Dun Dun Dun, Dah Dah Dun Dun Dun Dun!

(hmmm...wonder if anyone will get where that title comes from....)

Not much stuff really happened today, until the night...

-I got my printer fixed, and new ink cartridge too, yay!

-turns out that the sign at Meadowvale TC that I thought said "Extreme Pho" actually said "Extreme Pita" with the ita in Pita being arranged to look it the word Pho instead. Found out when mom bought some pitas back from there for dinner

-was going to finish off Gunslinger Girls today, but only made it through one ep 'cause I kept on getting distracted...the series just keeps getting better...poor gitai though

-Andrew offered me a ride, but I declined his offer...feel kinda bad sometimes when he has to go so far out of his way to get me

-Fellowship was WAY/JOY games night...lead by Silas, Sam, Amie, Betty, and Andrew kinda...a man, what a night it was! That was soooo fun!! Even though most of the games we played were really childish and kinda weird lol :) Props go to the organizers, Andrew for asking me "are you Season" during the first game, Trevor for being a robot (ask him about his Theory 6 shirt) and everyone else for coming and making it a blast.

-afterwards, had an interesting meeting for ppl who wanted to help out with JOY during the summer, led by Alan Liu. The handout he gave out says "Will you commit to making JOY fellowship a verb, not just a noun?" At that, I was like HAHAHAHAA!!!!! in my head, but couldn't really laugh that hard in front of all those ppl. Alan noticed that I found the "wording of the statement" funny, while he was talking to us. The reason it was so funny? Well, first of all, that statement kinda doesn't really make sense,and also that's what me and a lot of friends from Waterloo have been doing recently - making nouns into verbs....ex: Arrowed! Beasted! Jack Sparrow'd! Ninjaed! and now....JOY Fellowshipped! LOL :P

-decided to probably help out in communications, since that's what I did for WAY committee in my OAC year, and also decided to help out C Mok with the grocery run in two weeks, since I don't have much to do right now, and I love planning indoor/not really active games for ppl to play

-congratulated Jeff on his first guitar accessory tutorial, but it was really hard for him to hear me due to all of the music and noise in the bg

-while hanging out with ppl after the night ended, found Jane Wang's puffer on the piano. Since her and Wilfred and Jon and etc had already left for Dixie Park, that meant that I had to go over there and give it to her. Which was perfect for me, since I wanted to go there and hang out anyways, and so it gave me an even better excuse to go this time. It was also perfect how they finally decided to go to Dixie Park, after all the confusion, and perfect how Jon phoned me from there, so I knew where they were. My mom was at church for a cell group leader's meeting, so she was able to drive me home afterwards. And I didn't have any cash on me, and they didn't take any cards, so I was asking around to borrow money from ppl. Later on, I found a Chat and Tea house card in my wallet, with only one more stamp out of eight to go. Thanks to Jon, I got Arthur to get my card stamped, and thus ended up with a free large drink - finally after having that card for like two years! God always provides ;)

*** The Coolest Thing of All (well kinda...if your name is DB or Brose haha) ***
-so I hadn't been to Chat and Tea House in Dixie Park for a long time...and when I first got in...I was like...whoa...where'd all this extra space in the back come from? Cause the only ppl there were MCBC ppl, and I looked near the rear where there were supposed to be tables and stuff, but there was only like empty space...and a tv...on close inspection, I walked to the back and saw that they were indeed playing Mario Kart Double Dash (2 players) on a PLATINUM Gamecue . Jon had told me that he was playing Double Dash the first time he called me, and I was like "from where!? they have a gamecube there now??" That's soooo awesome!! After a while, I found that they actually did have four controllers hidden away in a bag with games...and that bag also contained SUPER SMASH BROS MELEE! I was like "yes!" 'cause I was really hoping that they would have it, and it makes sense for them to have it too, since it is the ultmate party game. They also had a cool looking platinum controller.

So I got them to switch from playing Double Dash for a while, and me, Trevor, a computer player and this other guy Marco (I think...sry, forgot your name...) played a couple games. Nothing really exciting happened during those games; I won the first one with Marth by default when Trevor's Samus had wrong move syndrome and kept missiling while falling off Yoshi's Story. Other people were getting bored with Samus and wanted to get back to DD - "only pros can play Smash well." - Arthur Lui. Thus, we played only one more game after that one, which was on Venom. This game wasn't as close, after many SD's, I barely beat the comp with Captain Falcon. During both games, Marco kept playing as Yoshi, and he would away from the battle and cower somewhere, and hold shield. When someone found him, he'd yell out something like, "Wah, gum yeung doe bay nay geen doe ah?!" (Whoa, I was hiding like this and you still saw me?!) This kept happening over and over again, with many ppl getting free hits on him. The times where no one bothered to go after him, he eventually got shield stupidity 'cause his shield broke from holding it too long. =/ I'm not sure he knew what he was doing...but he seemed to be having nonetheless.

Bao and Duy and Brose and etc, if you ever read this, we've got to go down there one day and play while drinking bubble tea lol. Makes me wish that more of my school friends would come to fellowship with me haha...well, Ambrose might, and so might Jason nowadays...probably would be hard to get David or the Waterloo Bros or anyone else to come though. Oh well...it still was basically the highlight of my day...I can see myself going there a lot after fellowship/church maybe. :)

*** End Coolest Thing of All ***

So all in all, a really good day. Sarah Sparrow asked me how Awake went, but I couldn't tell her 'cause I didn't go. Everything's fine and dandy, as she would say...well, almost everything....but yeah, long day of d20 tomolo...should go sleep now. nights all!

It's starting to become a habit again...

Oks, it's time for daily blog update. :P
Like the title implies, I'm kinda starting to blog regularly again, since it's summer and I dont' really have that much things holding me back....and some of my friends keep telling me to update...so also partially due to their encouragement, I'm blogging again. :)

Didn't really do anything special today...just looking forward to fellowship (combined JOY and WAY program, come Jason!) and d20 game over the weekend, and possibly getting a job soon. Watched more of Gunslinger Girl - man, that anime is still amazing...I'm kinda disappointed the only made it so short though. I have 3 more eps to go. Go Henrietta!

Also saw another ep of CSI today, it was a new one too. Cool stuff about a sabatoged roller coaster flying off the tracks and hitting a car, causing a dead body to fly out of the trunk. At the beginning of the episode, some kid was fooling around and decided to take off his seatbelt on the coaster, and I was like "he's sooo going to die," but he ended up living. It was the ppl on the next ride that died. And also, there was a story about how some single woman killed her 13 year old daughter because she thought the girl was trying to steal her boyfriend away from her. That was crazy...the mom was saying stuff like "I give you everything, and this is how you repay me?!" and yelling various insults at her daughter...reminds me of some other families...I know :(

favourite quotes from this episode:
=========================
Warrick (to woman's boyfriend): sir, can I have a word with you outside please?
Boyfriend: Why?
Warrick: Why not?

*later on*
Warrick: May I take a look inside your truck?
Boyfriend: Don't you need a warrant or something for that?
Warrick: Only if you deny me access.
Boyfriend: Okay...go ahead...
touche

========================

During commercial breaks, I saw a commercial that made me laugh out loud. It was this...car/tourism commercial, I think. And they were trying to promote tourism in Canada, and telling ppl to "drive it." The first bit that I found funny was that at one point, the speaker says, "From the East coast to the praries..." while talking about driving across Canada, and I'm like...what the, Canada doesn't end at the praries, you bakas. Then, at the end of the whole thing, their punch line was something like, "Drive Canada, the best country in the world!" Now that's a massively biased statement if I ever heard one! Considering that these people don't even have a good knowledge of Canada's geography, I hardly think they'd be qualified judges of whether or not it's the best country in the world. Like, for peacekeeping? Maybe we are the best. But in terms of military or economic strength, or something my cousin would love - street racing? No way. Funny commercials.

Last thing I saw on TV that I feel like mentioning, is an episode of Battlefield Investigators (on the History channel!) that talked all about how and why Napoloen failed at Waterloo. I've always been a way history buff, and I learned quite a few new things about that incident tonight. I now know what "canister shot" is. Interesting to note that back then, Napoleon's French artillery had cannons that were considered "the mother of all weapons" while nowadays, that honour would probably go to the hydrogen bomb. Or, in the case of C&C Generals, the Chinese Nuke Cannon. :P

I've also developed another habit...after running the d20 module Blood Sugar a while back, I've started to like the way each module tells kind of a mini-story. Thus, after finding out about the d20 modules and reading all of them, I started reading the normal DnD modules too. I recently started going through them alphabetically, reading at least one a day, and I'm on D now. Most of them are done pretty well, and some of them look like they could be adapted to fit a modern campaign pretty easily. Just wish that modern had all of the spells that Dnd had.

One last thing before I go....I just wanna wish a timely Happy Birthday! to my sis. Hope you had a good day...where ever you are... :)

Chinese Supermarkets are weird.

Today, I had the oppourtunity to visit a chinese supermarket somewhere in Brampton. But first, a small side story. Why was I there? The answer is that it was in the same plaza as this restaurant that my family was having an early Mother's Day dinner in. (it was Kingsley Chinese Restaurant, it sucks, don't bother trying it lol.) Anyways, in an economical move, my mom decided that we should have my cousins family give us a ride there, to save gas. So they get to our house, and my cousin Raymond is driving; he's a year younger than me, had his G2 for not even a year, and is really into cars. Right after we get in, he takes of speeding down the residential streets, going WAY too fast everytime he makes a turn. He also never signaled when he lane changed, tailgated, and always stopped just a bit short of hitting the guy in front of him. He was driving so crazily that his parents kept yelling at him to stop and slow down and etc, but he wouldn't listen. My mom couldn't talk him out of it either. All the inertia-ing was freaking out all the adults, but I just remained silent during the ride, knowing that nothing I said would've made a difference. Later on in the night, he says that he only likes driving really fast on turns, and not on straightaways, 'cause turns is "where the thrill is." To quote Trevor, "chee seen gah!" He seriously could've gotten us all in an accident tonight. But meh, I didn't really expect much less from my cousin, being selfish and arrogant like usual...weird how he's changed so much from when we were both in elementry school. I'm trying not to judge him, but it keeps getting harder and harder.

Now, about this Chinese supermarket. Firstly, you know it's a Chinese supermarket when it's called "AAA Supermarket". haha...it's not much unlike most other Chinese supermarkets, like H&H, only a bit dirtier. It was my second time there, and here's a sample of the stuff that went on this time:

- found out that they were selling brocolli in 2 different places in the store, both for the same price of 99c per head. If they're both the same price and item, why not hav them in the same place?

-one weird sign that caught my eye was one above a bunch of white and green vegetables that said "NAPA SHOT". I brought my mom over and asked her what the Chinese under it meant, and she said it said "sieu choy". Apparently, sieu choy is a kind of vegetablem (choy), and in English, it's translated into Napa. There's two different versions of Napa, the long and the short version, and this happened to be the short version, being advertised by a badly written sign lol. What made this sign funny for me was that, as I was walking by, I glanced at it and started thinking of a certain Dragonball Z character charging up a big energy blast...

-my mom was looking for red beans, among other things, so she approached one of the workers and asked them, in Cantonese, "Excuse me, where are the red beans?" When he replied "huh" in a mandarin accent, she asked him again in Mandarin and he showed her where they were. Later on, she was looking for a different kind of red beans, and stopped to ask a female employee, and the same kind of thing happened. Then, as we were about to leave the store, mom realized that she didn't have much cash left, and that these types of stores usually don't accept credit cards. So, she goes up to the nearest employee and asks, again in Cantonese, "Nae sul mmm sul card ah?" (Do you accept [credit] cards?) The employee, for some reason pulled an Anson, which is to stare blindly for a few seconds, and then look around and mumble a bit. Finally, he said something like, "ummm...uhhh..." Thinking that he also only spoke Mandarin, she asked him again in that language, but once again, he pulled another Anson. So my mom was like, "it's ok, let's just go," and as we turned to leave, the guy quickly turned to us and said in a quiet voice, "Ahh, yes, sul card, naw day sul card." (Ahh, yes, accept card, we accept card.) Unfortunately, my mom was too far away to hear him at that point, but she had enough cash anyways so it didn't matter.

oks...that part came out longer than I expected.
After getting home, I was going to watch some more Gunslinger Girl, when Bao told me of an upcoming CSI episode at 10. Since I'd hardly watched any of it, though I've played both games and really liked them, we decided to watch it "together". As in, we both watched it, and then talked about it afterwards....it was pretty nasty, with a lot of blood and dismemberment and etc. Not for the faint of heart haha. Tried to get Andrew into watching it, but he was preoccupied by other, more important matters...hehe :) Now that I know when it airs, I'll probably be watching a lot of it. I kinda wished that I had a tv with cable up in Waterloo now, so that I could watch stuff when I go back to school. Perhaps I could talk with the Waterloo Bros. about it. At least we'll each be able to have a phone next fall.

Tomorrow, is more cleaning and planning, and hopefully some resolution too...until then, cha!

A female who's not an Infiltrator

Okay, where was I? Stupid computers. Anyways, much thanks goes to David for his help on making gmail work for me. I tried it, and now I can read stuff! :) But I don't think I'll be using it much, since I'm already using Outlook Express for all my email needs. (Who needs 1 gig of storage space when you can use your whole hard drive with OE, right Jeff?) btw, anyone know the address of the gmail server, so that I can set up my OE to check that account as well? Thanks ya.

The main point of this post is going to be something I just started watching yesterday - Gunslinger Girl. I had already seen a bit of it with Bao and Wen and Jason during school, and I was pretty impressed, I just didn't have the time to watch it with them. I borrowed it from him later though, and I finally got around to seeing it. And now that I have, I must say that it's become one of my five favourite animes of all time, and I've only seen the first four episodes! There seems to be just enough action in each episode to advance the plot, and still satisfy action fans such as myself. The fighting and stuff is pretty realistic - well, as realistic as 14 year old girls with cybernetic implants gunning down terrorists is anyways. It's cool to see how the various gunslinger girls interact with each other, and how they each have a relationship with their own 'big brothers' that's unique. As Triela says in ep. 4 "Rico is [her brother's] tool, Henrietta is Jose's little sister....then what am I?"
Each of the girl's backgrounds also seems pretty sad, like being the sole survivor out of a mass murder and rape of your family, or being kidnapped and taken away to another country....etc. The secret agency they end up working for does "the government's dirty work" which makes them seem like both the bad guys and the good guys at the same time - though they're fighting terrorists and stuff, their orgainzation doesn't always follow the law, and sometimes innocent ppl have to be killed.
(I really found it sad that that guy [in ep. 3] had to die...won't say anything more in case I might be spoiling it for someone... those who've seen it should remember who I'm talking about.)

The story is set in Italy, and they show a lot of 'Italian' and 'European' scenery throughout the show. Which is why after watching the first bit of it, I started thinking that maybe auntie would like to see it :) After talking to Tim Kwan about it, he sounded like he'd be interested in watching it, and I figure Andrew would like it too, so maybe one day we could try and watch some of it together, since I'm pretty sure that we'll be meeting at least once this summer haha. Perhaps I could get BNao to make me a DVD copy of the series too.

Looking forward to first d20 game this weekend. And also maybe something else too; hoping for the best.

What the...

So I log into blogger again, to make a post about Settlers of Catan and Bao's party, and I see this ad for gmail. Since Wen told me about it a long time ago, and he and other people I know seem to be liking it, I decided to go ahead and sign up for my own account. I didn't really need one, since I use Outlook Express to check all my emails, but I figured I'd at least see how good it is. I got the account set up okay, but everytime I try to view a message, I see this loading sign in the upper right hand corner of my screen, and then nothing happens. I've tried everything, and I can send and receive stuff, but can't look at any of my emails. I'm thinking it's just my stupid MDG comp messing up again, but I'm not sure.

Unfortunately, after spending about 20 mins being frustrated at my comp for this and other problems, I'm not longer in the mood to write about anything. Plus, my parents are bugging me to go downstairs and do stuff, so I guess I'll just end off here. Wow, that was a really long and pointless rant...sry about that.