Mother nature decided to be two days late in sprinkling snow, but it finally snowed nonetheless. I don't know if it's just me, but it feels nice when fresh packing snow crunches from the weight of my feet. The thought of packing snow brings instant nostalgia of building snow forts, snowmen and snowball fights back in elementary/middle school.

The only picture I could really take of the snow... crappy picture, I know. I still need to learn how to take night photos... 

It's hard to believe that my Christmas break will be ending soon, now that I think about it. However, I don't think I would've spent it any other way. Even though my sleeping schedule is kind of messed, I'm happy for the freedom of being able to sleep till almost noon whenever I please. And although the beginning (and even now kind of) was somewhat hectic because my social life was evoked from its dormant state, it was nice to relax and talk to people. 

Karaoke with the YSDN kids at Mix2 (Dec. 14th)

mmmmm hot milk tea :D

deciding what to get at a Vietnamese restaurant

LOL

At Congee Dynasty (Dec 18th)

mmmm BBT :)

Beef Lo Mein :)

Chinese dessert

Birthday boy

ornaments from my family christmas tree!

Christmas dinner party at a friend's place (Dec 25th)

dinner at Bayview Garden with the parents

pig neck and hot pot rice?

scallops and cuttlefish with rice

It was also nice to actually spend some time to work on something that was supposed to be up three months ago: my portfolio. Still gotta work on the jQuery aspect of it though, along with actually putting my work up there.

Wow... I think this is the longest photo post I had yet, haha

Christmas Frenzy

I haven't posted here in awhile, have I?

This is due to the fact that I pretty much had your typical design student's nightmare with printing certain things and well... rushing to hand everything in, and feeling the shittiest ever because pretty much everything got pushed back and well... *exhales*. It's all over now. There's no use in looking at the "could haves" or "should haves" because what's done is done. I can only look at the days ahead that are slowly being ticked off one by one because naturally, people want to hang out and see each other during the break. So um, even more time management skill is needed to balance social-life with projects I wanna work on? Uh huh. So far, it's not working. Well... if I finish this post quickly I can get started on some stuff I guess... then again, due to YSDN screwing up my sleeping schedule recently, I doubt I'd be sleeping by 12.

I haven't gotten the chance to take some "quality" photos lately, so unless if you're up to see average photos of my friends and I during our hang out at Karaoke, then by all means, look forward to the next post. Though... I will post pictures of my cellphone charms for the next post as well. Unfortunately, these 3 months have proved to be too much for a good half of my charms, because they either go missing (R.I.P beautiful silver tassel that all my friends love to play with) or their paint job chips horribly (le fake pearls) so I was forced to get different things altogether. Whatever. I now have a feather and it's pretty frikkin' awesome. Let's hope nothing like paint chipping will happen to that.

Lastly, I want to thank all the people that have glanced or looked at my blog. It's still pretty unknown to most of the world, but to the ones that took time to look at my pictures and read my thoughts, I appreciate that. I truly do :)

Crunch Time!

So I have a feeling that I'm going to have a Mt.Eden music haul... yay! I haven't had any of their new stuff in the longest time and some of their newly released tracks stays true to the "chillstep" that I've loved from the very beginning. If you want to listen or download, I would suggest on following them on facebook. They have a link to Soundcloud directly on their post. Now if only my iPod connection wasn't messed up, haha.

I hope I'll be able to pull an all-nighter tonight to get some progress on my work. I haven't been able to accomplish that this year. I've gotten much more weak-willed this year than I have previous years. Is it because I'm growing old? Or because I haven't been as healthy before since I lack much more exercise this year compared to previous years? I don't know. Either way, I gotta man up tonight. I was hoping to get a good bulk of my app-making class done but I can't even connect to the server that has all the php scripts.... guess I'll work on the aesthetics of the other portions... which are only additions and not the main component. *le sigh*

And today would actually be my last day of Time-Based communication if only I was fortunate to skip out on the colitis Sunday night. I'm not going to go into details about how bad it was (you can go google that yourself if you're curious) but I've never felt this miserable eating bland food. The 30 hr famine was at least, 30 hours. But this? I have no idea how I got through 2-3 days of eating just congee/rice porridge when I had my wisdom teeth removed earlier this year; then again, there was pain involved. It's weird. When you have nothing wrong with you, you kind of take the simple pleasures of life for granted. Then BOOM! You can't eat normal food for a week, and you have the biggest cravings for food that tastes different from rice porridge. I was SO TEMPTED to eat just one fry from the Harvey's combo I ordered for a friend (silly me, I thought I could give them the hamburger and leave the fries with myself— nope!) but I managed to resist temptation. If I give in, there's no stopping, which would've been really bad. What have I learned from this experience? I guess if I really put my mind into resisting (and being the stubborn person that I am), I won't give in to temptation. Not food wise anyway. Oh, and to never trust the iced-tea from the Wendy's at the university I go to; at least not the ones that aren't bottled anyway.

When I'm done this real-food-hiatus I'm going to savour every moment of the fries I will order, every sip of the green tea latte that I absolutely adore from Second Cup, every bite of yogurt (the kind where you can mix the fruit with the yogurt too!) and quite possibly the beef Pad Sew. A couple of my friends were eating it for a snack/early dinner today. I probably looked calm and composed on the outside, but I was really tortured by the delectable aroma their food gave off :/

I think I've procrastinated enough writing my pathetic/miserable mindset of the past couple days to the world; I've got 2 questions that require 2000 words each for a take-home exam for a Monday morning class, refinement/compilation of process work/printing of my Information Design class and my Communication Class to do and well... I'll wait till I'm actually better to film the last portions of my film project for what was today's class. In the meantime, I'll be having fun (uhhh hahahah) with the other projects.

Christmas Break, y u no come sooner?!

I can't wait to skate at the public city hall ice rink ya know :D

P.S. Who knows, maybe the Christmas Break will prompt me to do less complaining or something. I hope I haven't over burdened you guys with too much ranting D:

Losing Things, Bubble Tea and Teriyaki

As is always the case, I tend to lose things during the year. Everyone does, no? However, I had hoped that this year, I could try to not lose anything that is essential to my daily routine/work/life such as my pencil case, lab cards, IDs, etc. So much for that. Already, I had lost the three things I had mentioned (ok, well my lab cards and IDs got returned to me today, and I didn't exactly lose them per se, but it still felt like I did) this year, and there are of course, other things that are not as important, but still have their place in my heart. For instance, the tassel ornament that I added with various other charms for my cellphone, I think it snapped off while I was at Chapters today :( And let's hope I didn't lose one of my necklaces, cause this time its value (and physical form) is definitely irreplaceable. Cross my fingers that my necklace is where I think it might be...

In shooting segments for my project 2 for Time-Based Communication today, I went to Bubble Republic because it's one of the more well known bubble tea places in my city, and from what I know, uniquely in this area with a vibe that is different from other places such as Destiny. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of kids today the time I went (then again, it is a school day today) so I might have to come back again to shoot at night just to capture its' very essence... oh well. At least I got my peach green tea bbt!

And the epic stairs of the City Hall :P (just because I had to do some footage yesterday for my Time-Based as well)

And here comes more pictures... of the Teriyaki chicken I first tried cooking last week! It was mostly a success, but the only thing I found was that I cooked the sauce too early so when it cooled down, it started solidifying! *le gasp* It still tasted good though. Just a note to self to cook later to maintain that semi-viscous texture next time...

Garlic rice mixed with egg and a bit of ketchup (this wasn't made by me btw)

Teriyaki chicken!

Catching Up is Always Hard to Do...

Sort of. Not really. School maybe. I feel like I've had a lot of instances this year in which I lagged behind; partially because I felt the need to redo a project/assignment or be... no it's solely because I had to redo stuff. But sooner or later, it will all be over because in two weeks, there's Christmas break! In the meantime, I shall recall other recent happenings with pictures because everybody loves looking at pictures :)

Regretfully, I had not received pictures of the butter chicken I had (proudly) made all by myself since I forgot my camera that day and I had to borrow a phone to take those pictures. I shall get those soon!

I do however, have a few pictures of my recent adventure to the International Centre for the DesignCity expo(?) that happened last Saturday. Big name printers like Epson, HP, Fujifilm and Heidelberg were there, as well as an assortment of printing services (though most are not retail), paper companies like Coast Paper and Spicer (damnit, I'm still kind of sad I couldn't get any samples from them) and some presentations like live software tutorials were there. I even met the lady of the Mississauga branch of Keng Seng, whom I haven't seen in the longest time. She's still as nice as ever :)

Being a total loser and marvelling at the display of clean design

This company based in Québec specializes in button machinery/ button making, lanyards, keychains  and plastic bracelets...

Heidelberg's heavy duty printing press

And their die cutter....

Foamcore being cut

Paint displays?

More printing machinery...

Fujifilm printing marvel comic book posters... too bad they stopped printing when I was waiting in line

Somebody was building this stack of cards. T'was pretty awesome.

Ernest Green's die-cutter machinery was cutting this foamcore of assorted characters when it broke. Again I was in line waiting at the time. What is up with me lining up and not getting stuff?! Must be my stroke of luck that day...

One of the winners of the International Awards

Taking pictures of the vast airport field while waiting for the bus...

Yep, that reflection of that yellow bag was the bag I was carrying... full of stuff!

I didn't want to take a picture of all the magazines, flyers and pamphlets I got so I decided to take a picture of the more exciting things like this colour paper sample

Oooooohhh shiny foil :D