Relationship is like driving a car. When you think you are getting the hang of it, you run into a crash. When you drive all careful and keep your eye wide open for pedestrians, you miss the little dog that’s trying to cross the street and you run into it. When you try to rush over a yellow light, you run into the red light. When you drive real slowly and think that you are super safe, you get a ticket that you’re driving “too slow”. When you drive to pick up some food and don’t know where to go for the best restaurant, you start trying to think hard, really hard, and at the end of the day you still don’t know where to go. When a certain part in the car breaks down, you try to get it fixed, it gets fixed up but eventually the exact same part that you replaced just break down again. When you think driving is risky and stop driving altogether, you miss driving and end up driving again. When you’ve tried to fix the same part that’s been breaking down again and again, you end up fixing it up “one last time”, even though it’s the 49th time that it breaks down. When you get into an accident and try to file a claim, the more you complain/yell at the insurance company, the less favorable you are and the less money you will be getting back. But at the end of the day, you still love driving and treat your car as best as you can.

I’ve been thinking about useful and useless stuff for most of the day, if not the entire day. Have been thinking too much lately, so insanely busy from everything - work project due in 1 week; renovation related stuff (big headache); broken harddrive that will take me $1600 to fix (may not even be possible) and constantly been feeling really bad about it; travel dates/destination; bills (overly crazy for this month), car service (2500km overdue); being unable to take photographers due to the cold and gloomy whether and feeling uneasy; having no time to practice a piano piece that I’ve been practicing prior to the renovation; infinite amount of items that I have to sell on craigslist in order to clear up some room for my room; no time to read the travel magazine that I paid $7 to buy; no time to get the ingredient to be able to make a cup of HK style milk tea; no time to read all the books that I borrowed from the library and ended up overdue and fined $10; no chance to clean up the gym area in the garage in order to start weight training again; haven’t had a chance to start playing Lost Odyssey on the Xbox 360, no chance to start learning about stock which I planned to start on since a month ago; and of course, trying hard to be able to devote most, if not all of my time and effort to maintain a good relationship with gf.

I can go on and on, the list will never end. I’m not good at managing my time, I’m trying hard to improve, but it’s tough. I think I need about 50 hours a day. Or, to have an ability to survive with no sleep so that I can work 24/hrs a day. Life is short, I want to get everything done before it’s too late. Is that possible?

It’s the 6th day since the reno, and my kitchen is still messy as hell. My pretty hardwood floor is now covered in a layer of drywall dust and has random spots of dried drywall pastes all over it, not to mention saw dusts, glue residues, footprints…etc… I wonder when this is going to be over…

I’ve been spending some time to pick the style/type of granite for the counter-top, probably going to go with this one called Antique Brown, even though it is super pricy (over $4k). I’m not sure, I may change my mind later on. For the wall tiles I’ve picked a white/clear glass style, going to set them up in a brick pattern (center of the top tile goes on top of the connecting edge of two tiles at the bottom). I’ve also went to Ikea to buy a new faucet, some brackets for the bar-top that I’m going to add in, and also some silver/circular counter-top lighting that will eventually replace the old florescent tubes.

I can see another week and half for the work to be completely done….hell…

This was a really crazy week at work. I had to work non-stop since Wednesday night to Friday, didn’t really have a chance to sleep properly. There was an emergency at work, Ryan in Xi’an and I had to work during off-work hours to fix some serious problems while we both were having serious headaches due to the stress and tiredness. After almost 3 days all the shit had been fixed and everything was back to normal. I don’t really want to think about it again and hopefully it won’t happen twice.

Other than that I’ve been playing Modern Warfare 2 a lot, on multi-player online. I used to hate MP games a lot but this game seems to be pretty fun to play online, even though I get killed a lot most of the time. Maybe I just suck too much in first-person-shooter type of games, I often get killed without even a clue. Enemy will just show up next to me and stab me before I could even comprehend. I’ll keep practicing and hopefully some time soon I don’t have to get ranked at the bottom of the list..

Just went home from Amigo restaurant with Wendy, I had a curry chicken rice and she had a steamed clams. She made tons of food for me today and then they were packed into small containers so that I have enough to eat during the week.

Oh also I’m renovating my kitchen. It’s going to be really pricy but the contractor, who did quite a few jobs for Wendy’s parents, was quite nice and seemed to be quite knowledgeable. Going to do some structural change like moving the fridge to a different location to open up some space where extra counter-top can be installed. Hopefully it’s going to look pretty good despite the amount of $ that I have to pay.

I just finished the game~ The final boss was tough but it was easier than I thought, and the couple bosses like Clare and Hauren were not hard as well. Actually the bosses were way harder during the beginning of disc 2, when my characters died again and again and I had to use up all my healing items everytime. Anyway it was a really cool/fun game, the storyline was SUPER good, it’s kept me curious for what’s going to happen next…etc. The voice actings were top-notch too, I actually never gotten bored listening tons and tons of dialogs in the cutscenes. It’s kind of sad that Juto died at the end though, I was somehow hoping Zephie and Juto could get together….etc. Anyway at least Celestine and Argo were, lol. I completed the game with around 45 hours of play I think, way less than some people in the forums, not sure why. As for quests I completed 82%. Pretty good.

Anyway this didn’t make me forget what happened today that REALLY pissed me off. I ordered Modern Warefare 2 from NCIX too days ago from online, went there to pick it up yesterday, no stock. Went there again today, they were “closing early” due to the grand opening of a new store tomorrow. I started to hate them now as I really want to play the game since yesterday and was hoping to play it today, now I can’t play it until Monday (if they have it for me on Monday)!

I’m still playing Magnacarta 2…it just keeps getting better. The bosses are so hard to beat now, some of them took me 5 times to beat it (reloading save games)…. I’m actually feeling good about this as I remember this was how the older Final Fantasy RPGs used to be - challanging and demands good knowledge on understanding the countless skills/combos/items from the games. Afterall, the harder it is to beat the game, the better you’ll remember it later on.

Other than playing games, of course it’s the endless work related stuff. Ryan from the China (Xi’an) team actually helped me out a lot on one of the stored procedures, I’m really thankful as it saved me a lot of time. 3:44AM now and I’m super hungry…

Went out to grab some Mcdonalds large fries, to eat while continue playing Magnacarta 2. It’s 3AM in the morning, it actually feels really cool to have hot fries to eat at this hour….so tasty, and they gave me 2 packs of mayo + 2 packs of ketchup~

Have been playing Magnacarta 2 for a while now, it’s a really sweet JRPG with great character design and story. Even though the voice acting is in English (usually prefer Japanese) but it turns out to be really good. Graphics are top-notch, with vibrant colors and detailed textures. I like the maps a lot, very imaginative and have quite some “FF feel”. All in all it’s totally comparable to Final Fantasy…..hm…probably except for the music - not that it’s music isn’t great, it’s totally fun to listen and well made but FF’s music is still the best in the genre.