In general, life, travel on
7 June 2008 with no comments
This stuff is decent, but who the hell slices a slice in half when the customer doesn’t request it? You think I can’t handle your measly slice of pizza in one piece? I know you’re sick of hearing the “I miss NYC because…” lines, but god damn I miss New York City pizzerias.
It’s never the right time to write for me. I think what I need to do to for frequent updating is to lug the PowerBook somewhere away from home where I’m not pressured or have someone hovering over me at all times. I could do that. There are libraries, cafes, etcetera. I just need to get over the laziness, leave the comforts of home and get over the fact that I would have to lug a six pound notebook with power cord to said destination, on top of hoping that there will be an available outlet for me to the plug power cord as my PB batteries only last up to an hour at full charge.
Perhaps I should just nix the idea. I am updating now right? With CP24 on the tele and Pete blasting Veruca Salt from his desktop while he plays Warcraft. A typical Saturday morning in the life of me. Or should I say “us”? Geeze, I’m an “us”!
We leave for Paris in a week. Leaving next Saturday evening and arriving in Paris Sunday morning. We’ll have six full days there. Not enough to experience all that I want to experience, but it’s a good enough chunk of time to wet my palate. When I had my sights on Paris years ago, I did not expect to have company. I expected my first visit to be one of a single clueless American girl finding things new, scary and exciting at the same time. You know, the stereotype. Years later, it looks like my Paris virginity will be lost with my husband in tow. I am not complaining. Maybe I’m just upset that I didn’t decide to venture across the Atlantic earlier in life. But fuck it you know? I’m going to fucking Paris. Finally. That is if our plane doesn’t crash in the middle of the flight.
Other things?
A new entertainment system has been purchased. This is where all my U.S. tax refunds have gone. I say “entertainment system” because it wasn’t just a 40-inch Sony Bravia. It was a HDTV, Blu-Ray player in the form of a PS3 and HD cable box. The purchases made Pete giddy but as I feared it has made me more of of a homebody than ever (is that even possible?). I can’t even count the number of hours since I’ve spent in front of the huge screen watching Planet Earth, various upscaled DVDs and playing Mario Kart. I am unhappy about this. I needed to unplug myself but have only succeeded in wiring and chaining myself more to a hermit life, away from live social interactions. Those that don’t involve work anyway.
Work? It’s going okay. Pretty mundane and mind-numbing as usual. The pros of working for the firm still outweigh the cons but the cons are slowly catching up. I’d go into detail here but I don’t want to get dooced. Those things are for locked posts.
Looks like I promised some details from our 2nd anniversary and the Cleveland road trip in my last update. I’ll try to sum both up in a paragraph each. Try I say!
We celebrated our 2nd anniversary on April 15. There were no gifts exchanged as that’s not an “us” thing. Instead we decided to eat at the restaurant where we had our wedding reception. Everyone commented on how much they loved the food after our wedding reception, but the meals ordered on our anniversary were pretty bog-standard. They weren’t terrible, but I certainly had better Italian meals elsewhere. Afterwards, we walked home trespassing through Rogers Centre people watching. It was warm and sunny. Really that’s all I remember about that day. I know it’s sad that there was nothing memorable about it, but heck, I was happy. That’s all that matters right?
We ventured to Cleveland on April 24 for a short visit, the goal of which was to see the Yankees play in another stadium on April 25. It was a five hour drive done at night (we left after work on Friday) so there wasn’t much to see. I know we stopped at McDonald’s to eat a Big Mac midway (shut the hell up, Big Macs gudt!) and I remember feeling good to be back on U.S. soil and able to use my Bank of America Visa debit card. Shit, that makes me sound super patriotic right? Anyhoo, we finally arrived in downtown Cleveland before midnight and got a huge ass wheelchair accessible hotel room with a weird shower. Made me feel like I was in a hospital.
(Oops, looks like Cleveland will be more than a paragraph.)
Plan was to spend the morning discovering the downtown area and visit the only place that I thought was worth visiting - the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We had the Yankee-Indians game at Progressive Field scheduled for the mid-afternoon.
Well for one, the weather in the morning was shit. I mean it wasn’t raining or anything but it was severely overcast, windy and chillier than I expected. Pete was coming down with a cold which made him grumpified and there were no coffee places open other than Starbucks. And that made ME grumpy. Turns out, the hall of fame wouldn’t let us in with cameras even though we promised not to take any photos inside. So yay, all we got to see was the outside of the hall of fame, the lobby area, and the gift shop. I heard it’s not worth the admission fee anyway, so maybe it was best.
The rest of downtown was pretty dead. The older buildings had a lot of rich architecture which impressed me but I got over it in an hour. Sorry Cleveland…maybe I should stop comparing a city’s coolness to New York or hell, even Toronto. Try to impress more next time okay?
Okay, so the real reason for being there was to see a Yankee game. Most unmemorable game ever. We left after the 4th inning due to boredom and not wanting to be part of post-game traffic. We just wanted to go home. Found out on the drive back the Yanks lost the game, but hell I crossed another stadium off my list and left early enough not to witness the loss. All-in-all it wasn’t really a waste of time visiting.
A week later a random person online commented I missed experiencing one thing at Progressive Field that was a must. What was it? The hot dog mustard. See face > O_O
Oh shit, this entry was long. Should make up for lag in updates. Will I update again before leaving for Paris? Dude, who knows.
In general, life, photos on
2 May 2008 with no comments
Ahh, Shake Shack burgers. You will be the death of me and I won’t mind.
Hello again dot net.
It pains me that I can never muster enough energy or passion to write here on a regular basis. It used to be so damn easy in the hey day, you know?
It’s been about a month since my trip back to NYC and trying to document all that happened there seems kinda pointless now. I must say I never realized how much people I actually know in NYC and can call “friends”. Remember how much I bitched about not having any when I was still there? Ha! Yes, I laugh because if I don’t I’ll cry. Heck, I even bumped into a childhood buddy while walking down 6th in a totally random fashion. Small fucking world indeed! Of course, I also realized efforts in keeping certain friendships alive simply aren’t worth it. Not sure why I even tried.
Unfortunately, I did get some kind of severe cold while there. Sicker than I had been in a long time. You should have seen the buckets of mucus spewing from my nose while I had breakfast with an old co-worker. I should have been laid out for at least two days. Surprisingly though (or not), the sickiness didn’t stop me from train hopping daily, having lots of good me time, and spreading disease to fellow NYers.
Side note: Twitter updating has screwed up my “two spaces after a period before a new sentence” automation. Stupid character conservation!
I probably spent over 10 hours on the subway while back, which is more than usual. That long ride to Brooklyn from mid-town to visit a friend got me all nostalgic about the time I fell asleep on the N in Queens, heading to work, and somehow ended up in Coney Island with drool on my blouse. And I forgot how awesome conversations are during the 4 train ride to Yankee Stadium.
The icing on the cake, was the surprise visit by my mom. They snuck her into NYC from Hawai`i without me noticing until she rung the doorbell to the Sis’ apartment. I know I don’t have the closest relationship with my mother, but it’s still better than most and having the three of us - me, my mom and my sister - together in one place somehow overwhelmed me with happiness. Seriously, I did that OMGWTF shrieking thing when I saw her at the door which weirded ME out. So it was a reunion, albeit a short one, but the weather smiled on us for that stint and I enjoyed every bit of it.
As much as I loved being back, I returned to Toronto with a refreshed sense of space and appreciation for sunlight. This is good news for Pete as he continually fears that during my visits back, I’ll decide on a spur never to return. Seriously though, here I can stretch my legs out and not kick the sink when I’m sitting on the toilet and I wake in the morning to sunlight streaming brightly through our huge windows instead of through the crack under the door. Why am I afraid of getting used to it?
Since then there has been a wedding anniversary, a baseball trip to Cleveland and other random nonsense. But that calls for another entry for another day.
In life, photos on
29 March 2008 with no comments
The above are some of Kanui’s fellow buddies at a doggie day care in Soho. We dropped him off here before roaming around the neighborhood and waiting to meet up with my cousin and her fiance.
Back in NYC for less than 24 hours and again have this overwhelming regret. Why did I leave? Why did the idea of moving to Toronto instead of him to NYC seem like the better choice?
The life, the energy, the memories revitalized me just boarding a dingy MTA bus, regardless of the horrid bout of nausea I was coming off of when my plane touched down at LGA.
Dinner in Tribeca with my family and new faces. Ate at a new Max’s and got tipsy off some pinot. Afterwards, walking up Greenwich, it was freezing with a strong breeze coming of the Hudson. I was shivering but nothing felt new. It was as though I never left. My home, my city.
In life, photos on
25 March 2008 with no comments
A sporadic read of my past entries, I suddenly realize that the third anniversary of my father’s death came and went. I did not remember it. My posts from three years ago, documenting the sudden accident and our emergency flight back home 4,000+ miles away (after we had just come back) is under the rare locked friends only post in archives. We had taken my father off life support after horrid accident. Wasn’t that only supposed to happen only on made for television dramas? Reading the entries I unexpectedly began to tear up, not only because I was guilty and had forgotten, but because I do not think I have changed significantly as a person since then. Regardless of the things that seemed to snowball after his passing.
A few months after the funeral I had moved out of my shared Astoria apartment into a downtown Manhattan studio, to be independent, to find myself, by myself. I forcibly separated myself from someone I was with intimately for more than four years, an attempt to own up to something that I had been hiding and denying. Soon after, I was struck with the most intense loneliness. I had never felt so lonely. I was so desperate for something I could not define. I lost a lot of weight fast, not eating and at night and doing nothing but ponder and feel sorry for myself in a small and empty apartment. Every morning for months I would wake up crying, clean myself up and robot my way into work. I soon met Pete, fell in love and knew it was that kind of love. I began a new job in a different path and became enamoured with the new people I worked with. Pete and I engaged and then married. I began the bureaucratic journey of immigrating to another fucking country. Things had turned sour with my relationship with my sister. She was also having her own self-realizations and wondering if the route she had chosen for most of her life was the right one. I could not deal with that surprising change in something I never questioned the stability of. I soon uprooted myself from the only city that I thought I could live in - the city that I didn’t think I would leave. I experienced a sudden sense of loss and regret to throw what I had worked so hard to become, sacrificed for love. I was not that kind of person, was I?
So much has happened in such a short time. Isn’t three years a short time? While at this point I do not regret my choices, I do not know if I am much happier compared to the person I was prior to his passing. I am certainly not at the happy that I want to be. My father’s death moved me to change things in my life - and so quickly. Too quickly maybe. The impact of it has fallen on the wayside, enough for me to forget that it even happened. What does this say about the person I have become? Change is good, it has happened and continues to, but why do I not feel like not much has changed at all?
In food, life, photos on
16 March 2008 with no comments
Firstly, I want to wish my husband, my wonderful wonderful husband, a Happy Birthday. I baked the lemon cupcakes pictured above instead of a traditional cake, and it was a hit. I rarely toot my own horn, but yo, these cupcakes were the shit!
Yesterday I had all of my Pete’s family over to celebrate. A day early as Pete had to work today. It was eight of us in total with lots of Wii playing and running around with my 1-year old niece.
This was only the second time I entertained a group at our apartment. I don’t know how people do this on a regular basis. I loved having all them over but I found myself completely exhausted after everyone went home. I woke up at 8 a.m. and was on my feet for most of the day cleaning, baking, prepping. I mean I didn’t even cook a meal, we ordered pizza. I can just imagine how wiped I would have been if I had to make a home made lunch. This certainly dubs me a non-entertainer type.
After it was all over, I fell asleep at midnight and when I woke due to the brightness of the room this morning, the clock radio told me it was nearing 10 a.m. It took that much sleep to recover.
Regardless of how tired I was at the end of it all, Pete loved it - or so he tells me. So it was totally worth it. I don’t think he sees as much of his family as he’d like since I moved here to be with him. I know it’s all a part of getting married and living your own life, but sometimes I feel it may be partly due to MY anti-socializing tendencies and extreme privateness (shyness? yes, even at my age). So I used his birthday as an excuse to bring them together at our place, in our space, in our intimate life. My attempt at breaking those tendencies.
May I add that I love his family to bits. Even the crazy ones.
I’m not sure where I wanted to go with this post. I just wanted to commemorate the day, my love’s birthday, remember it - and share it.
In life, photos on
10 March 2008 with no comments
I am all smiles while I sit here as I’m home at the usual time but there is a loud stream of sunshine coming through the windows and it should last for at least another hour or so. I had a small case of the Mondays when I started the day, but it faded after my lunch with Pete and with work interaction that made me really appreciate my job. I did have an issue with my stomach again before I left work, but I will stick with the positive, which rare for me.
It is so wonderfully warm in here without the heat on. The window is open and it feels like spring, even though the outside weather is contrary to that, registering -1C with piles of snow over 4 feet high everywhere on the street. The wonders of proper insulation and the fact that our apartment faces the setting sun.
I’ve been requested to make chicken adobo and as lazy as I am right now and want to just lay on the floor with the cats with sun in my eyes, I’m going to do it. I don’t think I make very good chicken adobo, but I guess it’s more than “good enough” for my very white husband to request it. And who am I to say no when the apartment was spick and span when I came home. Vacuumed and windex, swept and organized all by himself and all without my prompting.
So I best get to defrosting that chicken, right?
In life, photos on
8 March 2008 with no comments
After my appointment with Fatima this afternoon, I started to walk across the street to the streetcar shelter looked down at my boots and next thing you know I’m laying on my right side in the snow. Not sure what happened, the street was quite flat, there was snow, but it wasn’t the slippy kind (if that makes any sense), and there was nothing in my way that I could have tripped over. I had a half cup of coffee in my hand, and even though I had a good grip on it and it was covered I hit the ground hard enough for a bunch of it to splash out of the sippy hole. I lay there on my side for like 10 seconds wondering what the hell happened then got up feeling a little embarrassed with coffee all over my left glove.
My first slip and fall of the winter season. I’m faring quite well as winter is just about over. Although you wouldn’t really think so with the 20 or so centimeters we’ve gotten just today and it’s still falling.
I do love the snow though. All I hear is complaints about the white stuff here in Toronto but I don’t mind it at all. Even after my above mentioned right butt plant on the street. I do not have a driveway to shovel through or a car to dig out. I suppose love living in the center of a metropolis more than anything else.
Spoke with my mom today after not speaking to her over the phone in over a month…maybe even a month and a half? This is the norm for she and I. I don’t know if it defines what our relationship is like, but I never had been very talkative with my mom or like to do chit-chat about nothings on the phone in general. I love her to death, but I’m fine with us not being the best of friends. Our convos are the usual mish mash of what’s been going on in our boring little lives, how’s Peter, why haven’t I visited my cousins here in Toronto yet, the constant financial dilemmas of “the house” back home, and if I have any extra money to send to her (I never do). It’s when she starts asking when she’s going to get a grandkid that I start to wrap the call - telling her she’s not going to get one out of me and should save all her energies on pressuring my little sister into extending our blood line.
I do not want children. And this call with my mom was actually the first time she told me that I’d regret it if I don’t. There was a time that I thought about having children. I was with John and children was one thing that he had always envisioned in his future. I was so in love I was willing to give him that. With Wil, it was because we were down that road of we’ve been together long enough we’ll eventually get married and of course the children will come, it’s something expected - it’s what you’re supposed to do. But when I separate myself from all of that, there’s me and what I thought of having kids. I cannot remember a point in my live when I longed for a child. I could never see them in my future and I still don’t. Will I regret not having one? That’s a possibility, but at this point, I don’t think I will. Yes, I’m willing to gamble with regret. Check back with me when my ovaries have shriveled up.
Vertigo is on TV. I missed 30 minutes of it so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to follow it now.
Also, remind me to spring forward an hour.
In food, general, life, photos on
3 March 2008 with no comments
Above is a snap of the lunar eclipse we had a few weeks ago. I’m surprised at how well it turned out using the S3 especially since no effort was put into it. I mean, after being out for a mere five minutes all I wanted to do was get the hell back in the apartment. It was freezing - I couldn’t feel my face!
Today was unbelievably warm (about 6C). I wore my springy jacket for the first time since December. I’m sure it would have been uncomfortably warm during my walk to work if the sun was shining instead of the teasing drizzle.
Apparently, we had a record amount of snowfall this winter. It being my first full winter in Toronto, I just figured it was the norm. You’d think I’d be bitching about when spring is a comin’ but I really love(ed) all the snow we’ve been getting. We still get the dingy and stank slush like NYC but because it’s er, cleaner here and it’s not too bad. The only thing I can think to complain of is the salt stains on my pants that I can’t get rid of when I get into work.
I’m sure the carrot muffin from McD’s that I get every morning isn’t the healthiest breakfast but it’s really the only thing that I can get pleasure from in the AM without making me feel unsatisfied and ravenously hungry when lunch time comes around. I need to share tho, that $1.50 for a muffin and a decent sized cup of coffee is the the deal of the century. And the shocker is I’ve concluded that I like McD’s coffee better than Timmys coffee. Isn’t that fucked up? Better than Canadian crack! Really! Cheaper, tastier and no line ups - is it no wonder why I frequent the place every morning regardless of it being an evil unhealthy fast food joint? I was a little disappointed this particular morning because my muffin had a liner around it. I don’t like liners around my muffins. Muffins are not cupcakes. Weird because it was the first time I got a McD’s muffin with liner.
Did I just go on about muffin liners and bargains at McDs? I’m lamer than I thought.
Google break.
OH MY GOD. I need to stop eating that shit!
In general, life, photos on
2 March 2008 with no comments
Taking a shot at daily updates so that this new domain does not go to waste. Tomorrow starts a new week so perhaps I should recap this past week - highs and lows? I got some of those. Maybe I’ll elaborate the highs and lows of the month since we’re in friggin March already, Jesus.
Since the start of February my major worry was my taxes. Last year was the first year I started living and working out of the U.S. Unfortunately, I still worked in the U.S. for part of the year and regardless of your residential status, Uncle Sam says you is a U.S. Citizen, file your taxes suckah.
So after going through tax guides for out of country residents, visiting discussion boards here and there, and googling my brains out, the result was being more confused than when I first started. I knew I was filing married (I still can’t get over the fact I’m married!) filing separately, but the IRS are Nazis about SSNs even if you’re filing separately and Pete needed to add his to my tax returns. Well, guess what, he doesn’t have one and I knew if I filed my return with blank boxes where it notes “spouses SSN” they’d just bounce my shit out of there. We needed to get Pete and ITIN, which is not a SSN equivalent but something the IRS would accept. Turns out I would need to apply for this at the same time I file my returns. That was the easiest part (for me anyway, Pete was the poor soul that had to go to the U.S. consulate and deal with U.S. bureaucracy to get a U.S. notary to officiate a copy of his passport - he did not have a pleasant experience).
With that scratched off the list, my W-2, and other forms I can’t remember the names of in front of me, I hooked up with my old friend Turbo Tax. It opened up the horrors of filing with Foreign Earned Income and negative numbers.
Icing on the cake was figuring out my New York State taxes - they were even more confusing than my Federal shit!
Let’s conclude here. After three weeks of banging my head against my work table attempting to figure out this was this and that was that. I said fuck it and mailed my stuff out this past Tuesday putting all my trust in Turbo Tax calculations that didn’t make sense. No, I could not e-file since I live out of the country (about $30 went to international tracked shipping, do I look like I’m made of CND?)
My Canadian taxes? Easy peasy and if we did them right we’ll have some spending cash for Paris in June. Jinx jinx!
Hmm, let’s see other stuff? My PowerBook’s hard drive died and I lost a chunk of my photos and music. Turns out it failed during a backup so not everything was saved. To my surprise (and Pete’s shock) I wasn’t devastated and really didn’t care much. Still don’t.
My chili is ready so I guess taxes and dying hard drives is all I have time for tonight. Oh, and a photo of what we like to buy when we’re out grocery shopping:
In general on
1 March 2008 with 1 comment
Well whadayaknow. Another dot net. I meant to revive the prior dot net I had, but I was stupid, did not renew and I think they’re selling insurance, prostitutes and llamas on that site now. I have backordered it though. Heh.
What’s the point of yet another domain? Not sure really. I think I’ll do my journaling here instead of my past haunts from this point forward. Fo real this time. I think it’s about time, again, to anchor myself somewhere I have the potential to make my own. The difference from the last few attempts at staying in a domain (if you recall, this was in 1998 then again in 2001) is that well, I’m more driven and now have a geek of a husband I can use for tech help. Stop rolling your eyes mofo.
Nothing here will be password protected. Ninety percent of my past ramblings have been “public” so why hide now. This opens up a world of hurt feelings and judgement, but hey, that’s what the internet is for right? I also promise not to advertise. Tacky and I can make no money off the two of you that will potentially read this site.
Now excuse me while I twitter about this.
