When I stepped off the train this evening after work I noticed the station was darker than usual and that the stores and restaurants were all closed. I then realized the power was off. After a long day of work, I had come home to an inconvenience.

I wondered how the restaurants coped. The people who were in the middle of their meals, did they get to finish them? How did they pay? How did anyone pay without power? The Safeway was all dark and locked up. Did everyone just abandon their groceries and leave? As I walked by the movie theatre, I could still seeing people coming out of there with popcorn. That would have sucked, being in the middle of movie and then the whole auditorium goes darker. You don’t even get the satisfaction of knowing how your movie ends. I bet the theatre had given out free tickets to another showing.

When I got inside my building, the back-up generator was only running one elevator. Of course, it was packed to the gills when it arrived to take everyone upstairs. I managed to get on but I believe the carrying capacity is much less when it’s on generator. It refused to go anywhere with that many people in it. I took one for the team and used the stairs instead.

After a long walk up nearly 30 flights of stairs, I got to my darkened apartment. I lit some candles and sat in the near darkness for more than an hour before the power returned.


For as long as I can remember, we have a library at work where employees can sign out movies and games to play at home. The library probably has almost two decades worth of movies and games on all the various forms of media that we have gone through as a civilization.

The library usually purchases new media about every two weeks. I made it a habit to look up what new items were in the library using the intranet site. For nearly two months, however, no new items have been added to the collection. Not a single game nor movie has been to the library. There has been no official communication as to why this has happened.

It’s fun to speculate, so I’ll do that now. I believe this was done because of cost-cutting measures. I bet we won’t get new items in the library until the new fiscal year arrives, which means many more months of barren shelves at the library.

I’ll ask the people working the library desk tomorrow.


I bought a new pair of jeans recently and like many pairs before it, the garment contained 1% spandex to give it a nice stretchy feeling. Perhaps a man of my age shouldn’t be wearing skinny jeans but I can’t imagine how people wearing skinny jeans without the stretchiness. It must be torture.

That 1% spandex makes it so much more comfortable. We used to wear jeans that were 100% cotton denim, no stretch whatsoever! We were barbarians! This made me think that males aren’t that much removed from wearing jeggings like women do. On the top of male jeggings, take a look the stuff on sale on this web site. I don’t think I could pull it off.


It’s my favourite topic on this blog of late but this summer has been very mild. It was cloudy for most of the weekend and it even rained a bit this Sunday. It’s almost the end of June now and we’ve had no real long stretches of sunny and warm temperatures.

I wouldn’t even mind mild temperatures if it was just sunny instead but this summer has been bleh overall. We’ve received the odd day where it’s sunny but then the cloud cover will just return. To top it all off, this weekend was the summer solstice. That means, at least in the northern hemisphere, the days have stopped getting longer, and will get successively shorter until winter arrives again. So far, all we’ve experienced are longer and cloudy days. What we have to look forward to now are shorter and cloudy days.


In a previous post, I detailed this new diet where I don’t really restrict what I eat, I just stop eating many hours before I go to bed. So far, I tend to stop eating around 8pm and I don’t get to bed before 1am. Today, I had a bowl of ramen at around 7pm and I had some gummy candies at 8pm. It’s past 1am now and I’m starving. If someone gave me a cheeseburger right now, it’d be gone in ten seconds.

On most nights, I go to bed hungry because my body just needs food on a more regular basis than this. I can’t, however, argue with the results. I weighed myself tonight and I’m at 162 lbs. That may seem heavy but three weeks ago, I was almost 168 lbs. I haven’t been at 162 in a long, long time.

I think I need to eat more before I stop eating for the evening. It would just make things a bit more comfortable before I go to bed.


At one of our satellite offices at work, someone posted a message to Slack, with a picture, stating that someone had blocked one of the toilets and just left it there.

The accompanying picture showed a toilet with water that was varying shades of brown, getting darker in colour in the deeper parts of the bowl. There was also toilet paper in the bowl. It looked like someone had blended a giant poop. It was disgusting.

As you can imagine, the message elicited quite a response from the other people working in that location. One person chimed in that they encountered a similar sight in the women’s washroom on the same day. What’s going in that location?

A facilities ticket was created for the blockage to be cleared. I wonder what the person who caused the blockage thought or felt once their poo was shown to hundreds of people. We’ve all had washroom blunders and emergencies but rarely have they been broadcast onto the Internet after the fact.


In my last post, I detailed my need to buy a different vehicle in the next year or so. I saw a certified pre-owned vehicle for about $15,000 but I then I saw a 2005 Honda Civic on sale for $1,500. This used car was a tenth of the price. An idea then came to me. Even if that used Civic only lasted me three years, the $15k I would have used to buy that one car could buy ten cars in the $1,500 range. That’s approximately 30 years of having a car to drive. Would that single used car at $15k last me 30 years? The odds are very low.

Each of those ten cars obviously wouldn’t be from 2005. As each car got replaced, I’d buy a slight newer car as time marched on. So, the next model would be a 2009 model or so forth, all in the $1,500 range. I suppose I’m sorta re-creating a lease of some sort.

This idea appears extremely sound but I suppose there are flaws to this that I don’t see yet.


It appears that I might need to get a different vehicle to drive in the next twelve months or so. I currently drive a 1994 Honda Accord with about 250,000 km on it. It just got back from the shop where I spent $1,500 on some necessary repairs that were all safety-oriented. Indeed, when I got the car back, the steering felt much more tighter and responsive. It felt kinda mushy before. The mechanic I spoke to said he could have done a ton of more repairs, which the car needs but he agreed to only take on the most pressing concerns, the ones that would keep the car safe to drive for another year or so.

I believe it’s time to get another vehicle and not continue to dump money into a car that has served my family and myself very well. Unfortunately, I loathe the task ahead of me. I have never bought a car before and I do not look forward to it. I am almost certain I will not buy a new car. It’s just not economically smart. The vehicle loses so much value the second it leaves the lot. A used vehicle makes more sense but traversing the market for used vehicles can be a minefield. No one wants to get a lemon for a used car. There are certified pre-owned programs but the savings there are less, because you’re paying for the peace of mind.

I gotta spend the next couple of months trying to figure out what to buy and how to buy it.