I’ve been sending time away from the computer lately (I was online for ~10 minutes yesterday!). I counted it all up, and I spent nearly four and a half hours in public transit yesterday! 3 hours for to and from school, then more time on various buses and trains. I completely abused my transit pass, thank goodness I have it though – it would have cost $15 out of pocket if I didn’t have my transit pass!
Going out to dinner last night was horrible. My mom heard about this restaurant on the radio and on a tv commercial. They serve “fusion” food (Chinese food and western foods) but the service was absolutely horrible. We got seated very quickly, and we ordered within like maybe 10 minutes of arrival. After we ordered our food for dinner, it took over 50 minutes before the first dish arrived. We’d called a server over (at around 30 min) to see what was taking so long. She apologized for the wait and promised to go see what was going on. At another time (maybe at around 50 min), we called the (same!) server over again, in hopes of just getting rice or something while we were waiting (it was a 4 person combo meal, so we were supposed to get rice and dessert with 4 different dishes) and she sees us waving, walks over, stops, looks at our table and then just turns around and walks away – without even asking us what we were asking for! Every single thing that was brought to our table that night (including the bill) was brought by the manager, with an apology for the wait every single time. One of the dishes was too salty, the rice was cold (!) when it arrived at our table, the person refilling our tea cups spilled into two of dishes and… well… needless to say, they didn’t get a very sizable tip from us. But seriously, 50 minutes? One of the dishes we ordered was a type of fish with vegetables – which should have been the easiest (and quickest!) thing to cook up. The table next to us was seated after we were, ordered after we had ordered and they got their food quickly, ate, paid and left before we even got anything that we had ordered.
My dad just got home from his trip (I’m hesitant to call it a vacation, as he spent some time at tourist spots, but the reason for his trip was a death in the family). During the time, he apparently never got a hair cut and we were all like “Oh. My. Gosh.” when we saw him. There was definitely a lot of photos being taken before his hair cut last night (my mom did it) as it was the only time we’ve ever seen it that long. He did bring back gifts for us! My sister got a really nice watch (however, she’s not sure when she’d get to wear it as it’s not waterproof and she works with tanks full of water at work…), my other sister got a new cell phone (granted, she needs to use a power adapter, but it’s essentially an iPhone lookalike and she’s been wanting a new phone for ages, and her SIM card fits ‘quite nicely’ into it) and I got… Well, heh, I got another Blythe doll. I’m still bouncing around names for her, but she’s quite cute. She’s got black hair, bangs and a bowl/mushroom hair cut. So she pretty much reminds me of me when I was under the age of ten. Not quite sure what to call her, most of my childhood nicknames are related to my name and none of them seem to ‘fit’ her, especially since some of those nicknames are still in use and I haven’t had bangs and a bowl/mushroom cut since I was under the age of 10.
We’d gone out for most of today – out for tea/lunch, grocery shopping, the library (I borrowed Intensely Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History by John Ortved with the foreword by Douglas Coupland and Rubber Soul by The Beatles because my sister said that she never knew there was a song called Michelle). Got home maybe mid-afternoon? I spent a few hours looking at trip photos/videos from when my dad was on his trip – there’s the most adorable photo of the behind of a red panda! And giant pandas! And other awesome animals! And then there were photos of relatives that I recognize (ahem, I’ve apparently met all of my uncles and aunts, at least the ones that were living when I was born, but I only recognize a handful of them because I’ve never been back to visit them after that first time… When I was under 2 years old…).
Oh, also while I was out today, I found someone’s hiding spot outside of the restaurant that my family went to for lunch (the bottle was full and unopened – but I left it there):
