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It’s been a few months since my last random wayward text message. This one was FOUR PAGES LONG! (I had to paste the orphan line at the bottom to get each page in one shot.) She refused to believe I wasn’t the guy she thought she was SMS’ing.

So I did what most anyone would do. I asked, "Are you drunk??"

I was reviewing some transactions done in the U.S. last weekend, and it was more than a little odd to see that I pay LESS in Canadian funds than I would in greenbacks. It’s been more than 30 years since the Canadian dollar was worth more than the U.S. dollar. I was only a wee’un back then, when we were very new to Canadian life and my parents were still comparing the practically worthless Philippine peso to the currency of their newly-adopted country.

It’s a great time to travel south — I remember the sting of the exchange rate only five years ago, when I was in New York City and paying hefty sums for theatre tickets. As usual, retail prices have yet to catch up with currency rates, but monetary parity south of the border is something altogether new. The Canadian economy relies heavily on exports to the United States, however, so I can really only speak for importers and the tourists heading outside of Canada when I say it’s good to see the pendulum swing in our favour this time in terms of buying power.

I’ve never seen the U.S. and British measurement system called ‘English’ before, have you? I grew up with metric, so I still have a tough time converting Fahrenheit to Celsius, and even though I drive a car with gauges in miles I have to look at the odometer to get a sense of how far I’ve travelled or convert it to kilometres in my head. In fact, that’s something I do on long car trips subconsciously: whenever I see the distance on a highway sign, I try and estimate my time of arrival based on my speed (I never use the cruise control, either) and then calculate the distance in kilometres. This was also actually useful when I rented cars in the States during the time when the Canadian dollar was at its lowest, around 60 cents U.S. I could convert currency and mileage simultaneously!

One last oddity for today: I get a lot of wacky ISPs and domain names in my stats, but here’s one I thought of screen-capturing:

And yes, I tried visiting, but apparently Satan Penguin isn’t very welcoming. Heh.

Last Friday night I fell asleep in my armchair and woke up to this. Methinks it’s not intended for me, for two obvious reasons. Why would I waste a Saturday on my hair???

In the old days, smoking pot and using a telephony device meant accidentally dialling an ex. And taking a very long time to punch the numbers (or, on a rotary dial, false starts with the index finger falling out of the holes. Remember rotary dialling?). Not that I’ve ever done any of that, but I’ve got an imagination.

In 2007, smoking pot and using a telephony device means taking 15 minutes to type out a message like this, then sending it to a total stranger. Except the total stranger sees your number and posts the message on the internet.

Circle Drive-In Theater’s Sunday fleamarket, Scranton-Carbondale Highway, PA

• If I ever take a whole month off, I’m doing this.
• The Lung Cancer Alliance recently got in touch with me because a couple who lost their son at 41 years of age to lung cancer contacted them, and informed the Alliance of my efforts to raise awareness of lung cancer treatment and research underfunding through this site and these bracelets. I visited the Alliance’s website, and couldn’t help but be touched by this letter from Dana Reeve’s sister.
• Interestingly, I was contacted on Friday by a company who wishes to buy ad space on my website. I told them that all proceeds from my website are directed towards the Lung Cancer Alliance. Will let you know how that goes.
• At one of the service plazas along the New York State Thruway (I-90), I saw an Amish family try and figure out the vending machines on their own. Someone eventually came along and gave them a hand.
• I tried mochi ice cream (a Japanese confection) for the first time over the weekend, in SCRANTON of all places!
• Tomorrow, Vinny would’ve been a teenager.

A beluga sprays on command during a show at the Vancouver Aquarium, Saturday, January 23.

That’s how I felt this morning!

Yesterday I said “Roll on Tuesday!” but somehow that message must’ve gotten mixed up in the cosmos because this morning I woke up to a bunch of blinking numbers after eight o’clock instead of an alarm! Like some others, I scrambled to get to work on time.

According to this online article in the Globe and Mail it wasn’t officially a power outage but a drop in voltage levels caused by a fire at a Toronto fire (oops) power station. But it still reset every electric-powered time device in my home including the microwave, stove, and it knocked out my modem. The router and my VoIP gateway are back up and running after a reboot.

Roll on… er, go incident-free Wednesday!

Technorati tags: Vancouver Aquarium, beluga, whale

Cat Rescue Part 3 was supposed to take place this weekend, but I think it will be postponed for another week so there are two of us available for the cat-wrangling. It’s not a one-person task by any stretch of the imagination — those cats are more feral than domesticated. They’d claw me to ribbons unless I have some backup!

I’m ever so slowly catching up on emailing and my RSS feeds: other blogs, websites, news, photography, podcasts, what-have-you. I listened to Seuss and Addie’s latest broadcasts of their show “The Unharshed Mellow” from West Philly — check it out in iTunes or on the web — when the building alarms went off and firetrucks threatened to drown out the indie music coming through my speakers. (It took ages, but they finally dispersed. I don’t know if it was a false alarm, downgraded alarm, or what — it was 10 floors above mine.)

I’m still working my way through the dozens of TUM podcasts while I process photos and write email, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the music they’ve selected for the shows. Seuss and Addie’s banter is pretty amusing, too, maybe because it takes me right back to The Unharshed Mellow-ness of their place, otherwise known as the recording studio, living room, dining room, and pet romper room.

I had to laugh when I saw my name in the show notes, under the title The Unharshed Mellow #52: Jamaican Proctologist. Heh. Never thought I’d see the day…

… have been a bit of a rollercoaster.

The weekend started off with some horrific news: the death of a boy in a plane crash the previous Saturday who was celebrating his 12th birthday. He was there at Vinny’s memorial in Hamburg Airport, so I must have photos/video of him, but there were so many people (including Vinny’s classmates of the same age) that it was a bit of a blur of faces and names. I met the boy’s stepmother while in Hamburg, and my heart goes out to her. And to Berit, who was in attendance at the funeral so painfully soon after Vinny’s accident.

It was with this bit of news milling around my brain that I looked after two young boys for the evening, which was fun in the funk-clearing way that — for me — is best achieved by surrounding myself with small, playful children. They’re incredibly funny, these little people, and they make me forget the realities of adulthood while I’m with them.

more…

• Oh Income Tax Refund, where art thou?!? (It’s been a month already! I’ve never had to wait this long!)
• I was trying to submit an online form to one of the most high profile corporations in the country, and at the end of the process was informed that an error occurred because I didn’t use any of the three acceptable browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer (currently unsupported for Mac), AOL, and Netscape! What’s a Mac user to do! (Phooey, I downloaded Netscape… the lesser of the–well, you know.)
• The more I feed Hugh, the more offended he acts when I don’t share my food with him.
• I phoned in to my radio station of choice the other night to make a small donation to their quarterly fundraising drive, receive a free copy of a CD, and make a song request. I used my mobile phone to call in my particulars and the line was a bit static-y, but I was chuffed to hear them announce my contribution on the air within five minutes — “… and we’d like to thank all our listeners and fundraising supporters, the latest one with a song request for ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ by Nina Simone in memory of her husband. Thank you, Gail Edwin-Stelding…”
• I prefer using subway tickets to tokens because the TTC tokens are barely visible to the naked eye, but more often than not I’ve been stuck waiting in a queue at the collector’s booth for drunk people to count out their fare in DIMES or the collector’s gone off somewhere and I end up buying a token ANYWAY because it’s the only way I can get past the gate!
• Crazy Property Manager is a real title, or, at least should be.
• I’m really trying to get my sense of humour back, but it hasn’t given me an ETA. Working on it.

That’s the first time I’ve ever seen my birthplace on a sign. (Zamboanga, that is, not Alaska.)

As seen at a Money Mart on Queen Street West, Toronto.

I was following a link on Muckdog’s blog, and came across this rather wicked-looking set-up:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/zestyping/97476.html

Quite a lot of work for a party trick, but would make some nifty photos! (And utter chaos if you’ve had one too many.)