So here I am typing away on a public terminal in the hotel, attempting
to blog from yet another country! Just came back from a concert by
the Czech Philharmonic, which was ok, I guess, but the concert hall
was incredibly beautiful. I'm very tired, knees are bad, so is my
back, and I want to go home… I guess that doesn't sound so good,
eh? Anyway, a quick synopsis is that I like venturing on my own
(except for finding the food), and I don't like the tour group
environment (except for the food). Ok, signing off now, more details
(a lot more details) later.

Just moments away before I leave now. Still feeling incredibly nervous, incredibly scared, yet incredibly excited. I got some euros now, so hopefully I can survive on that. Things are going to be a bit tricky once in Vienna…pray for the best.

I’m only bringing this tiny blue luggage, this is the only non-carry-on luggage. Then there’s this large backpack that I’ve had for a while now, plus the camera bag. Hmm…I’m squeezing things in pretty tightly now…wonder if I’ll be able to bring anything back… Well, if not, then no gifts for anyone!

Should I think about research during the trip? Hmm…

I had a funny flashback to about October or November of last year. The fellowship was doing sports day, and there was also a chess table where Forest and Brian were playing chess. Brian took an exuberant amount of time in taking his moves, questioning everything and even questioning Forest’s moves. I later played half a game with him before we all had to leave. Thing is, now that we’re playing boardgames, Brian’s still one of the slowest players, and now I realize, ah…he’s always been like that!

One thing about the European trip that I’m afraid of is actually suffocation…from second hand smoke. That’s part of what happened in Bulgaria, where tons of people smoked, outside and inside. From what I read, Vienna is about the same…hope to still be breathing when I come back.

It’s Sunday, the last day before taking off for the big trip, and what did I do? More procrastination! Spent a lot of time on writing research stuffs for tomorrow’s supervisor meeting…yeah. But I probably spent more time sleeping, eating, watching TV and using the internet…of course. Now I’m semi-packed, but I still have to clean the house and tie up some loose ends tomorrow morning. It’s going to be crazy…

If there’s any miracle, that is the all-too-smooth installation of MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter… Wow…that went way better than I expected, being a dumb Vista user and all… So now I don’t have an excuse for not writing anything at home, eh? Doh.

I finally managed to fully update the boardgames page (some with photos!). Finally. That’s what a long trip do to me: I finish up things before I forget them. So it turns out that I would have played 21 games for the month of August. Though the games with John and Tim were mostly painful…

A ton of rest means I’m about 80% recovered from my sickness, which is good. What’s left before I leave for Europe? More logistic details on what to do in Vienna, more researching the travel locations, get euros from Graeme, pay residence fees, clean up the house, do more typing for supervisor meeting, and packing! Yikes…that’s a lot… Meanwhile, exciting things are finally happening for the trip… In particular, seats are reserved for a pre-season concert by the Czech Philharmonic! Also, a possible boat trip on the Danube! I’m exhausted already…

I kind of wasted three straight days…the first two I kept going between TV, bed, and computer, and couldn’t make myself go to school. The third, which is today, I got sick, so I slept for quite a bit. It’s really bad to be sick in summer, especially less than a week before I leave the country…doh. Can I recover? Can I do research? Can I survive it all? Probably not…

Now the trip to Europe…that’s a completely bizarre story right now. I’m supposed to arrive a day early than the rest of the tour group, so I have a day to spend in Vienna. My dad’s people were supposed to make arrangements for that day, but I still haven’t heard anything yet…doh. So looks like I’m going to sleep on the streets of Vienna… Besides this, I’ve been researching on Vienna and Czech for a while, and find that I probably won’t appreciate these places…doh again.

I think one possible reason why I couldn’t do anything and wasted all this time is because I’m overwhelmed with a ton of things that I should be doing, and that totally paralyzes me. I can only handle things one at a time… Or maybe I’m just giving myself excuses…

Today, the annual bizarre and silly fest that is VBS joint service. Yikes, the kids. I don’t know, it just felt…strange to have a Sunday service like that… Anyway, spent most of the rest of the day with John and then Tim. And I have to say, when playing boardgames become such an unpleasant and miserable thing to do, maybe it’s time to stop playing. Or at least stop playing with these people…yikes. Anyway, that’s how I wasted my day. Well, at least John and Tim were already up and ready when I was picking them up to church, so that’s something new.

Ed bought a new DSLR…heh. I think he had fun playing with my camera, and he saw it on a one-day sale thingie, so he bought it. So I have the first-generation Rebel, Andrew has the second-generation Rebel, and Ed has the third-generation Rebel. And boy, his camera is certainly a lot faster than mine…hmm…nope, not jealous at all…

Ah, this Vista thing is nuts. I faced the “blue screen of death” for the second time today. It was not pleasant to see. I blame Jason and Wayne for everything! Heh…

Saturday was (maybe) the bizarre day of the month. Started off with an early morning fellowship involving going down a trail and back near RIM Park. Supposed to start at 8, but of course it started at 9, making me wait a while. It was kind of chilly, and I was the only one with t-shirts and shorts…so I was regretting that a bit…but it got warm after a while, so it wasn’t too bad. We then settled at the usual fellowship restaurant for lunch where even though we all finished eating, they kept on talking and talking, and I had to go…so I left early.

Where did I go? Toronto, of course… To Toyota’s Mississauga dealer first in what was supposed to be an uneventful clean air safety inspection of the car to satisfy the government and straighten up the messed up car registration from 4 years ago. Well, of course it didn’t turn out that way…what turned out was that it appeared that my cars needed to have my tires changed….I shook my head in disbelief at how much money I then had to spend, all unexpectedly…yikes.

Anyway, after spending more than two hours and a fortune at the dealer, I was off to Markham/Richmond Hill area, where I would meet up with Andrew and Mary. But first, I spent some spare time at Chapters, picking up a guide book of Czech Republic (almost picking up another pocket map guide on Vienna, but that was deemed too costly). With Andrew and Mary, and Elaine, we went to a small restaurant whose name roughly translated as “little fat lamb.” It was a hotpot thing, and I guess it wasn’t too bad, except perhaps I ate too much seafood and put too much cholesterol into my body…oops. So much so that I almost wanted to vomit while driving back to Waterloo…but thankfully that didn’t happen. Anyway, thanks to Andrew and Mary for the dinner! And I got back home at around 10pm, taking the trip that was 10 hours, 4 cities, and 265.0 kilometres.

So I’ve been working on this proof these days, and a few steps toward the solution are made everyday…but I still don’t have a full proof. After what seemed like a gazillion case-analysis, there are 7 sticky cases remaining, which is frustrating me to no end. Ah…but that is only a start in my frustrations recently. Well, more like multiple annoyances that ultimately give me this unsettling feeling in my stomach. Annoyances like what to do with this trip to Europe (what to bring, what to do, where to get Euros, how to get to the airport etc), and this latest twist in the messed-up car episode where I’ll need to go to Toronto again this Saturday…doh. Anyway, this is all testing my patience greatly…

I helped two people (plus one “in spirit”) move their stuffs in two days. Maybe that’s why I’m so tired…

It appears that my appetite has grown…or rather, I get hungry quicker than before… Hmm…that sounds a lot like Brian and Forest… Is that a good thing? I don’t know…

I woke up early today, only to fall back into sleep. I did manage to go to school and work, which is another surprise. But I’ve been thinking a lot about my current research problem recently, and hoping that it would accelerate into something useful for the thesis…hoping is the keyword… And it turns out that the flaw I’ve found the night before doesn’t have an easy fix, so looks like I’m still stuck…

For some odd reason I’ve decided to cook a meal for the brothers as a precursor for today’s prayer meeting. I haven’t done this for a while, and since I’ve read about hospitality in Peterson’s book, I thought I would give it a try. The idea of communion extended through hospitality is still a mystery to me, but it should be a good thing. So I spent about 1.5 hours cooking, have 4 people come over for dinner, and all that cooked stuffs were gone in 20 minutes (or so it seems). I guess they like to eat… Played a boardgame afterwards, which was quite enjoyable even though I’ve lost miserably…

…and speaking of boardgames, I’ve been lagging behind in my boardgame blog…10 games that I haven’t recorded on it yet… Either I was lazy in posting, or I simply played too many games…or both…heh.

Crazy stuffs. So many things happening, so little time. I’ve made the insurance phone call on Friday and decided to shell out another $50 for the mighty RBC…doh. Also on Friday, something in my computer went wrong so I couldn’t get “premium access” of the internet. After hours of installing and uninstalling Norton softwares, and multiple recovery of Vista, I somehow managed to get the silly detection program to work…however, now Vista is constantly trying to configure antivirus…and I can’t even uninstall them all…very very annoying. Friday night, coworkers meeting, lasted 3.5 hours. But I think it was ok, mostly light atmosphere. However, I’ve committed too much during the meeting, and almost immediately regret it…doh.

Saturday…received a call to finally figure out what this car thingie is all about. Apparently the registration of VIN was messed up when I bought the car. So then I had to somehow send the ownership slip back to Mississauga as soon as possible…doh, that’s kind of annoying. Visited Tim to exercise in the afternoon where I became too tired. Evening bbq was ok, I guess. I don’t really like bbqs…

Sunday…looking for an excuse to go to Mississauga, I’ve decided that I would take David and Helen to Toronto. By doing that, I get a free dinner at Swiss Chalet…heh. At the Toyota place, I’m surprised that there are not mailboxes…only a “key deposit box” for people who dropped their car off early or late in the day for service…so I tried that, and later found out that it worked. So that’s taken care of. I went to T&T for “light” shopping and came back. Throughout the trip (218.5 kilometres, 5 hours), I was contemplating a research problem, only to find a flaw when I almost reached Waterloo…doh.

At Andrew’s suggestion during Paul and May’s wedding, I started taking photos in the RAW format, meaning that the photos don’t get compressed when stored in the camera. What it does, however, is dramatically increase the size of the photos, so I can store only about 100 photos on my 1GB CF memory card… So during the trip to Tobermory, I kept conserving the memory, and deleting the photos, and ended up at roughly 100 photos, though I could have taken a lot more. Storing in RAW has an advantage, though, since I can play around with the lighting and other details of the photos in a nice way through a software. So photos look so much nicer after playing with some settings in the computer. Of course I don’t have time to edit every photo, but that is kind of fun, and very good in seeing how photos do get a lot better with small tweaks here and there. I like it. And…I need another CF card…

For the past couple of days, I was buried under the storm of final exam TA stuffs. Yesterday, it was the proctoring and the marking. Well, the proctoring was boring as usual, but I did get to talk to a few of the fellow TAs, so it’s not that bad. The marking went pretty quick, and I wanted to get it done quickly so that I can come home to watch The Power of 10…heh. And I did. Good show, by the way. And I thought I was done for the TA stuffs for the rest of the year…until I get this email saying they want me back to check some of my markings…doh! So I reluctantly went back, and then they told me that they wanted me to do some tallying at the end…doh! I went through my markings pretty quickly, later returned a few times to do the tallying (which was just very tedious, but was not entirely too bad thanks to Nathan’s calculator!). In the end, through all the double checkings, we ended up finding about 15 errors totally exactly 70 net marks gained or lost! And Jim was the one who made the most mistakes! Hehehe… That’s why double checking is necessary… Anyway, we finished at close to 8pm…and that is it for my TA work for the rest of the year! (hopefully…)

There are a few important phone calls that I have to make, but I hate making these phone calls…somebody get me out of this!

Felt like a long time since I last posted…and indeed it was. So where to start? Monday, a 500km trip to Tobermory with Ed and Ingrid. It was a cloudy day to start, but it was in glorious sunshine by the time we got to Tobermory. In between, we visited Inglis Falls, which was still the same trickle that I’ve seend 5 years ago…heh. Near Tobermory, we got in to the Visitor Centre for what turns out to be Bruce Peninsula National Park. We saw a big tall tower, hoping to climb up and take photos, only to be disappointed when we found out that we have to pay over $5 in park entrance fee in order to use it…oops. So we moved on.

We find ourselves in the midst of a ton of people once in the small town of Tobermory. It was the long weekend, after all. Parking was a pain, but eventually a spot opened up. We’ve decided to go for a cruise that travels around the Fathom Five Marine National Park. But first…we need to eat! And that was no small task…we had a small area around the marine I didn’t want to go for the all-you-can-eat fish and chips (yikes!), and the other restaurant we set our eyes on was full. Eventually, after walking here and there and back again, we ended up eating an overpriced bbq hamburger or hotdog from a tent…and then ate an overpriced drink from the small cabin nearby. Granted, those were good, but still, overpriced…heh.

So about the cruise…it was a 2.5-hour cruise on a medium-size boat (smaller than the one for the 30000 island cruise in Perry Sound), but this one has a partial glass bottom. Reason: to see the numerous sunken ships that lie all around the waters! That was kind of cool to see. Although we didn’t get to know the history behind these ships…but it was very nice. The other highlight was seeing Flowerpot Island and the couple of strange vase-like stone structures along the shores. That was also nice. The funny thing about the cruise was that when it was traveling between the main attractions, it would drive very fast, and the water would splash onto the deck! I was on the deck during one of those splashes, and now I can claim that I have “experienced” the waters of Lake Huron, making that 3 out of 5 Great Lakes that I’ve experienced… Anyway, not too bad of a cruise (though I still like the one in Perry Sound better…heh). Came home after that, with a dinner at Timmies in Durham (visited this Timmies twice on the trip…). And arrived back at around 10pm. Good trip, and photos are up.

I don’t know, I have this strange light-headed feeling where I don’t feel much about anything that’s important (like school work, spiritual life), yet I would have strange emotions for silly things (like boardgames). I don’t know. I think I’m going crazy in a sedated way…

I prayed that I would have someone to talk to in private about some serious stuffs, but when the opportunity came, I foolishly passed on it…doh.

Long weekend. Did nothing so far. Going off for a day trip tomorrow. Hope to survive.

I kept on wasting time. I could blame the incredibly hot weather outside for this. Or I could blame the lack of interesting or pressing things to do for this. Or I could blame my crazy sleeping pattern. But really, I blame myself for everything. I should just stop slacking off and start doing things…

I played squash with David today, and I haven’t played in a long time. I’m surprised that I still lasted more than an hour, especially with the hot weather…so that’s good. As usual, injuries are my friend, but not too many this time around…so that’s good as well. I collapsed onto my bed after I got home, though…expect my body to be sore for a while.

Two boardgame nights to report… One game of Torres after Monday’s prayer meeting. Three games for today’s C&O boardgame night with Tony and Zhentao: A fun game of Play It By Ear, a standard game of Torres, and a supposed silent-and-quick game of Meeple or Noople? I really should start to photograph my games, otherwise the boardgame blog would just sound bland… And really, I don’t know why I keep these record of games that I play…