What wasn't meant to be

Continuing from where I dropped off on my last post, things went smoothly at work that night and that Sunday found me at my parent's timeshare on a vacation they had been trying to plan since its inception early last year. It had been postponed and canceled several times and up to the start of May all three[Mother, Father and sister] of them had dropped off the trip. Things changed for the best and it was only my mother who couldn't make it as she went to visit her roots, China, with her 103YO father and is still in her homeland.

160 degree lakeside view from the entrance at the Hilton Grand Vacations club. Click here to view the large version on my panoramio page.

It was a pretty nice hotel, the best I've been to with my parents. This place was not friendly to us walkfoot folk though, that massive lake in the middle meant endless amounts of walking to get anywhere on the property. Spending a few days in Orlando as a tourist was a very welcomed change of pace. I live in Jamaica and after spending 7 days there I came back with a tan, I forgot how much I loved having a pool access at my front door.

It is back to reality for me as I went back to work this week. I haven't been back to my main office yet so I haven't gotten back into my usual groove of things. It is depressing, the next time I take some time off work it will probably be used for study leave[hopefully I get into the MSc. program].

postings from the couch

It is Thursday night and after 200+ km and a twisty turny trip though Sligoville I am now sitting on the couch not the guest bedroom as promised. What am I doing in Montego bay in the middle of the week? vaca, I needed it badly as Ruthie may have noticed. Being over here wasn't 'plan A' but the stars lined up right and I had to jump on it, the stars don't often line up for me.

Anyway for those who follow this blog you may have noticed last month my sister moved shop to Mobay and her parents followed her up here to help her get settled in. When they came back to Kingston and said they loved the townhouse complex that my sister moved to so much that they were going to buy one. Fast forwarding to this week they made the final payment and have now taken ownership of a unit. Will I ever be that cashy? I guess I will just stick to my window shopping for houses while I save my pennies.

So they decided to take a road trip to see their newly acquired property and coincidentally I was on leave this week so I could get to go(yes this is what I get when the stars line up). Of course my parents won't be moving to Montego Bay anytime soon so they just planned to rent it and use it as income since they are retired. This is a good plan but had a major flaw, they decided they will rent it to their daughter(for now) at less than 1/2 the going market rate. WTF! yup when the stars are lined up for my sister and actual ruler is used and I guess I get a best effort eyeballed 'straight' line scribbled by a kindergartener.

Pushing bad mind to the back burner these row houses are pretty sweet, they are up in the hills and have a view of the city and Mobay harbor. Crown molding, granite counters, double paned windows, these people know how to please. I hope the sun comes out tomorrow so I can go to the pool and bake myself to a cripsy brown lol. Maybe the stars will line up a cute girl for me by the poolside? lol wishful thinking.

goodbyes and summer daze

According to the stat counter thing people still read my blog, amazing!

My sister after 9 years of medical school has finally finished and is now specialized in internal medicine.. congrats. She took a job in Montego Bay so last week we packed up her stuff and my parents helped her leave Kingston behind. Goodbye and good riddance, I love my sister and all but she is too miserable I can only manage her in small quantities which this distance will provide us. Hopefully she will let me crash in her guest bedroom the next time I'm in Mobay.

Last week Friday was also Emancipation day out here. Not that I would have gone anywhere but I was on standby and therefore stuck in town as per usual. I decided to take a trip to the waterfront downtown Kingston to give my camera a break from hanging out with the spiders and surprisingly down there was nice.

From the people sleeping on the grass(I hope they weren't homeless), the brick walkway by the seawall(ignore the kfc box), the few sail boats in the harbour and lets not forget the creepy guy who popped up and asked if I wasn't going to take his picture, lol I thought of my blog as I pressed the shutter button for him.. I love the new waterfront.

House sitting

Do retired people take vacations? Well my parents seem to be off yet again and can be spotted all over the eastern side of North America in what I have dubbed their back packing trip. They asked their helper to keep coming and watch the house during the week and me to house sit over the weekends when she is gone. Friday, Saturday and Sunday night up here in the sticks.. *sigh*. I am not about to be driving this far just to water their plants, feed their dog and ensure someone is in the house at nights so for the past few weeks I have ended up spending from Friday straight through to Monday morning up here.

One would think that spending so much time trapped in the bush would make me a better blogger and post more or read all those posts my blog friends have been typing up but the time has been flying while I'm up here surprisingly. As y'all can see from my last post I took a trip down memory lane and went through some old photo albums. In fact most of the time spent up here is a trip down memory lane as this is the most time I've spent up here in a couple of years.

Spending time up here has made me reminded me off all the things us townies take for granted. Water is gone up here all the time and my parents have a 2400gal. water tank but when there is no pressure it sucks just as bad. Watchable cable.. their cable quality sucks, nobody wants to watch grainy TV. Higher speed internet, am I really complaining about 1MB dsl? when I left here I was on 56k dailup.. anyway the internet is still much faster at my home back in town. One benefit up here is there is no traffic noise, only the chirping of birds :)

Anyway while we are still living in the past, how great is this video? yup, I've been also browsing youtube for my favorite 80's songs too.

Back to the present, what is sad is that they didn't leave an itinerary. I think they are in New Jersey now but I have no idea where they will be until they come back. I don't even know when they are coming back or the flight information, my guess is sometime around the end of this month.. and of course they expect me to pick them up from the airport.. slackers.

a time to kick back

For the past 7 weeks there has been one person missing from my dept. at work so I have been picking up a lot of slack but it is now my turn to shed my burden and drop it on their shoulders. I spent some time last Friday transferring knowledge to the rest of the dept. and now I am off for this week :D. What are my plans? maybe do some spring cleaning, some shopping* but my main goal is to relax and do absolutely nothing.

Not only did I have work to deal with my parents decided I needed more to do. They were re-shingling their roof before the rain season and them being 2 old retired folk decided that I needed to make the time to inspect the progress of the work as they couldn't climb up on the roof. So I had to drive up to the sticks with my camera in my work clothes in the middle of the work day and scramble up on their roof to take pictures for them. I wouldn't mind as much if they lived close but they lived on the other side of town and beyond. To demonstrate how beyond they live look at the view from their roof below, yes, that is a cloud at the same level I am at.



If that little hill on the other side of the valley wasn't there that view would be priceless but we all can't have a nice view. This picture on the left is what I see when I look out of my bathroom window at my apartment. Those houses are in Jacks hill.. not a bad place to live if you can weather Jamaica's version of fire season. After months of no rain it seems like a yearly occurrence now for them to have massive fires on those hill sides.

* As I was leaving work on Friday they gave me a gift certificate to show their appreciation for all the work I have been doing.. lol. It lists 10+ places I can redeem it at such as jewellery, computer, furniture, clothes, music, hardware stores, hotels and some supermarkets. The value isn't that much to make me say wow but at the same time it's large enough not to ignore. I guess I will pop by some stores this week to see what I can buy.

Bon voyage sun

The past couple of days have been rather wet here in Kingston and I am loving the rather cool weather the torrential rains have brought with it. I had plans to go to the north coast this weekend but of course that had to be scratched due to the inclement weather at hand.

All this rain has also highlighted the fact that water leaks in the trunk of my car. Water also drips from the roof in my kitchen but I have long accepted this problem will not go away due to the laziness of my landlady and I have just have a bucket under the leak all year round. Leaky roofs doesn't seem to bother me much as it would leak over my bed occasionally at my parents house. I would be sleeping and be awoken at 1am in the morning by some cold water dripping on my shoulder and would have to go for a container to catch the water them move over to the other side of the bed.

Aside from the rain flooding my trunk, turning the roads into a long parking lot in the evenings and squashing my North coast plans I spent a lot of cozy quality time with noodle at home. The artist Busy Signal also passed through the canteen one day for a signing session. I like some of his songs but I'm not really a fan of him as he beat up(wickedly) one of my friends who was one of the sweetest most harmless girl I knew. If you look at the pictures you might notice his knuckles are bruised.. I guess he gets into a lot of fights, one day he will get whats coming to him :p. Last week Beanie man also passed through too, my camera was in the car though so there were no Kodak moments captured by me then.

My father's birthday was last week as well so today we went out to lunch at the Terra Nova as usual to celebrate. I am usually rather tired of there food now but today their supposedly 80 item buffet was extra delicious. If I knew lunch was going to be that good I would have skipped out on the eggs, jerked sausage, bacon and hashed browns I had for breakfast this morning(thanks frozen food isle). Lets hope the food doesn't haunt me like the last time I went out with my father to lunch at Dragon Court(where I spotted a roach) three weeks ago which gave me the runs for the next few days. They claimed the food was that much more tastier and left with big smiles since it was my turn to treat and I footed the bill. I've had my eye on Ambrosia recently maybe we can go there next but it's so hard to leave the tested and proven Terra Nova.

One topic at lunch brought up by my sister was my apparently my ability to properly budget and manage money. Apparently she says she is getting old(late late 20's :p) and needs to settle down with this aspect of her life. She wanted a copy of my GnuCash to run on her mac laptop.. and she wonders why she has no money. Anyway GnuCash and its double entry book keeping system isnt for everyone so to spare her that pain and my pain of getting it installed on her OSX I recommended that she use one of the many free money management sites out there. Coincidentally recently I was helping Noodle set up and track her budget so all the following links were fresh in my browser.

• Buxfer - Good for keeping track of budgets and shared expenses such as shared rent/utility bills among room mates.
• ClearCheckbook - Haven't used it yet but it looks good from the tour.
• Expensr - also looks promising from the tour.
  

Also for y'all windows users I guess there is Quicken and MS Money if your willing to spend some cash on them. I also think the with the latest release of GnuCash they have ported it to windows.. I can't vouch for that one but I can say the unix branch is a stable solid piece of software.

Tagged? BS!

This is the first time I'm being tagged.. I think. Tami was the evil doer. Anyway here are my eight things about me:

1. Aside from my parents and sister I have no blood relatives in Jamaica.. family life is a strange concept to me.
2. I love bright yellow. A ugly girl could have on a nice yellow top and she would move up a few notches in my book.
3. I don't fancy a lot of things other people like.. such as cake, chocolate, fast food, soda.. etc.
4. Still doesn't mean I won't eat it if you put it in front of me.. it would be gone after 2 bats of your eye :p
5. I have a pool table yet still I still suck at it.
6. I'm not cheap.. I am just used to the all the years I never had money.
7. I have 3 offices across town, every day I think long and hard as to which one I want to work at for the day.
8. I am a very open person.. I can't keep secrets about myself. Get a few of my friends together and you would have an authoritative and complete source on my life.
   

As an extra I'll just throw in this, it has been a while since I put on a tie or went to church and I did both last weekend.

I guess I should tag someone now, Alex I choose you.

mothers day much better this year

This was the sad scene from last years mother's day when I took them to brunch at Eden Gardens, the buffet was lame and the place empty(I guess everybody else knew better). This year I made sure to call earlier and get reservations for the Terra Nova brunch, IMHO they have the best buffet in Kingston.

The rest of Kingston had the same plan and the place was jam packed, unlike the sad Eden Gardens pictured above. It was so bad that I had to park on the other side of the road and they had a shuttle carry us over there, a whole 1 minute drive lol, to wait to be seated. I went all out on their buffet, I had two large plates of food, then desert, then another plate of food and to finish it off more desert. I was so stuffed by the time I reached home, I touched my stomach and for the first time my 1pac felt firm. Of course the only thing one can do in that situation is sleep so I slept until the food went somewhere else.

Goodbye

My uncle Champy passed away last month two weeks before his 64th birthday. I have never met him before, in fact I first learnt of him when my mother told me her brother died, but I will miss him. Pretty much the only thing I know about my mother's side of the family is that they are Chinese and grew up in Trinidad.

I felt nothing when I heard the news as I didn't know the man but when I picked up my mother at the airport last week Monday after she came back from the funeral she started to tell me about him. I saw her again today and she continued where she left off, she also gave me some of his stuff she brought back.. lots and lots of gum and a box of chocolate, I now have gum to chew every day for the next couple of months.

Apparently Champy liked to shop and buy stuff in bulk, hence the lots of gum. She said she found lots of clothes brand new still in the packaging too amongst many other things in his collections. While the family went through his documents they also found out he donated quite a bit to charity even though he worked a minimum wage job carrying laundry in a hotel in Toronto. She also mentioned that a bus load of his coworkers from the hotel also came to the funeral.

I have always wondered who would come to my funeral when I die? and what would people say/think of me after I'm gone. I never did like the answers I came up with, maybe I should work on changing that.

R.I.P. Champy