Oh Mondays...

This has absolutely nothing to do with it being a Monday but it all happened on a Monday so there.

Got to work to find a young seagull dead behind the fenced area at work. Kind of sad. My new supervisor's kid (who sometimes comes over to waste her summer time away) visited and made it a paper plaque and tapped it on the fence edge. She named it Mimi. Then again, we've been getting a few trapped baby seagulls in the fenced area as of late. Seems like they fall right off the roof where their nests are (thus why I always have so much birdSHIT! on my car) and being unable to fly out, they get stuck. We've been releasing them as fast as we see them and yet...

A new lady showed up today who's apparently going to be taking my place when I leave. How come I'm not surprised they picked an old lady as opposed to all the young'uns who applied. (btw, it's because it's less likely the old ones will jump ship) Anyway, she's a pretty nice lady who's Mandarin fluent and has pretty decent English... but because work's been dead the past few days, there was absolutely nothing to do. I tried to talk about work stuff for a bit but she probably can't retain all that information without actually having some hands-on experience. It was prolly boring as hell for her to sit beside me while I tried not to surf on the net (but there was nothing else...!). Uh should I have offered my computer? I'm not sure what I should've done. What is to happen tomorrow?!

Before speaking of tomorrow, on my drive home from work I felt my car do a little "tug" and then soon after I noticed my engine light on. ?! I ripped out my car manual then tried to flip to the right section on the rest of my way back but didn't get to the right page until I got into the garage. It's either related to a connection to the electricity or gas. I got out of the car and the garage reeked of gasoline. Bad sign. Really bad. Don't blow up on me, please. I called the service and found out they were busy all week. Well, I'm too scared to drive my car and busing to work will probably require me to leave home by 6:30am so I think I'll want this fixed asap. I'm going to take some hours off tomorrow morning to see if there are any well timed cancellations. Don't blow up on my way there, please. I promise I won't speed, I swear.

Eventful August Days

It's August and that means school is approaching soon (nuooo~)... The week itself has been eventful and busy and it wasn't until today I finally get to just bum around and just savor being one.

Work has all of a sudden become rather busy - my new supervisor put in an ad into the Chinese newspaper to find more permanent warehouse workers to replace the ones the previous psychotic supervisor hired who were mostly summer only workers. Everyday we'd get about 20 or so calls from all sorts of people for the job and only on Friday did we start bringing them in for brief interviews to screen them. I think the weirdest candidates I saw right before I left Friday were these two old couples (almost old enough to be my grandparents) who brought their grandkid with them. And no, it wasn't the grandchild who was applying, it was the COUPLE.

On top of all the insane number of calls, some of the customers who still use a portion of our warehouse to store things also decided to move their stuff out as well. I, who suddenly became in charge of that, had to fumble around to do counting, invoicing and arrangements... it didn't help that I had never done it before either.

Friday night was also, hrm, in a sense, interesting as well. My brother told us that he might introduce his girlfriend to us "casually" that evening. Casually which was not dining out I suppose. We gave him a call to see if they were coming by and he said no. Later in the late evening, past dinner, and we figured that she wouldn't be showing up that night at all. Considering the time of night, I went to shower and get into more comfortable clothing. After I was done, I heard noise outside my door and I figured it was my dad and brother talking as usual. I quickly wrapped a turban towel over my wet hair and half put on my top (half being not completely on) and swung open the door to find his girlfriend from across the my brother's room smiling at me.

Being dumbfounded at first and just staring back, my brother walks by and asks me what I was wearing and I followed to answer that it was obviously my PJs. Awkwardly, I kinda waved to her, said hi, then said I think I'll go back into my room now... and so I did. It will be dangerous around the house from now on. Since she's already seen me in my PJs, which I'd think is safe to say that it's one of the most casual way of meeting a person for the first time, I greeted her again in my PJs today as I bummed at home. She greeted me back and laughed, so I think we're cool.

Continuing the ever so eventful weekend theme... Saturday morning, Moni, Braman and myself headed down to Chinatown for some Chinatown festival. We found parking and then had dim sum at Floata where we got tricked into eating a $16 coldplate! I didn't know that Floata still had the old school pushcarts so we waited around impatiently for food (since they didn't do special orders either!). After the decent lunch, we headed to the actual festival which was basically the MORNING nightmarket as there were all the same stands. There was this one Korean table that gave out free mini pottery pots and all you had to do was lineup for one (and so we did). While we waited, there was this European (?!) lady who sang country songs on the stage for her awesome audience made up of old Chinatown grandparents. After we got our pots, we went to my friend's bun stand (http://www.bonchaz.com) where we helped buy and eat some expensive buns. $2 a bun is pricy. At least it's good.

After the festival, I went home to drop off my pot and headed out to Matt's annual BBQ party at his place. When I got there, the guys were trying to put up a tarp over his porch in fear of rain. After watching the futile attempt, they gave up and forgot about it. They started cooking late but people came in late too expecting the food to be ready by the time they arrived which is smart thinking. The mandarin speaking group their own thing and played some board game in their corner while another group played rockband with only two instruments. Other groups were scattered everywhere, chatting and getting drunk. The types of people that were there were so varied, I wasn't actually sure where to be. I tried to keep myself busy eating but I could only eat so much. When most of the people had gone, the insane drunkards began going head to head on SF Puzzle Fighter. It was hilarious (and painful) watching drunk people play a game that was supposedly fastpaced.

Someone tried to get me drunk. NOPE wasn't going to happen.

Fireworks 2009 - Part 2

The fireworks has come and gone. Also means summer is close to its end...

Wednesday July 29, 2009 - UK
I had work that morning so I met up with Monica again at the sky train station after work. We ended up getting White Spot to go again just because we were indecisive on what to eat. When we arrived, everyone was already there so we relieved them from their post to go grab food for a bit. Sty decided to show up this time yay! The evening went by pretty quickly. There was the usual ungrateful bastardous crowd who did not say anything when we purposely gave up some of our beach space to them, and due to the massive crowd that showed up that night, most of us decided to stay standing for the show. Man, standing on uneven ground is tiring.

UK's performance was really symphonic (and even epic at times) which I really liked but the rest of the group thought otherwise.

Saturday August 1, 2009 - China
Wow August. That morning, Moni and I woke up early to ensure we'd get down to the beach earlier so that Sty won't end up getting mad at us for not showing up on time. On our way out, I was informed that Sty was waiting for Saboo to get ready so ok, they'd get there all around the same time as us - 11:30 was the plan. On our way down to the beach, we picked up Greek to go from Stephos and that was when I got a call from Saboo telling us that Sty was frantically looking for her beach stuff. *headdesk* Either way, me and Moni took our time walking down the rest of the way. We didn't have any camp items (e.g. mat, towels, umbrellas) so we just sat by our designated log until reinforcements arrived an hour or so later. At least the Greek was enjoyable... the bee that kept pestering us - not so much.

I brought out the beach monster and poked at the PSP for a while before more people came. Then the sun just made me sleepy and tired but dinnertime was approaching so me and Mo went for a walk and food. We got ourselves giant slurpee drinks to ensure no dehydration and also found ourselves a hidden gem restaurant which served fish and chips. When we got back, camp suddenly became 5 people more crowded (hm we had 15 people total?). It's good that we always make more space than we really need to accommodate unexpected people.

The night went on with cards and observing this poor guy who met this one girl for 5 months and came up from Seattle just to see her for the weekend. The poor part is that the girl doesn't seem at all interested in him and instead she makes him jealous by being more touchy and friendly with this other guy. But that other guy is not interested in her in a love way so he tries to make her disinterested by talking with some other girl. Complicated? I thought so too.

This year, China was back with vengeance because last year was obviously rigged. Their music lineup was quite unique and unexpected. They featured some orchestral, some tribal-style and yes, that Kung-Fu Fighting song BUT remixed version so it wasn't all THAT typical of them. The performance itself was creative and I even noticed they used some fireworks I've never seen before (or never noticed perhaps?). It was a shame the wind wasn't blowing in their favour that night. The smoke from the explosions mostly remained stationary and didn't move much so it blocked some of the fireworks. China still ended up winning the competition between the four countries so all was still well.

FF Distant Worlds Tickets~

Look what came in the mail! :D

The Clean Room Tour

Once every so often I suddenly get the urge to clean my room. The last two heatwave days were one of those every so often days. Strangely enough, in 35°C weather, I was even more determined to get the place cleaned up. Though I must admit, I was even more motivated after looking at the "show your otaku room" thing happening over at DC.com where people basically showed off their awesome geeky collections. Compared to them, my collection is laughable. I admire their pretty glass cases. They don't need to worry about this despicable thing called DUST. I also considered a before and after picture but considering I'm a girl, I don't think that would be appropriate. Hey, I don't know what you're thinking right now but don't go there.

Also more recently and a little bit more off topic, I began putting some effort into placing more images in my posts. As a blog reader myself, I finally (finally? really? took me 8 years to get it through my dense head I guess) figured that just straight blog posts with heavy text (since I'm a rambling long-air blog poster) would probably be boring as eff. So! to make that work better, I had to switch blog layouts to give me a wider blog posting area. The area before was restricting like hell, making me only post dinky photos... hoping this solves that. I'll probably do more layout tweaking when I'm not so lazy. K, let's do this.


Figures area which is unfortunately already too full for more.


A portion of my Pinky: st family.


The secondary figures area which is, uh, full too.


I'm proud of my Gloomy.


I don't consider myself a real daimakuradakimakura owner until I get a full size big one.


I haven't made room for the two figures sitting awkwardly at the top of my CD stand. Not sure if I ever will.


Convention badge history.


Digimans and Pokemans.


This is the first place that gets messy. You can just start imagining the mountain that will start building itself in the next few days.

I was also told to get myself an LCD already so I can make even more room. My CRT was 'dying' at a certain point this one time (strange high pitched noise plus the rare but happens blank screen when freshly booted up) but it seemed to have recovered itself at the moment so I'll try and delay having to get a new monitor as much as I can. Besides, there's plenty of other priorities (like wow, I fell in love with this!).


So... I buy a lot of manga and they get stored under my bed because - pfft - who needs a bookshelf?! It's close to full (yes, the back has reached the wall and you are looking the edge of the frontline) so I gotta start figuring out where to store them next.

And that ends the mini tour. I also have posters but my walls have been tame since my last room overhaul.

Here's a bonus photo:

LOL SH!T LOAD OF [UNOPENED] VIDEO GAMES