Easter Weekend

The Passion of the Christ. The Mel Gibson directed film about when Jesus was captured and crucified, the greatest and single most important event to ever happen in the history of..well..history. I watched it for the first time when it came out in theaters in 2004, but I never saw the big significance of the movie, partly because I was still new to everything Christian. I was still early in my learnings of the Word.

I was looking back on some of my posts in April 2006, which was the month in which I accepted Christ. It seems that my emotions where all over the place for the entire month. I was elated that I got a job offer at Canadian Tire and then accepted Christ soon afterwards. However, by the end of the month, I was frustrated and angry for some reason.

Anyway, I'm not writing to talk about that stuff, but I guess some things are indirectly related to the events anyway, especially surrounding the Easter weekend.

This past weekend was Easter weekend. Lots has happened since Thursday.

Thursday marked a huge day for my team at Canadian Tire because it was the last day at the office for my former supervisor, who decided to retire. Not only was it a great day to celebrate her retirement, but it was a week full of goodbye visits by her colleagues at work. For our team, we were very happy to see her retire on her own terms and no one on our team deserves retirement more. On the flip side, we are very sad to see her go and we have very big shoes to fill as she was the most knowledgeable person our team had about the work we do. It shall be a interesting few months following to see how the team responds to her absence. I hope the process will be smooth.

I have the utmost respect for her, even though we had some rough patches at time, especially when I applied for another position; however, she always had my best interests in mind and always gave me a piece of her mind. Sometimes I appreciated it, other times it infuriated me. The last piece of advice she gave to me while I said my goodbye to her was, "Get out of here, there is no future here for you. You are young." I didn't know how to take this. Did she mean get out of here as in, get out and on to better things internally? Or did she mean get out of Canadian Tire completely and pursue better things externally? This kind of got me thinking.

So that was Thursday.

Friday, was Good Friday Service in the morning. Didn't do much else during the day. So that's all.

Saturday, I went over to my friend's place, Vince and he helped in teaching me how to swap my tires. Last time he did most of the work for me, this time, I did most of the work and he helped start me off. So today, I was swapping my winters to my summer tires since it was great weather this weekend and I don't suspect that the snow will come back this year. Joanna helped me this time...well, more like she wanted to do it herself. Haha.. I told her that if my wheels fall off, it's her fault and that she would have to buy me a new car. Hahaha! :P

Anyway, the tire swapping was finished, Odie and Jo helped wash my rims while I packed up my winters in their bags and loaded the car. Thanks for your help ladies!

So afterwards, we chilled at Vince's for the evening, and had Swiss Chalet dinner. While picking dinner, I noticed that my car was pulling to the right. The alignment was off. This greatly annoyed me and I couldn't figure out why. The only reason I could think of that night was that the wheels maybe were incorrectly installed onto my car. However, I saw to it that it was done correctly. It puzzled me.

We watched The Blind Side, the movie based on the true story of Michael Oher. If you don't know the story, I suggest you Wiki both subject titles. It's a fascinating story. Pretty good overall. I thought it would've been more of a girl's movie. :P Anyway, Cecilia decided to join us in the middle of the movie, but she has seen it before, so it's all good.

Even later on, Rebecca joined us for the evening and we watched Up in the Air starring George Clooney. The basis of the story is that he fires people for bosses who are too chicken to do it. What a job.

On the drive home after dropping off Joanna, I finally figured out what might be the problem with the alignment of my car. I wondered if my tires were properly inflated.

On Sunday, I asked Phil and Vince to see if that might be a possible reasoning for misalignment of my car. They confirmed. The tire pressure of my tires for my car should be at around 32-33 PSIs. I got home from church that morning and checked it out with Joanna. The tires on the left side, just a little over 40 PSIs. The tires on the right side at around 40 PSIs. There was a warning on the tire that said that it's dangerous to have the tires at 40 PSIs. How did SimplyTire screw that up? Must've been a mistake, they generally are very good at these types of things. I'll let this one slide though as they have been good to me.

So I let some air out and got it down to around 35 PSIs for all the tires, only because I know that the tires will still lose a bit of air later on. In any case, the drive felt a lot more comfortable now. It still steers to the right a little, but at least it's not as noticeable as Saturday night.

Ever since I got the new tires on, I've been driving my car around corners a little more aggressively. I want to test out the tires. Hahaha, they're suppose to be really good.

Later on Sunday, Joanna and I headed up to Markham to have lunch at Kenny's Delight at First Markham Place. After lunch, we went to see Beni's (Joanna's Queens friend) baptism at Richmond Hill Chinese Community Church (RHCCC). Wow, that church is freaking huge! I thought I was walking in the ACC. It was a nice and quick baptism though, but I guess it had to be since they had 45 people to baptize! Beni had requested to go early so that some of the Queens people could skip out early to catch Derek's, another Queens alum, baptism at another church, North York Chinese Baptist Church (NYCBC). That one was long, but in the end it was worth it to see new brothers and sisters declaring their re-births. It was a glorious day in all.

Afterwards, some of us headed over to Beni's condo for a celebratory dinner. Was stuffed to the max. There was some good food there, good dessert, and good company!

We decided to leave at around 9.30pm because Jo had a paper still to write, due on Monday, but luckily it was only a reflection paper, but it still needed to be written.

I figured out a great way for making people leave when they don't want to. Hahaha. If we are suppose to leave, but there is no progress to leave, there is no point in me sitting around.

Case #1: After Derek's baptism, everyone just kind of loitered around after offering congratulations to Derek. We are suppose to head over to Beni's for dinner, but no one is moving and one chat leads to another chat and so forth. Now for me, I would just be sitting there waiting for Jo and Sarah to finish chatting, and it's understandable that they want to stay and chat a little bit more since they hadn't seen these people in a while. But we have a destination to make. So instead of sitting in the sanctuary where they were chatting, I decided to leave and wait outside. This would force them to come out. And it worked.

Case #2: Leaving Beni's place to go home (since Jo needed to finish her paper). To keep it short, again, I left the condo and waited outside while they were still inside giving extended goodbyes (goodbyes that would lead to a short conversation). This also forced them to leave and keep me not waiting long.

So my advice if you're "tired" of waiting on people: Just go. Leave and wait somewhere they can't really see you. Once they notice that you're not around, they will get the hint. :P

So I watched The Passion of the Christ again tonight, and I have a much greater understanding of the story after hearing it so many times now, and after watching it a second time, it was very emotional and disturbing. For most of the film this time around, I couldn't watch all the brutal bloody parts, only through my peripheral vision. It's just too painful to watch. Despite all this and some inaccuracies to the events, it is a great visual tool for me to see how Jesus may have died on the cross for all of us.

I'm glad I have Monday off. :) Nike Employee Sale, here I come!