Off the record - Craig Box

Five days from now we'll be in the air, on the way to Chicago (which is actually in exactly the wrong direction), and then onto London.

(Did I tell you we were moving to London?  Oh well, now you know!)

Before then, we have to:

• Sell our remaining stuff
• Have people who have bought stuff and not collected it, collect it
• Put boxed stuff on a boat
• Visit our "Canadian family" for Thanksgiving
• Fill in the holes in the walls, even though we didn't put them there
• Lots of cleaning.

Last Saturday we saw Russell Peters - perhaps not the "world's greatest comedian", as the intro announcer suggested, but definitely a very funny guy.  Half his act is race jokes (Peters is Indian, which pretty much lets him riff on whatever racial group or stereotype he wants), and the other half is embarassing the front row, especially couples of mixed ethnicity.

Sunday we had a lovely meal with Fern's old workmates from Manulife Financial, including no less than three different types of dessert.  I baked brownies.  By which, I mean "Cindy gave us brownie mix a year and a half ago; we bought a brownie pan six months later, and since we're leaving in a week, we should use both".  There is only so much you can get wrong in "mix water, oil, an egg, and this packet of powder"; I think it would have been nicer with standard vegetable oil instead of extra-virgin olive oil.

Talking of stand-up comedy, "extra-virgin" is something George Carlin would have had at:

That's another complaint of mine - too much use of this prefix "pre". It's all over the language now — "pre"-this, "pre"-that, place the turkey in a "pre-heated" oven. It's ridiculous! There are only two states an oven can possibly exist in: Heated or unheated! "Pre-heated" is a meaningless fucking term! It's like "pre-recorded" — "This program was pre-recorded." Well, of course it was pre-recorded! When else are you gonna record it, afterwards?