So we have to limit the length of our official documents to 14 pages. But we still need to cover 8 completely different, often highly technical, things within the new limit.

This is not easy, there’s enough space to write the conclusions and that’s pretty much it but when the conclusions are drastic changes from the ordinary I’m thinking that the people who approve the conclusions might want a bit more information. So I conclude and summarize and delete useless things such as the table of contents and non-essential references.

And I get down to 15 pages.

Then my boss starts reviewing it and adds a ton of comments along the lines of ‘this is interesting, I would like to know more’, or ‘expand on this’ or ‘add more background’.

But never once does he comment, ‘this can be removed’ or ‘delete this’.

So basically my boss believes that everything that I have in my 15 page document is absolutely essential, and I need to add three more pages of other essential stuff…but I have to do it all in 14 pages (and no cheating with font size or margins).

Now I’m no physics expert but short of deleting every ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘a’ or ‘at’ I don’t see how this is possible.

And I’m pretty sure the same people who made the rules would object if the prepositions (or whatever they’re called) were taken out.

We finally have snow and it comes as quite a relief for me because I was begining to think that my crazy carpet was going to spend all winter in the closet.

Anyway, even though it’s been less than a year I had forgotten some of the basic snow truths. Just so you don’t forget them too, you can be sure that when it snows:

1. No matter which direction you walk in relative to the wind, snow will always be blowing in your face.

2. The dog will always poo as far away from the well-packed path as possible.

3. When you step off the path to let a little old lady by you will step directly into the deepest drift in the entire park (and the drift will follow you just in case you need to step off again).

4.  Snow is just as good at burrying black gloves as white gloves, or green gloves, or red gloves, or orange gloves…
5. There is nothing more fun, once your feet are already cold and wet and your gloves already lost, and the poo already picked up, than running as fast as you can across a field of open snow.

Eleven odd years ago Bert and I had our first ‘date’. It was January and we went with ten other screaming fans to a hockey game where we stood (not next to each other mind you) and cheared (not for the same team mind you) while the Montreal Canadiens and the Vancouver Canucks battled each other on the ice below.

And so it happened that this year the Canucks and the Canadiens were again slated to face off in Montreal in January. So we decided to buy tickets.

Alas, because the Canadiens don’t suck this year, all of the tickets were sold way back in October. Not to be deterred Bert and I decided to meet up at the rink to see if we could buy a couple of tickets from scalpers. I have never bought tickets from a scalper before and was determined that I would not pay an arm and a leg even though the going rate for $30 tickets was $75.

The first offer made to us was 2 $38 tickets for $60 each.

The guy then went down to $50 each.

I decided that $50 each would buy a lot of beer and chicken wings from the sports bar so we declined.

Just as we were about to leave another scalper offered us to $60 tickets for face value.

We agreed. Then the conversation went like this.

“Jaime you have the money right”

“Yeah, Bert, I do but I only brought $100 cause I thought that’s all we’d need”

“Damn, we’ll have to go find a bank machine somewhere”

“Wait a sec,” the scalper said, “I’ll take $100 for the pair”.

We happily went off to enjoy the game until we got inside and Bert said, “I really want to grab something to eat, do you think the snack bar takes credit cards?” To which I responded,

“I don’t know but there’s $50 in my purse, why don’t you just take that.”

“Really?” Bert said, somewhat astonished, before he grabbed $10 and trotted off to buy a hot dog.

So you see, I lied about how much money I had in order to get a better deal on the hockey tickets.

I know that lying is wrong but I feel like scalpers are ruining hockey for the rest of us by buying up all the tickets and reselling them at rediculous prices.

I felt like my karma was in tact.

Until, with three minutes left in the third period some b@#%h threw a cup of coke at the Vancouver fan behind us…and missed.

The poor Canadiens fan sitting behind me and your truly got splattered with coke and I learned that apparently it is wrong to lie to scalpers, even though they are greedy and mean and ruining hockey.

Upon second thought though, maybe it wasn’t scalper karma. I had, in fact, unwittingly lied to my husband as well.

My high school has an allumni website which I check out every couple of months. Recently I found out that a guy from my class married a girl from my class even though in high school they were actually dating each others best friends. This is the kind of juicy stuff that only seems to happen in the USA or in the prairies (how is it that small towns in the prairies seem to be socially as evolved as a rich Los Angeles suburb).

Anyway, this peaked my curiosity and I decided to google some of my old high school friends. The only person I could find was in a photo at some sort of sex-themed club party.

This is not representative of my school.

Or at least I don’t think it is. We wore uniforms at my school, we had to volunteer at something one lunch time a week (although that only lasted half a year), we have a headmaster for crying out loud.

I was always under the impression that I went to a ‘good girls’ school but now I’m starting to wonder. I have always been like that - you know, completely oblivious to what’s actually going on. In part I think it’s because I’m actually quite unimaginative.

Anyway, I’m kind of interested in figuring out where everyone else went and how they all seem to have avoided google. I thought google got everywhere. But, if google can’t find them then there’s no way I can do it on my own.

Ah well, mysteries love company here’s one more to join the gang…oh wait, that’s misery.

This morning while walking the dog in the slushy snow (better than snowy slush) I was relecting back on our adventures in Korea. So, for todays blog post I want to re-hash an old post from our travel blog:

While leafing through the guide book on Korea in our hotel room in Seoul, I came accross a site called the Underwater Tomb of King Munmu. The name itself was enough to catch my attention and the legend associated with King Munmu was equally as intriguing (dear Lord Munmu was buried at sea in the center of an islet entombed within a giant granite slab so that he could be reincarnated as a sea dragon to protect the kingdom).

We could not leave the Korean peninsula without seeing this amazing site.

It was however 1 hour away from Gyongju, a city that is itself 4 hours from Seoul. Quite a day trip, so we decided to go for two days; afterall, Gyongju (see also Geong-ju and Kyoung-ju) is the ancient capital of Korea and the place is littered with ‘historical sites’.

On our first day we saw a number of these ‘historical sites’ which were esentially mounds of grass. But we we kept our hopes up, and decided that a tradional Korean dinner would pick up our spirits.

After wandering around for a good half hour we found a restaurant that the guidebook suggested. We were led into a large room where two cushion covers (yep, not cushions…cushion covers) were tossed on the floor. They were the only furnishings in the room.

Moments later we were pleasantly suprised by the arrival of a table, royally born forth by two well-dressed men who paused momentarily at the threshold of the room to remove their shoes and orchestrate a well-coordinated bow.

Almost two dozen dishes of varing size, shape (and we assumed, taste) were already laid on the table and the entire operation certainly seemed very, well, traditional. Some of the dishes were recognizable, others less so but we were ready to be adventurous. Here are some highlights:
1. The garlic cloves were not cooked
2. The saltwater fish was preserved in salt then marrinated in salt sauce before being served on a bed of salt
3. The red hot sauce (and when I say hot sauce, I mean sauce so hot that it almost burned our tastebuds right off…if only) played a staring role in the vegetable dish, the second fish dish, the soup, the greens and pretty much everything else that wasn’t salted salt in a salt sauce.

The next day, we were off to see king Munmu’s tomb, the only underwater tomb in Korea, no more mounds of grass for these intrepid travelers.

After an hour long hairaising bus drive (riddled with twisty turns and backache) we arrived at the site of king Munmu’s tomb. Which was nothing more than a few rocks a little ways off shore, that you can’t even visit because the tide never drops low enough and there are no boats or docks or even little inflatable duky arm bands.

And to add insult to injury upon reading the sign, it turns out that modern theory claims that Munmu was not even buried here but that his ashes were scattered from this spot. Or maybe not.

It was not our finest hour.