Sushi Overdose

We went to an "all you can eat" sushi buffet not too far from Sylvia's place, at 1280 Baseline. SushiKan looked like a huge conveyor belt sushi restaurant I had visited in Kotesashi, Japan, so it was rather nostalgic. Anyway, we settled in really quick - we had been delayed because of the traffic, and stopped over at Sylvia's place too to drop off some groceries - and got down to business.

The quality of sushi was really quite good! OK, I didn't try the sashimi, but everything else was much better than I thought it would be. It's amazing that we still managed to talk so much despite stuffing our faces with food! Service was excellent too - the dishes came faster than we could eat them. And it didn't cost us more than C$23 per person! Not too bad at all.

Coming to think of it, I did take quite a risk. I'd only known Sylvia for a day, and had just accepted her offer to go to some place I'd never heard of, which was a 30 min drive away, for dinner. To add to that, she walked over to my place after work and it was her boyfriend Steve who picked us up. So I'd gone along with 2 virtual strangers to some unknown place without too much thought. Instinct perhaps. But I did tell someone at work where I was going lah...

Sylvia's nice. We spent the evening talking about her adventures coming to Canada - I think she pretty much followed her heart and went wherever it took her. So she landed first in Winnipeg after graduating (but of course only after taking tons of exams to get her Manitoba pharmacist licence), then was charmed by a small village in Ontario and province-hopped (which meant another round of licence exams). In this village, she met Steve and over a year later, they decided to shift to Ottawa, where they have been for 2 months. She'll probably be here for quite a number more years, although when she and Steve marry and have kids, she'd like to bring them back to Singapore for a year to 'understand their roots'... and learn Mandarin! :-)

So I got home last night very very full, and very very sleepy. Overdose of good quality rice. This morning, when I got up, I got a real shock! This is what I saw at my living room window:


Hwah! Huh, there was no news of another storm leh, how come everything white white? Visibility zero lor. Win oreddy. I immediately turned on the TV and hit the news channel. It was hilarious! I caught the weatherman showing an aerial shot of Ontario traffic on the 417. All he could say was, "And now for the traffic on the 417. Well, we can't tell, so that's about it..." The whole screen was white - so glaringly white that you see those funny lines off the screen in the picture!

It was fog, super fog. There was nothing on the news saying when it would clear. So it was still everything as usual. I got myself to School in time for an Armchair session on Coaching. Led by Roxanne Cameron and Catherine Pagot-Reynolds, it was a very good session - excellent and applicable toolkits, and effective hands-on practice. I especially admired how they used enactment to illustrate some concepts. For example, in the first 10min of the session, Roxanne wanted to cover the differences between training, on-the-job training, coaching and mentoring. Typical way to do this is to have a few slides and draw up a comparison table, right? They didn't do that. They chose a scenario, and acted out for us how each type of intervention would approach the situation. Roxanne acted as the coach, whereas Catherine acted as the employee with the issue. So we saw for ourselves how a mentor would respond to the scenario vs. coach vs. trainer.

I had the chance to speak with Catherine and Roxanne after the session. Roxanne is retiring in 33 days. I suspect she will be back at the School as a consultant, but she said that she was keen to do more international work. Hmm, I wonder if she would be in our area anytime...

Well, I have quite a number of outings the next 5 days - meeting with people to begin saying farewells. Quite a bit to look forward to, yet tinged with some sadness :-(