The weekend drama started early for me. Just as I was getting ready to get out of here and on my way back home, American Airlines called to tell me that due to problems with the plane my flight was canceled. Luckily for me they had space available on the next flight out, although it left two hours later, and they booked me right on it. It was a full load, so I wonder if they had to put some people from my flight on stand-by. Doesn’t matter. All I really care about was me being on the flight. Call me self-centered.
I did get stuck in the middle seat of a three-person row. I should learn to look at the seat before I walk away from the ticket counter. I could have easily had that corrected to a decent seat. Again, luck was with me; neither of my seat-mates was the stereotypical 300 pounder. Oh, well. I’m willing to suffer some discomfort in order to spend a couple of nights in my own bed.
Went to a friend’s wedding this weekend. It was nice, which was nothing less than I expected of her. Very short ceremony, which is always good for weddings. There was a nice spread upstairs at the reception. I got to see a couple of close friends that I don’t often get to see, and I saw another couple that I like to see every once in a while but wouldn’t be able to survive on a regular basis. I’m not meaning to be mean or anything like that, but the female half of the pair is one that I find best in small doses.
Sunday morning I found myself at the airport again. I think the people at the ticket counter are starting to recognize me. It’s now week 3 and I should be wrapping everything up, and I will be as long as the client cooperates.
The week, fortunately, progressed as planned. The client got everything they needed to get me, although most of it was at the last minute. We were able to wrap things up pretty quickly. I still have one more test that I need to perform, but it’s one that I can do from the home office rather than from Toronto. It’s good to be done though. Toronto is a very nice city, and it’s got a lot more night life than Dallas, but it’s time to spend more than a day at home. I get one week to live it up before I’m back on the road. Hopefully the next trip will be the last for at least the balance of the year.
One good thing that came out of the week is that we got to go home a little early. We finished everything up and scheduled a flight out for Thursday afternoon rather than Friday. I would have gladly stayed at work for 12 hours to get everything finished in order to make that flight, but we didn’t need to do that. Airport security seemed tighter than usual to me at Pearson Airport. Not only did my checked-in luggage get searched but so did my computer and me! I didn’t get thrown up against the wall and frisked. They just wove the wand over me to see what made the metal detector go off. I think it was my belt, and I think they’d dialed up the sensitivity on those machines because my belt hasn’t set off a metal detector in a long time. As far as my check-in bag was concerned… They’re kind of suspicious of power adapters. I carry three or four along with me when I travel. Every time I’ve had my bag searched it was because of them. Well, I also had my carry-on bag searched because of my international socket adapters once.
The other good thing that came out of my trip is Icewine. If you’re a fan of sweet, dessert wines, then you need to check this stuff out. I had a glass on Wednesday night for the first time and it was absolutely AMAZING. There’s virtually no wine taste to it, although the bottles I bought are 11.5% alcohol. I had a white, and it was light and sweet. If you have a chance to try some, I highly recommend it. I bought two bottles for myself at home. Highly unusual, that.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Monday, September 26, 2005
O Canada… - September 18 – September 23
There hasn’t been much to report about this week. It’s been pretty tame except for the seeming lack of any progress on the work. It’s going to take me the full three weeks to do my part of the program. If everything we asked for initially had been ready for us then it would have only taken a week and a half at most. Oh well. That’s just the way things go.
I’ve seen a little bit more of downtown Toronto this week. It’s actually a pretty cool city. We went down to Yonge Street for dinner a couple of times. The first time was to go to the Toronto Hard Rock Café, which is apparently the first HRC in North America. It was ok, but if you’ve been to one HRC you’ve been to them all. And since I’m not a gigantic music fan a lot of the memorabilia was lost on me, not that I went around the joint looking for it. Another night we found a giant mall in the middle of downtown. I thought it was just an office building, or at best a stand alone Sears, but it turned out to be a full-fledged mall on the inside and it wasn’t a small one. I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to explore it a little more thoroughly. I may not do a lot of shopping, but I do like to explore these monuments to capitalism, except at Christmas.
There’s a store here called HMV. I guess the only thing I could compare it to would be like a Virgin store. It’s huge, and there are two of them within like three blocks of each other in downtown Toronto. Those are just the ones I’ve been to. It’s the Starbucks of music stores. The guy I’m with buys a lot of CDs, so we stop at just about every music store we come across. Lucky for me they also sell DVDs. I only bought Superman. Well, Superman and two CDs, but they had a great sale going on.
The highlight of my week was my trip to see the Maple Leafs play a pre-season game against the Canadiens. The CFO of our Canada division heard that I was interested in going and just gave me his tickets. Thanks, Ian. I had a hell of a time finding someone to go with me though. My boss was going to come, but he decided at the last minute that he didn’t really want to go. He said it was because he had a lot of work to do, but I think he may have just wanted some alone time or that he really wasn’t interested in hockey. I know he doesn’t follow the Stars. But, really, how can you go to Canada and not go see at least one hockey game? The people here are nuts for it, which made my difficulty finding someone to go rather strange. All the accounting people were dealing with month-end close. I asked all of them and they all said they couldn’t go. I ended up going with this guy in Operations, and he pretty well summed up what I thought would be the general sentiment regarding free Leafs tickets. He said that he would miss out on five hours sleep or come in early the next day or just come back to the office after, but there was no way he’d turn down free tickets to the Leafs. Needless to say, the Canadians in our accounting department up here are the worst Canadians ever. I mean, I thought they ate, drank, and breathed Maple Leafs hockey. Guess I was wrong.
So the game was great. I think the new rules they’ve instituted have really opened the game up a bit. We saw seven goals scored (that’s a lot for you non-hockey people), and that’s not even counting the shoot-out they did at the end. That was some cool stuff.
We had a debate this week about whether to go home for the weekend. Well, it wasn’t really a debate. I was going home. If the company is willing to pay for me to return home on the weekends, then I’m taking advantage of it. The travel people told the boss that if he went home for the weekend then it’s possible that he wouldn’t be able to return on time Sunday thanks to Hurricane Rita. I’ve seen enough newscasts to be fairly sure that all the hurricane hitting D/FW was over-hyped. So the fear that I might not be able to get back by Monday is, I think, completely unfounded. I think he really just doesn’t like the idea of only getting to spend one day at home. Me, I think that being able to spend even one day at home is worth it. That’s just me.
I’ve seen a little bit more of downtown Toronto this week. It’s actually a pretty cool city. We went down to Yonge Street for dinner a couple of times. The first time was to go to the Toronto Hard Rock Café, which is apparently the first HRC in North America. It was ok, but if you’ve been to one HRC you’ve been to them all. And since I’m not a gigantic music fan a lot of the memorabilia was lost on me, not that I went around the joint looking for it. Another night we found a giant mall in the middle of downtown. I thought it was just an office building, or at best a stand alone Sears, but it turned out to be a full-fledged mall on the inside and it wasn’t a small one. I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to explore it a little more thoroughly. I may not do a lot of shopping, but I do like to explore these monuments to capitalism, except at Christmas.
There’s a store here called HMV. I guess the only thing I could compare it to would be like a Virgin store. It’s huge, and there are two of them within like three blocks of each other in downtown Toronto. Those are just the ones I’ve been to. It’s the Starbucks of music stores. The guy I’m with buys a lot of CDs, so we stop at just about every music store we come across. Lucky for me they also sell DVDs. I only bought Superman. Well, Superman and two CDs, but they had a great sale going on.
The highlight of my week was my trip to see the Maple Leafs play a pre-season game against the Canadiens. The CFO of our Canada division heard that I was interested in going and just gave me his tickets. Thanks, Ian. I had a hell of a time finding someone to go with me though. My boss was going to come, but he decided at the last minute that he didn’t really want to go. He said it was because he had a lot of work to do, but I think he may have just wanted some alone time or that he really wasn’t interested in hockey. I know he doesn’t follow the Stars. But, really, how can you go to Canada and not go see at least one hockey game? The people here are nuts for it, which made my difficulty finding someone to go rather strange. All the accounting people were dealing with month-end close. I asked all of them and they all said they couldn’t go. I ended up going with this guy in Operations, and he pretty well summed up what I thought would be the general sentiment regarding free Leafs tickets. He said that he would miss out on five hours sleep or come in early the next day or just come back to the office after, but there was no way he’d turn down free tickets to the Leafs. Needless to say, the Canadians in our accounting department up here are the worst Canadians ever. I mean, I thought they ate, drank, and breathed Maple Leafs hockey. Guess I was wrong.
So the game was great. I think the new rules they’ve instituted have really opened the game up a bit. We saw seven goals scored (that’s a lot for you non-hockey people), and that’s not even counting the shoot-out they did at the end. That was some cool stuff.
We had a debate this week about whether to go home for the weekend. Well, it wasn’t really a debate. I was going home. If the company is willing to pay for me to return home on the weekends, then I’m taking advantage of it. The travel people told the boss that if he went home for the weekend then it’s possible that he wouldn’t be able to return on time Sunday thanks to Hurricane Rita. I’ve seen enough newscasts to be fairly sure that all the hurricane hitting D/FW was over-hyped. So the fear that I might not be able to get back by Monday is, I think, completely unfounded. I think he really just doesn’t like the idea of only getting to spend one day at home. Me, I think that being able to spend even one day at home is worth it. That’s just me.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Back in the Saddle Again – September 11 – 16
I’ve decided that I’m only going to make one blog entry for this week and probably only one per week for this trip. To tell you the truth, so far Toronto just isn’t that exciting. We’re not in a great area of town. That’s not to say that we’re in a bad area; it certainly doesn’t appear to be. We’re just in a boring area. There’s not really a whole lot to do around our hotel.
Speaking of the hotel, it’s very nice and very crowded. There’s been this travel agent convention or something like that going on there, so there have been lots of hotel people. We had dinner with a guy from Hilton the other night. I saw a woman with a Holiday Inn nametag walking around. They’re all staying at the Airport Marriott. Kind of funny.
We went to downtown Toronto for dinner the other night. Got stuck in traffic a bit, but nothing too bad. I think I saw a drug deal go down, and it was right out in the street. There was this homeless looking guy on the median. He wasn’t very old, probably somewhere in his late teens or early twenties with ratty looking clothes (what do you expect? He’s homeless.) and dirty blonde hair. Anyway, this well dressed guy maybe a few years older stopped on the other side of the street, got out of his Mercedes, and called something out to Mr. "I-don’t-have-a-home-because-I’m-free". The kid took a small package out of his pocket and tossed it to Flashy Dresser. It really looked like a drug deal to me.
They really do their arenas right around here. There’s no putting your playground out in one of the suburbs with lots of parking and plenty of feeder roads. Nope, they stuck both their baseball stadium and their hockey (basketball too?) stadium right smack-dab in the middle of town. And parking is brutal downtown. I guess that makes sure that only your real fans, the ones that are willing to suffer, come to see you play.
Speaking of hockey, I’m going to get to see the Maple Leafs play next week against Montreal, I think. One of the bigwigs up here offered my boss and I his season tickets for that night when he found out I was interested in going to a game. I was just going to pay for it myself, if I could even get a ticket. I’m getting the impression that hockey fans are a bit, well, fanatic around here. Eddie Belfour better have his game on for me. I miss seeing him in a Stars jersey. Good goalie. Old though.
Lake Ontario is pretty cool. I was about to say that this is the first Great Lake I’ve seen, but that wouldn’t be true. I’ve been to Chicago once or twice and I remember seeing Lake Whatever. I think it’s Michigan, but it’s probably something else. When I first saw Lake Ontario I thought it was an ocean. It’s just that big.
Had a horrible nightmare the other night. I dreamt I was in one of those gigantic two story mansions that you only see in mysteries. It was very nicely decorated. Almost exactly what I would have made for a Nancy Drew episode. Spooky. I was upstairs in some room and there was a big poisonous lizard on the steps. He was well hidden, so no one saw him until it was too late. Once they got to the right spot though, he jumped out and bit them. So eventually someone made it up to the room and I told them about the lizard. We got together and went to the stairs to see if we could find the toothy bastard. He was hidden away under the carpet with his snout pointing out. As soon as we spotted each other, he jumped out on the attack, but we somehow managed to scare him away. Unfortunately he ran into the creepiest room in the house. The one with all the furniture covered in sheets and no working lights. For some reason, I went into the room alone, armed only with a club of some sort and a candelabra to provide light. The light from the candles caused strange shadows and didn’t do a terribly good job of lighting the place up. I was poking around the room when I heard some noises behind me, between me and the door. I looked up, and I could see this vague lizard like shape on the ground a few feet from me. By time I realized what it was, it was on the move and jumping at me. I sat straight up in my bed gasping for breath and looking around the hotel room to make sure there weren’t any lizards in the room. I have no idea where the dream came from. Perhaps some handy dream interpreter will figure it out for me.
Last night (Thurs) we went to a little French bistro in downtown Toronto. We’d gone downtown once earlier this week, but we must not have been on the right street for entertainment purposes. There was much more to see on this street. We started off at the little hippy artist section and perused a fine display of hemp-based products as well as various forms of street art. Then we admired the booming business being done by the hot dog vendors. Our final stop before dinner was in a little record store. And I do mean both "little" and "record". I don’t really know how the store manages to stay in business. There wasn’t a huge selection. I imagine that it caters almost exclusively to the DJ crowd. There were real, honest-to-god records for sale and turntables up against the wall so that potential buyers could sample that old record feeling. I’m not a big music person, so most of it was lost on me, but it was kind of cool. After dinner we wandered around a little more. I was drawn to the giant television screen outside Chapters (think Barnes & Noble but put it in Canada). If you were standing right and looking at the corner the right way, you might have thought you were in Time Square or Picadilly Circus. The payoff wasn’t that good though. We didn’t bother going in and it didn’t attract us to a significantly more interesting area. We ended the evening in a little pub. Funny, but it looked just like all the pubs I went to in England.
Speaking of the hotel, it’s very nice and very crowded. There’s been this travel agent convention or something like that going on there, so there have been lots of hotel people. We had dinner with a guy from Hilton the other night. I saw a woman with a Holiday Inn nametag walking around. They’re all staying at the Airport Marriott. Kind of funny.
We went to downtown Toronto for dinner the other night. Got stuck in traffic a bit, but nothing too bad. I think I saw a drug deal go down, and it was right out in the street. There was this homeless looking guy on the median. He wasn’t very old, probably somewhere in his late teens or early twenties with ratty looking clothes (what do you expect? He’s homeless.) and dirty blonde hair. Anyway, this well dressed guy maybe a few years older stopped on the other side of the street, got out of his Mercedes, and called something out to Mr. "I-don’t-have-a-home-because-I’m-free". The kid took a small package out of his pocket and tossed it to Flashy Dresser. It really looked like a drug deal to me.
They really do their arenas right around here. There’s no putting your playground out in one of the suburbs with lots of parking and plenty of feeder roads. Nope, they stuck both their baseball stadium and their hockey (basketball too?) stadium right smack-dab in the middle of town. And parking is brutal downtown. I guess that makes sure that only your real fans, the ones that are willing to suffer, come to see you play.
Speaking of hockey, I’m going to get to see the Maple Leafs play next week against Montreal, I think. One of the bigwigs up here offered my boss and I his season tickets for that night when he found out I was interested in going to a game. I was just going to pay for it myself, if I could even get a ticket. I’m getting the impression that hockey fans are a bit, well, fanatic around here. Eddie Belfour better have his game on for me. I miss seeing him in a Stars jersey. Good goalie. Old though.
Lake Ontario is pretty cool. I was about to say that this is the first Great Lake I’ve seen, but that wouldn’t be true. I’ve been to Chicago once or twice and I remember seeing Lake Whatever. I think it’s Michigan, but it’s probably something else. When I first saw Lake Ontario I thought it was an ocean. It’s just that big.
Had a horrible nightmare the other night. I dreamt I was in one of those gigantic two story mansions that you only see in mysteries. It was very nicely decorated. Almost exactly what I would have made for a Nancy Drew episode. Spooky. I was upstairs in some room and there was a big poisonous lizard on the steps. He was well hidden, so no one saw him until it was too late. Once they got to the right spot though, he jumped out and bit them. So eventually someone made it up to the room and I told them about the lizard. We got together and went to the stairs to see if we could find the toothy bastard. He was hidden away under the carpet with his snout pointing out. As soon as we spotted each other, he jumped out on the attack, but we somehow managed to scare him away. Unfortunately he ran into the creepiest room in the house. The one with all the furniture covered in sheets and no working lights. For some reason, I went into the room alone, armed only with a club of some sort and a candelabra to provide light. The light from the candles caused strange shadows and didn’t do a terribly good job of lighting the place up. I was poking around the room when I heard some noises behind me, between me and the door. I looked up, and I could see this vague lizard like shape on the ground a few feet from me. By time I realized what it was, it was on the move and jumping at me. I sat straight up in my bed gasping for breath and looking around the hotel room to make sure there weren’t any lizards in the room. I have no idea where the dream came from. Perhaps some handy dream interpreter will figure it out for me.
Last night (Thurs) we went to a little French bistro in downtown Toronto. We’d gone downtown once earlier this week, but we must not have been on the right street for entertainment purposes. There was much more to see on this street. We started off at the little hippy artist section and perused a fine display of hemp-based products as well as various forms of street art. Then we admired the booming business being done by the hot dog vendors. Our final stop before dinner was in a little record store. And I do mean both "little" and "record". I don’t really know how the store manages to stay in business. There wasn’t a huge selection. I imagine that it caters almost exclusively to the DJ crowd. There were real, honest-to-god records for sale and turntables up against the wall so that potential buyers could sample that old record feeling. I’m not a big music person, so most of it was lost on me, but it was kind of cool. After dinner we wandered around a little more. I was drawn to the giant television screen outside Chapters (think Barnes & Noble but put it in Canada). If you were standing right and looking at the corner the right way, you might have thought you were in Time Square or Picadilly Circus. The payoff wasn’t that good though. We didn’t bother going in and it didn’t attract us to a significantly more interesting area. We ended the evening in a little pub. Funny, but it looked just like all the pubs I went to in England.
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