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kevkaiwrote:
Wow Ken.. Looks like you've been up to a lot since we last talked! Congrats on the new house. 
June 11
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December 03 The Sport Button
I can say it's a completely different car. I had to relearn everything I know to get use to it. I would say I got pretty good at starting from stop in manual that I wouldn't need to get the RPM pass 1000. Still at the gas station, I press the button. The tach showed "SPORT". I put in first gear and started like normal, the gas was so sensitive it shot up to 2000 rpm. The gas pedal became more stiff and throttle was much more aggressive.
I then turn out from the gas station and jumped on the ramp for the freeway. The steering wheel became much tighter giving me even more feedback to the road. Before, the steering felt very light and while great for parking, I sometimes felt it's too easy to flick it left and right. Now, it totally feel like a sports car where every bit of turn matters. Not only is the throttle more responsive, I actually felt the gain of torque when going up the freeway. Every gear felt so different. It can now reach 4000 rpm even easier, I guess that's why my MA advised me not to use it until after the break-in. I'm going to spend some time getting used to the difference the two modes make. I was already happy with the "normal" mode of the MINI, this new life just makes it even more fun! Two cars in one! November 24 My New MINI!Today (well, yesterday) I picked up my MINI. This is actually my second time buying a MINI, the last one was an '05 but I had to let it go when I moved here to Seattle. This new model has the same great handling but with even more power and fuel efficient. I really enjoy small cars that doesn't feel like driving a ship. With great handling, great power and great fuel efficiency, I couldn't resist but to get the car again.
Last time I had a dark silver with white top. I had doubts when I ordered the white top, but after having that car for a year, I really liked it a lot! This time, I opted for the white top but wanted to try a different color. I always liked blue so I picked a darker Lightning Blue instead of the Laser (or Electric) Blue Fei has. Options I picked include: Premium, Cold Pkgs, Xenon, LSD, DSC, Rear fog, white turn signals, alloy dash, and comfort access. With all these the price is still around 10k less than what I payed in CAD for my first MCS with only Premium pkg. It really cost much less getting a car in the U.S.
A little diary of the MINI. I ordered the MINI back in August 18, 2007. Had to line up to get the car get in production on September 28. My MINI was born on October 4, 2007. It got shipped to Rasmussen MINI in Portland, Oregon on November 9. It was then it got put on its ClearMask. Scheduled for pickup on November 23. That was yesterday. It was a long trip to the dealership to pick him up. We woke up at 5am, took the bus (missed one so we had to sit out in the cold at 29 F - whatever that is - to wait for the next one) to Amtrak Station in Seattle downtown. Take the 3.5 hours journey to Portland. Our MA Jarid picked us up at the train station and took us to meet our MINI. We did all the paper work, done a bunch of autographs, wrote a cheque, billed the credit card, then finally we get to walk through our MINI and drive him off!
Driving the car was a blast! Although I miss the whining sound the previous supercharge MCS makes, I definitely love the turbo this one offers. Picks up really fast and not much turbo lag. I could even faintly hear the blow off valve (psssshhhh) if I shift quickly. It's in break-in period right now which means I can't go over 4500 rpm, I'll take it as a good time to get used to the car. We drove around Portland for lunch and did some Black Friday shopping. Drove down to Woodburn Company Stores for more shopping then head back home around 9:30. Got home at 12:30 and burned around 300 miles. 900 miles to go until broken in! April 10 Moved in!Finally after many huddles, we moved in! We dealt with the last minute mortgage stuff on the night of March 22, wired the money in on morning of March 23rd, and got the keys in the afternoon of the same day! Oh, and the inspection was done on the 20th, walkthrough on 21st. They got everything ready for us in a very short time.
After we got the house, the first thing we did was to paint a few rooms. The master bedroom in blue-silverish color, another room with light blue, and the utility in light green. I'm sure there are better names to the colors but I'm too lazy to look them up. That took us the whole weekend and the monday night.
We then spent the rest of the week packing, slacking, and packed everything into boxes. We never thought we had so much stuff! Packed until 5am on the moving day.
On the big day, last day of March (Sat), we rented a 16' truck. Big thanks to Michelle's coworkers (Tyrone, William, Anathy, and Sheila), we filled up the truck (and the trunk of the cars), and moved everything to the new place. We were all so tired and had a lot of exercise from the move. If I knew there were so much, I would ask for more help!
We originally planned to save some space on the truck for a stop over at Tom's place to pick up the fridge, washer/dryer I had bought earlier and stored at his place. However, that didn't really go well with the truck getting full so easily. So we had to drop off all the stuff then go back for the appliances. Tom helped us setup all the washer/dryer/fridge stuff even though he was sick! Thanks much! Else we would be out of them for a while!
After all is said and done, we finally plugged in the fridge on Sunday and unpacked everything for the kitchen. Everything looks so great! Now we just need our bed, unpack everything else, save up enough to buy other essentials like LCD TV, a grill, maybe a dining table, sofa... November 07 Vancouver weekend - Oct 28-29 2006We went to Vancouver for the weekend, it was a worthwhile trip since we really miss little HK after we departed Toronto. We are just spoiled from all the nice chinese restaurants, stores, people from Toronto. Even simple store signs of chinese names got us excited when we first reached Vancouver!
This is actually our second time in Vancouver after we moved to Seattle. The last time we were there was when my mom, aunt, and cousin came to visit us. A friend of my aunt, who provided great help when we were first here, brought us to Vancouver and showed us around. We didn't have much time spoiling ourselves in the nice stores/food places though. Hard to do that with a larger group. But we did explore a lot of places like Chinatown, downtown, Stanley park...
This trip was different, just two of us for two days. We booked a room at Radisson, just right next to the nice and new Aberdeen Center and all the nice malls/plazas in Richmond. It was walking distance to anything we ever dreamed of! (ok, so our expectation dropped to the bottom after we moved to Seattle)
It was surprisingly not a long drive from Seattle - 1 hour and 30 mins we reached the border. There was minimal line up to cross, only 3 cars ahead of ours and it was fast. We were asked where we lived and what are we doing going across the border, then she let us through.
The first stop was TD Canada Trust, our main purpose of the trip was to smuggle some money back to our account in Canada to pay our OSAP. We then went to Richmond Center, a normal shopping mall that for some reason so much better than the ones in Seattle! We enjoyed it and got some nice jackets there. Though the jacket I got didn't have the size that I wanted there so they taught us the direction to go to the Vancouver's largest mall (More on that later).
At around 3:30, we went up No. 3 Road to our hotel at Cambie St. to check in and drop off our luggages. The hotel is actually in the same place as T&T and another mall with foot court. It's really a great location surrounded by shops, food courts, everything we needed! Our room has this Sleep Number bed that allows us to adjust the firmness of the mattress, it was a very comfortable king-sized bed and we slept really well that night.
We didn't stay in the hotel for too long since we didn't have an official lunch yet and were starving (we ate breakfast at 11). We walked over to Aberdeen Center's food court and had some noodles. Walked around a bit then set off to the largest mall in Vancouver.
It was about a 15 mins drive going to MetroTown. We arrived at the mall Metropolis and boy it is huge! We got lost several times and had to refer to the directory to find our way around. There are many great stores there and it would take days to go through all of them. We didn't stay too long there (or did we) since we spent most of the time finding our way and were tired from walking. We left and came back to Richmond for our dinner.
We ate at a Japanese restaurant that apprently was disappointing with the expectation from the price. They have this Super White Tuna which I really wanted to try but heard they ran out. We had an assorted Sashimi and a rice with Uni, Ikura and crab meat. It was tasty and filling, but weren't as good as I expect.
After the dinner, we started looking for Karaoke! Back in the store where we got our jackets, a girl there told us there's a good new place around the area. Our target was to look for that place but after almost 30 mins of driving, we had no luck. So we went to the one we saw on our way to the hotel, only to find that it's all Taiwenese and since our Mandarin songs are limited, we thought it would be better not to spend a night there. We left.
Didn't want to give up, we kept searching for the one mentioned by the girl. On a right turn at a red light, a police stopped us! My first thought was if I was caught not stopping fully before the line. So I stopped and rolled down my window, the police officer pointed his flash lights over our chests and asked if we have our seatbelts on. At this point I was relieve to find that he was only randomly picking on cars. He then asked us who the car owner is and that tinted windows were illegal. We told him we came from Washington and he just checked my license, verified the plate and let us go. So we went back to our journey of getting lost finding the Karaoke place.
Upon turning streets and roads we came to this Alexandra Rd. saying it will be the last place we find before going back to the hotel. At this point, Michelle spotted the name of the place and I took a sharp left turn. We found it! We dropped in and made a reservation for 11pm. Then roamed around learning the area and went to hotel, sit and killed the 1 hour we had to wait.
The Karaoke place was great! None of the songs are DIY but are very new from the promotional copies. The sound system was excellent as well. The one complaint I had was the song selection system, it crashes! It crashed twice both when the song ends and trying to transition to a new one. Solution? Cut the song before it ends! Okay... that works for us, it'll force us to save some time on each song! Oh, and there's no alcohol. We sang for 2 hours when we lost our voice and left. It was a fortunate thing that it was coincidently a weekend to adjust to daylight saving time so it was only 1am when we got home.
We had a great night of sleep thanks to the Sleep Number bed, actually much better than sleeping at home! Good call on the marketing, makes me want to get a new bed now. Despite the great sleep, we still tried to wake up early so we don't waste the day there. We went over for dim sum at around 11 at Aberdeen Center, one of the best dim sum places in Vancouver and well worth the 30 mins wait.
After lunch, we just went to shop around there in the "2 dollar store" where everything's 2 bucks. We played a couple games of Drum Maniac (her first time!), then drove off to check a few other places out like Parker's. Apprently, Parker's was the place to go prior to the new Aberdeen Center. I guess it's similar to what happened in Toronto where Market Village got fairly quiet after Pacific Mall was built.
We stayed until around 6, ate something from the foodcourt again and started our journey back at around 6:30. It only took us 20 mins to get to the border where we waited for 10-15 mins just to find out the officer wanted to do a Compex check on us. What that meant was basically another 20 mins of human line up, questions of what we brought over (again), and provide keys for car inspection. After wasting an hour of our lives we continued our drive back home.
It only took us 3 hours in total to get from Richmond (Vancouver) to Redmond (Home) so it wasn't that bad at all! If not for the hassle of crossing borders I would want to go there every week! Much like coming out to Tor from Queens or something like many people do. All in all, it was a great trip for some HK refreshness, except maybe for the bad luck we had with the two officer incidents. |
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