Or do people not do landing pages anymore? I will need to reroute the blog to a separate page then. Hmm.

The last time I updated my Movies page was at Terminator 2! That was at movie 71. Now it’s up to movie 86! I am watching a movie after this blog entry and hopefully a few more of those Futurama movies will bump me to up 90 soon. At least I know I will make it to 100 movies this year, after trying to reach that mark for so many years!

At this point I’m just looking to going back to school. I can’t believe my summer break is finally almost over. It will be nice getting back to a normal routine. I’m just not looking forward to waking up at 6:30 when it’s still freakishly dark outside.

Before that, I still have a Vancouver Canadians (baseball) game to go to, grabbing my U-Pass and new Student ID, and a Photo-Walk with my tweeps! Despite my hermit-like state this summer, I actually did a lot of things with my parents and friends. Maybe I’ll do a recap thing in the near future to celebrate the Summer Break of 2011.

I seriously still can’t believe there was a person up at that sign. I didn’t even notice until I put up the picture on Flickr and started typing in the comment box. Where was I during the editing process?

PS: And now it’s 87 movies since I re-watched Jeux d’enfants (Love Me if You Dare) between starting this post, editing and uploading photos onto Flickr, and finishing this post.

During this lame-o week, I have been watching a lot of baseball and reading a lot of tutorials. I’m excited to make my own layout soon, but dang, I need to reformat my laptop. I bought new RAM (up to 2GB now!) but it hasn’t worked out much. My twitter buddies told me that I have just too much stuff for the RAM to work. So…

QUESTION: Can you use any sort of Windows XP recovery CD as long as you have the geniune code underneath the laptop?

I guess I’ll delete all my Sims 2 stuff (or at least save the game files). I probably have 20GB of stuff from that game and I only have 1GB left on my HD.

I’m tempted to nudge mother to make more or buy more new food! Or just take a picture of all the food I eat. That’ll do some good.

Hopefully the weather cooperates this weekend (or at least Sunday) both Rio Tinto Alcan Dragonboat Festival and Krinos Foods Greek Day! I’m looking forward to heading out there and taking some pictures with my camera. And everyone knows that I need to get out of the house. Not looking forward to practice driving again. That’s probably the only downside to Vancouver – the necessity to drive anywhere.

Officially I’m a Bachelor of Arts in Geography (major) with Urban Studies certificate and History (minor)! Simon Fraser University Alumni ’09! On the other hand, I’m unemployed, which means I’m grouped into the ‘looking for a job’ group. This will be interesting and hopefully I won’t relegate to a minimum-paid job because I get sick of staying at home.

Grouse Grind

A few days back Vancouver has been named as the most desirable (or “easiest”) place to live for 2009 which coincide with my experience of Vancouver on Sunday. (Of course I’m ignoring half my paper on why these rankings are bad for all the other cities and does not represent the actual city.) My friend invited to me to tackle the Grouse Grind in the morning. I have previously been told that the hike was pretty hefty and mentally I was prepared for it. The day even compiled with my plan as once we reached North Vancouver, it was cloudy with barely any sun peeking in.

Once I got there and 10 minutes in, unlucky for me, my ears began to hurt like mad. For no particular reason – unless it’s some elevation thing but then I can fly on planes. So 10 minutes in, my friends are already way ahead of me and I am just taking my time walking up. Considering my out-of-shape-ness, my final time wasn’t that bad, especially with my ear ache! But compared to the fastest male and female times, I’m way, way off. It is only a 2.9 km hike but 2,830 steps total!

I would like to thank my friends who all waited for me to finish before taking the gondola back down. At the same time, I’d like to say a “boo-hiss” to the same friends who all thought I had given up and turned around before calling me. At least they all called me to see where I was! Thanks guys, total overall thumbs up. As we waited for the gondola down, the mountain top was cold enough to see the breaths in front of us. And there was still snow (or ice by now) on the ground!

Cloudy with... snow?

After the awesome/awful Grouse Grind experience, we were going to grab some McDonald’s via driving back over the Iron Gates Memorial, but alas, we took the wrong route and realized we were actually driving over Lions Gate. By the time we got off the bridge, Vancouver was sunny again and as we passed by a sign for Stanley Park, we totally yelled “BEACH”! After de-de-deja vu-ing by turning to the same street twice (after driving into Stanley Park and leaving immediately, oh wrong road), we finally reached Stanley Park, not after driving for awhile to figure out where the beaches are.

We stopped at the first beach we saw, or called Third Beach, and found a map that told us the beach was pretty big. After walking away when we found a parking spot, I again realized we forgot to pay for parking! (Previously in downtown, again)

Third Beach

What a gorgeous day it turned out to be as the sky cleared up and all was left was the beautiful blue. This was the extreme opposite of the cold, gloomy and what-the-ice in North Vancouver and on Grouse Mountain. The Chinese in me is screaming “what am I doing here?” I put on sunscreen and the next day woke up to even darker skin. So… WHY?

Hello, Chinese people want paler skin (thank you, Hong Kong television for bombarding these commercials every second you can). Even though the sun is warm and the day is beautiful, the water is still cold. Or “cold” in my standard. We had our blankets and were already in shorts while holding onto our McD paper bags. What a Sunday in Vancouver. Snow in the mountains and sun at the beaches – the perfect Vancouver scenario. You can put that to those marketing brochures and testimonies! We have a real example at hand already.

To complete the deja-vu, we ended up getting on another wrong bridge (this time – Granville) but luckily found West Broadway and then we knew the right way home.

It's not that cold...