幾鬼秘的部落格

So as everybody who attended my wedding banquet knows, I was extremely unprepared for the thank you speech.  So here, in no particular order, I’ll try to make it up to the people whom I (or Chris) missed in our speeches.

Andy and Eugenia, for going the extra mile.  You were the first ones at the ceremony and at the banquet.  What you’ve done was way beyond what we expected of you, especially Andy, running around the whole day and night making sure that everything went smoothly.  And of course, delaying your vacation just for us.  Hope you’re enjoying Paris.

Josephine, for organizing the surprise video montage.  That was very
thoughtful of you.  Dom and Emily, for gathering the videos.  And Matthew
(my new brother-in-law), for putting it all together.

Maverick, whom I’d thanked at the banquet, but forgot to emphasize
that he’d worked 2 long nights prior, and was getting through the day
with Tylenols

Charles, not only for being my photographer, but also for putting together my slideshow with very short notice.

Vincci, for sharing your story of my storage rental business :)  And for being the biggest contributor to winning the Q&A contest for table 10.

Jeff, Annie, Sharon, and Jimmy, for taking care of decoration and sound at the banquet.  All your hard work is behind the scene, but it’s just as appreciated.

Emily and Monica for MC’ing for us, and thinking up all those questions.  I heard that there was supposedly another game that was planned but was skipped due to time constraints.  I wish we could’ve played it.

CC for bringing us the floral arrangement to the ceremony - not the easiest job with low vase full of water.

Thank you all for making our big day a success.

Last night was the first night of our summer league at Club 300.  For some reason they did not have a record of my average from last year, so they gave me a default handicap of 32, which is probably 10+ points less than what it should be.

I didn’t play particularly well at the beginning, but a string of strikes gave me a first game score of 199.  Between two gutter balls, a 7-8 conversion,  a couple of pin 7 spares, and a streak of strikes (some ugly, some lucky), I ended up with a total score of 611!

If this continues I don’t think I’ll ever go back to World Bowl

As a result of my parking mishap 2 weeks ago, the front left fender of my car was left
with some major scratches, chipped paint and paint left on from the wooden frame with which it made contact.  From the "before" and "after" photos, perhaps you’d agree that I’ve done a pretty darn good job of undoing my own damage.  I felt pretty hopeless at first when I couldn’t even remove the paint left on from the wooden frame of the garage.  In desperation I used a few drops of Vim to remove the paint.  Most of the scratches were removed using a polishing compound that costs $4.99 from crappy tire.  While I did use touch-up paint as the final step, the operation was far from "touching up".  I was practically painting the fender with the tiny brush.

If you look hard enough you can see a minor dent.  But hey, for $4.99 + tax I can live with that

Last month I made a $300-mistake by ripping apart Chris’ Lancer bumper in a snow bank while backing out of my driveway.  I blamed it on the cars that filled my small street.  But of course, I also could’ve shoveled my driveway more cleanly

Well today, I got no one to blame.  Through pure inattention, I rammed my Miata against one side of my garage.  I’ve always bragged about the width of my garage.  So to do this, especially with a tiny car like mine, is embarrassing.  And of the four corners, I did this to the front driver side, arguably the easiest corner to judge.  Arrggghhh… I am pissed!

My experience with windshield damages:

Sometime between 1998 and 2000 - my very first stone chip on my very first car (MX-3).  I tried to fix it with some DIY kit that did not help a bit.  Luckily the chip did not spread before I traded the car in.

2002 - two years after getting my new MX-5, I got a stone chip that was repairable.

2004 - two years later, I got hit by a fist-size rock falling from the top of a truck
traveling on a different lane ahead of me on the highway.  Needless to say, that wasn’t repairable.

2006 - another two years later, I heard a pop while traveling on the highway, but did not notice any chip on my windshield.  Turned out that the chip was hidden behind the rear view mirror.  By the time it was noticeable, the crack has spread too much for it to be repairable.  I tried to live with the crack but had to eventually replace it in before I traded the car in.

2008 - two days ago, I heard a loud pop while going to work.  This time I actually got a double whammy - I don’t know how I could’ve gotten two chips when I only heard one pop.  I had them repaired today.

Looks like I’ll be due another hit in 2010

February has been quite an eventful month so far.  We had a very snowy start to the Chinese New Year, which coincided with my birthday day this year.  Chris and my sisters treated me to Cfood that night, then a bunch of my friends celebrated with me at The Sultan’s Tent, complete with a belly dancer, later that weekend.

The cold and snowy weather continued to the following week, but apparently that wasn’t enough to stop a guy from riding his motorcycle!  I wish I’d taken a pic.  That week I was invited and then uninvited to the Eason Chan concert, which I heard was pretty good.  For V-day Chris and I decided to go out for dinner the day after to avoid the crowds.  That night she surprised me with a homemade steak and lobster dinner! Very impressive and delicious.  I had more seafood the following night at The Doctor’s House in Kleinburg.  We walked into a virtually empty restaurant and was seated right by the window with a beautiful view of the adjoining chapel.  I had tiger shrimps which came with Oreo-sized scallops!  Even in the cold and dark of night Kleinburg looked quite nice.  It’s only 20 minutes from my place so it’d definitely make a good destination for a bike ride there.  I can’t wait until the weather gets warmer.

This past weekend I accidentally took a chunk of my middle finger off with a putty knife.  Yes I screamed like a girl.  Yes I need a letter opener.  Luckily that was with my right hand.  Because days later, I used my other hand, with all fingers intact, to bowl a 223 at our weekly league.  I can’t quite remember if that was my personal high - it was either 218 or 238.

I hope it was just a coincidence that the lunar eclipse happened that night, cause I don’t want to wait for 2 years before breaking this high score.  I took my first attempt at photographing the moon and have noticed 2 interesting points. 1) It is a lot brighter than you think so you don’t need a good fast lens to photograph it, which is a good thing because 2) its movement is very noticeable when you’ve zoomed up close to it.

The last time I used the short term parking @T1 @YYZ, it was $2.5 for half an hour.  This morning, I drove my parents there for their flight to HK.  I got their boarding passes for them from the supposedly "express" check-in machine, only to be told to line up with the rest of the people even though we only need to check in 2 bags.  I’ve never waited for so long to check in.  More than one hour later, I got a $12 bill for parking!  @$4/half hour, that’s a 60% increase!  I ddin’t hear of this price hike on the news and couldn’t find anything online about it.  I’m very curious about how they justify such a huge hike.

For the last day of our trip, we’d planned to arrive in Paris as early as possible, in the morning, so Chris can see a different side of France.  But as a result of us moving base from Avignon to Arles, I thought that we’d have to take a regular long-distance train which wouldn’t get us to Paris until the afternoon.  Of course the solution was simple - we’d take a train from Arles to Avignon to catch a TGV from there.  I only wish that I was the one coming up with that solution

We arrived at our hotel in front of the Gare de l’Est before noon.  After lunch, we started our day of shopping.  I’d wanted to start at La Samaritaine, which was centrally-located in the first arrondissement close to many tourist attractions.  But unfortunately it’s closed indefinitely for renovation.  So we went to the Galeries Lafayette instead.  This was on a Friday afternoon and I couldn’t believe how crowded the store was.  It felt like boxing day at home!  Are these people all tourists?  Well, judging from our observation that there was at least one salesperson who spoke Mandarin at almost every department, I’d say that’s a good guess.

While we didn’t really have a shopping list, we thought that it’d be nice if we could get our wedding bands here in Paris.  We didn’t see anything that piqued our interests so we walked over to Le Printemps nearby.  At this point I really didn’t think we could pick out something in such a short timeframe, as both department stores looked the same to me.  Soon after, we casually walked into a Cartier store where a Japanese sales lady greeted us.  She showed us the collection and even though we were quickly attracted to the Love collection, we didn’t stay for long.  We got a couple of quotes and left the store to continue our search.

Eventually we did return to the store, since we didn’t see anything else that remotely
came close to our liking elsewhere.  We were in the store for more than one hour, mostly trying to decide whether to get the rings in white gold or platinum.  Or rather, to get them in white gold or not, since they didn’t have the platinum in our sizes.  The sales lady, who’s been living in Paris for 10 years, was very patient and helpful.  With a little help from her we finally decided to get them.  It was now close to 6pm so we hurried out the department store to search for a post office to mail home the packaging.  Then we went back to finish up our shopping, applied for our VAT refund and headed for Place de la Concorde, where we rode the ferris wheel before finishing our day with a Japaneses dinner.

So, although this was my 3rd time in Paris, it was very much a completely different experience for me.  We told ourselves that we’d come back to Provence to celebrate our 10-yr anniversary.  Since we completely missed the lavender and truffles season this time, I can totally see ourselves coming back to catch Provence at a different time of the year.  Au revoir!

Today was a logistically challenging day as we had 3 destinations in our plan, all to be done by trains and buses.  We arrived early at Nimes.  The first thing we did was to get the timetable for buses to Pont du Gard and Uzes.  After studying the schedules, we decided to aim for the 11am bus to Pont du Gard first, and see how the day would go from there.  Before then we’d be strolling around Nimes for 2+ hours.  The first sight we saw was the arena.  But since it wasn’t yet open, and we’d already visited one in Arles, we did not go inside.  At this point we really should’ve taken a side street towards the old town center.  But instead I led us on to the first main boulevard that I saw, took a wrong turn and got us off the map, literally (well, at least off OUR map).  We must’ve walked for half an hour before I got us back to the old town.

After breakfast, we visited the cathedral, the Maison Carree, and the Fountain Garden, where we finally saw a game of Petanque being played for the first time.  Before we knew it, it was almost 11am, so on we went to the bus station heading to the Pont du Gard.  Even though we arrived there before noon, we didn’t actually see the aqueduct until after 1pm because we spent so much time at the museum.  The
museum is so big and has so much on display that one can easily spend a few good hours in it.  Since it was now after 1pm, there was no way we could catch the 1:35pm bus to Uzes.  We would now have 2+ hours to kill before the following bus at 4pm, so we took it easy, had a picnic lunch, and walked down to the Gard River away from the tourists.

I’d been carrying around the engagement ring for almost a week now at this point.  At the back of my mind I probably had always planned to propose in Paris, perhaps on top of the Eiffel Tower.  But since I know that Chris doesn’t like big cities in general, and touristy places in particular, I thought the peaceful and private place that we were now enjoying would be perfect.  So after I nervously popped the question, and she pretended to have to think about it :), we were engaged!

The next couple of uneventful hours flew by quickly.  We arrived at Uzes after a short bus ride.  Uzes was never a must-see destination on our itinerary, but I was very glad to have made it there.  It’s not so big to feel touristy, and not so small to feel like a dead town.  Unfortunately we only had 2 hours before the last 6:30pm bus back to Nimes.  The town is definitely worth a longer stay.

It was probably around 5am this morning that I felt a sting on my left ankle.  It quickly became so itchy that I couldn’t go back to sleep.  I got up to check on it and saw that it was a little swollen.  Chris was previously a little annoyed that our towels weren’t changed after 3 nights and that the garbage wasn’t cleaned out, which seemed tolerable, until this.  Since we couldn’t go back to sleep we decided to head out to check out other hotels.  We rung the bells on four hotels of which only one had a free room, which wasn’t available until after noon.  We then considered moving base to Arles, so I started calling some hotels, most of which didn’t have 24 hr reception.  At the end we felt confident that we should be able to find a hotel when we get to Arles, so we went back to our hotel, packed up and headed to the train station.

When we were planning for the trip we’d actually considered staying at Arles as our base.  But we eventually chose Avignon because it is a more convenient transportation hub.  When we arrived at Arles, I was so happy with our spontaneous move.  We both liked the feel of Arles much better than Avignon.  The walk from the train station to the town wall was short.  We walked into the first hotel we saw inside the wall.  It had a free room, at even a better price than our last hotel.  I didn’t feel like looking around to compare, so we decided to settle there.  We dropped our backpacks at the reception and went out to check out Arles’ market.

Of all the markets we’ve been to, this one felt the most "local" - we didn’t see many tourists around at all.  After a short stroll we walked back inside the city wall to the back of the Roman Arena.  We sat down at the nearby Place Voltaire to have breakfast before going inside the Arena.  It’s funny that of all things, the first thing that came to my mind upon entering the arena is the movie Ronin.  The place was very quiet with few visitors.  It’d be nice to see what the atmosphere is like when the place is filled with spectators.

We continued our sightseeing to the classical theatre nearby, which allowed us to
better appreciate how incredible it is for the theatre in Orange to remain standing as it does today, when most other similar structures are left only with mere columns, like this one in Arles.  We then walked by the Jardin d’Ete, where Van Gogh spent many days on his paintings, onto the St. Trophime church at the large Place de la Republique square.  The intricate carvings on the church facade illustrated biblical stories to the illiterates of the medieval world.  I went inside just before the church closed for lunch while Chris stayed outside to eavesdrop on a tour guide explaining the stories.

As most of the sights in town were now closed for lunch, we decided to go to a local supermarket to buy lunch before going back to the hotel, as our room was to be ready by now.  We went out after lunch only for a short while, visiting the Roman bath and Place du Forum, before returning to the hotel for a 2+ hr nap, as both of us woke up so early in the morning.  We woke up after 7pm, just in time to catch a few blue-sky photos of the arena at dusk.