spoiled chinese girl

Alright so I’m backdating a bunch of entries that I will be discussing the NAUCC (North American Unicycling Convention & Championships… or it means something like that) because I want to break my diary up into some nice managable chunks. Anyone who knows me knows I’m long-winded enough without the necessity of needing to cram 6 days worth of events into one blog entry.

So here I begin.

Friday night I was planning on seeing the Simpson movie on opening night, then spending some time with my best friend before crashing at his place then heading off early in the morning. Well the movie didn’t happen because I felt grumpy and we wouldn’t have made it to the showing I wanted to go to, so instead we hit up the bike shop where we settled up some bike repairs (yes I realize this is supposed to be a unicycle entry, shush up) and then to the bar, then to another bar.

So I somewhat stumbled home due to being tired and just ever so slightly tipsy. Not even. I just argue that I was tired. And me and Phil stayed up a good portion of the night and I think we finally crashed around 2am or thereabouts.

In the morning I had to go shift my car before 8am and somehow ended up doing it at 6am to a spot where I could park all weekend without getting ticketed or towed. And after that I couldn’t really go back to sleep so I decided to take a meandering walk down Roncies. Walked from Dundas & Bloor down to Queen & Ronccies before turning around, crossing the street and heading back. All the little shops that started opening at 7am were amazing because they were open. I was kind of hoping the hot yoga studio would have had a 6am or 7am class because I would have taken it just for the sake of being awake.

Phil ended up getting up and he headed off on his day of tubing at the Elora Gorge. I showered, grabbed a bagel and a muffin, some fruit and a giant thing of water, and hopped in my car at around 10:15am.

Start driving.

Continue driving.

I stopped once to make sure I had the right set of directions. (Realized I should have STUDIED my directions before just driving!) Border crossing wasn’t too much trouble. I didn’t have a signed passport which gave me just enough trouble to find a pen. I had to roll down my back window to prove I had unicycling equipment in the back. And it’s always amusing to see the attempt at non-reaction when they say “What’s going on in Saline Michigan?” “An 8 day unicycling convention, sir.”

And I basically drove from Toronto ON to Saline MI in 4 and a half hours, as predicted by my maps, and without any stops or breaks. I had eaten my bagel, and drank a can of Redbull, and that was about my intake until I arrived at the school most of the events were held at, where I then ate my muffin.

Basically passed out on the floor of the Bedford booth soon after arriving, tried to figure out who my roommate was on my own without any luck because I never bother researching who I’m staying with when I’ve only met them online. Got someone to drive me to the hotel so I could check in but left all my gear in my car meaning no swimming nor anything exciting or early registration.

Got myself back to the event. Found my roommate & introduced myself. Headed off to… lord knows if I can remember. The Bedford Experience was the only thing that got me there that day and it was cut down by more than two thirds of it’s original showing. Headed to the hotel for some unicycling after-party fun which included a lot of board games.

Hung out with my roommate over some beer, rum & coke & discussions over extraneous unicycling skill levels, tattoos and driving cross country. Passed out at probably 4am.

Tomorrow’s the company office putluck for Valentines day.  Honestly I don’t see why we need a potluck for Valentines but the HR person suggested it and so why not.  They’re trying to get the company more friendly with one another, while harping on us if we talk too much.  I just don’t get it.  Either ease up on us and let us chit-chat just a wee bit when we’re working, or don’t.  Don’t tease us by having these things where we can hang out and talk, but only every 6 weeks or so.

Anyways, the potlucks are getting funnier and funnier.  The first my friend Lizzie brought chips and dip.  Keep in mind she *JUST* moved into a new house with her hubby and we’re speculating she didn’t have a kitchen. And she brought in a lot of stuff.  Some really great varieties of chips, tortias and lots of dip and salsa.  Well Amanda is all about fairness and complained about chips and dip not being “real food” (whatever) and ever since our last potluck and this coming potluck the rule has been “No bringing chips and dip” which Liz takes offense to since she did that the first time around.  And it wasn’t like it was bad.

The comment on that is “we need to make sure there’s enough food for the 20 or so office people” and if I recall correctly, it’s not like we ever ran out of food.  We’ve always had leftovers and extras and food we end up sending to the warehouse lunch room for them to all munch on. (I hope they’re not offended by us giving them our leftovers!)

But this most recent one is hilarious.  The e-mail told us that there must be like one green salad, one fruit salad, three meat dishes, two fish/shrimp dishes, one casserole, two vegitarian dishes, one rice dish, one pasta dish, three desserts…  We in the lunch room have been laughing our heads off as we sign up for stuff, and talk about who’s going to duke it out with who if two of the sign-up things were “too close” to each other.

Even better is my other coworker & friend Donna said in passing how she might bring pizza again (Last time she ordered two pretty big pizzas, one veggie one meat and they were awesome) and if I heard this story properly, the HR lady said “No pizza, it’s not on the list”

Revenge of the Human Resources I do think I hear!

Anyways, no one said I couldn’t bring cucumber sanwiches, and I figured it would be easy, cute and silly.  I just realized I only have a few hours to make all of them now too!  Away I go!

Never send a white girl to do a Chinese girl’s job.

This girl at work decided on Thursday since we were going to have a week off (not our choice, and also with very little warning so it wasn’t like we could plan anything last minute, freaking jerks.) we should order in lunch on Friday for a bunch of us and saw what each person wanted.  The options were pizza, chinese food and swiss chalet.

Seeing as how on Wednesday we all had large servings of Pizza during the second potluck of the month, I opted for Swiss Chalet since I didn’t really have any interest in chinese food.  Of course it seems the majoriy of the people picked chinese as their first option.  I went with it since why the hell not… it’s a company “girl bonding” thing.

So we were all picking dishes we wanted to get to share and the girl ordered from some place.  The food shows up and as I’m walking into the lunch room I hear her going on the phone to the company saying how the portions are way too small and how it was too expensive and she’s never going to order from there again.  I don’t know about you, but when I worked retail, complaints like that meant nothing.  The woman even said “This was your first time ordering with us” as a retort to the “I’m never ordering from you again” and while the food was very obviously overpriced, I don’t know, I didn’t see it as being that bad.

I also found out that not everyone in the office was invited to partake in this lunch which I thought was rude since well… there’s other people that are in the lunch room as well and suddenly they’re eating their brought-from-home food while we’re all pigging out on this nonexistant chinese food.

Side story:
One of the chinese girls came into the room when a large number of us were in there, and said in Cantonese to the other chinese girls in the office (but not me) “Oh… there’s no room for me to sit down” and just out of habit in that I understood every word she said, I immediately replied (in English) with “Hey, there’s a chair under this bag.”  And had EVERYONE in the office stare at me.  One other girl said “So… she understands Cantonese?”  And the first girl who talked was like “If she replied to me… I’m going to say yes.”  It was funny. So they start talking to me in Cantonese asking me how all this chinese food came about and what we paid for it and all that jazz, I’m guessing so the non-chinese people who took part wouldn’t know what if anything we were talking about, although I replied in English anyways so I’m sure you could figure it out.

She said the same thing in Chinese to the other Chinese girls as I said to the non-chinese people.  “Leave it to a white girl to order chinese food and this is what happens.” is what I said.  The chinese girl said “See the white people went and ordered Chinese food without asking us Chinese people where would be good to order from!”

I think the whole thing was silly.  I was full and had about a plate and a half full, there was lots of food for the people who ordered.  It wasn’t a stuff-yourself-silly type of lunch and it was expensive for what it was… but really.

I think the most amusing was the girl who did the ordering, I mentioned “Wow, so I’ve finally eaten chicken balls” and she’s like “You’re Chinese and you’ve never ha d chicken balls??”  To me and everyone else’s reply of being “BECAUSE I’m Chinese is why I’ve never had chicken balls! That’s a dish invented by Americans and somehow given a Chinese name.”  It was HILARIOUS.

Ignorance is bliss I suppose.

So my work is having another pot-luck lunch tomorrow, and it’s also the kris-kringle, secret santa, gift exchange deal.  Anyways, we had a max limit of $20.00, and I ended up getting the person who I know the least, who really doesn’t socialize or ANYTHING with ANYONE so I didn’t know what to get him.  Actually I first got some girl who I didn’t know at the time but got to know quite well in the past few weeks, but traded with the girl I sit beside because she didn’t want to get the computer programmer guy and I didn’t really know anyone at the time.

Either way, I only spent like 7 bucks on my gift for him which sounds cheap and cheesy but really, I know he’s a “Brown guy” (so like, Middle-Eastern somewhere) and they have all sorts of dietary restrictions so the easy way out of “Chocolates” didn’t work.  He ended up with a tube of caramel popcorn.

Onto the pot-luck.  I cheaped out and did the same thing I made last time, pasta salad, just with different veggies this time.  And I was wondering why my pot of water wasn’t boiling fast enough, and finally realized it was because I had set the heat to medium.  Oops.  This time it took longer because of that.  I also sort of blanched my veggies by throwing them into the pasta & water for the last 30 seconds to cook before I drained and cooled everything off. I think it worked out better.

Again, I made twice as much, but this time for a good cause.  I have another pot-luck to go to on Thursday for Unicycle club and the Christmas party, and I’m bringing the remains there.  See, I’m a thinker.

I think I had both days scheduled as Lazy Sundays.  I know that the week before I had talked to my friend Phil about going down to St.Kitts, Niagara Falls in an attempt to go across the border into the US and buy a carton of ciggerettes, then smuggle them back into Canada without paying the duty costs.  I think we would have succeeded but he wasn’t too sure.  We also didn’t know if we were really going, even though I had slated to grab the car.

Well I’m pretty sure Friday night I started to read Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.  Only I passed out after the third page, while in bed, at about 8pm because I become so freaking dead tired at the end of the week.  And I woke up at around 1am unable to sleep.  I bummed around online, read the book some, was shocked at the fact I could fall asleep 3 pages in, and just made myself tired by about 5am which is generally when I wake up, so I fell asleep listening to the radio that’s supposed to be my alarm.  Woke up again probably around 9am and just felt normal.  Did laundry, the sort of weekend-things most people do.  Stayed in my jammies basically all day.

Sunday I woke up early, watched a bit of Coronation street, while I am still interested in the show it’s not a must-see-TV type of series for me anymore, I think all the cute boys I was infatuated with have gone which makes it just not so interesting.   Called up Phil and asked if he still wanted to head to the border for our secret mission.

Picked up Phil around 2pm and started heading down to St. Kitts.  Found out our friend Marty no longer resides in St.Kitts so we overshot and went straight to the strip in Niagara Falls.  Hung out in his new diggs and chatted, hung out, I went on a mission to find pants that fit me, considering I threw out all my “fat pants” at the beginning of the year, am now required to re-purchase them all.  After 2 failed stores finally was able to find something at the Roots outlet store, 50 bucks for both pairs taxes in, which ain’t too shabby.  Went to a bar to meet Marty’s dad and got a free coke out of it, I was driving so no alcohol for me, drove around in circles looking for sushi places and finally ended up back at the same bar for pizza and wings.  Nabbed a copy of a movie, and drove home, and was home before my parents got back from the Casino.

So maybe my weekend wasn’t THAT uneventful.

Just makes me realize I need to visit my friends more often to make it something worth writing about.