幾鬼秘的部落格

Restaurant Review - Hachitarou

As any of my friends and family will tell you, I am far from being qualified to critique food.  So if a restaurant is so bad that I have to rant about it, you know it's pretty bad.

Hachitarou is a relatively new all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurant, located at the NE corner of Hwy 7 and McCowan.  After seeing it being featured on a Chinese TV show, my family decided to go there last Sunday night for dinner.  We made a reservation for 6:30pm for 6 people.  When we arrived the restaurant was already packed, and we were offered a table that normally seats 4.  Honestly even for 4 people the table was darn small.  We were basically distributing the food as soon as they came so the waiter could take the empty dishes away ASAP.

None of the food is worth mentioning, which is not the worst part, as most all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurants are not that great anyway.  The service was extremely poor, as one can guess from them trying to cram so many people into the restaurant  At one point I had hot water (from condensed steam) drip onto my shirt as the food was being delivered.  The washroom was rundown even for a normal restaurant, let alone a new one.  As hand wash soap you're given detergent - that's definitely a new one.

All in all it was probably the worst dining experience I had in a long time - bad enough to make me take the time to blog about it.  But if I can just save some of you from making the same mistake, then maybe it wasn't a completely worthless experience :)

How to blow a clean game

Step 1 - spare, strike, strike, spare

Step 2 - gutter ball, gutter ball

Step 3 - spare, strike, spare, strike, spare, strike

As any of my team members can attest, I'm known for rolling at least one gutter ball on any given night.  But I don't remember having rolled two of them in a roll in recent memory.  This is definitely one to remember.

 

Thank you

So as everybody who attended my wedding banquet knows, I was extremely unprepared for the thank you speech.  So here, in no particular order, I'll try to make it up to the people whom I (or Chris) missed in our speeches.

Andy and Eugenia, for going the extra mile.  You were the first ones at the ceremony and at the banquet.  What you've done was way beyond what we expected of you, especially Andy, running around the whole day and night making sure that everything went smoothly.  And of course, delaying your vacation just for us.  Hope you're enjoying Paris.

Josephine, for organizing the surprise video montage.  That was very thoughtful of you.  Dom and Emily, for gathering the videos.  And Matthew (my new brother-in-law), for putting it all together.

Maverick, whom I'd thanked at the banquet, but forgot to emphasize that he'd worked 2 long nights prior, and was getting through the day with Tylenols :(

Charles, not only for being my photographer, but also for putting together my slideshow with very short notice.

Vincci, for sharing your story of my storage rental business :)  And for being the biggest contributor to winning the Q&A contest for table 10.

Jeff, Annie, Sharon, and Jimmy, for taking care of decoration and sound at the banquet.  All your hard work is behind the scene, but it's just as appreciated.

Emily and Monica for MC'ing for us, and thinking up all those questions.  I heard that there was supposedly another game that was planned but was skipped due to time constraints.  I wish we could've played it.

CC for bringing us the floral arrangement to the ceremony - not the easiest job with low vase full of water.

Thank you all for making our big day a success.

My first 600 series

Last night was the first night of our summer league at Club 300.  For some reason they did not have a record of my average from last year, so they gave me a default handicap of 32, which is probably 10+ points less than what it should be.

I didn't play particularly well at the beginning, but a string of strikes gave me a first game score of 199.  Between two gutter balls, a 7-8 conversion,  a couple of pin 7 spares, and a streak of strikes (some ugly, some lucky), I ended up with a total score of 611!

If this continues I don't think I'll ever go back to World Bowl :)

Not bad for $4.99

As a result of my parking mishap 2 weeks ago, the front left fender of my car was left with some major scratches, chipped paint and paint left on from the wooden frame with which it made contact.  From the "before" and "after" photos, perhaps you'd agree that I've done a pretty darn good job of undoing my own damage.  I felt pretty hopeless at first when I couldn't even remove the paint left on from the wooden frame of the garage.  In desperation I used a few drops of Vim to remove the paint.  Most of the scratches were removed using a polishing compound that costs $4.99 from crappy tire.  While I did use touch-up paint as the final step, the operation was far from "touching up".  I was practically painting the fender with the tiny brush.

If you look hard enough you can see a minor dent.  But hey, for $4.99 + tax I can live with that :)

Well I feel like an idiot, again

Last month I made a $300-mistake by ripping apart Chris' Lancer bumper in a snow bank while backing out of my driveway.  I blamed it on the cars that filled my small street.  But of course, I also could've shoveled my driveway more cleanly :)

Well today, I got no one to blame.  Through pure inattention, I rammed my Miata against one side of my garage.  I've always bragged about the width of my garage.  So to do this, especially with a tiny car like mine, is embarrassing.  And of the four corners, I did this to the front driver side, arguably the easiest corner to judge.  Arrggghhh... I am pissed!

My luck with windshields

My experience with windshield damages:

Sometime between 1998 and 2000 - my very first stone chip on my very first car (MX-3).  I tried to fix it with some DIY kit that did not help a bit.  Luckily the chip did not spread before I traded the car in.

2002 - two years after getting my new MX-5, I got a stone chip that was repairable.

2004 - two years later, I got hit by a fist-size rock falling from the top of a truck traveling on a different lane ahead of me on the highway.  Needless to say, that wasn't repairable.

2006 - another two years later, I heard a pop while traveling on the highway, but did not notice any chip on my windshield.  Turned out that the chip was hidden behind the rear view mirror.  By the time it was noticeable, the crack has spread too much for it to be repairable.  I tried to live with the crack but had to eventually replace it in before I traded the car in.

2008 - two days ago, I heard a loud pop while going to work.  This time I actually got a double whammy - I don't know how I could've gotten two chips when I only heard one pop.  I had them repaired today.

Looks like I'll be due another hit in 2010 :(

An Eventful Month

February has been quite an eventful month so far.  We had a very snowy start to the Chinese New Year, which coincided with my birthday day this year.  Chris and my sisters treated me to Cfood that night, then a bunch of my friends celebrated with me at The Sultan's Tent, complete with a belly dancer, later that weekend.

The cold and snowy weather continued to the following week, but apparently that wasn't enough to stop a guy from riding his motorcycle!  I wish I'd taken a pic.  That week I was invited and then uninvited to the Eason Chan concert, which I heard was pretty good.  For V-day Chris and I decided to go out for dinner the day after to avoid the crowds.  That night she surprised me with a homemade steak and lobster dinner! Very impressive and delicious.  I had more seafood the following night at The Doctor's House in Kleinburg.  We walked into a virtually empty restaurant and was seated right by the window with a beautiful view of the adjoining chapel.  I had tiger shrimps which came with Oreo-sized scallops!  Even in the cold and dark of night Kleinburg looked quite nice.  It's only 20 minutes from my place so it'd definitely make a good destination for a bike ride there.  I can't wait until the weather gets warmer.

This past weekend I accidentally took a chunk of my middle finger off with a putty knife.  Yes I screamed like a girl.  Yes I need a letter opener.  Luckily that was with my right hand.  Because days later, I used my other hand, with all fingers intact, to bowl a 223 at our weekly league.  I can't quite remember if that was my personal high - it was either 218 or 238.

I hope it was just a coincidence that the lunar eclipse happened that night, cause I don't want to wait for 2 years before breaking this high score.  I took my first attempt at photographing the moon and have noticed 2 interesting points. 1) It is a lot brighter than you think so you don't need a good fast lens to photograph it, which is a good thing because 2) its movement is very noticeable when you've zoomed up close to it.

Huge Hike @YYZ Parking

The last time I used the short term parking @T1 @YYZ, it was $2.5 for half an hour.  This morning, I drove my parents there for their flight to HK.  I got their boarding passes for them from the supposedly "express" check-in machine, only to be told to line up with the rest of the people even though we only need to check in 2 bags.  I've never waited for so long to check in.  More than one hour later, I got a $12 bill for parking!  @$4/half hour, that's a 60% increase!  I ddin't hear of this price hike on the news and couldn't find anything online about it.  I'm very curious about how they justify such a huge hike.

Provence, Day 7

For the last day of our trip, we'd planned to arrive in Paris as early as possible, in the morning, so Chris can see a different side of France.  But as a result of us moving base from Avignon to Arles, I thought that we'd have to take a regular long-distance train which wouldn't get us to Paris until the afternoon.  Of course the solution was simple - we'd take a train from Arles to Avignon to catch a TGV from there.  I only wish that I was the one coming up with that solution :)

We arrived at our hotel in front of the Gare de l'Est before noon.  After lunch, we started our day of shopping.  I'd wanted to start at La Samaritaine, which was centrally-located in the first arrondissement close to many tourist attractions.  But unfortunately it's closed indefinitely for renovation.  So we went to the Galeries Lafayette instead.  This was on a Friday afternoon and I couldn't believe how crowded the store was.  It felt like boxing day at home!  Are these people all tourists?  Well, judging from our observation that there was at least one salesperson who spoke Mandarin at almost every department, I'd say that's a good guess.

While we didn't really have a shopping list, we thought that it'd be nice if we could get our wedding bands here in Paris.  We didn't see anything that piqued our interests so we walked over to Le Printemps nearby.  At this point I really didn't think we could pick out something in such a short timeframe, as both department stores looked the same to me.  Soon after, we casually walked into a Cartier store where a Japanese sales lady greeted us.  She showed us the collection and even though we were quickly attracted to the Love collection, we didn't stay for long.  We got a couple of quotes and left the store to continue our search.

Eventually we did return to the store, since we didn't see anything else that remotely came close to our liking elsewhere.  We were in the store for more than one hour, mostly trying to decide whether to get the rings in white gold or platinum.  Or rather, to get them in white gold or not, since they didn't have the platinum in our sizes.  The sales lady, who's been living in Paris for 10 years, was very patient and helpful.  With a little help from her we finally decided to get them.  It was now close to 6pm so we hurried out the department store to search for a post office to mail home the packaging.  Then we went back to finish up our shopping, applied for our VAT refund and headed for Place de la Concorde, where we rode the ferris wheel before finishing our day with a Japaneses dinner.

So, although this was my 3rd time in Paris, it was very much a completely different experience for me.  We told ourselves that we'd come back to Provence to celebrate our 10-yr anniversary.  Since we completely missed the lavender and truffles season this time, I can totally see ourselves coming back to catch Provence at a different time of the year.  Au revoir!