Been busy on various things: Getting my new iMAC 27″ setup (wooo!!!), hanging out with my mom since she’s here for a month, working on music, playing computer games…etc., and of course, work from my job. Also been working out a lot, was able to keep increasing the weights, making good progress. Got my huge bottle of soy protein yesterday, hoping it’ll further help out on getting more lean muscle mass.

Last two days was all devoted to the new PC game that I got: Alice: Madness Returns. Still remember ~10 years ago when I played the original game “American Mcgee’s Alice”, how creative and fun it was, and the cool graphics and character design. Been waiting for a sequel year after year and finally, American Mcgee made one! I didn’t know how good the sequel would be, i’d play it regardless how good/bad it is. After setting up the game, I was visually stunned already at the very first scene - super detailed graphics, very nicely rendered, with nice voice acting. After wandering around the “asylum” area in London where Alice’s “normal” life lives, I was brought into the wonderland. The first few minutes I was basically in awe how beautiful the scenery is, wandering around the area, checking out the mushrooms, flowers, insects, water, trees, and all the floating gardens. I haven’t seen anything that looks quite like that for quite a while, and I kept taking screenshots. The music from the game is just as awesome, with orchestral scores and some erie/dark elements. Very high quality sounds as well. All in all I’m extremely pleased and can’t wait to keep playing it for the next while.

These days, I tend to do my blog posts the following day, just cause I usually work till really late and don’t have the time to prep for the image that I wanted to post. I guess it’ll get better when my project (due in June) is done.. Anyway yesterday I had my favorite Chirashi Don (mixed sashimi rice bowl) at Ichiro Tei Japanese Restaurant with Alice for lunch. I finally remembered to bring my camera with me so here’s the picture of the awesome food.

But the main thing for the day was that I finally got a flash for my E-3 DSLR. I had been wanting the bigger version of the flash (Olympus FL-50R) but it was too pricey plus I’m not always doing flash photography so I decided not to buy it. These days I tend to take quite some outdoor photos for Wendy so I figured I should really get a flash, maybe the smaller version (Olympus FL-36R) of it (Olympus has 2 flashes, big and small). Peter was able to get it for me at Futureshop for a much cheaper price since he works there, so I decided to go for it. Ended up being about $200 + tax, which is a pretty good deal. I’ve actually never seen a real digital flash before, when I looked at the user manual I was a little overwhelmed by the complexity of it, like all sorts of different settings, and tilting the flash in different angles would give you totally different results…etc. Oh and I also tried the wireless function of the flash, you can actually place the flash somewhere else, and then wirelessly trigger it through the camera….it’s so cool…. I guess I have so much to learn now but, it seemed to be quite an interesting thing to know about….and hopefully will also help in other areas of photography that I take, like macros. See the picture of my flash with my camera body, it’s so frigging huge!

At night I had cake at Berry Good with Wendy. I tried their Black Forest cake (which is one of the kinds that I always asked my mom to get for my birthday parties), it was pretty good. I kind of forgot how it’s supposed to taste since I haven’t had it for so long, but I liked the one I had. Wendy got a Strawberry Shortcake, which even though I wasn’t sure what a shortcake was, tasted pretty good. Berry Good remains one of the best places for late night dessert cravings.

It’s Xmas Day…feels like it’s the end of the year. I can’t even remember what I did on the same day last year…. I spent half of the day today trying to sell off my two extra X Japan concert tickets off Ebay, craigslist, and a couple other Hong Kong forums, hopefully can get rid of them soon. Last night (24th) I went to Alice’s place for some Xmas food: lamb chop, Greek salad, cream puff dessert, chips, wine….etc. and played a lot with Brandy (dog) and got both of my hands super wet from his saliva. I didn’t take any pictures but I do have some that I took on the 20th - same place but a different party with her friends:

Going to go for another Xmas dinner tonight with Benny and his friends in Downtown Vancouver. Tomorrow I might goto Futureshop to get this $14.99 Microsoft wireless laptop mouse for my Boxing Day gift…hopefully I won’t have to line up or anything.

BBQ party at Matthew’s friend’s house in New Westminster. He turned 40! Got there around 7….stayed till like 3am. It was quite fun to meet a bunch of people and strangely they were mostly locals.There were like…more than 10 of them including their kids (some kids were at my age). Well guess it’s always more fun to do it with locals as Chinese usually aren’t as crazy and funny.We had some pretty tasty appies then some of the guys started up the heater thing which quickly became the focal point of the night. We chopped some logs with some huge axe and threw them all in. It was quite a huge fire. Not after long a couple guys got drunk from the unlimited supply of beer/wine/shooter, and they started throwing in everything like paper plate, newspaper, trashed xmas tree…. Matthew got tons of presents, including 40 rows of toilet papers from one of his friends…pretty hilarious.

We had LOADS of food, some crazy delicious steak and grilled chicken, loads of chips/appies, caramel/espresso shooters (I really gotta look this espresso shooter up it’s called Van Gogh it was so tasty), vodka jello, different wines brought by his friends….etc. It was a really fun night, it was fun and energetic, and I love the fire! Had some long chats with Alice and Matthew, also his realtor friend (can’t remember his name). I couldn’t believe I was having fun chatting with all these people that are at least 15 years older than I am, lol.

Went to have dinner at Alice’s place as usual. I was there to pick up some stuff that my mom asked her to bring to me all the way from Hong Kong. Got some clothes, some accessory made in the shape of a turtle with Jade (so I’ll have better luck or something?), and some red pockets (that are given by the Chinese during new year) She cooked and treated me dinner and it was really tasty… And of course I got to play with her dog Brandy as usual. We walked Brandy around the False Creek area. It was pretty chilly out but anyway it was a nice walk and I got to see a couple of Brandy’s “friends”..i.e. other dogs that were being walked by some other people.

But…the most awesome thing of the night was….I taught Brandy how to “sing”! lmao…I just accidentally squeezed this squeaking toy of his in a weird way and he started responding with his singing voice! Alice told me that it’s his first time doing that and we were all so excited I think I made him sing 60 times last night, pretty crazy! Here’s a little footage of the fun:

So I went to Aki Restaurant on Monday with Alice and Matthew. I didn’t bring my camera with me so I took some pics with Matthew’s cellphone. It took him a couple days before he sent me the pictures but anyway here they are It’s in downtown, 745 Thurlow Street, really close to Burrard. I liked the interior a lot, it had this “Japanese izakaya” feel, and the chefs were all Japanese. They had an open area where the chef grills stuff in front of you, really interesting. As soon as I stepped in I already noticed a lot of Japanese people sitting around so I kind of already knew that the food would be pretty authentic, unlike all those westernized Japanese food…

I liked the tamago appie a lot!!! Tamago is always my all time favorite, and this one came in huge! size of a brick Also had this tasty beef sukiyaki, ebi mayo (prawn + mayonnaise), chicken kidney, mixed mushrooms… Oh we ordered two of these Yaki Onigiri (grilled Japanese riceballs), they were super tasty!!! Both sizes were crispy, and had a salty miso taste. Also ordered grilled sable fish and Japanese rice cake. Both weren’t too bad. The ONLY bad one was the “shiokara squid” (salty raw squid). IT WAS SO BAD. It was extremely salty, and I mean it literally. Alice said that it was supposed to be that salty, but after one bite I was like….ewww…couldn’t take it anymore. We ordered a couple Heinekens, and were finally able to finish the dish…lol.