Adventure girl

A few months ago, my sister told me that she wanted to travel somewhere "out of the ordinary." So she has now taken a leave of absence from her job, and tomorrow afternoon she'll be on her way to Africa, with stops in Toronto, Frankfurt, and Saudi Arabia, before she finally lands in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. (Click here for a map of this route.) There she will meet up with a friend who works at a refugee camp in Ethiopia. At the camp, she will help out refugee people from the war-torn country of Sudan. The whole trip will last for three months! Yep. My little sister is quite the adventure girl.

Rough day

What a day! First of all, I slept through my alarm. And my back-up alarm. Ended up late for work, although only by a few minutes, so things weren't too bad yet. At lunch, when I got out to my car, I found it was covered with snow. So, I lean inside the car in order to start it, and then I get back outside so that I can brush the snow off the car. Once that's all finished, I'm about to get back in the car, when I notice that the doors are all locked. (Somehow I guess I managed to activate the automatic door locks.) So I hitch a ride to my house in order to get my spare car keys... but when I get to the house, I realize that my house key is missing. Duh! It's on the same key-ring that is currently inside of my locked (and still running) car. So I break into my house, get my spare car keys, and hitch a ride back to work where I finally manage to get into my car. I drove back home to eat lunch, and then I walked back to work after lunch. Then, as I'm taking my jacket off, I notice that my cell phone clip is on my belt, but my cell phone is not. It's gone. Lost. I have no idea where it is. I tried phoning it a few times, to see if someone would pick up, but no luck. I think I should have just stayed in bed.

Don't light a match

A belated Happy New Year to all y'all. So last night I needed to fuel up my car. I've got a key-card account at a local unmanned station which allows me to fill up at anytime of day or night. Convenient. Except that the temperature at that time, last night, was a cool minus 36 degrees. So I start the pump, and suddenly the rubber hose decides to contract (from the bitter cold) and it pulls itself out of my gas tank. I had already clicked the little handle lock (so that I didn't have to hang onto the nozzle), and unfortunately the lock didn't disengage. So gasoline starts spraying absolutely EVERYWHERE! I finally managed to catch the stupid nozzle and turn the thing off, but not before I was literally soaked with gasoline. My boots, pants, jacket, gloves... everything was just saturated. D'oh!

Ochenta y siete

Today was my final exam in Spanish class, and... I passed! My grade on the final exam was ochenta y siete (or eighty-seven) percent. That was also my average for the entire semester. I was so proud that I immediately phoned mi madre to brag a little bit. ¡Yo soy muy estudioso!

Usanda... don't forget your meeting

Talk about reaching the wrong number! I just received a telephone voicemail message, reminding "Usanda" of her meeting, which will be taking place this Sunday at 1:00pm at the Mariott Hotel in Dallas, Texas. For those of you who may not know me, I live approximately 2,100 kilometers away from Dallas. (And I don't know anyone named Usanda!)

Pablo habla español

Did you know that I'm an official college student? Yes, seriously! I'm in a first year Spanish class, which I began this past September. I'm only in school for three hours a week, but believe me, that is more than enough time to totally fry my brain. But I guess I've been doing alright so far, as my current grade is 87% (through three tests.) The funny thing is that at this point, I could tell you more about Spanish grammar than English. A few months ago, if you had asked me define a direct or indirect object pronoun, or to give an example of a complementary infinitive, I would have looked at you like you were from outer space. The scary thing is that en español, this stuff is actually making sense to me.

News is funny

I should watch the evening news more often. Very entertaining! First of all, one of the big stories today, was that Canada is allowing foreign girls to immigrate into Canada if they are strippers, because (apparently) there is a huge shortage of strippers in Canada. I found that tremendously funny. I mean, the USA will let in foreign doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists, and so on. But in Canada? Oh baby... all ya gotta do is take off your clothes for money and you're in! What a joke.

Another lead story today was a huge privacy breach by the CIBC (a large Canadian Bank.) You know how all the banks are always bragging about how "your personal information is safe with them" or whatever? Well, it turns out that the CIBC has been faxing highly confidential customer documents to a small scrap yard in Virginia. They started doing this in 2001. The guy who runs the scrap yard has repeatedly contacted the CIBC to let them know about this breach but the bank has apparently not done anything about it. (Gotta love that "speedy" customer service at the big banks.) Of course in a typically classic "American" twist to this story... the scrap yard is now suing the CIBC for $3 million dollars because supposedly the CIBC faxes were overwhelming the scrap yard's fax machine and were therefore causing an interruption to the business. Right. God bless America.

News is funny.

Ah... now I get it

A few days ago, I wrote about a sandwich that was being auctioned on eBay. I was amused at how high the bids were going and I was convinced that people were just being stupid, and bidding up the price with fake eBay user accounts or something. I mean seriously... who would pay thousands of dollars for a sandwich? Who would pay any amount of money for this sandwich? Well now I get it. In fact, I'll fill you in on the rest of the story. After being delisted and relisted a few times, the sandwich was finally sold for around US$28,000. You might be thinking... that's insane! Crazy! (I know I sure thought so.) But then I read the identity of the buyer: the internet casino site known as GoldenPalace(dot)com. And it finally all made sense to me. GoldenPalace didn't care about the sandwich at all. This was all about marketing. And I must say, it was rather ingenius thinking on their behalf. Where else could you pay a mere $28,000 for commercial time on thousands of TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, websites, magazines and more? GoldenPalace figured out how. They paid what seemed to be a large amount of money for a novelty item, when in fact they were actually paying a rather small amount of money for a ton of "free" advertising. So you see, buying that sandwich was not really so crazy after all.

It's a good idea

It's always a good idea for a person to keep one eye on the clock while cooking a pizza. If you do that, then you won't accidentally cook a 16 minute pizza for 48 minutes. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to open some windows to try to clear all the smoke out of my kitchen. Later!

Embarrassment

Carolyn Parrish is an embarrassment to the human race. The people of Mississauga should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for electing this brain-dead idiot into political office. Carolyn should do Canada a favour and consider a career change to something that would better match her intelligence. At best, she might be qualified for work as a circus clown, but I think she should get a job as a speed bump!