How I Spent My Last Weekend

My daughter is sorely in need of time management skills. The apple did indeed fall far from the tree.

The situation last Friday night was this: Shaula had no idea, after having six weeks to think about her Grade 6 Social Studies assignment, how she was going to build a model of her chosen city, Tokyo. What she did know was the due date--Tuesday.

She toyed with the idea of a Japanese shopping mall, but left it at that.

I suggested doing a model of Ginza. We ran with that.

Had anyone called me anytime Saturday, he would've been treated to the background din of Michael's, Daiso, and Staples. Fortuitously, Michael's had a sale on acrylic paints, foam board, and sponge brushes.

Sunday was a gruelling twelve-hour family craftathon that left me sore for the next two days. My upper legs ached from being on all fours on the kitchen floor cutting foam board with a utility knife.

The result by the end of that day was a whole square block of Tokyo!, sans lamp posts and LED lighting. We installed these two items late Monday.

NOTE: the foam board warped, making it look like there’s a lot of lens distortion in the following pics.


Fizz Soda Billboard


Looking down Soya Road


Looking up Soya Road


Headquarters of a great company (red LEDs lighting up the windows)

Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle: Part 1 of 2

We spent a whole sunny day on the grounds of Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, our first visit.

This was taken in the Butterflies and Blooms Pavilion, where the critters land on and alight from your hand.


Komodo Dragon.


Orangutan in the Tropical Asia "Trail of Vines" area.


Bald Eagle from the park's Northern Trail.


A very tame parakeet.


Taken with my Pentax K10D and DA 50-200mm f/4-5.6, DA 16-45mm f/4, and FA 50 f/1.4 Pentax lenses.

I'm curious about where some of the zoo's animals are housed (its tigers, giraffes, etc.) when winter comes—indooors, I suppose.

Barnes And Noble, Bellevue

I spent a few hours at the Barnes and Noble in Bellevue last week. I picked up the following (Buy Two, Get the Third Free!) at US prices, which, given the favourable exchange rate, ended up being a pretty good deal.

Bel Canto because it sounds and looks interesting, and seems to have garnered a lot of positive reviews.


Stardust because the movie adaptation is currently playing at the theatres.


Kitchen Confidential because two of my brothers recommend it. One of them is a chef.


BTW, my five-year old and I got into a tiff. Because there were no children books to his liking (and mine), and he didn't want to leave the bookstore empty-handed, he started to pick up anything and everything for purchase. After several terse "No"s, the silly boy took off from me. I found him at the opposite side of the store, flipping through the pages of a magazine. He spent his timeout back at the hotel room closet.

The ZEOS zeitgeist

Flipping through a 1993 issue of PC/Computing magazine brought back a flood of memories of my computer distribution days (at a now-defunct wholesaler). This was when OKIDATA, NEC, AST, Hayes, Harvard Graphics, Nanao, Conner, CompuServe, and Quarterdeck ruled the roost or were players in their respective areas.

Lotus and WordPerfect were already on the wane and Dell was on its ascendancy.

So many sales calls on so many by-gone products and brands.

Even the magazine bit the dust. Remember Creative Computing and recent victim Byte? There I go again lamenting the passage of time—sorry. The November 1993 issue pictured here had 546 pages, and if page count is any measure of the peak of a New Idea, then the Golden Age of home computing had played itself out fifteen years ago.

There was one familiar name on the masthead of that magazine, that of Penn Jillette, penning [!] an article about Uma Thurman and public-key encryption. Penn's one of my favourite entertainers. No Bullsh!t.

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ZEOS—The Company That Didn't.

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Conner—Can you make that an MFM drive, please?, RLLs are so yesterday.

Mindfulness

A relative warned me about the person sharing the semi-private hospital room with my father-in-law. He looks like a gang member, a young Chinese guy with body jewellery, I was told. Did you talk to him?, I asked. No, was the reply, he was too scary-looking.

We went down to VGH later that evening. The roommate was asleep, the mouth of his foreign face agape, and shirtless, his slight brown upper body showing. I told Shaula and Matthew to keep it down. As Betty's father recounted his day, he mentioned that his roommate was scheduled for some scans and exploratory tests. Betty's dad took in much of what the doctors and nurses said because his roommate spoke only Cantonese and required the services of a translator.

My father-in-law has since returned home. Before his discharge, he overheard the results of his neighbour's tests—there was little anyone could do to save him. The patient asked the doctors whether going to the US could result in a different outcome, and was told no, his liver cancer was too advanced.

The "gang member", the "scary-looking" tough guy, I would learn, spent much of the time during my father-in-law's two-night stay in agony, sobbing, in tears—crying.

Last Weekend

Sunday. Off to Tiffany & Co., where we were helped by an associate reminiscent of über actress Uma Thurman. Then it was chic and tony Robson Street for some chow at celebrity haunt Cin Cin. The sign on the door said Open at 5:00PM, so we improvised and lunched at the IDIBC award-winning Tropika instead. We sat across from A-List news anchor Mi-Jung Lee. The afternoon ended with a jaunt over to the VAG for the Monet To Dalí exhibition.

Since I'm on a roll dropping names left and right, Suzanne Vega owns one of my B&W prints. I have an autographed copy of Hans Fenger's The Langley Schools Music Project, and happen to know somebody who once got Sarah McLachlan's husband upset by accidently sitting on his jacket at the Juno Awards. And when people say "Les Miz", I know they mean Les Misérable, that's how "in" I am.

Toodle-loo for now!

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On a more serious note, I would recommend the Monet to Dalí show. The paintings and sculptures are the real things, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was especially thrilled by one of the side rooms: flanking Rousseau's Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo were a Max Ernst and a Dalí (see paintings below).

The exhibition catalogue, good as it is, is no substitute for looking at the originals, more like frottage. The Matisses hanging on the walls were more vibrant than the reproductions of them in the book, for instance, and a sense of scale is altogether lost in printed form—Dalí's The Dream is physically rather small, requiring very small strokes and a steady hand to render the tiny background figures, something not apparent to the reader.





So yeah, it's worth the trip down there, if not just for the people watching.

It's Mostly a Nonfiction Week!

Three hundred pages into this 700-page memoir, Hollywood Animal, and it's still going strong. If I'm not too lazy, I'll post a capsule review. Sure is one ugly jacket cover, though.


I've read two of Harpur's books over the last two decades. Water Into Wine is his most recent. Another "god"-awful dust jacket design.


I already have the softcover edition of To See Every Bird on Earth, but at $6, couldn't resist picking up the hardcover as well.


my new filing technique is unstoppable consists of sets of one-page clipart-based comic strips. Oddly, each strip does not end with a punch line. The title caught my eye, a quick skim, and I had to buy. $2 at Chapters.


Let me mention that I'm sweating profusely while typing these words out. I almost slipped off the seat, I'm so bloody warm....

My next read will mostly likely be Lolita.

Canada Day 2007

We went down to Steveston on Canada Day for the Salmon Festival. Parking was a nightmare, probably because we arrived so late. The parade was already over. We ended up parking almost 2km away from the heart of the festivities, on a sidestreet. Our first stop was for lunch at a small Mexican restaurant, a little off the beaten path.

I ordered a mild chicken burrito to share with Matthew along with a hot-as-hell habanero version for myself. It was so hot that I started to tear and my nose turned red. Shaula accused me of trying to poison her when she sampled some. Needless to say, our next stop was for ice cream to quench the burning.


What follows are snapshots of some of the activities.

Entertainment, crafts, a trade show, booths, and a huge kids' play area at the Steveston Community Centre.


Free Sun Chips and Brisk beverages.


The folks from Sirius Satellite Radio Canada were out in force. I've recently ended my subscription with them—just having XM will do.


Watching the buskers.


Several blocks were closed to traffic. I've never seen so many white folks in one place in Richmond as today. :-)


We're definitely going back next year. Maybe we'll even find the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre where, I'm told, they have the salmon barbeque.

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Shaula explained tying shoelaces to Matthew as "strangling one bunny ear with another."

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Gray is to silver as yellow is to gold.