Tonight was a night I looked forward to for a large portion of the summer, or at least since an email was sent out about a “reunion” of sorts for friends from my elementary school, North Toronto Christian School. Many of these friends I haven’t talked to much or even seen since grade 5, since I skipped grade 6 and they threw me into grade 7 at The Yorkland School. I thought there were going to be a whole lot of people, but it didn’t end up that way. Didn’t make the night out to become bad though.

There were 6 people in total who officially came out to our gathering. Gabriel Tsang, Shauna Wong, Rowena Leung, Risa Marie Corbett, Walter Chan, and myself met up at China Buffet King at 401/Warden at 5:30. Ok, maybe we didn’t all meet up at that scheduled time, since Risa got off work late, and Shauna and Rowena got lost driving the opposite way to Etobicoke! I got to talk to Walter a bit that way, since we waited like 45 minutes before Gabe arrived and another 20 minutes before the others arrived. Mandy also showed up but only to say “Hi” because she had to go off somewhere else.

We decided to NOT eat at the buffet, and headed instead after some deliberation to Alice Fazooli’s at Hwy 7 and 404 (East Beaver Creek). It was nice, I wasn’t expecting it, but I think it ended up to be a good choice.

After so many years, I’ve realized that some people really don’t change too much! They still have many of the same mannerisms and behaviours as before, not that these things I’m talking about are bad things. It just reminds me of the old days so much.

We didn’t quite know what to do after the nice meal, and people were very indecisive about going to bubble tea or karaoke or a movie. I ended up suggesting we rent a video, and we ended up going to Gabe’s home to watch The Whole Ten Yards. It’s not a great movie, admittedly, but it wasn’t downright crappy, like many movies can be. Some people didn’t want a chick flick (which I really don’t mind), or too deep or gory movies like psychological thrillers or horrors. That’s why this movie ended up being the “one everyone didn’t mind seeing”, haha.

Overall, I kind of liked meeting up with these friends again. Sure, grade 5 friendships aren’t typically that solid or deep, but I’m much more interested in repursuing those old friendships. Just talking about friends like Jonathan McCormick, Gaynor Wong, and Mark Kresovic totally brought up things I’ve never even thought about. Now I really want to meet up with them and find out where they are after, for some of them, 9 years!

So, my hang time in Guelph is over, now for some hang time in Toronto! I’m glad to be back, with Chinese food made by my grandma. Here in Toronto, I get to offload all the footage I made at Tim’s cottage as well as numerous digital photos I took while in Guelph. Mostly of sunsets and my cooking though… heh.

We held a surprise party for Sam Vijayan since it is nearing his final days in Canada, before he heads down to U of F in Miami for med school. It sure was hard to keep everything a surprise throughout the planning though, because of numerous things. Some people gave a bit away by telling Sam that they “couldn’t make it to the party and were sorry”. Seriously, why do people do that?? It just messes things up. Then, Sam asked his good friend Patrick about a “surprise party that Silas told him about”. Patrick, thinking Sam knew everything, spilled the beans that I had invited Patrick out the the party as well. This was not good!

So we thought of a way to just hold our bible study as usual at 6-7:30, then went out to have some desserts at Williams just across the street from my apartment. During this time a few guests and surprisers arrived at the apartment, and Thomas ushered them in. While we had a great time at Williams, we pulled out the gift we had prepared for him — two laminated poster boards of pictures and messages of friends from Sam’s Guelph career. We hoped this would be enough of a surprise to throw Sam off.

However, some people mentioned in their messages on the poster that they couldn’t make it to the surprise party! Sam was a bit confused but he kept to himself. After John, Kathleen, and Margot headed “home”, and Dan went to the airport, and Liz took off to “fill up on gas”, Sam, Jess, and I walked back to my apartment. We just small talked our way up, and made Sam think that all we were doing was grabbing my stuff in the apartment so we could leave for Toronto with Liz! Fortunately, the surprise went off without a hitch from there, and we definitely surprised Sam. He even walked into my dimly lit room, which was full of the guests’ coats and shoes and picked up my guitar to bring back to the living room, not noticing anything out of the ordinary and such.

I’m glad we ended up still surprising Sam in the end. It was what we intended on doing at the outset, and with lots of planning it went well. And Sam got to see many friends from Guelph. Too bad I arrived home in Toronto after the ride from Liz at around 1:30 am, even though the ride was great with wonderful conversation, fact-sharing, and funny jokes. Much fun, definitely.

This is awesome! PHP emailing, from webpages. I’ll use it for my Contact Page, most likely.

Sitepoint Tutorial

This Sitepoint place has some really great tutorials in CSS, PHP, and a load of other geeky stuff. I subscribe to its email newsletter.

After much thinking, stressing, and prayer, I have decided to live with Dennis, Lisa, and Jess at Gordon St. and Kortright Ave. in the townhome. I figured that would be a good choice, since it is such a nice place and it would be a great experience, yet it comes with some tremendous responsibilities that I will need to commit to and be accountable to.

I’m grateful that Dennis is very supportive after I talked to him about the potential problems of living there, but he reassured me that he’d do his best to help me through them. Right now, I’m feeling comfortable with my decision, and I look forward to returning in September to a new environment.

OK, seriously, there must be a way for me to watch the Olympics when I’m here in Guelph. When Ben returned to Guelph about a week ago, he took away the television, which was good for exam studies, but bad for Olympic-event-watching!

So, I’m finished my final final exam for S04 Semester, my third semester of my projected 4 years of a packed in university degree. How many of you can say that? I’m so glad that’s done, since I was having no fun at all with a lot of the distance ed courses, and I really need a break now.

Statistics exam was very good, I think, since he gave us like 6 pages of formula sheets to use while we did our 23 Multiple Choice, 4 Short Answer questions. It was essentially looking through the formula sheet for how to do the questions, all I needed to know how to do was put the right numbers in the correct variables.

Now, to finalize where I will live. It’s still up in the air, but I think I’ll be more comfortable with whatever decision I make, after talking to my parents extensively as well as Thomas. I’m really glad that I have Thomas as a housemate right now, since he provides such great advice, sharing his experiences and demonstrating that he knows what I’m dealing with, in terms of the rent, struggles, and stresses. Too bad I can’t stay.