dozen buses come up the hill and every time one approached us, we would say ‘Please let this be the 9A. PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE!’  A 9A showed up 15 minutes later, but the douche bag was going on break or switching to another route.  I was ready to give up and snag a cab, but we were in such a remote location, there weren’t any cabs near by either.  Well, after an additional 10 minutes, one showed up.  Woohoo!!  To make things a little better, the bus ride was free.  It turns out that in Virginia, when the weather gets to hot, they try to encourage people to leave their cars at home and take a bus, so they offer free bus rides.  Pretty cool.  So after 2 hours from the time I left home, I finally walked into Best Buy at PYC. 

The roller coaster ride continued.  They said I couldn’t exchange purchases made from their website.  I could only return it.  WTF?!?  So it wasn’t that big a deal because they would sell me another one for the same price that I purchased it online.  I would just return the broken one and my funds would show up on my credit card later this week.  The problem now, was that their computer system to the bestbuy.com site was down and they couldn’t process the return.  Fuck!!!  How much shit can go wrong in one afternoon?  To ease the pain, it was tax free weekend, so when I re-bought the drive, I saved $8+.  It worked out in the end because Anand and I killed some time by eating and visiting Target.  I bought a door mirror for $6.  I don’t know how I was able to survive without a mirror for 7 months.  Anyway, by the time we were done, Best Buy had their system back up and I was able to process a refund.  So the ordeal was over and six hours later, I was home watching movies in HD.  Oh yeah, plus I kept the UPC from the broken drive.  They have a promo running now in the US; if you buy an HD-DVD drive you can mail away for 5 free movies out of a selection of 15.  I intend on sending it out
for an additional 5 free HD movies.  So that’s 10 free movies coming my way.  Anyway, I suggest that everyone get one or even a PS3 for Blue-Ray.  It’s awesome!

On Friday night, we went out to watch The Simpsons Movie.  I must be getting old because I have a hell of a time watching movies on work days.  I think getting up early really takes a lot out of me.  I can feel perfectly fine throughout the day, but as soon as those lights turn out, my eyelids feel like dead weights.  I only missed about 1/3 of the movie I think.  The chick next to me and in front of me were laughing hysterically throughout the movie.  I wanted to lean over and tell her that ‘it wasn’t that funny’.  By coincidence, the Simpsons Movie screener was made available for download.  I burned it onto disc and tried to watch it again this morning, and I got 30 minutes into it when I fell asleep AGAIN!  I guess it’s not that entertaining after all.  I suppose I’m not that old either.  Now that I think about it, I managed to sit through all of Harry Potter and that was on a Monday, not to mention a way longer movie too.

To wrap things up, I managed to eat Chinese food for dinner this week.  We went to some place in Chinatown called Full Kee.  It wasn’t too bad and I’m looking forward to trying some other dishes there in the future.  Alex Ku wanted to order weird shit that not everyone would enjoy.  I saved Anand and Nakisa from eating sea cucumber, frogs, and some other weird shit that he wanted.  Anyway, til next time.  I’m out!

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!