happylife

Strange red boat

Do you know what this strange red boat is? You can often see this kind of red boat in False Creek. Is it a submarine? No, this boat is an emergency boat which came from a large cargo ship or tanker. As you know, Vancouver is one of the most popular harbours in North America and there are quite a few cargo ship waiting in English Bay for the loading or unloading. While the ship is waiting, some crews on the ship land on Vancouver using this boat to enjoy shopping, drinking or something else after their several month sailing. By the way, the primary purpose of this boat is emergency refuge from fire and this boat can stand in fire for more than fifteen minutes.

Logs on the sea

Last evening I sailed to Point Atkinson with single-handed, and on the way back home, I hit a log on the sea. I was very surprised to hear a large crash sound. Fortunately both the boat and I didn't have any damage, but in the worst case I would have been killed. Though the hull of the boat is hard but it's very thin less than 1cm in thickness. If a log hit the boat directly at the corner of it, the hull could have a hole and the boat could easily sink. There are a lot of logs in the sea around BC coast, and among them there are some so called 'deadhead' which means a log floating vertically in the sea and only the small top part of it can be seen like a head of a man over the sea. They are the most dangerous, even more dangerous than killer whales or sharks. We always have to take care of them while sailing.

Do you know what this bottle is?

Can you imagine what this bottle is? It isn't beverage, shampoo, or detergent. It is eyewash made in Japan. Most eyewash is in a very small bottle, but this eyewash named "eyebon" is 500ml in amount and it is not for business use, just for personal use. How do you think you can consume such large amount of eyewash? The secret is in the cap of this bottle. This cap is shaped to cover your eye. You can pour this eyewash into the cap, then cover your one eye with it, and look up blinking your eye several times in the eyewash. After washing eyes, I can feel relaxed and my vision seems to be clearer. I use it almost everyday, so I use up this 500ml of eyewash in a few months.

Second life of a coffee cup

Thanks to Kathy Hand & ropeboy's advice, I found the third option which I almost forgot; not to throw the old cup away but to use it in other ways. So I went to Walmart and got a new coffee cup and a small pot of flowers. They look pretty. Red flowers and green leaves look more vivid in the white ex-coffee cup. And if I had an uninvited guest, he would have this cup of coffee.

Should I buy a new cup?

My coffee cup has some scars and they look dirty. I wonder whether I shoud keep using this old cup or throw it away and buy a new one. Of course wasting things is not good, but is it wise to keep using this old cup and to look at these dirty scars everytime I drink coffee? Economically saying, a new cup will be less than $10 and if you divide the amount by the count of my drinking coffee, it will cost less than one cent per day, so it is a good investment. But when I throw something away I feel like doing something bad. The best way is that this cup is broken itself, but it is very strong. If you drop it, it won't be broken, it just adds some scars.

A business plan

It is often said that if you write a letter in the night, you should re-read it next morning before posting it. A letter written in the midnight is too emotional and dogmatic. I think this also goes for business planning. I have a small business plan which I got about three months ago. I am convinced that it is a nice plan, but I have been deliberately keeping it untouched for some time in order to cool it and ripen it. I have got a lot of ideas which have been rotten before any actions. But this time, this idea has never been rotten. So I have moved to the next phase. I can say nothing about this idea now, but I made some actions couple of these weeks and finished the feasibility study. I'm now coding. I have selected PHP & MySQL for the platform. Though I hate coding and am not good at programming, this excellent platform helps me a lot. The internet and some technologies around it help us to realize our idea easily. I appreciate that I am living in such a world full of convenience and potential.

Alarmless morning

These several months, I wake up without using an alarm clock. As I don't need to go for a work nor go to school, I wake up when I want to wake up. You may think I should live an idle and irregular life, but my everyday life is not so irregular. I am leading rather a disciplined life. I usually wake up before six o'clock and after taking light breakfast I go out for cycling if it isn't raining. One hour cycling in Stanley Park makes me perfectly awake. After cycling I take a shower and I like best the moment when I get out of the shower room. When I was in Japan every morning, an alarm clock dragged me out of the world of dream, and I went to the office half asleep. What a difference! I wish I would keep my present life forever.

Heeling

The most surprising thing you feel on your first borading on a sailing boat is heeling. Most sailing boats heel under strong wind. My boat heels up to 40 degree. This is a great heel, and I was scared when I expected it for the first time. I felt like the boat would turnover and I would be thrown out. As most sailing boats have keel which is a very heavy substance set on the bottom of boats, they rarely turnover. But even if you know about this, it takes time for you to be used to this phenomenon. And once you are used to it, you feel a kind of extacy while heeling. Heeling is one of the biggest fun of sailing.

The best hamburger

In Japan it is not so popular to cook hamburger at home. It was when I was an elementary school pupil that I had a hamburger of Macdonald for the first time. I remember that I was very happy to eat such a delicious food. Since then, I have had countless hamburgers, and my taste has become sensitive to hamburgers. I don't like Macdonald's anymore because of its taste. Until last year while I was in Japan, my best hamburger shop was MOS, a hamburger franchise in Japan. But now in Canada, I found by far the better hamburger shop. It is Vera's burger shack which has four shops in Vancouver. With its organic ingradients such as heavy beef patty, and its free choosable flavour shots, I evaluate Vera's as the number one hamburger shop in the world.

Original menu

I have created a new menu which is named "Moro Tama Don". Moro is an abbreviation of Tomorokoshi which means corn in Japanese. Tama is an egg and Don means a rice bowl. So you can now imagine what this food is like. First, heat butter on a frying pan and mingle corns with an egg. Second, add some salt, pepper and soy sauce. Then, just eat it on a bowl of rice. It's very easy to cook and takes only a few minutes, but it is colorful and tastes very nice. And corns and eggs are the cheapest food all around the world.