Involuntary Holiday

Although I didn't request nor expect any sort of holiday this year, I have come to accept this unwanted break. I've gotten to the point where I'm leaning on keeping this NEET status until the end of the month when PAX comes and goes, and I would've run out of any other major events to look forward to.

The timing of things have been keeping me rather busy in and out of the house so I'm not quite living up to the NEET title yet. I've have very few days of just pure home time which I ended up spending on playing Tropico 3. Buenas tardes!

A bit before my sudden lay off, I took a quick two day trip down to Seattle for a weekend early July for both Shi2's b-day and to meet up with online FFXI friend, Jiinn, visiting from Phoenix, AZ. Saturday consisted of some brief Downtown loitering, the Pike Place Market, the Space Needle slash French Festival thing, not awesome Chinese ayce hotpot and finally ended with a failed attempt at karaoke because the place was crazy packed. The rest of the night involved chilling out with liquor, chips and wasabi peas. Sunday encountered technical issues with online friend's mobile, so we ended up doing things ourselves with our gentleman guide, Garret, who followed us shopping ladies around when we shopped. Dinner was at none other than the Cheesecake Factory because no Seattle trip is complete without Cheesecake Factory!  Then finally we raided Walmart as usual before getting home at a ridiculous time in the morning for work the same day (me, anyway).

The Saturday following my termination, a group of us visited an anime-themed Summer Festival at SFU to do some "research" for a possible business opportunity in the near future. More on it if/when it develops. I also surprisingly bumped into LightingSabre near the end of our visit. After pestering people to do the surveys for us, we fled the scene and stopped by the night market for some eats before finally going to Industry for some many drinks, compiling the survey results and unexpected appearances by childhood friends.

Oh, MiniComi. Spent the day hanging out with Jenny who wanted to check it out and take some photos of her campus before she left for Japan later that month. A bit disappointing seeing that it was a gathering of artists which unfortunately didn't quite capture the artist quality we actually have here in Vancouver. That one room they fit the event into didn't seem to do the event enough justice. Assuming it was successful to them, I'd like to see them do a lot better next year.

The International Autonomous Robot Racing Competition was happening at the same time right outside the SUB building. Not so sure about the "international" part since the competitors were all from Canadian universities.  Watching the little guys move and recognize (or not recognizing) the road ahead of them was more amusing than what was happening inside the school.

It's the "Kinect" (top) VS the "PSEye" (bottom).

Tired and hungry, we left the campus when we were done with the photo taking.  Found Shi2 and gang free for dinner so we settled for some good old bar food at the Flying Beaver. Brought with her was fellow bRO player, Kaz, visiting from England for the two weeks.  Being the youngest group in the bar, we failed miserably at the songs-older-than-we-are guessing game.

And finally, went for a weekend trip to Portland during the last long weekend (last weekend of July). I sadly didn't end up getting anything but my parents (and aunt) got quite a haul. I spent most of the travel time watching Glee although I'm nowhere close to catching up. We followed a tour bus for this trip which also took us to some sightseeing places like the Point Defiance Zoo, but it was mainly all shopping. We sat in on a skit at the zoo which conveniently used the bad gamer stereotype vs the nature lover *rolls eyes* but yeah, compared to a video game, a real life lynx is a lot cooler.

 

 

To compensate for the lack of photos, here's some from Eat! Vancouver a few months back. Observe: beer tasting (with chocolates) and wine tasting (with cheeses).