Vegetarian Heroes

28th May 2007, Monday

On Friday we got rocked by a couple of news about fellow colleagues at work...
One of our most studious and least flashy (also absolutely nonchalant without a murmur of any ill-treatment of work or company) rocked the department with his resignation, designated in July...
His reason was that the everyday routine stuff was too "dead" for his liking and he will be moving to something else with more live in it (make it an over dosage of it) as an educator..
The rumors had been sprouting for a couple of weeks now by the inauspicious tandem of Shitty Green & His Beautiness but his e-mail verified the claim...
Which is why our supervisor has been pretty keen to go through her list of prospective replacements and spared whatever precious time for interviews...One of the candidate being my colleague LF...
The story will unravels as time comes as who will be the faithful one to be the replacement for Beautiness to "sabotage" with....

Speaking of story... I have completed watching the 1st Volume of a American drama series with perhaps the best storyline ever... "Heroes"..
The finale ending at episode 23 was a well-rounded one with no Lost-style bloody cliffhanger which leave fans hanging and the same hordes of fans, badly disorientated by the story (i.e. Lost) and abandoned the show...
Meanwhile NBC prime time feature had the conclusion which they have been roasting up for the previous 22 episodes...
I was stranded on episode 17 for a while, so that my missus could catch up my pace...
So on Friday evening, we opened that bottle of wine my buddy and his lass got for us when they came over a fortnight back as well as a pack of Ruffles Sour Cream chips to get ourselves cozy in front of our wall-hung LCD TV to begin our adventure till the end of the beginning of the apocalypse of New York...
However after going through 3/4 of the wine (which contains a mere 9.5% alcohol level by the way), my crimson-faced wife started to lose her soberness and did the next best thing, dozed off...
Fed up by her failure to see my effort to finish up the series together with her, I marched on towards the end by myself only to be succumbed by my drowsiness...that is after watching that cool episode 21 which see Hiro and Ando teleported themselves to 5 years in the future when the apocalypse of New York did happened and the future Hiro became a vigilante for their kind against an American government who sighted them as monsters under the leadership of President Nathan Petrelli...
Peter with that scar on his face and hooking up with Jessica (now a stripper) was much like Neo from the Matrix especially his execution of all the powers he had attained over the years upon interaction with other special people like him...
I continued the final 2 episodes on Saturday and was awe-struck by how well the story was tied up and how all the characters come into the whole picture...There was even a sneak peek into the next season's storyline...

Feeling a state of emptiness with the conclusion of a show which avid fans like myself, Foo and Chan had to patiently anticipate for at least 4-5 months, I left for La Tendo, hopefully I could share my woes with the rest...
However the main attention at the store was about how Tian Tian managed to fend off a supposedly stalker, smitten by her and seriously not in the right state of sanity as he would squat in front of the shop to just gaze at her...Man, there sure are some basketcases out there...
Karen arrived from her class and she and Eng Kiong mentioned about getting their portable game console.. for her a NDS Lite (smart choice, girl) for him a PSP perhaps...
However I unleashed my own white jewel box and introduced them to "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan" (since they were fiddling with the Taiko game on Chan's PSP) and instantaneously they are sold...
In the matter of minutes, Karen vindicated her choice for a pink NDS lite while EK suddenly abandoned his plan for PSP to switch allegiance to the Nintendo counterpart and even Chan who under the impression that his brother might want this, joined the bandwagon...
Then everyone agreed to head down to AMK Hub where EK know of a game shop who they have been distributing figurines to, to see if they could pull a special deal...

Before that, we were joined by Yanhui who arrived from her own shopping spree to dinner at Fortune Center for an organic dinner..literally...
It's a rare diner offering vegetarian cuisines made with organic vegetables with the likes of "Golden Pillow" (nice seed breads with fillings of vegetables and delectable sauces) and Salad Soba...
As you should guess by now when the word "organic" comes into the picture, things will not be cheap...

At this juncture, I am already in the midst of my "Heroes Withdrawal Syndrome" and kept citing Heroes reference in my conversation, which led the rest to a state of irk...

By the time we got to AMK Hub, it was around closing hours for many shops but that didn't encourage the crowd to subside...
We headed straight to the game shop and was prompt to pick up 2 NDS Lites at a pretty good price and the next destination..my place...

my La Tendo clique has yet to grace my pad and this must be the most queer occasion to do so, as they wanted some NDS roms to allow them to start fiddling with their new consoles asap...
Beside the foursome, Ferris too made an appearance and putting the games into each micro SD card was as easy as I citing reference from "Heroes", and before you know it you have 4 NDS Lite hook up on Wi-fi engaging in a tag-team Ouendan action and it was something fresh for me as only in "against mode", you will see a few sequences not to be seen in the "Hitori Ouen" option...
It was near 1am when I finally duplicated copies of the ROMs for all 3 and we parted ways to have a good rest with EK & Karen having to wake up for badminton at Clementi and Chan and myself at our swan song in CSC...

It wasn't the best swan song ever...
If last week's sales was pathetic, this week just takes the cake...
By 3pm, my net sale was just a wretched $2 from that "ah pek" who speaks gibberish and I had problem understanding...
Meanwhile Chan was able to clear some items previously deem as un-sellable...
TW dropped by in the afternoon to acquire his Gundam FIX Figuration and had a brief time, hanging out our booth which didn't do any good to our business anyway...
It was only till the end of the day when we tried our best to rid of those loose figurines with much deflated prices and the usual scalpers came and did us (esp. myself) a favour by purchasing alot of loose female figurines like a true blue Moe-loving otaku would...

It was time for a celebration for that past 4 weeks of sales with garner us a few hundreds even we spent many times more for those items eons back...
I gave Ek a call and check whether he and Karen would be interested to join us for dinner...which means..yes..more VEGETARIAN...
The nearest eatery which offer food without any meat in it would be Ling Zhi restaurant at Far East Square...
After some consideration, we decided to indulge ourselves with the mushroom hotpot with a la carte buffet which buffers the time the duo will take to close the shop and travel down...
The spread and array of mushrooms and other mock meats truly suits the Tom Yam soup and tonic soup we had chosen...then those sumptous tim sum and finger food..
Our digestive systems are calling out for a break before they arrived our table with the excessive air conditioning and didn't eat too much but we all agreed it was good food...expensive but good...perhaps too expensive for a simple dinner...
But the talks about Stephen Chow classic movies, Romance of 3 Kingdoms and Buddhism studies can wreck endless laughter which my missus nearly buffed out with a Chan's joke...

So 2 evenings without meat..good for the health but the gorging is not...we ain't Heroes afterall...

Japanese word of the day: 菜食主義者 (Vegetarian) I wonder how can leafy delicacies be actually be more expensive than actual animal carcass...