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.

Was reading some reviews on my camera today and realized I haven’t really done a formal introduction of it like how I did it for my last couple cams like Canon SD1000, Canon G9, Fujifilm F50fd. Bought this camera about a little more than a month ago off Futureshop, with a staff discount from Peter who works at Best Buy, ended up paying just $355+tax for it, including one lens. Super amazing deal. It’s named “World’s Smallest DSLR”, which is one of the reasons getting it as it’s no fun hauling bulky cameras around. And as usual I fell in love with the camera since day one not just because it’s new but it is also my first ever DSLR camera. I’ve been wanting one forever, have been wanting to get the Canon Rebel XTi about a year and half ago, but wasn’t able to afford it back then. This Olympus turned out to be so affordable so I decided to get it without second thought. The pic is the camera itself, with a flash attached that I got free from Peter.

Also there is the $119 tripod (on sale from $149, lol) that I got 2 weeks ago, the Manfrotto 728B made in Italy. I decided to pay a bit more to get a brand name just to make sure I get an OK quality and sturdy one, so I can keep it for a long time. I love this camera, have already taken thousands of pictures with it in the past month, and liking every single one of them. I’m looking forward to bring it with me to the San Diego one-week trip next week, and take tons of pictures at Legoland and the San Diego Zoo

Super nice day out today, and warm. I think it was 20 degrees. I drove out for a bit, took some pics of the blue sky with my new Canon SD1000 camera. It’s the smell of summer! Can’t want to do some outdoor activities. Oh I’m going to Banff next week, wish weather will be as nice as today…

Went to had dinner with Benny, Peter, and Dorothy since Dorothy came back from Hong Kong so we had a meet up at a bubble tea place. I met Dorothy last November, but she hasn’t met Benny and Peter for ages. We had a pretty good chat about basically everything. After dinner Peter and I went to place near the airport to take some night time pictures trying out his new Sony A350 DSLR camera. Actually we went to River Road to take some sunset pictures as well. I tried to use EV bracketing function to take the same picture 3 times with different EV settings, and used an application called Photomatix to generate a HDR image. Turned out to look pretty amazing!

Just got back from party at Tony’s house. There were 9 people in total, I didn’t know any of them other than Peter and Jenkin…(just met Tony once). They were very nice and easy to talk with K let me recall the names…Tony, Peter, Alan, Jessie (Alan’s gf), Louise, Gail (Louise’s gf), Joanne, and I. Yahoo~ I remember the names! lol. I brought to the party some of my liquors collection and also I brought three wines…two red wine and a champaign. We had hot pot, on two stoves with different soup base. Lots of fish/meat balls, fresh fatty beef, veggies, tofu, chicken, dumplings….etc. It was pretty tasty with the addition of soya sauce plus satay sauce

We had some chats, then we started some Wii fun (yea I brought my Wii, and Alan brought lots of Wii games~). Played a couple games like Warioware, Mario Cart….but we all ended up playing Mario Party 7 since it’s just so much fun~~~ It’s a turn-based game where each player throws two dices in each round and that determines how many steps he can take on the “game board”, and of course there are pitfalls, bonus…etc on the board, and who gets 10 stars first becomes the winner. It was sooo much fun and everyone was lol throughout the game. The mini-games were amazing and very entertaining. We chilled a bit after the game while having some nice cakes, and left around 1:30am.

Darn…. I think I left my shooter glasses at Tony’s place! And also my Wii sensor bar..! >< (still at the top of his TV I THINK)

Phew.. finally done all the clean ups for the party last night! Since I don’t trust my dishwisher I had to do all the clean ups with my own hand~ It was fun… we had about 3 girls (Korie/Linda/Vivian) and 5 guys (Benny/Peter/Vincent/Andy/Me). Most of the girls were playing on the Wii (Rayman Raving Rabbids, Elebits, Cooking Mama), and guys were busy helping out prepping the food. My place is kind of tiny but luckly everyone knew what they were doing and didn’t really make a mess I was busy prepping martinis and shooters with the new liquors I got yesterday, learnt a couple tricks from Benny and I was lucky enough to be able to practice with real people…lol. They liked my mixes in general, which felt great! I especially love the taste of apple sour puss and hypnotiq, they just have this irresistable great taste.

We first had this delicious smoked salmon rolls, with Benny’s secret ingredient called “capers“…then it came the ultra tasty mussels with of course another of Benny’s secret house curry sauce (the guests really liked it so much). After that we had three plates of duck breast, medium cooked. They were good, but since the oven wasn’t hot enough and also the heat didn’t dissipate equally, the duck had to be cooked longer than usual and Benny was saying that it would be much tastier if it’s cooked in a shorter period of time:roll: …anyway I still find it super tasty~!

We had wine as well, it was Benny’s restaurant’s house wine, naked, pretty tasty. I liked how it doesn’t taste too sour as I generally prefer red over white because of its sourness. He forgot to bring the molten chocolate cake for the dessert, but luckily I’ve got some dairy/fat-free icecream for the dessert craving guests After chilling out for a while the girls and couple guys left.. Benny, Peter and I stayed till something 4am to finish up the wine and drinks, and had some long missed chats.

There’s a party going on at my place today Benny, Peter and I are going to host a party at my place without friends, serving great food and great drinks - Benny calls it “Elite dinning” (I think Elite could be a gamer’s word meaning the best out there or something?) Chef Benny, the proud owner of the tapa restaurant 14981, is going to do all the cooking (here is a link to their reviews on dinehere.ca) I’ve never hosted any party at my place so yesterday I had to go and buy all the dining accessories like wine glasses, plates (got like 15 of those!), shooter glasses, and of couse, liquor! (got the soho, peach schnapps, sour apple, baileys…and all that) It was really a pain in the butt to wash all those plates and glasses and to prepare all the other stuff…I’m sure it’s going to be fun though.

Benny created a dining menu specifically for the party, lol. I think he did it in something like 2 minutes, he just knows his food too well. Peter is going to get fresh oyster and Benny will bring over some mussels and something called “gravlax salmon” which he said they were “cooked” in bare sugar and salt, I really am looking forward to try it.

Okay it’s time to do some house cleaning and more grocery…etc!