Fives

I've been tagged by Crystal, so here goes.

5 years ago....

1. I was still single, just like now. Yeah… let’s not go there.
2. I was living in Lethbridge. It was pretty much everything I dreamed it could be.
3. I bought a Garmin Legend GPS unit and started Geocaching. My lone surviving cache is now one of the oldest in the Lethbridge area and has been visited over 200 times. It has survived 5 years of Lethbridge weather and even one major flood. Good thing I went with an air tight container. (It’s called VB2 just in case you want to check it out.)
Here's the area normally

Here's the area flooded

4. My work sent me to New York where my boss and I were offered Letterman tickets on the street. I ended up being selected as a possible audience participant and got to spend about an hour pre show in a “green room” with the other possibles. Ended up not being chosen by Dave but got to see the show from the best seats in the Ed Sullivan Theater. Much cooler than standing in line for three hours to spend a few minutes atop the Empire State Building.
5. On the New York trip we also went to Washington DC where my boss and I were mistaken for undercover agents. I also got pooped on by a bird there so it kind of evened out.

5 Things on my list for today...

1. List? Oh THAT list! Yeah, right. Sorry, it just slipped my mind for a second.
2. So, let’s see then, I’ll be saving the world in the morning. Hopefully have that finished up early so I can beat the rush at lunch time.
3. Lunch at that delicious dim sum place in the T&T mall.
4. Afternoon in various important meetings with important people about important things.
5. Dinner and a movie later. Nope, just me.

5 snacks I enjoy…

1. Chocolate
2. Chips
3. Nachos
4. Pepperoni sticks
5. At this time of year, Mandarin Oranges (or as they call them in Japan, mikan.) They are so much better there, where they actually get a chance to ripen before they cut them off the tree. BTW I did that once too, mikan harvesting. They actually have to cut them off the tree because the stem is much stronger than the skin so if you just try an pull it off the stem doesn't break and the skin around where the stem meets the mikan rips and you are left with a dime sized hole in the skin. Next time you have a "mikan" in your hand, take a close look at the stem stump. You will see that it has been cut, not just pulled off the tree. (I wonder if it's the same with other citrus fruit.)



5 Places I've lived...

1. Grew up in Raymond. So naturally I thought every town had a fanatical and borderline unhealthy obsession with high school athletics.
2. Osaka, Japan. Mission.
3. Tochigi, Japan. Teaching English.
4. Banff. To continue with the Japanese thing.
5. Calgary. Here and now.

5 jobs I have had...

1. Paper Boy. From grade 3 until forever it seemed.
2. Raymond Mercantile Hardware store.
3. English Teacher in Japan.
4. Dining room porter at the Banff Springs Hotel. Spent the evening running back and forth between the kitchen and dining room carrying entrees, often 16 plates and covers at a time. Never dropped anyone’s dinner, luckily. There was this one time though when I was wheeling a huge stack of about 300 coffee cups and the cart’s wheels caught on the threshold of the dining room door and I dumped them all in a crash that sounded so much like “you’re fired” but in the end I wasn’t and after picking up all the pieces it turned out that only about 15 were broken so I guess I was lucky.
5. Tour Guide in Banff for Japanese tourists.

5 Things I would do if I had a million dollars...

1. I’d buy a house, furniture, and a couple of cars and bikes for the garage.
2. I would travel.
3. I would be generous with some of it, cause that’s always fun.
4. Probably wouldn’t be any left over for numbers 4 and 5 so sorry about that.
5. This being tagged stuff is a lot of work!

The Remains of the Day

It would be my first Halloween not spent in Banff in many years so I was looking forward to handing out lots of treats to all the little Jokers and Sarah Palins who would shirley be knocking on my door. Banff, being the tourist trap it is, is full of single service industry workers and doesn't have many families with kids that age and the families that do have them tend to be concentrated in a certain area of town. Long story short, I never got trick or treaters in Banff.

I didn't get around to carving a pumpkin but I hung a string of miniature jack-o-lantern lights outside my door so that any potential candy scavenger would know they could find some here.
By 5:00 pm everything was set and I was ready to begin the handouts. I took a before photo of the candy pile and figured I would take an after photo at the end to get an idea of how much had gone out.


My first customers were a brother and sister who had scary makeup on and the boy was wearing some ragged clothes but the little girl was wearing a fairly standard Disney princess outift. I was curious as to just what she was pretending to be and wanted to ask her and decided it would be better to ask if she was a princess rather than ask if she was a monster of some kind just in case the scary vibe was accidental. She then informed me that she was indeed a princess but she was not Belle or Ariel or Pocahontas or Cinderella or Snow White or Jasmin or Giselle or even Jafar.
She was a zombie princess. ...I must have missed that movie.
BTW her brother was a zombie as well but not a zombie prince, just a plain old zombie.

It turned out that she was the best dressed of all my visitors. I only had seven more after the first two for grand total of nine. Didn't even make it to double digits. Only about half of them bothered to wear a costume so that means 4.5 of them did not.

Talk about disappointing! I moved away from Banff for this?
Of course I realize that the area I live in has a high percentage of people who may never have heard of Halloween or for one reason or another don't participate... so, whatever.

So rather than upload an after photo of the candy pile and use up a bit more of my allotment of cyber space I will just refer you to the before photo once again because I'm sure you couldn't tell the difference anyway.


P.S. The title of this post is also the name of a fine movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, in case you were wondering.