Blair's Blog

What the old saying about March?  In like a lion, and out like an angry lion? This weekend has seen another dump of snow, at least it was only 2 or 3 inches this time…

Anyway, it’s a little disheartening when you’ve got a shiny, new (to me) red motorbike waiting in the garage – calling with its siren song.  Yep, we are now a two motorbike family.  After Brenda got her motorbike licence last year, she decided that she was used to and comfortable on my 2000 SV650S – so she stole it.  I was pretty sad when I discovered the theft, but at least I knew the culprit and was able to extract some compensation!

Of course, when your motorbike is stolen, the only thing to do is to replace it.  So after thinking about what I might like, going to the motorbike show in January, and spending some lunch hours browsing the bike dealerships, I decided that the best bike to get would be a 2009 Triumph Daytona 675 ( in “arrest me red” of course).  But then my inner Scotsman heard about the plan (i.e. the price tag) and had a go at my inner Hooligan.

So on Friday I picked up my new bike – a 2006 SV650S …at least I got the colour I wanted…

Now if the weather would just cooperate.

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That’s “Continuous Number Plate Spotting”, or more often, just “the licence plate game”.  The game is a bit of OCD foolishness that has afflicted a number of my friends and family over the past few years.  The game has been around in various forms for a long while and gained some prominence in Britain about 5 years ago when a popular comic and TV personality started to play the game.  It  involves spotting car licence plates bearing each of the possible 3 digit number combinations from 000 to 999 in strict numerical order.  It takes a bit of time to play…

Tomorrow I’ll be celebrating my 6th anniversary of playing the game and today, the last day of the 6th full year of play, I saw my 500th plate – how perfect is that?  To save those of you the trouble of doing long division in your head or searching for that little 4-function calculator in your junk drawer; that’s 83 plates per year (6.9 plates per month) or 1 plate spotted every 4.4 days.  For six years.  … I know, it is amazing isn’t it?

In case you wish to join in the fun, here are the basic rules:

1. Only passenger class licence plates from your current province of residence are valid spots (no vanity, commercial, fleet, diplomatic … plates) in Alberta, these plates are of the following form ABC-123 (or ABC-1234, coming this fall)*
2. Go about your day in your normal fashion, excepting only a hardly noticeable scanning back and forth to get a glimpse of the licence plate on every car you encounter.
3. When you spot 000, congratulations! You’ve started!  (You may actually be in denial at this point, but don’t worry – eventually you will see 001 and you’ll be off.)
4. You must actually see each sought-after number with your own eyes and clearly enough that you won’t be wracked with pangs of guilt in the middle of the night for taking credit for seeing a plate that you’re just not sure about.
5. If you don’t have a steel-trap memory for the locations of upcoming plates you can jot them down or add them to a list in your Blackberry, but you actually have to physically lay eyes on the right plate in the right order.  It doesn’t matter that the blue minivan with 057 was there just yesterday…
6. Cruising parkades or parking lots is allowed, but don’t go bragging about it at work, some people might not understand that you are on a Quest.
7. Seeing the number after the one you want (repeatedly) builds mental toughness.  Quit complaining.

Have fun and repeat after me, “No! I don’t have Asperger’s, why do you ask?”

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* There is some debate on how this will affect the rules, but the concensus seems to be that only the last 3 of the 4 digits will count.  …and that the game could be extended to be multi-generational if you try to get all the plates from 000 through 9999.  (That’s a total of 11000 plates to spot: 000 – 999 plus 0000-9999) Not only that, but it has taken the province 25 years to run out of 3 digit plates, so the lifespan of the 4 digit plates will approach 10x as long (well not really, the plates are used at a far faster rate in 2009 than in the 80’s as the population has increased, but still…)

Tags: CNPS

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Just like that, the holiday is over!  … well except for the unpacking, the laundry, putting the suitcases away and getting the house whipped into shape!

Today was just a travel day,  no sights or attractions other than the airplane ride. The hotel by LAX was handy, but it really made us appreciate just how nice the other hotels had been.   We started the day with a less than satisfactory continental breakfast, but it did keep body and soul together while we faced the rigours of the air travel security theater.  We boarded the plane in sunshine and 15 °C and three short hours later got off the plane to be greeted by -2 °C and a stiff north wind – and snow for tonight.    It didn’t take us long to lose our acclimatization to winter.

Gramps was at the airport to meet us with our van and when we got home Gram was in the midst of preparing dinner for us.  What a treat to not have to think about what to have for dinner, and to have something prepared fresh – nothing deep fried in sight!  After supper we had a chance to look at the videos and some of the pictures that we took on the vacation with my folks before they headed home and left us to our unpacking.

Now to try and psych myself up for work tomorrow…

Tags: Travel

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Today was pretty busy – we started by packing up all of our gear a checkig out of our hotel in San Diego after a big brunch in the hotel restaurant. We got to SeaWorld about noon, it was a fine, sunny day. We saw the killer whale show then toured a number of the exhibits – bat rays, penguins, belugas, walrus and polar bears. We rode the Skytower at the end of the day, then piled into the van for the drive back to LA.

It was almost exactly 2 hours from SeaWorld to our hotel by LAX – not the nicest part of town! However, the hotel is handy for dropping off the rental car and getting to the airport in the morning.

Our flight is at 11:00 but we need to check in 2 hours earlier, so we’ll have a busy start tomorrow.

Tags: Travel

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