what I ment to say

I'm never good with speeches. So tonight, when I won the award for excellence in instruction I was pretty tongue tied. I would like to ask the vfs class of dd02 to disregard the garbled thing that I said and replace it with the following:

First of all, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to teach you guys (and ladies). To be honest though, instructors can't really do much unless the students contribute. That being said, thank you for being such a great bunch of students. You all have taught me so much and I've always been in awe of what you guys are capable of.

Next, its quite an honour to be in the presence of each and everyone of my collegues. Its true that when you're surrounded by greatness you get pushed to be great yourself. So thank you to all my collegues. Specifically Brett, who has been the butt of all my flash-sucks jokes.

I'd like to leave you with a quote so profound that it boggles my mind.

Wounds heal, chicks dig scars and glory... lasts forever

Alive and still kickin'

Damn it, I'll write more when work actually dies down. For now, here are a few interesting updates. Java graduated from obedience school, ICBC.com was redesigned; I helped, I've finished my marking a whole week early, snow is coming down; the mountains are bekoning, and my students are graduating this Thursday.

Busy busy.

Christmas shopping...

Yes folks, I've been shopping for my Christmas presents (or the materials for them at least). In my search, I've been frequenting the malls and it has been hell. So I'd like to post my rant about shopping for presents in malls.

First of all, what is up with stupid kids and the urge to pull fire alarms. In the 4 hours that I was in the mall, I heard the fire alarm go off 5 times, each one declared false. A small message to those kids: Chill out, it's not as funny to everyone as it is to your retarded little brains. Fire fighters need the authority to sever hands of kids with the jaws of life. That would make me very happy.

Next, I know it's the holiday season, with the snow and the romantic holiday thingy. You don't have to use the mall hallways to declare your love for each other but if you decide you do, here are a few tips. Don't be all smoochy faced with your partner in the crowded walkways blocking incoming and ongoing traffic. This holds true especially when you have a pissed off Filipino carrying at least 5 heavy bags of holiday cheer. Take your smooching to the movies, your bedroom, your parents bedroom, or better yet DON'T DO IT!

To the Asian ladies who almost trampled me in the process of fighting for $30 dollar toaster ovens in Zellers: $30 dollar toasters isn't worth trampling me for. Thanks.

Next year, I'm doing all my shopping off the Internet.

blah blah... christmas spirit. blah blah

Time to breath... I went to the Gwen Stefani concert last saturday. I have never (in my life) heard a stadium full of 25-40 year old women scream in unison. It was absolutely insane! I think I can cross that experience off my life's to-do list. Right next to "Swim the nile in a rubber ducky inner tube."

Anyway, Christmas is just around the corner and I'm deciding to make all my gifts this year. I'm going to be using my l33t photoshop skillz as well as some creative manly craftsmanship. It'll be interesting and it is better than building your own e-card system (which was really cheesy and i already done a few years back). I'm also going to try and send a whole bunch of snail mail "cards" out. So if you'd like a card; send me an e-mail with your name and address. (But get it in soon, since I need to start mailing these things out!)

OH yea! This year, I get to participate in a kris kringle. Here are the rules: I get to send out a "wishlist" that is made of 3 items of choice. The limit for the exchange is $100. Either the three items could total $100 dollars (and hopefully get all three) or it could be just one item (totalling close to the $100). But I'm all out of ideas (except for the first one). So I'm soliciting suggestions from you (the readers, peanut gallery -whatever you guys want to refer to yourselves as) for some help: What should I pick?! Post your ideas through the comments.

The list:

• Mario Kart DS
• Animal Crossing DS
• Donation to my favorite charity
• l33t books!

The only time I have to post

Originally uploaded by ritchie mac.

I have to admit, it's not that I've been incredibly busy with my life. Same things have been happening: teaching is still there, boogienet is still there and icbc is, you guessed it, still there. I'm pretty much into my 14 hour day routine.

The last few weeks have been thrown off balanced. I had some visitors in the house. By some, I mean enough to make my living room look like the underground railroad for filipinos + 2 dogs. Yes, you heard that correctly. 2 dogs, one is Java. The new addition to the family.

If you've been following along with my flickr pictures you would've noticed him a few weeks ago. I can easily see how owners and dogs can get attached emotionally to one another. In Java's case, it's more the owner being attached. See Java already knows how to control us (Cheryl and I). We call him, he doesn't come unless he absolutely needs something. He wakes us up when he wants to go for a walk. He also makes us fetch his chew toys (when they slide under the furniture). Not to mention the fact that we're already being lead by him when we take hime for a walk and picking up his poop in the park.

If aliens saw us from above, they'd probably think that dogs are the more dominant of our two species.

Shoe shopping and babies...

This past weekend I went shoe shopping. Yes, I'm talking about shoe shopping. I've officially run out of things to talk about and in the process I've set the notion of blogs back a few years. I might as well talk about what I had for dinner last night.

Anyway, I digress.

Shoe shopping is always an interesting experience to me. As most of my students/readers know, I'm pretty much color blind when coordinating the elements of my wardrobe. I still live in the dark ages when geeks and nerds wear button up short sleeved collar shirts, complete with neon green matching pocket protector. Unless Ashton Kutcher (responsible for making the trucker hat famous and fashionable) decides that pocket protectors and thick-rimmed glasses are in style, then I'm pretty much a lost cause. Damn it! I digressed again.

Needless to say that I rely on the people around me when I try to coordinate my outfits. Usually this daunting task falls on the girlfriend, but in some cases it also translates to sales people. Unless you were the sales person we had helping us this weekend:

Me: *trying on a pair* So yea, this looks fine right? I think it'll go well with pretty much anything.
Cheryl: I think so, it's going to be your work shoes right? I've never actually heard of that brand name before though.
Me: Yea, me neither but then again. I've never heard of any of the styles here in this store.
Pregnant sales person: Those are, like, really nice shoes, the good thing is they go with pretty much anything even the stuff you have on. (read: dress shirt and pocket protector)
Cheryl: I think they look good, I've never heard of the brand name before though.
Psp: Humm, yea actually me neither. But you know, this store only carries brand name shoes.
Cheryl: ...
Me: ...
Psp: Please buy these shoes so I don't have to sell my baby!

Surfing the web at work...

They recently implemented put in some web filtering here at work. I mean, I understand that it is unproductive when people start surfing pr0n site when you're supposed to be answering disgruntled phone calls. But these days, I get notification that certain websites are blocked. For example, Yahoo 360 is blocked because it's considered "Online chat", flickr is blocked because it's considered "Network storage" and friendster is blocked because it's in the "Dating" category. Not to mention that things considered "Personal" websites are blocked as well.

Today, I came accross a category called "Tasteless" which boggles my mind. Isn't tasteless a subjective term? What I mean is, Tasteless by who's standards? The site that I was trying to browse should be in the "Funnier than your over-paranoid butt" category. Bah!

An email....

Dear Anna,

I'd be a horrible stalker... Ya know why? Well, I got an alert this morning on my organizer that it was YOUR birthday. So I figured that I'd drop you a quick e-mail on how we've lost contact but I still think that you're definitely one of my cooler friends cause ... you're pretty cool and really nice (not to mention funny). I was going to say things like how missed our e-mail exchanges were and how proud I was of you for graduating, but even before I could compose anything my plans grinded to a halt.

I couldn't find your e-mail address.

I looked through my long list e-mails and couldn't find one trace of you in my mailbox. Don't take it personally, work kinda trashed my inbox and for whatever reason (largely due to my incompetence of using my organizers throughout the years) I couldn't find your e-mail anywhere. So I started looking through my old bookmarks, thinking. Man, my e-mail address is so easy to find. Surely google would be my friend but it wasn't. So I decided to look through the old websites you had like blogspot, and xanga. You'd be amazed at the time a person can take sifting through a few years of blog entries just looking for an e-mail address. But nothing.

Eventually, I saw this: [insert link to geocities site with flashing banners and other misc. glowing graphics]

I'm not actually sure how, but yea. The e-mail address I'm using was published on the 'stuff' page.

So there it is a long winded entry on how I became your stalker for a few hours. I hope this still works because it would be horrible if this e-mail bounced back. Worse yet, if you didn't even remember me. I mean it has been a few years since we last talked right? Anyways, this is what I really wanted to say:

Happy Birthday, I hope you're celebrating it with lots of good people around you and hopefully it's a memorable one. Have a good one!

Ritchie

A month?!

Where did September go? Damn it, my life has been consumed once again with work. Trust me kiddies, I haven't been hiding anything from you. It's not like I go and write an entry like "Dear blog, Life is boring and work is killing me again... btw, I had pizza and Coke for breakfast." And then run off to do something interesting like paint my body neon green and participate in Burning Man. It doesn't work out that way, I like yellow paint.

Ritchie: The amazing valley girl from the Philippines.

Ok, I wasn't born here (and by here I mean Canada). I'm sure people know that from the horrible spelling and grammatical errors in every single one of my entries. I was born in the Philippines and I migrated to Vancouver with my family when I was 13 years old. Although I learned English in a school back home known to produce Politicians, English and Art majors; I still had a pretty thick accent coming into Canada. Which made things ... um AWKWARD.

Of course, it didn't help when the Filipino population of your new high school was 0 wait... 1 (me!). Ironically, my high school was right in the middle of Richmond (also known as Chinatown v3.2 release 1a) only had a very small group of Asian kids.

So let me paint you a complete picture (if you haven't painted it for yourself by now), in a high school of predominantly white kids, I was the only Asian kid with a Spanish-sounding accent. When they asked where I was from I would say that I came from the Philippines, a country in the southeast of Asia. Standing out was never something I took well growing up but back then, I was literally the miscellaneous demographic of the school.

I decided that I needed to learn English by watching MuchMusic and an insane amount of Jenni Jones. I eventually developed a valley girl accent which further confused every single person in the school.

Teacher: So Ritchie you're presenting tomorrow Ok?
Me: Like, ohhhh. my.. GOD! Like you're totally not serious right? This book is like totally boring! Like, nuh 'uh you gonna get me to present in front of this class girlfriend. Nuh 'uh girlfriend!

*this is where everyone in the class just looks at me in complete horror like I just ate their children*

Me: Yes, Ma'am. I will do it. *slithers back into the dark corner of the room*

Ahh, thank god high school is over. Not to mention the awkward teen age years.