I don’t know what it is about me, but whenever it’s mosquito season, or I travel to somewhere tropical, the mosquitos devour my skinny-ass ALIVE! In Beijing a few years ago I remember counting 24 bites in 3 days. I thought that was a lot.
I just returned from a three-week backpacking trip to South America. After my first week in Peru I counted at least 30 mosquito bites. Yikes! I am usually pretty good about ignoring the pain of mosquito bites. But oh dear me 30 bites is a whole other story.
But it doesn’t end there! Two more weeks along the west coast of South America brought a couple dozen more bites. And on my last day there, 20 more bites! Through my pants! All on the right side of my body!
Oh man the last 2 weeks has been really uncomfortable. Also, it’s winter and the air here is dry has heck. So i’m painfully itchy and have dry cracking skin all over my body. Hooray!
Protip: eat less bananas… makes you doubly tasty to the mosquitos…
Photo via
70 year old Mr. Tortoise tries to eat the three of us. As he’s making his vicious lunge towards us, I get a peek down his throat which is this slimy light pink.
Fun tortoise fact! Tortoises can live up to a year without food or water. That’s why pirate ships used to stop at the galapagos in the 15th century and pick up 200 tortoises at a time for food for the long Pacific journey. It’s estimated that 200,000 tortoises were eaten for sailors over a few decades.
I’m not sure how many of you have ever watched Lost. Basically the show is about the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 that crash lands on a mysterious island. As the dozen or so survivors get to know each other and work on finding food, shelter and a way off the island, you learn that the survivors aren’t quite who they seem and that the island has really bizarre properties (why was there a polar bear in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?!).
I remember thinking that the first season of the show was really amazing. The show set up some really mind-boggling scenarios and I kept watching each episode with greater anticipation for the answers to all the mysteries of the islands and an unnatural set of coincidences which somehow connected these strangers. Then of course the show got crazy. The stories got more and more unbelievable (giant mechanical monsters made of… smoke? wth?!) and there was no viewer satisfaction that any questions were getting answered.
Well, that’s why i sort of gave up the show a year or two ago. Flash forward to season 4 and I’m all caught up after a couple weekends of some intense internet viewing. I’m probably even more confused about what’s going on in the show as ever, but I think all the fun of Lost are the random theories that try oh-so-hard to rationalize the events of the show and explain what the heck is happening.
So I’m going to break a long silence on refusing to talk about Lost. Every now and then I’m going to ask a random question about the show that is completely mind-boggling but can never have a believable answer.
Who the hell is Jacob? Seriously! When we first met him, I was just about ready to throw my computer away. He has an imaginary shack that no one can see, except sometimes when everyone can see it. Don’t show him a flashlight or he’ll cause an earthquake. He has some weird painting on the shack wall which i’m convinced has some hidden meaning which we’re never meant to find out. Also, you can’t see him… because he’s imaginary. Unless he’s not, in which case you need to be shot where your kidney is missing.
Buh?!
It’s tax time and RRSP season! Hurrah!
If you’ve graduated and are thinking about going back to school, you can withdraw up to $20,000 over 4 years from your RRSP tax-free via the Lifelong Learning Plan.
The caveats:
1) You need to be enrolled full-time in a qualifying program
2) The amount needs to be paid back within 10 years of you leaving school
3) You can only withdraw funds that were in an RRSP for 90 days or more
2007 was for the first year that I was employed for the entire year. I’ve already exhausted all my tuition credits that piled up over the years and so the tax I need to pay this year is significant. Since there is an 8% chance I’ll be going to school later this year, I’m dumping money into my RRSP upto my limit just in case!
Doing the Deal and Dishing the Dirt - Mark Cuban on making the pesky Kidd deal happen.
Does Obama Have an Asian Problem? Time Magazine on why Hilary receives a disproportionate percentage of the Asian-American vote.
What Would Obama Say? On Barack Obama’s 26 year-old speechwriter.
