Lei

Time to Hibernate

It's quiet outside. And cold. slowly I fill the small scoop with moss like material which has filled up the gutters on the house. There is so much water that it overflows down onto the conrete below. With each push, more gunk comes up and water spills over. From atop my ladder, I can see down the street. The wet road partially covered in a thin layer of slush. A car approaches four blocks away before turning off into another part of the neighborhood.

Small drops of cold water continue to fall all over me. On my hair, my jacket, the gloves on my hands. But I don't look up. I just keep scooping the stuff out of the gutter until finally, I hear the water running down the pipe along the side of the house. The plug is gone.

At the corner of the roof I see an opening where the frame has been partially knawed away. There are still one or two squirrels running around this neighborhood even though I had killed or relocated four of them.

I was at Home Depot yesterday and through their speakers I swore I heard the song which was used at Club Med before the evening show. The familiar and upbeat trumpeting. I wish I could go again. My friends rebooked for Turks and Cacoise but I couldn't. The resort is fully booked.

Instead, I am left to deal with this snow, the hot water tank which needs to be replaced, the gutters which need to be unplugged, the accounting which needs to be looked after, the driveway and sidewalk which need to be shovelled, etc. etc.

My throat is feeling dry and scratchy now. It's a good time to hibernate with some movies and some Breyers ice cream. But wait, *pause*... oh... oh...

*ACHOO!*

Li La Li, Li La Li Li Li Li Li

There were three birthday dinners this weekend. I made it to two of them. First was for Leslie in the badminton group. Calvin, me and another friend bought dinner for her. We went to Sui sha ya for all you can eat.

Saturday, my other friend Lynette celebrated her birthday by having a potluck dinner at her place. So of course, we had to have her usual Dr. Pepper shots. Glug glug glug we went.

Afterwards, she fired up the karaoke machine. After everyone finished embarassing themselves like *cough* 'Sarah' *cough*, only Lidia and I sang in the end. Many had already left and as she put it, if she was gonna go down, she needed to take someone down with her and that person happened to be me. Down we went where all the horrible singers are sent in the afterlife. Thankfully, some songs are not terribly difficult to sing. Songs with words like the 'Li Li Li's' in The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel, or 'dit dun dit dun' and 'thong thong thong thong thong' of the thong song by Sisqo. Yes, karaoke can be humiliating and painful to ones ears but as long as you can repeat simple words and somehow hold a tone, thats all you need. What wonderful songwriters there are.

I missed the third birthday. It was my sisters. Doh!

Models, Lights and Little Stars

The light from the strobes shine down on our model from four points around her. Each meant to highlight a certain part of her body with one main one to the side in the front and high up.
"How about a smile? Give me a smile" Dave says to the young croatian woman. She is wearing a stylish red long sleeve shirt with a sewn in pattern on the front, a crimped skirt and a pair of shiny tall black high heeled boots. Very cool looking. The fan is on blowing her hair for extra effects.
"I'm from eastern europe. We don't know how to smile."
"Hmm. So what can we do?"
"You need to make me do something. Something wild or talk to me and make me laugh that way." The model continues to shift parts of her body just a little to give us a continuous stream of different poses.
Dave clicks away slowly occasionally stopping to preview the shots on the screen of his digital camera.
"Oh can I look? I need some of these pictures to build my portfolio." The class had agreed to give her one or two photos each because our photography teacher had suggested it. Even though she was a very good model, she had started late and didn't have a complete or up to date portfolio.

Dave was finished and sat down in his chair. The room went quiet and no one moved. The model just stood there waiting for someone to get up. Everyone in our group just sat there because they were either too afraid to get up and do something out of shyness or because they wanted to go last so that they could see what other people did to give them ideas for their own shoot. The model didn't care. Luba didn't want to be loved. "She just wants someone to shoot her" I said to the class. "So somebody shoot her!"

We all took turns taking shots with her until the models swapped rooms. The big haired Andrea came into our room with the white model background while our croatian went over to the black room which now had a hollywood lighting setup. Everyone was given a choice of which of which room they wanted to take pictures in.

I gave the sync chord adaptor to Elenita and started to make my way out of the studio to go to the other room. As I did so, Andrea's eyes followed me towards the door. I could read exactly what they were saying, "why aren't you staying to take my photos?" I was surprised at this but didn't think much of it. There's still another four or five student photographers waiting to take Andrea's photos with the rembrandt lighting set up and I only had six frames left on my roll of film. I preferred the hollywood lighting in the other room.

Our female teacher was probably the most enthusiastic of anyone in the class. Always pointing out something about the lighting, the background, the set in general, the way the model stood, moved, held and positioned themselves. It was non-stop comments that eventually started to annoy some of the students as in previous studio sessions during this course. I've never met anyone so into photography. It was a bit much I think for some but didn't bother me. She'd get excited about everything. Even the theory. The good thing was that she knew it. This way she could joke her way out of it by saying something like, "ok, I'll be quiet now." or "I'll stop talking now."

In one of the December issues of the local papers, one of my photos will be used in an ad. Once a month Salon Firouzi has a small blurb about their Yaletown shop and this time, they will be highlighting a friend who just started working there. They needed a headshot of her and I coincidentally happened to be there when this request came up. I didn't have any head shots of my friend on my film camera so I took the best shot I could with her small digital camera at her place nearby. The lighting in the shop was horrible for a her camera. Using some dark blue curtains as the background, I took a number of flash filled pictures which were all overexposed. Even with the exposure setting set at the lowest, the camera always put out the same light output unlike the flash of an slr. I took a bunch of these photos home and fixed them up on my computer. My friend isnt' that young any more so I got rid of some lines, added some more lip to her thin upper lip, blotched out some wrinkles and dark spots, whitened her teeth a bit and got rid of the excessive light on her skin from the flash. The final picture was completely different from the original one. It made her look younger having smooth and blemish free skin. Frank was happy with the results and quickly submitted it to the papers. My first soon to be published photo although it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. A plain ol headshot.

Last week I went to the last mandarin class. We had decided to go to a chinese restaurant downtown called the Snow Garden. It used to be the place to be because of the chef. That was some ten to twenty years ago. Tonight, last tuesday that is, the place was rather empty. Our small class of seven pupils sat at one table with one of the two instructors and her husband. The food was good and our instructors husband told us stories of his travels in china. He is a canadian born citizen who married the instructor from china and is now fluent in mandarin.

During our last two classes, we learned to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in mandarin. God was that embarassing. Then the instructors husband taught us another chinese song which he performed for us complete with chinese sound instruments. Little bamboo things which you hit together to make noises. I'll stick to playing with my guitar.

7:30

Yesterday morning I went to sleep at 7:30am.

Friday evening I worked at the nursing home after cancelling out on ice hockey. Afterwards, I met up with Eric at a club downtown. I don't know why but for some reason it seems that whenever I get into the clubbing phase, it's always back at the same place. Way back it used to be called Madison's with my asian clubbing friends. Then it changed to the 'Drink' during my DJ lesson era, and now with the predominantly south or latin american ESL group, it is reborn as the Red Room.

The place was pretty good and I felt like I was in Cancun at the disco hut again. Nice crowd, great music. Jose got drunk. Eric danced with some people whom he already knew through school.

Some south american woman grabbed me as I was taking some photos and started dancing. I made my attempt at it and she put her hands on my hips gesturing me to swing them side to side. I think it was supposed to be merenge and I think I'll need more lessons. In another song, I held her lead hand with my left and put my right against her back, taking two or three steps forward and another two or three steps back facing each other. It was some popular dance that they all knew.

A little while later, I found myself watching a young woman not too far from me. She was standing at a table with a group of female friends, some of whom were dancing on the small platforms found at the edge of the dance floor. We glanced at each other a few times. Then she moved to stand at the side of the table so that her body was facing me yet she wouldn't look at me any more than a brief second or so.

A couple of footsteps and I stood in front of her. She turned away from me as I approached but eventually turned back to face me again. "Hi."
"Hi" she said back. "I'm Ann."
"My name is Lei. It's nice to meet you."
"How old are you Lei?" I was worried about this. At this point, I feel like some older guy preying on some young woman or something. "Guess" I replied.
"thirty?"
"Nope. Go higher"
"Thirty four?"
"You got it... How old are..." She started to move her head side to side. "Okay, I shouldn't be asking that."
"What do you do Lei?"
"I'm an engineer." I hesitated for a moment leaving out the part about leaving my job in the summer. "And what about you? What do you do?" Just as I said this, the music from the speakers immediately above me became really loud. I could hardly hear myself speak.
"I work with deaf people."
"What?"
"I work with deaf people!" she yelled. I was about to become deaf I thought to myself and maybe she will have to work on me just as soon as the song decides that it doesn't need to be this loud anymore. Now I remember why I'm not too fond of trying to make small talk with people I don't know in clubs. Or at least, try doing it while standing in front of a speaker. I was also starting to feel like this was one of those dates where you start off with a whole bunch of questions. So did I pass or meet her standards?
"I want to dance to this song with my friend" she then said to me. They danced but I decided to just watch not continuing to persue her although I could tell that she was still interested.

We stayed until closing before deciding to go over to a friends place just a block away. Three ESL students got together and rented this condo/suite because they didn't want to live in a homestay anymore. It was a small get together for a friend which included Yuki and company from japan, Maria and Janet from brazil, and Lily and Carlos from Venezuela. I couldn't figure out where Natasha was from as she and a canadian guy kept joking it. Natasha she was able to speak many languages. Suki's boyfriend recently left to return home to Italy. Of them all, I liked Janet. Too bad the majority of them will be gone by christmas. One by one they will all disappear. We stayed at the small apartment until 5:30am.

Eric was getting hungry so I brought him to Denny's instead of Pho noodles. By the time I dropped him off at his homestay house, the light from the morning sun was already coming up. I went to sleep around 7:30am.

Here Eric shows his disappearing cigarette trick to everyone at Maria's go away party.

I woke up around 1:30pm. My sister dropped by with her weekly laundry. "So did those people get back to you yet?" she asked.
"Nope, I'll talk to Eric later about the others later."
"So you'll be there at 4:30 right?"
"Yes. we'll be there."

An old friend and former teammate was having his birthday today. About sixteen of us went down to richmond for some indoor go-karting. I came out with my usual first or second fastest time. Only Ben was faster in the first race. He bumped his way around the track pushing people all over the place. As a result, he received the only warning from the track officials for his driving tactics. In the second race, the two of us once again fought for position only to find ourselves held up by Tony who was slower. He didn't leave enough room to pass on the tight track.

Fellow night owl and birthday boy Ko getting ready to race.

Eric getting ready for his first lap around the track from the starting grid.

Then it was off to Sammy J Peppers for dinner with the group and some more. Not everyone raced. Eric had never been to this restaurant before and liked all the canadian waittresses there.

We all went to silvercity to catch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I was hesitant at first but after watching it, I liked it. All but the ending that is. I won't go into details. We also kill time in the lineup by playing card games for over an hour and a half before we were allowed to go into the theatre.

I woke up at 7:30am today. At least that's what I thought. I think there might have been a power outage during the night because the clock was about two and a half hours behind. Back to work I go to replace an old bathroom fan with a new one at the nursing home.

Brand Van 99

Ninety-six, ninety seven, ninety eight, ninety nine, one hundred. The pump stops. That's how much it cost to fill up the new van with gas. I feel no envy for all those big SUV owners out there.

I finally brought the van over to the nursing home for them to use after my week of testing it out. When I pulled up in the back alley, the staff came out as soon as they saw it. It has been a couple of months since they've had any vehicle to drive the patients around in. Ann the recreational therapist loved it cause it still had a new car smell and look to it. Eloisa explored the middle of the van like a kid. "It's so clean Leimon, we just bought a used car too and it was really dirty inside."

I didn't respond right away. "It's a ninety nine without the cloth seats and carpetting. So its relatively easy to keep clean and odor free. You should have seen this other van I looked at. As soon as I opened the door, the odor just hit you. Needless to say, I didn't bother with a test drive."

Word spread through the house and patients starting coming out. They were all so happy. One especially. Lindsey stood there on the steps of the old victorian home completely overjoyed. Her mouth just kept moving "oh is that our new van? It looks so wonderful! I'm so happy thank you Jamie. Jamie thank you. Now we can go for a ride. When can we go for a ride..." Many of the patients call me by my brothers name. Suffering from some sort of mental disorder, I never bother trying to correct them.

Incidentally, I first saw the van in an ad some months ago before it disappeared off the lot despite the ad still being on. It turns out that the van had been rented by a video crew and used on some show. So if you happen to see a large green Dodge twelve passenger van parked or driving on a street in some movie or show, it might be ours.

Fix This Replace That V - A Day in the Life of a Bum

I woke up. It was late. A spot on the wall was lit up by the sun seeping through the blinds. Slowly I stumble out of bed to go to the washroom. At the sink, I bend over and turn on the hot water. I hold my hands under the tap to cup what is just luke warm water before splashing it on my face.

The cereal is bland. No sugary stuff as I've binged on all of that already. Those boxes lay empty on the table. It has only been recently that I've gotten back into eating cold cereal for breakfast. Maybe because its fast and convenient, yet it never fills me up and I am soon feeling hungry again.

My sister drops by. She has just returned from a week in San Francisco with some friends. Nothing terribly exciting has happened and now she's back here to dump off a weeks worth of laundry. "You know, Debbie said that you could do some work for Clint. His office is busy and he could use another CAD Design person." I ponder this for a moment before responding. "Maybe. Maybe later. I'll think about it." That's my attitude towards work these days. Engineering work especially. Even with the courses I'm taking, it just seems that I've fallen back into the rut of not knowing what I want to do.

At my desk, I decide to make a few phone calls overcoming my fears of social contact. Facing or communicating with other people with the possibility of backlash or confrontation. It is monday morning and about a week since the last payment to me from my old company was due. Four days since the email which was sent to them requesting that they fulfill their legal obligations to pay me out. I didn't ask about the share stock options. No response has been received since.

I call and my old boss soon picks up the line. "Hi there" he says. I respond in kind, "hi. I was just wondering what was happening with the last payment."
"Oh well, I was witholding it because I didn't know if you wanted to continue to get the share stock options."
"Can you gaurantee me that if I agree to it, that I'll see those share certificates at my door in 48 hours?"
"No, and we will not give you the whole payment and allow you to give us a cheque in return for the share stock options when the certificates are produced."
"I see" I told him. "You know, the issue here is not whether I'm good for my money, its whether the company can be trusted with its end of the bargain. So far it looks like you and the company are continuing to just shrug me off."
In a demeaning and 'I got you' tone of voice, he says to me "so what's it going to be? A full cheque and forget the stock options or put in the request for the stock options with no guarantee that they will be produced and the balance afterwards?"
"Ok. Lets go for the stock options and balance afterwards. In 48 hours, if there are no certificates at my door, then I'll just take the whole cheque."
"Okay then" he says.
"I'll talk to you later." The phone clicks and there is a pause.

He thinks he has me. I know he does and for the moment I think so too. They'll just sit on the next 48 hours and just give me the cheque. They don't want to issue me the stocks because they know that I'll just dump it on the market and at this point in time, they are doing everything they can to keep the stock up. The AGM is just over a month away and they need every cent they can get in what remains to be a cheap penny stock.

I decide to send an email off to him and the CEO down in Texas. In it I write something to the effect of,

"As per my conversation this morning with the company, I see that the company continues in its old ways of ignoring my requests or putting me on the back burner. I know that the issuing of the stock certificates will be delayed as it has been all summer since I first requested it. I am reminding you that the majority of the companies products have been made with pirated software. Deleting your files at the office will do you no good. In addition, the penalties for such acts are far greater than what the company owes to me presently.

I have requested that the shares be couriered to me within 48 hours and you have responded by telling me that you will look into what is required to get it processed. I had already done that for you two months ago when I last visited you at the office. At that time, I had contacted the share transfer agent directly and found out everything that was required.

So the choice is yours. I leave this in your capable hands."

I think I got him and if not, there's more...

-------------------------------------------------

Aftwards, I took the 'new' used van out on some errands. First to return the tools I jimmied to fix the dishwasher at the nursing home. Someone had jammed the large metal drain plug so tight that no one could pull it out. I used two bearing separators with a screw inbetween to easily force the plug out.

Then it was back to the used car dealer. The van has been good except for one thing. I found that whenever I make a left turn up onto a small hill or at speed, there is a grinding noise on the outside. This never happened on the original two test drives because during those rides, I just circled the block(s) in a clockwise direction never having to make a left turn. The dealer was nice about it. He took me to a mechanic nearby which he uses who would look at it. Too bad they were busy and recommended that I come back early next morning when they open.

Following this I drove up to a nearby strip mall. I pull up at a small bank at one end. My American Express bill is over due and I need to pay it off. It's just a tiny amount though. A measly nineteen dollars and thirty cents. As I walk up, I notice it is dark inside. Great! They're closed on mondays. I also don't have my cheque book with me to write a cheque out for the payment via machine. I hop back in the van and drive over to the other end of the mall. I get out and walk into the mall to one of the first few stores. In the key shop, I stand behind two other men while a woman is busy cutting keys for one of them. As I stand there, I wonder if they will even have the key blanks that I will need. A fuel cap and general car key. Then I wonder if they will take a credit card. I open my fake Louie Vuitton wallet and leaf through one five dollar bill, an american dollar bill which I had my friend Jorge sign before he left at the airport and some loose change. On the wall, I see a small sign that says 'sorry, cash only'. I don't think I have enough cash.

So back outside I go, deciding to walk the length of the parking lot back to the teller machines at the bank. I get the money and walk back thinking this will be the most exercise in fresh outside air I will get in a long time. I return and the two men are gone. I get the keys cut and I'm done. However, the total cost is only five dollars and fifty two cents. I didn't need to go to the bank after all. Now it's off to London Drugs to buy a new battery for one of the cordless phones.

I return home to plant myself in front of the computer. Surf, blog and chat with Gambit via Gizmo. Yesterday he had H and P over for dinner. So with Gizmo up, I could hear everything they were saying and talked with them a bit as well. Today I tried to play some guitar songs through the net for him to listen to. With no amp hooked up, it was barely audible coming from an electric guitar.

Meanwhile over at the nursing home, I am told that the pest control guy has just accidentally ripped out one of the wall sockets in the kitchen which the fridge was plugged into. Wonderful...