A 5 Point Post

The good: Family, specifically the one I have the honour to call my own. Yes, we fight, we yell and we scream but someone has to pass the beans at the dinner table... :) This weekend, we rallied around one of our members after a sad event in their life. Nothing like being relied upon to be the shoulder or leg to cry on. We may all be different in our own little ways but when it matters most we're the first in line to back one another up. Un-conditional commitment like that makes all the bickering and silliness worth it and the closeness is indeed priceless.

The bad: Microsoft Corporation and in particular their XBox 360 support and technical team. Our console has not been working since before Christmas and all Microsoft had to do was sent a Purolator box to us so we could send it back to them to fix. Well that only took 5 calls to their customer service centre and almost 2 and a half months before it happened. I was promised a lot by some of the managers I spoke to and those turned out to be lies. Boooooo to lies. I think they taped some of my calls so hopefully those get used for training purposes and I was very polite with my daggers, enough so that they at least promised to send me a free game for my trouble.

The funny, in this case kinda cute: I went to visit my old grade 4 teacher the other day. I was last in her class about 17 years ago and she was one of my favourite teachers. I took some time out of my lunch and borrowed a half hour from the city's budget to go see her. It'd been ages since I was last at the school and I think the last time I saw her was before high school. When she came in with the kids from recess, she saw me in full uniform and she recognized me right away. She gave me a big hug and we caught up. I ended up joining her in the classroom and had an impromptu Q&A session. One kid couldn't quite grasp the Q part of that and told me stories about the time he went to the fire hall and the firefighters had to run out because of a call and their trucks. Mrs. Henderson cut him off there and told him to tell the stories to the class later, but to stick to questions for me. When it was his turn next, he proceeded to tell us all about his uncle who was a police officer for another service and the cool car he had to drive. Mrs. H. was again gracious in reminding him that it was question time. By the third time she'd clearly run out of patience and cut him off with, "Do you actually have a question this time or another story?". He had a funny look on his face that I almost laughed at but had to remind myself he was only in grade 3.


The sad: I actually don't have anything really sad. I could talk about the ex or the girl I was dating recently who I just found out via facebook was already in a relationship but I won't. Instead I'll comment on how sad it was that I wasn't able to include all of the pictures from my afternoon with my grandma. It's really too bad that I am making you work to see the rest of the hilarity that took place. It was a riot. She's 86 and she can still school me and here's the proof.

The down right odd: Shabu Shabu Shomuni is a Japanese hot-pot restaurant, but it serves more than just beef and vegetables. Named after a manga comic book and a short-lived '90s TV show about six Japanese "office ladies," Shomuni features an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink menu served by 15 costumed waitresses who start off dressed like receptionists and end up handcuffing patrons to their tables in sexy police uniforms. Shomuni is the latest addition to a growing number of fetish restaurants sprouting up around Tokyo where geeks are finally able to live out their fantasies of being gawked at and served by pretty, submissive girls for a small fee. At Shomuni you can find servers that give raw strip teases to dining customers. With hand mirrors and binoculars at their disposal, the customers can ask the waitresses to mix them a cocktail, feed them beef from their hands, or strip down to their underwear and change into a cosplay outfit of their choice.

At 5,000 yen (about $40) an hour, the cost of eating here is not that different from any other all-you-can-eat restaurant in the bustling Shibuya district. But the mouth-watering effect it has on geeks is incomparable.