想い出は遠くの日々

Testing my new gallery. I’m back in action on my blog.

Heya,

Another month has passed since I updated… here are some highlights in the past month.

Rock Climbing
Ski season is over and now my friends and I need to find an alternative physical activity. We finally settled with indoor rock climbing as a suitable replacement to replace skiing. It’s been a month since we started climbing and our skill level is increasing quickly. In the beginning, we were only looking for explicit stones to place our hands and feet. As we progressed, we’re looking for other features on the wall such as built-in ledges and able to wedge our bodies into the wall. Eventually, I hope to climb real outdoor rocks in the summer. Pictures below:

New York City
My friends and I went over to New York last weekend. I should introduce the cast (order from left to right on the picture below):
Me – The only Chinese guy in the group
Jen – you can easily pick her out in the photos, she joined us when skiing started
John – he’s a friend of Rowan’s and Jen’s we met up in New York
Link – the guy in the blue shirt, I’ve known him since Co-op Japan
Rowan – the tallest person in the group, known him since last July when we formed the outdoor enthusiast group

We did a variety of things – took a lot of photos, saw some wicked shows, and for myself: I saw what could have been if I were to work in New York instead. I still think I made the right choice one year ago. I also met up with my cousin Sam – we took a long walk from the World Trade Center all the way up to Times Square.

Saw two shows while I was in NYC: Cirque du Soleil and Avenue Q. Cirque du Soleil was about clowns and Avenue Q was like the muppets for adults. Got an awesome price on those tickets thanks to Microsoft benefits.

Will post more pictures soon – Wordpress is not cooperating.

The month of April was a fun month – work is still busy but I’ll keep marching until my product ships.

Bought myself a whole pineapple today. Cutting it into serviceable portions required the use of provided instructions. Just had a quarter of the pineapple and man, was it tasty.

Anyway, ski season is about to end here. So my friends and I will need to substitute skiing with something else. We’re going to try out rock climbing next week and see if that’s as fun as skiing. I’m all for doing more physical activities.

At work, once again, my team has been keeping me quite busy. One of the things that I like over here is the autonomy I get with working on features. It’s also amazing talking to customers and realizing how important my work is. Also consequently, there is a lot of expectations and pressure riding on the success of what I’m doing. All I can do is put on a brave face.

Went skiing again today. Cripes! Stevens Pass got a lot of snow today and skiing was fun but dangerous. It was snowing heavily and the winds were blowing hard – had several instances where I had to stop because of white-out conditions.

Today was the first time I ever drove a car that got stuck in the snow. My friends had to push my car out of the parking lot. Also, today was the first time that a highway closed due to snow conditions – my friends and I had to wait 3 hours for the road to reopen.

I’m done for the night – I am damn glad that I got my friends home safely.

As promised, the pictures:

Time to dust off the good old blog. February has been a hectic month in terms of life and work.

On the work-side, I got myself a promotion – a bit more money and a bit more prestige. My boss says that I’m doing work that is exceeding the expectations of entry level devs. I would beg to differ since I think I’m still quite inferior in knowledge with respect to my coworkers. I’m looking forward to doing more hard work to gain the next level. I need to do better.

On the life-side, I’ve been skiing once every two weeks so far. My friends and I have covered almost all the ski resorts in Washington state – Crystal Mountain, Stevens Pass, and Snoqualmie. There’s one more resort that we haven’t visited yet and that’s Mount Baker which is quite a long drive away. My skiing skills have improved significantly over this season and I’m quite proud of that feat.

Some recent events… last weekend, my friend Brett and I went up to Vancouver and met up with our Co-op Japan friends. We spent the weekend skiing in Whistler which was a lot of fun… remember from my last trip up to Whistler, I really didn’t do much skiing at all – I slid on my butt for most of the run. This time however, I got my revenge and was able to ski swiftly on the blue-coloured trails. Anyway, I talked enough I think… once again, I’ll let the pictures do the talking

I have some video also but I need to convert them over to flash format first. Will post later on.