Now that I think about it, I think the TV could easily be moved on the cart by 2 people. It's 2 blocks, 1 or 2 street crossings, both of them on side streets. There would be one instance of lifting (getting the TV onto the cart), and then it's just a matter of not letting it fall off the cart (which was, in fact, designed to hold a TV although not to transport one) and looking really silly while walking around. Anyone up for an adventure sometime within the next few days?

So my TV arrived at 12:13 today. No one was home at 12:13, so it will be at the post office tomorrow after 1:30 pm.

So unless someone can hook me up with a car and a person who can lift half of a 20" TV, I'll have to pay exorbitant amounts to some taxi driver. Or go to futureshop and convince their delivery guy to take a free 4 block round trip. Or, I suppose, wheel my TV cart down to the post office, but that seems rather silly.

How long does it take to stop talking like a teenager? I still pepper my speech with "like" and say "that sucks" even when I'm at work. I don't want to talk like this because I want to be taken seriously as a professional, but I can't help it. I wonder if these speech patterns will be permanent - maybe in a decade or so they will be taken as a demographic marker. But I'm not in contact with anyone who is in their late 20s or early 30s who spoke like a teenager when they were a teenager, so I can't do empirical research

I reach for a clip to put back a strand of hair that falls into my eyes, and the clip is red and sparkly. I look around for a clipboard and it has 4 years' worth of graffiti on it. As must as I try to pull off this grownup thing, my possessions betray me. And when I think I have it all under control, I refer to grownups in the third person.

Can't sleep. I'm glad Tuesday is a holiday. I'd be majorly stressing if tomorrow was the first day of a full week, but instead it's a little blip followed by a day off.

:(

There was once this website where you type in your city, and it generates a sort of doll that's appropriately dressed for the current weather in your city. Does anyone know what I'm talking about and know the URL or what it might be called? I wanted to see what kind of doll it would generate when it was 42 degrees here, but I couldn't find the site!

It was a normal looking summer evening, but an ominous blue-grey cloud was looming on the horizon. I saw this cloud, and decided to stay in instead of running to the grocery store. A few moments later it started to rain. As the rain fell, visibility was reduced by about 50%. The wind picked up, and the rain started falling even harder, mixed in with the occasional hail. Now I could only see one block from my 14th storey window. Suddenly a huge violent gust blows straight towards me. I slam the window closed as it throws hundreds of hail stones against my walls and windows. I can't even see the edge of my balcony, and I wonder if I'm in the middle of a tornado or something. Then this blast of hail passes, the rain stops, and the sun comes back out. The only evidence left is the puddles on the ground and the water dripping down the side of the building. The whole thing took less than 15 minutes, and if I had entered the grocery store right before it started I wouldn't even have known what had happened.

I hope no one at Pride got hurt by all the hail!

I have 1.5 cups of leftover hollandaise sauce. WTF can I do with 1.5 cups of hollandaise sauce?

White wines are meant to be drunk chilled. Red wines are meant to be drunk at room temperature. Why don't they invent whites that taste better at room temperature and reds that taste better chilled?

I saw yet another ad where they discussed campaign fundraising in the US as though whoever raises the most money automatically wins. Can someone explain to me why this is so important? I mean, I do realize that election campaigns are expensive. I do realize that you need money for all the travelling around that is involved. But these articles were talking about fundraising as though the voters automatically vote for whoever raises the most money. This doesn't make much sense to me. If a reasonable campaign can be run for $10 million, could $100 million really earn more votes? I always thought the candidates had plenty of forums to air their platforms that are of little to no cost to the candidate - websites, televised debates, media interviews, etc. What could an extra $100 million possibly buy that would make world media declare that this person is obviously going to win BECAUSE he has an extra $100 million? Bribes?

I have no problem with putting a clause in the same-sex marriage legislation that will allow religious institutions not to perform same-sex marriages if they don't want to. But it would be so much classier not to mention the genders or sexual orientations of the happy couple when legislating this. Instead of specifying that this is intended specifically for the case of same-sex marriage, they should put a more broadly-worded clause that a religious institution does not have to marry a couple if they feel that performing this particular marriage would not conform to the moral or community standards of their religion. Yes, this does allow the religious institutions to not perform marriage for a myriad of other reasons, but there are always civil marriages, and why would you want to be married by a religious institution that doesn't support your marriage anyway?

One thing I love about the professional world is that people assume I'm perfectly capable of doing basic research. In school they'd tell us to do our research, but then they'd tell us where to look, and in class they'd tell us what we should have learned. At work they just assume I can find stuff out.

For example, during my research for a medical text, I found out that a certain generic name of obscure (to me) anti-seizure medication corresponded with a certain brand name. When I mentioned this, no one was surprised. Then I found a list of all doctors of a certain gender, specialty, gender, and geographic region. Again, no one was surprised. The medication name took about 20 seconds and the list of doctors about 2 minutes, but in school that would have been considered going above and beyond, almost to the point of showing off. In the real world, it just means I'm not stupid and I know how to use Google. It's very refreshing.

Things I need advice on:

1. I have spinach dip, but the flavour is more intense than I thought it would be. What's a good thing to dip in intense spinach dip?

2. I need some colours that would look good on me. I have dark brown hair and pale green eyes. My skin is . . . the best way I can describe this is pale olive. It has yellow undertones, doesn't have any tan, but it doesn't get completely pale either. I look really good in bright red and greens that match my eyes, and I look bad in white, pastels, neutral colours. What other colours should I try?

This week went pretty well. I'm not as exhausted as I thought I'd be. I should be getting a TV within the next few days. Don't have much else to say right now.

Ooh look, a new blogger template! And now for some non-cohesive thoughts:

- On the subway, there was a lady reading a newspaper. Next to her, there was a lady with a baby in her lap. Newspaper Lady has the extra sections of her paper in her lap. The baby reaches over, grabs one of the sections, throws it on the floor, and giggles madly. Newspaper Lady picks it up, laughs, and puts it back on her lap. The baby grabs it again and starts waving it around, then throws it on the floor. Newspaper lady is highly amused, so she picks up the paper, rolls it up in a tube, and hands it to the baby. The baby bops her on the head with it.

- In front of me in line in the grocery store there were two middle-aged men bickering over the fact that one of their mothers had taken it upon herself to order their wedding cake without consulting with them. I love this city! I also love the fact that in one year, this won't be anecdote worthy.

- Working on medical texts makes me a psychosomatic hypercondriac. Today I've diagnosed myself with chronic depression, fibromylagia, and irritable bowel syndrome, just from reading about them too much.

- This morning I was tired and grumpy. I had my brekkie but it didn't wake me up. So on the way to work I went to Second Cup, and got a cup of Early Edition coffee. By the time I got to the office, I was a genius. I was plowing through texts, reading difficult handwriting, everything was working. So tomorrow I'm going to get another cup of this coffee and see if it has the same effect tomorrow.

- My cooling strategy: I leave my curtains closed during the day so the apartment doesn't heat up. I open the windows at night if and only if it's cooler outside than inside. When I'm home, I set the air conditioner to a level that will make me comfortable. But when I'm out, I set it as cold as it will go, so the apartment will get cooler overall. I know this sounds like a waste of energy, but I know that one day my building's air conditioning will die at 5:30 when everyone gets home and turns up the air. So I'm being prepared by pre-cooling as much as possible

I'd like to remind these people that being married does not automatically mean having children. I find it very disconcerting when people of my exact demographic don't even consider the notion getting married and not having children might be an option.

Good day today. I feel like people at work care about making me feel at home in the unit and care about whether I'm comfortable at work and have everything I need. I can get random stuff for my office (a wheel mouse, sticky notes, a thingy to make my monitor higher) just by asking and it's like it's no trouble at all. This is very new to me. I'm also starting to get random internal spam - emails sent to everyone on the list - and that makes me feel like I belong. Like there was an internal spam to tell us that archiving is down and might not be back up today. So I knew that archiving was down and worked around it without having to ask and without anyone having to walk in and tell me!

The office is way over-air-conditioned. Today I was wearing a t-shirt, a long skirt, sandals, and a sweater, and I was FREEZING! But then I remember that it's 33 degrees outside. Thirty-three degrees and I'm uncomfortably cold. Bliss

And now for another Great Idea that's Impossible to Implement and Probably Illegal:

Every time any particular nation has an election for leader or ruling party, the rest of the world should get a vote. They should come up with some way of measuring global sentiment, find out which leader or ruling party the world would prefer, and give the world's favourite a 1% bonus. That way the citizens would get to vote for the leader, but if there's a tie the rest of the world gets to break the tie.

Why are people blindly unquestioningly believing that the atkin's diet is god? Don't people know that it was popular in the 70s and then people stopped using it? Don't they think that people stopped using it for a reason? How can otherwise perfectly intelligent people get brainwashing into thinking that perfectly healthy foods that have been staples centuries, like bread and potatoes, are now EVIL and UNHEALTHY? I mean, protein is wonderful and all, but so are BOWEL MOVEMENTS!

Stuff I Learned On My First Day Of Work That I Can Blog:

- It takes me 20 minutes to get to work, door to door, including a stop to return a library book. Not too bad.
- You can get static cling on your skirt even when you aren't wearing stockings.
- Even if you have air conditioning at home, it's a good idea to close the curtains on the windows of your 14th storey apartment that is in direct sunlight after 12 noon before you leave in the morning on days when it's going up to 31 with a humidex of 34. GAH run on sentence!
- Even if you only have to be outdoors for one block, as you walk from your air-conditioned building to the air-conditioned mall (which connects directly to the air-conditioned subway which connects directly to your air-conditioned office building), it's better to dress for the heat and keep a sweater in your over-air-conditioned office.

Other random weirdness: I keep finding the lids to water bottles all over my apartment, but I don't have any water bottles that are missing lids.