I follow a few financial blogs and found this one recently. They have a lot of interesting articles that will help anyone with financial planning. They are also celebrating their 3 year anniversary and they are giving away an iPad! You can enter here: WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com

Goodluck!

I experienced Dine Out Vancouver for the first time last Saturday. Dine Out Vancouver happens once a year for a couple of weeks, participating restaurants put together a special menu for people to sample their cuisine without breaking the bank. One can enjoy a three-course dinner for $18, $28 or $38 per person.

We went to a place called Aqua Riva which is by the waterfront. It's a pretty nice restaurant. It has a nice view of the water front and the sails of Canada Place. They also serve Ocean Wise seafood.


The dinner included bread in to snack on as we waited for our dishes to come. Two types of bread and with butter and diced tomatoes were served. I love warm fresh bread. Excellent.


The appetizer I chose was the Fire Grilled Prawns & Scallop – grilled endive risotto and basil vinaigrette. I think this was VERY good. I loved how the risotto tasted. The presentation could have used some more work though. It seemed they were in a rush and just plopped the risotto down in a hurry. But I don't blame them it did get pretty busy and we were a table of 9 ordering almost the same thing!


For the main entry, I chose the Wood Grilled Ribeye Steak – herb roasted Yukon gold potatoes, hazelnut & caramelized onion compote and stilton jus (medium rare) and K chose the Grilled Lemon Maple Glazed Wild Sockeye Salmon - roasted garlic & basil polenta, cucumber salsa and ginger butter sauce. Both were good but the salmon was better I thought. The steak may have been a little overdone. It was no millionaires cut that's for sure. lol All beef are ruined by the Kobe beef that I didn't know I was eating and the millionaire's cut. Nothing tastes as good anymore. LOL Still the steak was pretty good. I just didn't like eating the carrots under it. The salmon was cooked to perfection though. I highly recommend it.

To me there was only one choice for dessert: Apple and Cranberry Crisp – vanilla ice cream. Delicious vanilla ice cream. They don't put enough ice cream on. After the ice cream is gone the apple is very tart. Some other people's Crisp were all broken apart - another instance of poor presentation. But I didn't care too much - as long as it tasted good and it did!



Overall it was a good experience and it was nice to see my university friends again. It was a delicious meal that was worth the $28!

I'm 25 years old today. Wow time does fly. I had a good day today. The radio was playing all my favourite songs and the FlipMino HD I won from the ScotiaBank Show Your Colours contest came in the mail today! What perfect timing. =D I had a very small celebration. My parents surprised me with a mango cake from Anna's. It was very good. They also gave me a card and two Lindt white chocolate bunnies! Mmmm.

I went to the annual Vandusen Garden Plant Sale today. It was so crowded but I guess it is like that every year. There were many plants there but all the nice ones were already bought because people started lining up for the 10am sale at 6am! I went fairly late - about 2:30pm. The sale ended at 4pm. I went there with the intention of buying a nice Magnolia tree for our garden. When I finally found the section with the Magnolia trees, there didn't seem to be a whole lot left. The volunteer was very nice and helped me choose one that didn't grow too big. I wanted one that was purple-pink and was fragrant. I had planned to get the Magnolia 'Galaxy' type but she said it would grow very tall (up to 40ft!) and might be too big for a regular city plot. I ended up getting the `Betty` which has a nice pink colour and grows up to 10 feet. I also ended up purchasing a Peony. I wanted to buy more plants buy the problem was I wasn't prepared and didn't go with a wagon. I only had two hands so I could only buy two plants. Oh well, there's always next year!

BzzAgent (a word of mouth company) has a new product testing campaign for me (yay!). I was sent 2 cans of Nabob Coffee, each a different flavour. I received Full City Metropolis and Breakfast Blend. I have brewed both for my family and all I can say is mmm...coffee. Delicious!

Nabob Coffee comes in several other flavors, such as Sumatra Blend, Colombian and Espresso. If delicious coffee doesn't want to make you go out and try it, how about it being environmentally friendly? I guess people don't really think about coffee being environmentally friendly, but Nabob Coffee is Rainforest Alliance Certified, meaning the farms that the beans grow on use non-harmful methods to remove pests and helps protect animal habitats like forests and rivers! Yay for protecting the environment!

Go out today and buy a can of Nabob Coffee to help support the Rainforest Alliance program! I also have a few $1 off coupons that can be used on any Nabob Coffee, so if you're interested send me an email! Act quickly though, I only have a few left!

Official Google Reader Blog: A veritable boatload of read items

Wow they ran out in just 27 minutes! Google's April Fool's joke was to distribute what they call ReaderAdvantage™ badges to people who sign up under their program. A reader gets points depending on how many items they read in GoogleReader. I thought it is such a cool badge. I'm so sad I missed this. I want one. =(

Seen on Cambie Bridge

I was sent a bottle of Ultra Palmolive Aroma Sensations dish washing liquid to test out from BzzAgent, an awesome word of mouth company. Palmolive has changed the look of their line of dish soap and revamped the formula to a new and more powerful cleaning solution! I was sent a bottle of Aroma Sensations, with the Fresh Green Apple scent but it also comes in other scents such as Lavender and Tropical Blossom.

I've been using it for the past few days and I'm quite pleased with it. I've used Palmolive in the past but now because of their new formula, it only requires a little amount of detergent to make all my dishes nice and clean! Plus Palmolive is phosphate free and uses biodegradable ingredients in its formula so that's good for the environment! I really like how it smells and the green colour of the soap is also very pleasing to the eye. I'm looking forward to trying the other scents as well.

If you or anyone you know would like to try Palmolive's new Aroma Sensations, I have several $0.50 off coupons for any Ultra Palmolive 591ml dish liquid. Just leave me a comment or send me your email, and I will send a coupon your way. Canadian residents only please. If you live in the US, the Palmolive site has a $1 off coupon available for normal Palmolive and a $0.55 off coupon for Aroma Sensations.

I went to the Easter Vigil at 9pm tonight. Nobody was baptized this year but four people were confirmed. It was still a nice service. I love the lighting of the candles. I got participate in lighting a candle at the beginning this year. They turned on the lights earlier than I recall last year. Father Michael recognized me as I was exiting the church and said "Why hello! You were baptized last year! I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name." LOL It's nice to be remembered yet forgotten at the same time. I'm like that too though. I would remember a person by their face but not remember their name.

Happy Easter everyone!

Our family went to the Vancouver International Auto Show today. Usually my dad goes by himself every year but this year my sister managed to score four free tickets. There were a lot of people that attended. We entered almost at opening time around 12:15 and stayed until 5:30. I didn't realize I could take so long looking at cars! It must be all the shininess and newness of the cars. There was a Lamborghini that was already sold! There were a lot of cars to see and lots of freebies to get too. I happened to be at the right place at the right time and got to participate in the CIBC Drive Smart demostration. All I had to do was ride a little bike around a track and they gave me a $25 Petro-Canada giftcard as thanks!

There were a couple of cars I liked. I liked the Ford Fiesta, SmartCar and Honda. Oh the Ferrari was nice too. The Ford Fiesta is my favourite car (the same one I saw at Oakridge). The second is the SmartCar. The Fiesta costs $12,999 and the SmartCar I think around the same. Why not have the extra seating for the about the same cost? I like the green coloured one but the blue I have a picture with is pretty sweet too. It matches my outfit.


I also like this BMW sports bike. I drool over it.

All in all it was a nice family outing and a good experience. I'd probably not go again for some time but I'm glad I got a chance to go this time. I even put up some of the posters that I got from the show in my room. The Lexus poster is especially nice.

Here's K's post about the Auto show.

During the Olympics and Paralympics, there were a lot of uniformed people walking around and I liked to take photos of congregating uniforms! See if you can recognize any of them. There are a lot of red, white and blue uniforms. LOL

Went to the Canucks game tonight. K won tickets to the game and four autographed hockey sticks! The seats were pretty close to the ice. The game was awesome. I think one of the Sedins scored, Burrows scored, Kesler, the silver medalist, scored, and Louongo, the gold medalist was sitting on the bench. The crowded chanted "Raycroft! Raycroft!" Final score: 4-1. Woo! Go Canucks!

Alex Burrows was at Best Buy today! The only the first 300 people had a chance to take a picture with him and get his autograph.
Now this is more like it! Then again Vancouver is a hockey capital. The line wound around the block. We made it just in time!
Burrows is so cute.

Best Buy released New Moon, the second installment of the Twilight series, just past midnight tonight. They had an ad that was delivered TODAY. Their marketing person didn't do a very good job. Nobody's going to look at the flyer on a Friday! Flyers are on the last thing on people's minds on Friday nights! Anyways the they were giving out hats or rings to the first 250 people in line. No more than 50 showed up. The Beat was there too playing loud music hoping to catch other people's attention. The lineup started at 9pm. This was the line up at about 10:30:
This was the ENTIRE line. It is very sad. The Best Buy staff were also playing games with people in the line and giving away $10 gift cards to the winners. There was trivia, dance competition, singing. It was fun. I won a gc for dancing my CRAZY dance! Hahahah!

It was a little weird standing in line with all the diehard fans of the book when I haven't even read one of them. And only having watched the first movie last week that I borrowed from the library, I answered a trivia question wrong.

There was a crazy Jacob lookalike there! He looks SO much like him especially from the side. I only got a bad pic of him but you be the judge. He won one of the three $200 giftcards for the dressup contest. Congrats to him! He really deserved it.
There was also a nice new moon out tonight. Pardon my pun. ;P

I took the day off to chase the torch again. It was a 24 hour relay and they started yesterday afternoon. I sent K down to UBC yesterday to see the torch there and then she went downtown where she caught Luongo lighting the community cauldron! This morning I hitched a ride with my parents downtown and when I got there I was just in time to catch the torch at the corner of Granville and Georgia. Perfect timing! Too bad it was raining. I took a lot of pictures though.



Even though it was pouring rain, the school kids were out supporting their teacher. She was the last torchbearer to light a community cauldron.



I met up with K after the torch left Robson Square. We then went around looking for pins and found that RBC were giving some away! Then we saw Sumi at Robson and Beatty and also at the Canada Pavilion at LiveCity. For the rest of the day we went around looking at the sights to pass the time before we had to head to BC Place to see the Paralympic opening ceremony!



We left LiveCity at about 4:30 and there was already a huge amount of people heading over to BC Place. Organizers told us to be there at about an hour earlier since there will be audience participation and they will be showing us how to use the props.



We had to wear ponchos! Awwww we got white. One Inspires Many was the theme of the evening. Paralympic opening ceremony!



It was totally worth it for $30. We even got to participate in a breaking a world record! The world`s largest flash mob! Sumi was there again flying! OoO



Rick Hansen was there and the tribute was given to Terry Fox the greatest Canadian of all time. His parents were given the honour of bearing the torch into BC Place.




Let the Games begin!