Our hot tub is up and running and my goodness is it ever divine. There’s nothing quite like feeling cool raindrops on your face while your body is toasty warm. Sometimes I like to prop my feet up on the side so that my toes get cold as well - cold toes, cold head, warm everything in between - loverly.

Bert even promised that if I get up early one morning he will bring me breakfast in the hot tub. In my mind that has got to be even better than breakfast in bed. Anyway I’m tentatively planning on setting the alarm early on Monday…I’ll let you know how it goes.
The only two things I don’t like about the hot tub are (1) smelling like bromine afterwards (while bromine is not quite as offensive as chlorine, it’s no great shakes either) and (2) putting on a bathing suit that hasn’t quite dried since the last time I soaked. Especially the tummy bit - why is it that the tummy region is so sensitive to cold?

Anyhow, we usually keep the hot tub running until early December but this year we’re thinking about starting a fund-raising drive to buy a real cover for it so that we can keep it running all winter long. Part of me thinks that this is the best idea we’ve every had but another part of me thinks that it’s not a very environmentally responsible thing to do.

I want that Riddler coin from Batman - the one with two heads so there isn’t two sides to this coin. Or was it the Joker with the double-headed coin? Or am I thinking of another series of movies all together?

You may recall the stories of George, the dog park guy, who became something of a stalker, inviting me to his cabin and reminding me, every morning, of what I was doing in my house the night before when he ‘happened to walk on by and look in our window’.

George is the reason I developed the Christmas light cloaking device which protects our ground-floor apartment from at least some prying. George is the reason that I run home from the dog-park, so that if I see him I can tell him that I’m ‘running late’ (tee hee). George is the reason I have started lying about my daily dog walking hours - I’m trying to throw him off the scent.

Well I ran into George today and let me tell you, Meeka is about as sick of Max (George’s dog) as I am of George. I was running back from the dog park when this little ball of fluff launches itself out from under a bench and into Meeka’s side. I swear to God Meeka actually groaned in time with me.

I said hello to George as I ran by - not showing any signs of slowing - but I eventually had to stop and wait cause his damn porrly behaved dog kept following me and my little angel.

“Sorry George, I’m on my way home’

“Oh, ok” George says, “I’ll walk home with you”

“Oh no George, you don’t need to do that”

“No, I want to Jaime, I’m just a bit sad because I’ve been carrying an apple in my pcoket for a week hoping that I could give it to you but I had to throw it away yesterday because it was rotting”

WHAT THE HELL?!?

No, seriously, am I the only one who feels completely creeped out by an old man carrying a rotten apple around in hopes that he can make me eat it? What is this, Snow White or something?

Anyway, if anyone of you sees an old man with a little black dog and he happens to ask about me, tell him that I’ve moved to Iceland. For good.

Did you know:

1. That duck billed platapus (platapi? platapusses?) sweat milk cause they don’t have mammary glands

2. That polar bears have black skin and that their fur turns yellow as they age (this second fact was told to me by a zoo worker as an explaination for why the polar bears at the Vancouver zoo - which doesn’t exist any more - looked like they’d been rolling  in pee puddles)
3. That dung beetles don’t drink water - they get all their liquid needs from the poo they eat

4. That a group of meerkats is called a mob

5. That the sale of clown fish actually increased after the movie finding Nemo (you know, the movie about a clown fish who is captured for a fish tank and who tries to escape to get back to the wild ocean where his father is frantically searching for him)

6. That wallowing vegetarian hippos can actually quite easily bite a man in half (or a woman for that matter)

I have gone on business trips to cities that people would consider ‘vacation spots’ in the past. Paris, Rome and London are good examples…but…these cities are also thriving hubs of business.

I have also been on business trips to cities that no one in their right mind would visit on vacation - Guinea Conakry for example - geez what a hole.

In November I will be going on a business trip and organizing the whole meeting in Antigua and Barbuda. Not only is Antigua a popular destination for people who are not working, the meeting will be held in an all-inclusive resort (it’s cheaper that way). It is going to be weird.

Can I dress casually given that on the way to the meeting room I will pass through a lobby full of people in bikinis?

Can I wear flip flops given that house liquor is free at our buffet lunches?

Can I relax by the pool in the evening or will the other participants be expecting me to work frantically all night long?

You see…all of the rules I’ve learned are called into question all because some politician somewhere thought that the best place to discuss arid lands agriculture is in a resort on the beach.

By the way, this all-inclusive resort is supposedly 2.5 stars. I didn’t know they gave out half stars.

A few things I’ve noticed over the past week:

IT people suck at hiring: the new IT guy seems to be the best choice if the main selection criteria is ‘will, through virtue of supreme mediocracy, never threaten the jobs of any of the existing IT people’

Beef Bourginion should be frozen: because the freezing, thawing and re-heating cycle seems to subdue almost all flavours except for the flavour of the entire bottle of red wine that went into the original six servings and who doesn’t love meat and potatoes that taste like wine

There’s no point in trying to get hair to look the same two days in a row: after perfecting my morning hair routine (which takes all of 2 and a half minutes) I have discovered that my hair seems predestined to follow a alternating cycle of flipping out ends one day followed by flatness the next

Wearing a glove on one hand has absolutely no impact on the gloveless hand: I biked to work with only one glove this morning and arrived with one hand the perfect temperature, and the other a useless claw of palid grey-ness

Black tea has way more of a kick than green tea: I don’t know if it’s psychological or what - in fact, I don’t care - but since switching to black tea with milk this week, my afternoons have been notably lacking in strange periods of droopy eyelidedness