Friday, January 17, 2025

Okay, so 2025. Hard to believe COVID is half a decade past at this point. And I remember lots of people saying certain protocols were "new normal(s)".

Last month, Onion and I celebrated our 9th anniversary together. After having a lot of nice places we want to visit, as well as nice places we want to revisit, we have decided that we'll seek new places on our wedding anniversary, while enjoying old haunts on our relationship anniversary. We ended up with Copacabana. We haven't been to that Brazilian steakhouse in quite a while, so it was nice to get stuffed there with all the rotating meats.

Oh, we also did curling! Yeah, we basically paid money to sweep the floor. Lmao. We had long made fun of curling 'cause it seemed so hilarious. Throwing big blocks of marble and sweeping the ice to help control the rock's speed. So we thought why not actually try it out? We signed up for a Learn to Curl clinic at East York Curling Club. After a brief introduction about the game, we were sorted into different groups to learn. We had an Asian guy, and I'm so sorry but I can't remember his name! But he was a friendly dude, and was very patient. We grabbed our brooms, grippers, sliders and went on the ice. We learned that the condition of the ice was very important, and as I learned quite some time ago, the ice is textured, and it's the friction of the sweeping that affects the rock's speed. We learned how to sweep, how to throw the rock, our posture, turning the handle to control the movement and making visual points to guide the person sliding the rock, and of course, scoring. There was a short break before we continued again. This time our group was split into two and we competed. It was friendly of course. The waifu and I had a hard time gauging our strength. Either too strong or too weak. Our team didn't score very well, lol, sorry! All in all it was pretty fun and I signed up for the Saturday Scramble to continue for casual fun.

We also got stuffed in our respective company Christmas dinners. Dragon Pearl for hers, and Mandarin for mine. We met our partners respective colleagues and generally had a nice time. Along with a ton of food that we weren't sure we would finish, because we got greedy, lol.

Towards the end of the year, we had our family Christmas gathering. This time round we used the Secret Santa system, so people could actually get what they wanted. The waifu and I spent a few days to get the gifts of everyone specifically as they wanted, like the drawing tablet for my cousin Colin, and the makeup box for my other cousin, Lilian. Not just a "close-enough" gift. Anyhoo, as has been the case lately, it was a potluck and because it was easy, I offered mashed potatoes again, following the recipe from Tasty's YouTube video. Lots of good stuff to eat. Then we proceeded to have a gingerbread house-making competition of sorts. Chloe, Onion and I did the example on the box, while Lilian, Colin and Uncle Thomas did theirs with some original concepts. Just want to say what a pain the icing is to apply, lmao. But I got better towards the end. And instead of gambling and board games as we've done most family gatherings, most of us ended up playing some random cup-grabbing games, cup-flipping tic tac toe and stuff.

Two days later I went for a NYE social event, held by Social Creatures. They posted on reddit and I spontaneously decided to go for it. It was held at LOCAL Public Eatery, and when I walked in, there were only a few individuals there. We were given some papers for a short icebreaking activity, and I took the effort to speak to different people to get answers, and that established a good starter. More and more people began to arrive and eventually some people started to switch groups to have conversations. When we walked in, one of the things we needed to to was write an interesting fact about us, write our name and later on, people would need to guess who was who. When it was my turn to guess, I had the fact "Been playing soccer since I was 8". There were 4 guys and a girl (Jany) lined up, and I guessed one of the guys. It was Jany. Aye, unintentional sexism there, lol. During my turn (I wrote I bite cans to open them), they picked me as a guy who did martial arts, haha! So I'll take my compliments. The organized stuff faded off and it was just a good evening of getting to know a ton of people over beers, pizza and French fries, from all walks of life. Lenny from Germany (who I bumped into another time), Jass, who broke his femur in a major car accident, Lilian and Vivian, Vietnamese girls who were looking to upgrade their computers, Dhruv, who wanted to start a PC part business and many more. Kudos to DiAndre for organizing this.

Days later I got sick. Zzz. The waifu and I took it easy 'cause she got sick shortly after and we mostly bummed around at home, playing a ton of Breath of the Wild (finished the main quest and all the shrines), and I finished up Ori and the Will of the Wisps, after procrastinating for a while. Oh, back in November I bought a new laptop. When I was playing Black Myth: Wukong (more on that another time I think?), my old Asus TUF (RTX 2060) struggled at some parts, like the sandy parts and snowy parts. Plus the battle against Erlang and the Four Heavenly Kings was laggy like hell. Everything else was fine but I saw a good deal on Staples for an Asus Strix (RTX 4070), and I went for it. Everything I've played on has been super smooth, and rendering my church's weekly services has gone from half an hour to less than 5 minutes. Sweet.

Speaking of church, my minister, Karen Dale, has decided to retire in 6 months. I was part of the search committee to select her, and we did a great job in vetting candidates if I do say so myself. A lot of the uncertainties in the church on the redevelopment have only piled on, and the congregational meeting we had last week gave a bit of optimism with the plans. But I shan't say too much here.