Sunday, February 23, 2014

Turquoise



After things got stalled for a couple of weeks, finally I got my butt off the couch and sprayed a coat of turquoise on the body.

March/Leyton House is probably the only F1 team that uses this turquoise color. I cannot think of another team that uses this color.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Old school media

Nowadays, because of the internet, we ditched the old media for news and entertainment. But this past week has been an old school media week for me. Radio and movie. Radio program production was something I've done before, I'll leave it for another blog post for now.

Even though the only operating radio that I have now is the one in the car, I have been a fan of several public radio programs. One of which is a news quiz show that has a panel of comedians answering and make jokes out of news. The show is produced by a local Chicago radio station and they have the recording in an auditorium and make it into a live show event. Usually, they sold out all the seats well in advance. Also having recordings on Thursdays which I am normally on the road made it almost impossible to attend.

This Thursday, at 6:30pm, the show posted an announcement on Facebook that a block of tickets just became available. Since I didn't have anything important to do, I ran down to Chase Auditorium where the show is taped (lucky that I live in downtown) and attended the live taping of the show. 


Movie is still a popular media, there is absolutely no sign of it going away. There may be other channels to deliver, but movie theaters are places where stories are being told.


This morning I found out that Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is showing in selected cities across US. Quick search on Google and found that Chicago is one of them! Lucky! Got to the theater at 10am to try to catch the first show. It turned out that they are showing 2 versions. Japanese dialog with English subtitle, and the English dubbed version. If the original is available, I am choosing the Japanese dialog one, but that means I have several hours to kill since they only show that version at 1:40pm. So I went to get breakfast.


All the above only for $7. Chinatown has the best value always.


Sunday, February 9, 2014

Clean


Project stalled for weeks, now parts are washed and rinsed, ready for some primer.




Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Happy New Year and 1st World Problem


2014 Chinese New Year Firework at Chicago Navy Pier

Last night, I was watching TV at home. All of a sudden I heard something familiar. In the summer, every Wednesday and Saturday night, Navy Pier has fireworks. Since my place is close by, I can hear fireworks explode. Quick search on Google and found that Navy Pier is having fireworks for Chinese New Year! So, I grab my jacket, tread though all the snow and managed to catch a glimpse of it and shot the video with the phone. Didn't even have my gloves on and it was cold.

Growing up in Hong Kong, I got to celebrate 2 new years. The Gregorian Calendar new year usually is just an extra holiday to nurse the drinking at the New Year's Eve party. Chinese new year on the other hand was a big deal, with lots of family gatherings (i.e. Food) Living in U.S., celebration with family for me now is just a phone call to mom and text message to my brother wishing them a healthy and prosperous year ahead. I got the red packet lucky money (signifies good fortune) from mom back in Christmas when I was home. The only celebration I had this year was a dinner gathering with a couple of Chinese friends from Hong Kong and Singapore, and an American husband of one of the friends (he lived in Singapore for a while, and married a Singaporean, so he is practically Asian). My family had a tradition of having vegetarian meal on New Year's Day. Grandma's wisdom - she thought that with all the family, friend, business gathering, everyone would be eating to much meat and greasy food, so New Year's Day, no meat. We had this tradition as far as I can remember, even after she passed away. So, I also cooked a pot of vegetarian delight. My version is just whatever vegetable I can get from the supermarket and some tofu and bean threads.


So I wish every visitor of this blog a very prosperous, happy and healthy year ahead!

Now back to the 1st world problem. Modern technology, broadband internet connection in particular, allowed me to work from home. This is extremely nice when we are under the effect of the Polar Vortex. But in the past couple of days, the service provider had been having problem, I was forced to brave the cold and head to the office instead.

After 2 days of outage, it seems to be back now. Not a bad way to start a new year.