I have received my compensation package today. I am very happy with this year’s adjustment. I got a raise, a not too bad bonus and some useless options. I can finally afford living a moderate life with the adjustment this time. Since a large portion of my salary is used up in fixed living cost, the marginal gain in disposable incoming of the raise is relatively large. To treat myself, I am going to replace all the cheapy plastic furnitures I bought when I first come to Vancouver with more decent wooden furnitures from Ikea. I need to upgrade my computer, but I am still waiting for the price of AMD 64 X2 comes down a bit more. I am thinking about buying a cheap laptop from Dell since I don’t have a laptop, it would be convinient able to carry it around. iPod is under consideration, but I think I can resist the temptation as it is not very useful. I promised Pat to buy her a gift with my bonus, so that she can’t complain any more on my bad taste in choosing her valentine’s day gift. Maybe I should buy a few pants. My old pants are a bit tight after I have gained some weight in the past few years. The only problem is that I have a phobia of buying clothes.

Another friend from work is leaving the company. He is moving back to HK for good. He seems have found a better oppertunity in Shenzhen, China. I wonder how come his girlfriend let him work in Shenzhen by himself. I have heard many stories about all the temptation in Shenzhen to young single male from HK. To make him more attractive, he even have a Canadian passport. We gave him a two part farewell. We had dinner last night followed by soccer game and went to Kirin to have dim-sum again today. However, we will see him once again at lunch on thursday if he has nothing else to do. I don’t really want to go to the soccer game last night, I was really tried after skiing on Saturday. However, since I have promised to come, I don’t want to eat my words. I feel that I am really exhausted today. My place is still full of boxes, I am still slowly unpacking my stuffs. The only problem is I have to buy new bookshelves and cabinates from Ikea to better organize my stuff. The old shelves doesn’t fit well to the layout of my new place.

I took another level 5 ski lesson in Whistler today. The snow condition is really good, we have some new snow over last week. Too bad that they don’t have the $40 full day deal this week, I have to pay the edge card disccount of $52 for full day of lesson. Today I have a small accomplishment from the lesson. The instructor focused on mogul runs other than warming up. He took us down a double black diamond run, and I make it to the bottle without falling down. It is the first time I ever go down on a double black diamond run. It is interesting that once I did it, when I look at the slope again, I feel the slope is less steep. It is just the perception of I see the run. I am thinking of going to Whistler again next weekend, gota seize the chance to ski before the snow melts away.

I discontinued my cable TV service and only keeping the high speed internet in my new place. That would save cut my cable bills to half. I figured that even I subscribed to basic cable service, I rarely watch TV. I am not even interested in watching TV. For the programs I want to watch, I can download it off the web. In the matter of facts, I have more video files than I can finish already. Althought I cut the cable, I can still watch some odd channels here and there. It is probably due to there are gaps to the filter at the cable box in my apartment building. To my surprise, I can watch commedy channels for free. I think I got UPN14, a shopping channel and some uninteresting government channels. That should be more than enough for me if I just want to turn on the TV to generate some background noise. When I was at Shaw cable’s service center, I took a look at their service plan. The most expensive plan gives you over 100 channels. I wonder who would needs that many channels. Even somone watch TV 24×7, he still couldn’t get the worth out of all the hundred channels.

I continue my unpacking procedure today. It is kinda like the old computer puzzle game on pushing boxes. There is only one empty area in the living room. So everytime I want to organize my stuff, I have to shuffle the boxes to that empty space as the buffer zone. Finally all the big furniture are in their place, now I just have to open the boxes, shelf my stuff and put away useless stuffs in the storage. I went to Ikea to buy some compact shelfs today during lunch hour. The lunch menu in Ikea is actually quite good, better than the cafe at work.