My new best friend

Maybe it's the new school year, maybe it's the newly added responsibilities, but I find this September particularly exhausting for me. There seems to be never ending work to do at school and still more household chores when I get home. As a result, I decided to invest in something that would make me feel like I'm getting a reward after each hard day's work.

Our new massage chair is awesome. It massages from head to feet with different ways to massage, music, various intensity and strength, comes with heat pad and arm massage pads too. It always helps me relax after tense thinking and work. Of course...I'm certain it can still be even better, especially with the feet functions...but then again...I'll have to work much harder to afford the even more expensive one! This one will be just fine for now.

Nice hacker?

Most of us have been freaked out by people of all sorts some point in our life but have you ever been freaked out by a machine? I certainly did yesterday. So the incident goes like this...

As many of you know, the start of a school year is one of the busiest times of a year for a teacher and the same goes for me. So I was logging onto my classroom computer in a rush to type up a sign up schedule for teachers before I did some testing on students and had a meeting with another colleague when--I lost control!

After logging in, I wanted to click on Internet Explorer to check my email first but the mouse pointer was moving against my will in the opposite direction and had its own agenda by clicking into various items before going into WordPad and then TALKING to me! For the first few seconds, I thought I had been overworked and was hallucinating but no. It turns out to be the district's IT HelpDesk remotely controlling my computer and telling me what it was doing, so I would just let it control MY machine! Well...before I knew it, I was having a full conversation with my machine...

So yes, I got hacked. But no, it wasn't bad. Reminds me of the power of the remote district though...they can read and know everything we do on those computers.

Seattle

Before school started, P and I were determined to go on a mini-trip to ANYWHERE. Due to limited time and a busy work schedule for P, we settled for Seattle and some shopping at the Premium Outlet and Alderwood Mall on the way (you know...good currency exchange rate). Weather was initially very nice and our shopping was going well. This time around, we booked our hotel through Hotwire and it turned out to be awesome. We had a great room at Mayflower Hotel with 2 bathrooms! The hotel was located in the centre of downtown where everything was within walking distance and the customer service was excellent. Most importantly, we only paid half the regular price! Unfortunately, we were so busy with valet and loading and unloading luggage to and from that we forgot to take a picture of the hotel!


We got a chance to walk around downtown Seattle before returning to Vancouver and we walked by this mobile PIG sandwich stand and had to give it a try. The pulled pork sandwich turned out to be juicy and good though for a pricey $6 without any sides or extras. And of course we had to go visit Pike Place Public Market...that's just a tradition!

The market was as I remembered it last time I visited at least 5 years ago. There's still the throwing fish stand, the beautiful bouquets of flowers and the colourful fruits. Ahhh...memories.