Meal madness

As the ads on My Yahoo! have been proclaiming for the past month or so, May 9th is Mother's Day, <brent>AKA</brent>, Yet Another Day In The Stable Of Commercially-Marketable Days. Except that this one, along with Father's and Teacher's and Children's, isn't recognized as an official holiday, denying the workforce of yet another excuse for a day off.

Many bright people have caught on to the fact that Mother's Day is indeed a commercially-exploited day, and arrange to have their celebrations the day or night before. Many brighter restauranteurs have subsequently gotten wind of this grand plan of theirs, and have arranged for prices to be raised for the whole weekend in honour of the occasion, creating special menus at ridiculous markups featuring the same selection of food as available on non-celebratory days. And so the same bright people are snagged along with the clueless, by the net that global marketing has worked so deviously over decades to create.

We could not escape no matter how hard we tried. Mom was so happy at lunch today at the Bar and Billiards Room (Saturday seafood buffet, $45++ per head), you'd have to wear sunglasses in case she beamed your way.

At 2pm, my brother-in-law (edit: the older one), procrastinator that he is, asked J to find a venue for dinner tonight with my in-laws, which she unquestioningly got down to doing. (While not quite having agreed to do it yet, either. The arrogance of assuming that she'll definitely help out annoys me greatly! Grrrr. I absolutely detest being handed last-minute requests.) By that time, most of the restaurants she called were already full. One place had a table available for 7:30pm but it was gone when we rang ten minutes later - they had an 8:30pm table, $250++ Mother's Day set menu only, take it or leave it. So we left it.

We eventually wrangled a booking out of Lei Garden at Orchard Shopping Centre, #2 in the Lei Garden hierarchy (CHJIMES > Orchard Shopping Centre > Orchard Plaza). Gotta see how that goes, traffic tonight is probably going to be a bitch.

In other news
As promised, I loaned my 300D with kit lens to the other brother-in-law for his US trip; he departs tomorrow morning and will be back on the 21st. No camera for two weeks.. sob!

Attended the first of eight (maybe more?) photography lessons with Stanley last night. Interesting, he covered quite a bit of photographic basics, unearthing gems of knowledge that caught most of us by surprise. No practical stuff yet though - all theory.

Fortunately for me, next week's lesson won't involve equipment at all, so the timing of the camera return falls in place neatly. I may not have to borrow G's camera after all. :)

As for holiday plans, J says July might be a better time, and I agree - we'd skip the school holiday period. Still haven't decided on this one. Stay tuned.

Whoops, time for dinner. Out for now.