Arrived home yesterday afternoon on a rainy day. Tired from the long haul flight, I napped immediately after showering. Mom woke me up for an early dinner, I was still tired and having a little headache, didn’t have the appetite to eat much. Slept early at around 9pm.
Woke up at around 4am this morning after a very restful sleep. While trying to restart my morning routine again, I had to start unpacking my luggage to take out my newly acquired apparatus to make my morning coffee.
Went back to my studio at around 11am. Everything seemed just the way I left it in mid-July before the long vacation, and my colleague seemed to have taken good care of my many succulents upon my absence. I skimmed through some of my vacation photos, archived some travelling paper items, and reminisced my (unplanned) long vacation in Canada for another day. Very thankful for the long vacation and being able to meet and catch up with family and friends in TO.
It has been a rather productive day so far thanks to an early morning start. Today, being the first day of the last quarter of 2018, is a good day to pick up where I left off before the long vacation started!
Managed to meet and catch up with friends every day except Tue. in the past week. Including a couple more meetups planned for my last few days here, I’ll have seen and catch-up with almost everyone I intended to see during this long vacation. On top of that, a couple of my UW friends just happened to be visiting town from US and HK, and I had a chance to meet up with them yesterday!
Started off the past week with volunteering at a Senior centre on Monday morning, the elderly seemed happy seeing me again and I’m happy that they still remember me and welcomed me to do Chinese calligraphy with them. Had lunch with my friend before I headed downtown to see the 
Barely slept last night, probably due to worries of not getting enough sleep to drive my parents and sister to the airport in the early morning. Worrying about not getting enough sleep is truly a self-fulfilling prophecy. At one point I did fall into a short but deep sleep. I dreamt that my dad found a dim sum restaurant that opens at 4am so we could get some breakfast before heading to the airport, I probably had way too many dim sum for this trip already!
We (my parents, sister, and me) tagged along my Toronto’s sister’s family of four to a 3-day weekend trip to Montreal, Quebec. My brother-in-law lived in Montreal for 4 or 5 years when he first emigrated to Canada with his family, so he knows the city pretty well. He took us to many places including Saint-Joseph du Mont Royal, Notre Dame, Old Montreal, Old Port, Chinatown…
We have arrived in Toronto for 4 days and had dim sum for lunch every day and of which 3 consecutive days were at the same restaurant! After the dim sum lunch with some family friends today, we went to visit our old neighborhood upon my mom’s request.
Concluded our rushed 5-day local tour through the Rockies yesterday. It was my first time visiting some of the most scenic locations of my home country. We rushed from one tourist attraction to another including Lake Moraine, Banff, Lake Louise, Jasper National Park, Maligne Canyon… Being immersed in the breathtaking sceneries, one just cannot help but humble oneself before nature’s awesome Creator! I also now see God as an amazing sculptor on top of being an amazing scenic painter.
