Archive for November 12th, 2005

Another pot pourri of comments

I got a haircut today. A much needed one. I went in to my usual hair cutter near my house and put my name on the waiting list as my regular cutter was busy and had people in line. I really didn’t want to wait too long so when this Asian haircutter asked if I wanted her to cut my hair, I had to think. I originally said no since why ruin a good thing and risk getting a bad haircut? However due to time constraints I decided to go with the new person. I figured since she’s Asian, she may know how to treat Asian hair.

She is Vietnamese. And she speaks quickly and ever so softly that she almost slurs her words. I couldn’t understand half the things she was telling me. I just nodded and smiled. She thought I was in Grade 9 or 10. I chuckled. Is that supposed to be flattering or insulting? I’m not quite sure yet. I think she was trying too hard to impress me since she had to do a good job as my regular cutter was standing right beside her. She took a long time too. At the end of it all, I guess it wasn’t a bad cut. Nothing too spectacular either, but then again, my hair style is pretty much generic and simple to style. I guess she’s ok.

I was actually free today. For the first time in so many weekends, I had no plans for the day. It felt kind of weird actually. I felt as if I was missing something. Weekends are usually busy catching up on all the things I’ve fallen behind on during the weekdays. It was a gorgious day today too. What was I to do on a day like today? I did my laundry.

Sarah emailed me – see my previous comment. I got some wrong info. in there last night. My apologies for that. I corrected them. Boy, you do take a lot of pictures! But it’s great to see photos of other people visiting the same exact places you’ve been to in the past. Brings back good memories. We pretty much did the same things as well, like the glass bottom boat tour, starsand beach, eating, and more eating. I like it when I see pics and can say, “I’ve been there!”

I seriously need to do something with my homepage. It’s been like this for months now and I think half of it’s not even working properly anymore. I actually spent some time today trying to think of a new design for it. What did I come out with? Not a whole lot. I came across lots of interesting designs but I’m finding that it’s getting harder and harder for me to be able to implement a blog while at the same time carry other information on my homepage. Website building has come a long way since 1995 when I built my first webpage. I seriously need to brush up on all this stuff.

And if you’re wondering why you can’t comment on any of my blogs, it’s because I disabled commenting for the time being. I’ve received so many spam comments that it was no longer getting funny. I’ll enable commenting a bit later once I figure out a better way to kill spam. In the meantime, feel free to post any comments on my shoutboard on the left hand side of this site.

Anyone heard of BookTelevision?

There’s two Smakies in Mississauga!

A funny thing happened to me tonight. After dinner, I went over to someone’s house to sell a copy of my U&I Magazine. She lives a mere 10min. drive away from my home so I figure it wouldn’t hurt to drop by. Little did I know I would meet Taki… or better yet, Smakie.

As it turns out, her nickname is Smaky, which is a play on words of her first and last name. A lot of things about Sarah – her real name (hello if you’re reading this) – can be coincidentally linked to me somehow.

Her real name: Oddly enough, I was supposed to meet up with another Sarah this same evening. A coworker of mine who was missing in action today, I was supposed to drop off some of my risotto that I had made last night. Earlier in the evening I made contact with coworker Sarah and couldn’t reach the other Sarah. Later in the evening, it was reversed as I couldn’t reach coworker Sarah but managed to reach the other Sarah.

Her nickname: Smakie. How coincidental is that? My coworkers recently gave me their own nicknames, which included Taki, Smaky, Slacky, and even Tic Tak. I don’t really mind being called a myriad of names since I’ve been accustomed to it since high school where they called me by many other names, which I will not mention here. So you can imagine how surprised I was to hear that someone else uses the same nickname as I do… and it’s just a mere two characters away from Smaku, which has been my online alias since 1995. Wouldn’t it be neat if she had her domain name as smakie.com? My Smaky nicknamed started when I went to Elora and the bowling alley guy there misspelled my Smaku nickname and entered Smaky into the computer. I even got Billy Klippert (one of the top 10 finalists in the Canadian Idol) to sign his photo to “Smaky.”

Her boyfriend’s name and nickname: He’s Japanese. He goes by the name Tak, which is short for Takeaki. He can also be called Taki. I’ve also been called Tak and Taki.

Meeting them kind of surprised me as I would have never even imagined meeting a Taki or Smaky in my lifetime.

Her job: She’s an Autism Consultant – an ASD Consultant. She works with speech language pathologists. That makes her the second person I know who works in relation to SLP.

Her friends: Even more coincidental is the fact that we have mutual friends. Who would have thought the two Smakies would have same friends? She told me that an old highschool friend of mine got married and moved to Australia about three years ago. It would have been nice to say goodbye to her.

Her most recent holiday: The two of them just came back from a month long trip across Japan where she said she took over 3000 photos. Hmm… I only took 265 on my month long trip to Japan this past Christmas! They visited the same places I did, including the little islands of Ishigaki and Taketomi, just off of Okinawa. Very cool.

Had it not been so darn cold outside tonight, I would have wanted to chat with them a bit longer. It’s a small world we live in and it’s always great to be able to meet up with people like this. I have to thank U&I for getting me in contact with so many old friends now. Who would have thought I would meet up with old friends and coworkers in this manner?