幾鬼秘的部落格

Currently at 9th last place in our league, last night was our chance to move up as our opposing team was absent!  All we had to do was play better than 90% of our averages to win all 20 points.  But it was not to be.  Only our sub NY was able to play above his average, and well above it too!  MJ struggled throughout all 3 games, getting only 3 strikes in 3 games!  The scores of my first 2 games were deceptively high at 156 and 168, but I was just lucky.  My balls were rolling all over the lane.  And it would eventually catch up with me in the last game, where I only had 1 spare! I barely scored over 100 in that game

At the end we were still able to score 14 points for our team, thanks largely to NY’s awesome play and my 2 lucky games.  If there was something to blame, I’d have to say that I was a bit rushed.  Only 3 of us (instead of the usual 6) were playing 2 lanes.  We were incredibly busy bowling from one lane to the other with not much rest in between.

I will have no practice before our game next week as I will be out of town this weekend.  Let’s hope that my game will come back in time.

Last night after having dinner at my mom’s, I decided to take a nap before heading to WB.  When I woke up just before 9pm, I knew I was going to be late for the warmup session.  And last week after play, I forgot to put my wrist guard in the locker so I left it in DF’s bag instead.  And since he couldn’t make it to this week’s game, it meant that I would have to play without the guard.  These were not good signs…

By the time I arrived, the practice session had already started.  I think I missed a few head pins and put a couple of balls into the gutter during practice.  The only good sign was that, as far as I remember, it was the first time that we faced a team with a higher handicap than us.

This was the second time that our sub NY and I had the same handicap.  But since my average was one point lower, I was up first.  As I’d already missed quite a few practice balls to the left, I consciously made sure that I rolled my ball straighter, and bam, first ball was a strike :)  It all went quite well afterwards, for all of us.  The first game was my, and MJ’s, best game of the night.  All 3 of us beat our opponents the first game.  I played ok the second game, while MJ left many frames open.  NY was on his way to beat his personal best of 199 until he missed the last frame, ending up with a 194.  I brought my game back up in the third game.  MJ recovered strongly in the second half of the game to give our team a win in total team score by just 2 points!

Overall, we did not play as well as last week, but still very good.  Our team earned 15 points last night.  Hopefully at this pace, we will climb up and away from our fifth last place in the league

After a fully-packed day of lunch with family, dinner with friends, and K until 3am on Saturday, I woke up before 8am this morning to join AL and his friend to an autocross event in Barrie.  We arrived ~9am, registered our cars and walked the course a couple of times before the timed laps began.

I was a little nervous during my first run  Not looking far enough ahead, I misread the course and missed a cone.  The second run everything went well - I was timed at ~66 seconds.  After this run, I sat as a passenger in AL’s RSX.  Only then did I realize how conservatively I’d raced through my first 2 runs.  So in my 3rd run, I started emulating his hard cornering, tire squealing style of driving, and drastically improved my time to just beyond 62 seconds.  I was hoping that I could break the 1 minute mark by the end of the day, but my last 2 official runs (part 1, part 2) of the day yielded similar results at ~61 seconds.

However, after the 5 official runs, we were given time for some fun runs, where our runs were timed but not recorded officially.  I was able to get in 3 runs, all coming in at just beyond the 1 minute mark, the best being 60.243 seconds.

This was the very first time I participated in an autocross event.  With 5 official runs @ ~1 minute each, I basically had 5 minutes of fun after driving 2 hours to and from Barrie.  Even so, it was so fun that I’d love to do it again.  Today ~50 cars came out - there were many MR2s and MX-5s, as well as other what I’d consider unexpected entries like Corolla, Escort and a station wagon!

Despite the short runs, this experience compares favourably with the track run I did at Shannonville last year.  Sure, today I put in less than 10km through the course, and never even came close to 3rd gear, but the timed aspect of these runs make them much more addictive as you try to improve your time run after run.  The short mileage also means less stress on the car too, especially one like mine that has no mods done.

Let’s see… next time on my bike?

This morning I woke up early for our weekly tennis game with our boss.  When I say early, I mean earlier than usual, but I was actually late for our 7:45am "meeting".  On my shoe mat I have a pair of tennis shoes beside a pair of badminton shoes.  In haste I picked up the badminton shoes without a second thought.  Speeding my way along the 407, I managed to arrive on time just after my boss.  Only when I picked up the shoes to change into them, did I realize that they’re the wrong shoes!  I felt so helpless - my boss was already standing on the court; all I could do was walk over there with my street shoes on, since I didn’t want to ruin my relatively new indoor badminton shoes.

This evening, I received my CAA membership in the mail.  Since I never did get a proper diagnosis on my bike, the motorcycle incident from 2 weeks ago can very well repeat itself any time without warning.  So I’d decided to get a CAA membership just in case.  When I took out my wallet to store the membership card, I found a driver’s license with a photo of a strangely unfamilar face on it.  Alas, it was a photo of some white dude! At first I’d thought that somebody had drawn on my photo as a practical joke.  It didn’t take long for me to realize how my driver’s license was switched…

When we bowl @WB, we always pay after we play, which means giving them a photo ID as deposit, which one would get back upon paying.  Well, it looks like they’d returned me the wrong ID.  My last practice session @WB was last Friday, which means that I’d been riding/driving without my own license for a week!  Upon this discovery I immediately rode to WB.  I held up the wrong ID to the attendant and before I could finish explaining, he was nodding and proceeded to retrieve my ID specially stored in an envelope.  He said that he’d expected me to call.  Of course it dawned on me then that I should’ve called first, especially since I didn’t give myself much chance of getting my ID back.  I feel bad for the poor white dude who was probably pissed at WB for losing his ID, assuming that he did check it, unlike me :)  Lesson: always check that you’re getting the right ID back!

It’s been a few weeks since the original members of team SGP last played together in our weekly league.  Last night DF, MJ and I played our best games together as a team.  All of us averaged 150+, scoring a total of 18 points (out of a maximum of 20 - I was responsible for losing the 2 points btw :S) for our team!  During the 15-minute warmup, I had strikes all over and missed only one spare.  At the end I scored a personal best (and most consistent) 3-game average ever - 165, 164, 187.  This was most unexpected since last week, in my last practice session with DF, I was struggling to score 100+!

Needless to say, we’re all very happy about our performances (well, maybe not DF, since he had a mediocre 2nd game :)).  Unfortunately, DF will have to miss the next 2 games due to work.  But who knows, maybe it’ll be our cycle - one good game after two with substitutes?

Last weekend I had lunch with a whole bunch of friends from UW.  A couple of them had just had kids a few months ago.  It was MW’s first one, and he flew his whole family to TO for a visit.  WM just had his second one; his first being 2+ years old already!  Congrats to the 2 dads!

Last Sunday was of course LT+JY’s big day.  They couldn’t have picked a better day weather-wise.  It was all sunshine throughout the day.  I even got a tan from taking photos all day.  The location was just as perfect.  The ceremony took place in a cosy chapel @ Oakview Terrace, and the banquet at a beautifully-decorated banquet hall at the same location, overlooking a lake.

Being Chinese and having mostly Chinese friends mean that I don’t often get to attend such western style banquets at such "exotic" locations.  Gastronomically I personally do prefer Chinese style banquets because of the wider variety of food served.  But the photographer in me does not because of their usually boring locations.  For a wedding, I definitely think that the photos are more important than the food.  So L+J, good choice :)  And congrats on your marriage!

I think this is it for me as far as photographing weddings is concerned for this year.  Who’s next?

On Tuesday my boss asked me and two other co-workers to play tennis the following morning @7:45am!  Not only is that 2 hours earlier than when I usually go to work, it’s also the day of my weekly bowling league.  Of course when you’re asked by your boss, you cannot say no.  I must admit that at that time of the day, the weather is perfect.  Considering that this was my first game of the season, I played pretty well.  I did send a few balls over the fence, not to mention one right at my boss’ back!

My arm was still sore at the end of my work day, so I could tell that it was going to be trouble for week 5 of our bowling league.  Surprisingly, however, my practice session went very well - I had quite a number of strikes.  The streak continued through the first half of my first game, where I was on pace to score a 200-game.  But it was not to be.  I left too many frames open and ended up with "only" a 149 - a good score for me, but not for that game.  The second game was horrible - I was struggling the whole time, aiming not to score lower than 100!  I decided to take off my wrist guard for the final game, looking for any change to get off the slump.  With a final game score of 139, my average of the night came out to be 131, which was alright.  DF continued to struggle to find his groove with his new $200+ wrist guard.  NY recovered beautifully from a mediocre first game to 2 awesome 170+ games.  We ended up scoring 5 points for our team, which was better than our last 2 games, but still we could’ve done so much better.

I have since asked my boss to re-schedule our weekly tennis game to Friday mornings.  Let’s hope that it’ll actually have some positive effect on my bowling

Sunday morning was gloomy and cloudy, but still dry enough for me to ride my bike to CL’s to pick up her car and drive EK and her to the airport.  Self-proclaimed 大頭蝦, neither of them knew which terminal the flight was to depart from.  I automatically assumed that it was T1 just because they were flying on AC.  Fortunately they were early and had plenty of time to take a shuttle bus to T2 when they found out where they were supposed to go.  Ooops

I went back to CL’s to pick up my bike.  On my way back home, I was stopped by a cop for no apparent reason.  Immediately after I pulled over, she stepped out and asked if it was a new bike and how I liked it.  Hmm…. a strangely friendly cop, I thought.  After I gave her the documents, she came back shortly to tell me that she just wanted to check that I have valid insurance.  I hope this is a good sign that all my future encounters with cops on this bike will be just as friendly

Once I got back home, CW and I IM’ed to discuss where to ride later on.  I wasn’t too keen to do it since I was dead tired from no sleep the night before.  At the same time I haven’t had enough of riding since I got the bike, and we’d already planned to do so the day before.  After a short discussion, we decided to pass, as the weather looked iffy.

I went back to bed and slept until late afternoon, woke up, made "lunch", and got ready to ride to L+J’s wedding helpers party.  I was debating whether I needed to get gas.  Since my bike’s odometer had been out until recently, I’ve had to manually keep track of the mileage I’ve put on the bike since I last gassed up.  I calculated that there should be plenty left for one trip to Mississauga, where I could gas up later that night for much cheaper.  Everything was fine and dandy until I got on the 403 from the 401, when the bike completely gave up on me without warning.  Luckily traffic was very light - I had to pull cross three lanes to the shoulder coasting @ just around 50 km/h!  My first instinct was that I was running out of fuel, so I was a bit surprised that turning the fuel selector to "reserve" did not help.  I tried to start the bike back up but it made no sound at all.

I called auto-assistance planning to get my bike towed to a gas station.  After a long chat with them beside the noisy highway, I was told that my subscribed service does not cover motorcycles! Dang! 

Still believing that the bike was simply out of gas, I called JY + CW to bring me fuel.  But after I checked the tank, I called them back to tell them that that was not it.  I went through the manual while I waited for my rescuer-friends to come.  Of the many things that I went through, engine oil looked to be the most probably culprit as the sight window showed no oil at all!  Even though this didn’t make complete sense, since the engine oil light never came on, I called CW to bring me some engine oil just in case.

I didn’t have to wait long until CW+KL showed up.  CW agreed that my bike seemed to be out of engine oil, until he levelled the bike off the kickstand, when we saw through the sight window that there was plenty of oil.  Out of ideas, we decided to call CAA with AT’s membership, which turned out to lack coverage for motorcycles as well.

$100 later, my bike was sitting in Cycleworld’s parking lot and we were finally on our way back to the party, where more than 10 people were waiting on me to plan the wedding, and 2 people starved because they were helping me :$.  Sorry guys.

Looking at the bright side, this could’ve been a lot worse.  I could’ve been stranded in the rural areas where CW and I were planning to ride that afternoon.  Or on a much busier 401 during the commuting hours on my way to work today.  What a lucky guy I am :S.

Last Sunday’s practice session went surprisingly well considering how much riding I’d done.  I was pretty tired and exhausted, but still scored a decent 146 on my first game.  Feeling confident, the three of us, MJ, DF and I, played the second game for $2.  I ended up with my 2nd career high score of 203, but still lost to MJ who scored 222!!!  Of course I stopped betting on subsequent games - if I can’t even win with a score of 203, there’s no way I can win anything :)  At the end, I averaged 157 over 5 games, which I was very happy about.

Last night was the 4th week of league play @WB.  Our opposing team was probably the best one that we’ve played against so far.  Their anchor had no handicap, and the 2nd member, against whom I was playing, had a handicap of 1 while mine was 57!  You can imagine how happy I was to win scratch against him the first game (180 vs. 177), giving our team our first point.  But then it was all downhill from there.  My second game was still pretty good (159), but the last game was embarrassing.  I put the ball into the gutter twice, and scored a 99 at the end :(  DF had a great recovery from his mediocre first game to score a 184 in the second, giving our team our 2nd, and unfortunately, last point of the night.  NY, our substitute "straight-shooter", didn’t shoot so straight last night.  We really need MJ to come back next week to help us score some points!