Posted on October 26, 2005 by Ching under Wishlist.
Remember how I said I wanted a Canon SD550, which just happens to be on my Amazon wishlist for those of you who are feeling generous (it is only four days until my birthday after all) for my next camera? Well, I take that back. I really want a Casio Exilim EX-S600.
Posted on October 25, 2005 by Ching under Life.
The other day I had further proof that my car is on its very last leg. Remember how I had blogged about how thrilled I was that my right tail light started working out of the blue after a year of being broken? Well, on Saturday night I found out that my left head light was out. It made sense because I had always thought about how dark it seemed at night despite having my headlights on. I just never bothered to check so I never confirmed that one of my headlights was out. Then again, I usually don’t drive by myself at night and when I do, it’s usually just to and from school. We live relatively close to Wichita State so night driving hasn’t been too much of an issue. Last Saturday I needed to get gas so Brian and I decided to take my car to Neighbors. After poker, we all decided to convoy to IHOP. Corey led the way, followed by Dill and Becca and then Brian and I. Corey was apparently lost. We didn’t know this until Dill and Corey started playing leap frog. Tired of the show, Brian finally pulls up to see what is going on. This took Dill by surprise because he didn’t realize we were in the car behind him. He thought it was some other random vehicle because it only had one headlight. News to me. I absolutely had no idea. So like the whole time at IHOP I was thinking about having only one headlight and how long I had survived not knowing this was the case. After IHOP Corey, Dill and Becca went to Sharky’s to try to get in the game. They were almost 30 minutes late because it was alright 12:30 am by the time we left the restaurant. Not sure if they ever got in. Brian and I decided to head on home. We went to stop at a Quiktrip for gas. While there, Brian decided to check out my headlight problem. He shuts the headlights off, taps on the part of the hood where the left headlight is, and then turns the headlights back on. Lo and behold, it starts working again! My poor fall-apart little car. It makes me think that this is foreshadowing for when I am older and my body parts start falling apart. Like when I start going senile and forget things. Oh, just tap her on the forehead a couple of times. That ought to jog her memory. My dilapidated car is kind of symbolic of the rest of the things going on in my life. I think the more stressed I am, the more my car acts up and starts falling apart. It must be a reaction to my stress levels. Anyway, speaking of depressing things. Sarah gave me a pair of jeans today. She said she could no longer wear them because they are too short. While that in itself is nice. It’s always nice to get free clothes. The fact that these jeans were a size 6 and they fit me perfectly totally depresses me. I mean, you’re talking to a girl who can’t let go of her tattered size 0 jeans from Abercrombie & Fitch no matter how many holes they develop because they are size 0! By golly, I’m going to squeeze my fat behind in those things until they fall apart! P.S. In case you haven’t noticed, Brian is going to start blogging with me. I want this blog to be more like Brett and Hiromi’s (minus all the panty pics, of course) and Goose and Gander where we’re both blogging as a couple and the commentary isn’t just one sided. Brian’s posts will be distinguished by a subtle gray box container. Anyway, I thought I’d give you all a heads up.
Posted on October 24, 2005 by Brian under Life.
On Thursday I was at work taking calls like normal. One of the calls I took was from a customer that operated “Yoder Embalming Services”. She just needed to make a payment but since I only had a few min till my lunch I decided to talk to her a little. She said that I was very professional and that she really needed someone like me to work in her office. I asked her “Doing what!” she told me that the job would include a wide variety of things like embalming bodies, delivering them to the morticians for their final dress up and retrieving the bodies from the morgue. Their might be some other little jobs like answering the phones and speaking to police and clients and stuff. I thought to myself “This is the perfect job for me, No bitchy people complain about their service, No angry customer cursing ME out because THEY cant pay their bill and we are going to cut their service off, Just dead people, silence, no drama, just dead people. I asked the woman what happen to the person that she had before, since she said she needed someone professional I assumed that she must have recently let go a person that was not. She said that the last guy was let go because he would do things like get stoned, turn on the answering machine and then go have sex with his girlfriend in the embalming room, or in the delivery van or anywhere else he could find (Ok, that’s just gross). She said that he would also carry a gun with him (like the dead people are going to get up and mug him, what the heck do you need a dammed gun for) and finally I guess the thing that pushed her over the edge was that he delivered a load of bodies to the Mortuary and told the man their “Dude, get-em while their cold”. Me, I found that part a little funny, but evidently morticians don’t have a sense of humor. I finally decided this morning that I would not do it. My wife was concerned about the smell and I know for a fact that I would definitely smell from that job working with decaying bodies and chemicals. I wanted to ensure that I would have a wife to come home too. So instead I will continue with my endeavor to get a better job threw perseverance and applying at every possible acceptable position available.
Posted on October 23, 2005 by Ching under Web.
I’ve sold out and decided to start my own Yahoo! 360° page. I mean, even Ritchie‘s mom has one. I should have one, too. Anyway, some of the features are pretty cool. I can tell that Yahoo! is trying to infuse their usual boring applications with some great Flickr-inspired ideas to make things better and more attractive to users. I think it’s working. So anyway, some of the things you’ll find of note in my 360° page is the Netflix news feed. It shows you the last three movies that we received so if you ever want to keep tabs on our movie watching habits, now you can. The only downside is that the page only allows you to have three news feeds. So I have a news feed from my other blog and the two Netflix news feeds. I wish it would allow more so that it can pull all the entries from my other blogs and make them available in one place for easy access. Speaking of Netflix movies, the last two that we watched were Monster-in-Law and Robots. Monster-in-Law was alright. It had some funny moments but it didn’t really move me. Robots was pretty good. I almost cried. I’m not sure if Logan has seen it, but that would be a great movie for him to watch. That, and Iron Giant. I love those types of movies. They’re inspirational. Sappiness aside, we got to hang out with our poker buddies after the hockey game last night. We didn’t qualify for the final event at Neighbors (not yet anyway), but we had a blast reminiscing at IHOP after poker. We being Corey, Brian, Dill, Becca and I. Tony, Niki (Tony’s wife), Nick (who Brian always calls Lance for some strange reason) and his wife all came but they arrived late and didn’t get to play. They got tired of waiting for the rest of us to get knocked out so they all left to go dinner separately. It’s a shame they couldn’t wait two seconds. It would’ve been fun to get the whole group together. The funny thing is, I got a text message from Dill about a $10 buy-in home game at Tony’s slated for that evening. I replied saying that Brian and I had made plans to go to Neighbors. Apparently, Corey replied with the same thing. When Dill and Becca showed up at Neighbors we knew the home game was canceled. Anyway, Brian and I have decided that we will return to Neighbors on Saturday to try again. So no home games on Saturday nights guys. At least until the tourney at Neighbors is over. “Never give up. Never surrender.” P.S. The person who names the movie that the quote comes from gets a cookie. =P
Brian’s parents had mentioned Beijing Bistro, a new Chinese restaurant in the East side of Wichita, a couple of weeks ago. They said that if we ever wanted to check the place out to give them a call and they would join us for dinner. Brian and I don’t really have anything edible in the house so we decided to give his parents a call and have dinner there tonight. We figured that it would be a great excuse to do a restaurant review.
The location of the restaurant itself is unassuming. They don’t have a fancy building or anything. Instead they just occupy half the space of a commercial building next to Wally World. The other half is occupied by Play It Again Sports.
The inside decor kind of reminds me of a PF Chang’s minus the fancy statues, lighting and ceiling work. The booths provided ample space and the tables were quite sturdy.
The service was so-so. We could tell that the hostess who seated us was fairly new because she received instruction from a couple of other employees. She also plopped the menus in the middle of the table instead of placing them carefully in each place setting like you’re supposed to. A server who was waiting on another table came over, called her on it and rearranged the menus.
I didn’t plan to drink an alcoholic beverage but I took a moment to look over the drink menu. They offer a wide selection of domestic and imported beer as well as wines, spirits and mixed cocktails. They had a list of exotic drinks which I thought was pretty good.
The food menu wasn’t bad either. The menu offered your usual Chinese dishes and the prices were very reasonable. The one thing that caught my attention was a disclaimer on the last page that says “Substitutions are subject to additional charges.” The message practically screamed deviate from the menu and die. It’s something that I’m not used to because I’m pretty particular when it comes to the ingredients that I want to be included or excluded from certain dishes. I guess I am spoiled because I’m used to places that cater to consumer needs without question.
For instance, at PF Chang’s Brian and I will normally ask for the Mongolian beef and substitute eggplant for the green onions. We hate green onions and just pick them off anyway so they might as well cook them without. PF Chang’s Also encourages you to mix different meats so you can have a combination of beef and pork and chicken and whatever you want mixed in with your dish. You can pretty much create your own dishes. I think it’s great and I think restaurants shouldn’t discourage you from doing that.
I’m afraid that places that do not allow you to do this just have vats of pre-made food in their kitchen. That’s the reason why they cannot deviate from the menu selections (or at least penalize you for doing so).
Anyway, that aside, Brian and I decided to order some dumplings and lo mein. Portions at these restaurants are typically pretty large so we opted to share the triple delight lo mein that consists of beef, chicken and shrimp.
The pan fried dumplings were pretty cheap. You get six for $5.95 which isn’t a bad deal at all. The dumplings themselves weren’t spectacular. I like PF Chang’s dumplings better. They only give you four, but you get four big meaty ones. These dumplings were really doughy. The shell was thick and there wasn’t a lot of filling inside. [By the way, if you want a good deal on dumplings you need to go to Japan Express. You get about a dozen yummy steamed, deep fried or pan fried dumplings for a really low price.]
The lo mein, on the other hand, was outstanding. There were large pieces of chicken and beef. The vegetables were easy to pick off. The sauce was delicious. The dish which was supposed to included shrimp only consisted of about three pieces. They were jumbo shrimp but I couldn’t help but be disappointed that there weren’t any more in there. Despite the scarcity of the shrimp, the lo mein was one of the best I’d ever had. It totally made up for the so-so dumplings.
At the end of our meal, Brian and I were considered some chocolate cake for dessert. There was a three layer cake that was pictured on the menu and I was curious about it. However, when we asked to see the menu for some dessert our server said they didn’t have a dessert menu because their dessert offerings vary. He mentioned cheesecake and chocolate mousse. Brian got a little excited to hear there was chocolate mousse, but the server who was not very confident about what they had said he would check and then let us know what was available.
When he came back he said they were out of dessert. It was like five o’clock in the afternoon. The evening had barely begun. How can you be out of dessert already? That was another strike against them.
In the end the fact that there was no dessert, mediocre service and no substitutions outweighed all the pluses of the nice, private ambiance, cheap prices (our bill was only $14.75 which got rounded to $18.00 after the tip; you can’t eat that cheap anywhere else; at least not at a nice sit-down-restaurant type of place, anyway) and good lo mein offered. Overall I give the place three out of five stars which means I probably won’t avoid the place but I won’t go out of my way to eat there either.
« Older Entries « » Newer Entries »
