Today is mid-autumn festival. Living in Canada, I don’t feel much festival mood here. The main reason is the next day is not a public holiday like in Hong Kong. It is nothing special about a festival if it’s not a holiday. I don’t like eating moon cake very much. I remeber when I was a little kid, I like it alot. Probably the freshness of moon cake wears out or it is simply moon cake is good with peer pressure. Tonight we went to Pat’s friend’s place BBQ. It’s quite nice to spend the night with some friends, although I bearly know those people and the talks are so superficial to a point it is very boring. The only highlight is her friend’s place has a small golden retriver. I found playing with the dog is more interesting than talk to someone neither of us had no intention become a deeper friends. The BBQ dinner is very fulfilling with lots of food and several different kinds of moon cake. After dinner, her friend suggest watch a movie, so we end up watched an 2 years old rerun. Some of us were very tried and very eager to go home, but we all waited politely for the end of the movie and dash out in no time. Why can’t we call it a day while we had a good time, it is better than waste another 2 hours staying together just for the sake of staying together.

Charlie made a mess of Pat’s carpet while she was in Hong Kong, and it did it again last night. As I had promised Pat, today we went to rent a carpet cleaner from Safeway to clean the carpet. Cleaning carpet is easier than I thought. Just fill the machine up with water and cleaning solution, then move it back and forth on the carpet like vaccum cleaner. The dirty water sucked up and hold in the upper compartment. We spent the whole afternoon cleaning all the carpet in her’s place. The dirty water is very horrible, looks like ink. This pure hand work free up my mind. Doing house cleaning is a very good excerise sometimes. I think I should rent one and clean my own apartment some time.

Once made up his mind, many people never go back to revisit his decision. Just like once we black-listed a resturant, we never go back to visit it again. I remember when I first start working at PMC, we tried out different resturants close to work every week. Out of various reason, the group, as a collected conscious, stop going to one resturant after another. Gradually the resturant list has shrinked to the only a few visited places. Occasionally, we try out the new resturants, but usually the new one are not attractive enough to make us break out of the habit only going to the default ones. I like to go to a Korean resturant on North road, but this resturant is black listed by the group due to limited selection of food and the price. I havn’t eat there for quite a while. Today, I have the chance to pick where to have lunch. So I decided to go there again. To my surprise, the resturant has changed hand and has a new menu. The lunch combo is only $4.99, which comes with small side dishes, a large portion main dish served on hot place and dessert. The few came with me today all agree this resturant is good enough to enter the default list. The moral of this story is that we have to give a black-listed resturant a second chance, you may find pleasure surprise. This principle can also apply to people. Sometimes we may discover something by giving a second chance to someone we havn’t forgiven.

I boiled some chinese medicine for myself tonight and last night. Unfortunately, I couldn’t time it right, I always end up with half a bowl of medicine instead of a full bowl. As a result, the medicine is super concentrated. It is quite easy to boil the medicine, just throw all the ingredient into the electricity pot and plug it in. The pot will handle the rest, by turning down the power when the medicine is done. Cleaning the pot is less work than I had expected. I though the medicine taste so bad, the reminding in the pot must be very nasty. It turn out that I only have to throw away the residuals and rinse it with water. I feel better after drinking the medicine last night. Since it is not too much work, I will boil some every so often. I used to find the medicine taste awful, but somehow I become used to that awful taste. It doesn’t feel as bad as it was before.

I went to the post office mail the ebay items I sold, insurance claim of my lost luggage together and a complain letter to Air Canada after work today. I am surprise the postal fee is quite expensive, especially when confirmation is required. In the modern fully computerized postal service, I wonder what is the incremental cost of assigning tracking number to each letter and parcel. Send a regular letter within Canada is $0.5, send a registered letter is $6.5. I have to pay $6 extra just for the confirmation of delivery, what a rip off. In near future, stamps will be embedded with RFID tags and all postal infrasturture from mailboxs to central office will have internet connected RFID reader implemented. This will provide a real time online tracking system to let the end users pin point the where about of their parcel.