Nice... Shoes?

I was walking back from the grocery store today, a bag in each hand, purse slung over one shoulder, black shoes hot in the sun. There's the usual traffic and construction going on along St. Clair Avenue, dogs walking in the parks, people strolling along in the sunshine for lunch, streetcars rumbling past every so often.

The lights at Spadina had just turned red. I slowed down a bit and suddenly, faintly, I heard somebody whistling nearby. But... it was one of those catcall whistles. Of course that wasn't directed at me.

Looking up, I saw a man in the second storey window of the corner house that's currently under construction inside. And he's looking directly down at me.

And he whistles again, slowly, now making eye contact.

I couldn't help laughing -- he was wearing a painter's mask to hide his face.

Anyway, he turned around and went back to his work and the streetlights changed and I continued walking home.

Quit It

Don't yell at me for not having a job... I'm working on it, all right?

Cutbacks At Work

I find it ironically amusing that, on my last day of work of my first real job, the coffee cup I bought this morning from Country Style says "freedom" on the side.

Freedom.

Freedom from what, from work? From usefulness? From salary??

So here is one of those new chapters in life that has another elusive title. Gosh, what the heck will I do next if I'm not testing smoke alarms?? Go back to school? Find a job that's within, like, a hundred kilometres of where I live? Move to a different city? Move to another country??! Travel? Change fields??

Crazy to imagine, exciting to anticipate, scary to follow through... Yay freedom!

Professional Practice Exam

Yep, tomorrow is the big day: I'm writing my Law & Ethics exam at 2pm over at good ol' U of T.

500 people, three hours, two courses, and zero open books = one PPE sitting.

Add to that the 48 months of engineering experience, 48 months of university nightmares, and three good character references, and you can get yourself a P.Eng. application...

Should be fun. :)

Taxing Routes

I know it's generally seen as horrid and long-winded and overly mathy -- and perennial -- but I have a small confession to make:
I actually enjoy doing my taxes.

It must be a throw-back to the days of yore when "Choose Your Own Adventure" books were hot ticket items and you could follow whatever path you wanted because it was all laid out for you.

Unfortunately for those books, I always ran out of fingers keeping the pages as markers so I could return to find out what Else might have happened... I had no patience to re-read the segments later.

And therein lies the fundamental likeability of taxes: there is only one route I need to keep track of... and ooh SNAP! it's all based on numbers! yaaaaay! :)