One day in and I already miss life as a bum.  For the first time since December of 2008, I am back in the ranks of the working class.  I actually had an excellent day at the office.  Everyone was very nice and it seems like it will be a fun group to be around.  I will get to satisfy my geeky nature while I continue to pursue my ultimate goal of being a firefighter.  It really is the perfect situation.  Hell, my new boss even bought me lunch today!  Not bad at all.  Everything was great right up until 5:30 when I left the office.  In case you don’t live in Toronto, we got hit with a bit of a snow storm.  This wasn’t exactly unexpected, it was on pretty much every weather report you could find.  Somehow this managed to cripple the commute home.  my hour long drive took 2.5 hours to get home!  I needed over an hour and a half just to get to the highway.  On my drive I saw people in ditches, people who had smashed into each other and people who almost ran over pedestrians.  Seriously, we live in freakin’ Canada.  This is freakin’ February.  Why the fuck are we so unprepared for this?!?!?!  It’s snow.  You have seen it before!  Make your dumb ass familiar with it’s properties and it’s affect on your vehicle.  This will come up again in the near future.  Unless you have the memory retention of an eggplant this knowledge will be applicable repeatedly.  Just a tip from your favorite smart-ass!  Now, as is tradition, a web comic that has nothing to do with anything I just talked about.  This is just about how awesome engineers are.  Enjoy!

Greetings from Orlando!  My buddy Shea and I decided that we needed a reward for finishing school.  Our choice was to get down to Florida from some fun in the sun.  We are spending a  couple of days in Orlando before heading to Miami for the rest of the week.  One of the best parts about this trip is that we are flying home to Toronto on a private jet.  Yeah, that’s how we roll.  We decided to get down here by a regular flight out of Pearson in Toronto.  Our flight was at 6:30am so we decided to show up at 3:30am because of all the security measures going on these days.  This meant that we didn’t sleep at all!  Shea was able to get through the security with no scrutiny at all.  I wasn’t so lucky.  My carry on was searched and everything was swabbed and analyzed.  They also made me reach my hand down my pants and then swab fingers.  Being a smart-ass, I asked if I was…ummm…you know…supposed to touch it.  He said that wasn’t necessary and seemed to relax a little bit after that.  Humor can get you out of anything!  Not sleeping at all meant that I was able to sleep on the plane.  As soon as we got into the sky I was out cold.  I woke up as the pilot announced we would soon make our descent into Orlando.  There was still enough time to select an episode of Two and a Half Men on the entertainment system.  I like having my own screen and the ability to select whatever movie or TV show I want.  Definitely an improvement.  After arriving in Orlando we met up with my bro who lives here and immediately had some beers and some food at Bahama Breeze.  We hung out back at his place in the evening and things went a little down hill for me.  We all went down for some naps and I woke up feeling horrible.  My stomach was bothering me and I just didn’t feel right.  I had a shower and then everything decided to come out or me.  I threw up like there was no tomorrow.  Weird because I didn’t even drink that much.  Luckily we had already planned to lay low on this evening.  I rested up and now am back to 100% awesome!  Today we are headed to do some shopping and hit up Disney.  We are going to do some drinking around the world at Epcot.  Hopefully I will be able to post some pics tomorrow.  After that I may not be posting very much.  I didn’t bring my computer with me.  I will try to get you a couple mid week posts though.  Later!

Sorry for not providing a weekend post.  Once again I found myself pretty busy.  I got to do something pretty cool on Friday.  I was taken to a restaurant that I have never been to…in an area of Toronto I have never seen.  I wish I had pictures and more details but I didn’t have a camera (didn’t even bring my phone) and I got pretty drunk so I don’t even know the names of the bars!  The only place I know the name of was Pizzeria Libretto.  This is in the Dundas and Ossington area of Toronto.  After eating there I now know what pizza would taste like in heaven.  Since I am certainly destined for hell, I think I will load up while still alive!  This place is the real deal.  I took this straight from their site and it explains everything you need to know about the place.

Pizzeria Libretto makes the only certified Vera Pizza Napoletana in Toronto, using the guidelines set out by the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association and as set out by the Italian Government and the European Union. This strong statement is backed by our commitment to specifically selected high quality ingredients, made in a traditional manner with old world equipment. For example, the pizzas are made with San Marzano tomatoes, which come from the foot of Mount Vesuvius in Naples, with Fiore di Latte Mozzarella brought in fresh daily, and dough made from 100% organic stone ground flour. These ingredients are baked quickly in 90 seconds in a 900 degree wood burning oven. Our oven was hand made in Naples by a 3rd generation pizza builder. We could have spent half as much on a prefabricated oven from California, but we had a 5000 lbs oven shipped across the ocean because we believe that part of making a real Neapolitan Pizza is achieving the charred and blistered crust that you can’t get from a prefabricated oven, or even from a new high tech electric oven, and especially not from a gas oven.

I know it may sound crazy to go through such pain just for pizza, but you really can taste the difference.  Hell, there was still a line up for dinner at 10pm!  Obviously I am not the only person that thinks highly of this place.  We were on a wait list for about an hour and a half.  That made it easy to skip around to some of the other bars in the area for drinks.  There is a tequila bar, a burlesque bar and other funky places to get sloshed.  We hit the tequila bar after dinner and that’s where things get a little hazy.  I will certainly be going back for some pizza and booze very soon.  When I do, I will be sure to grab some pictures and post them.  In the mean time, I strongly suggest you get out to Pizzeria Lebretto and the Dundas & Ossington bars.

There are many perks to taking the pre-service firefighter training program.  How many people get to spend two days tearing cars apart with over powered hydraulic tools?  Well, that’s what I was up to this past Thursday and Saturday.  It was an awesome time!  We were at the GTAA fire training location at Pearson airport in Toronto.  This is a top notch training facility that has just about everything you could need.  While we were working on the far end of the lot we got to watch these massive airport fire trucks go through training exercises.  They have top mounted water cannons and they start drenching things before the truck stops moving.  We also got to do some international relations training.  The airport firefighters from Athens, Greece were in Toronto for training and during one of our breaks we got into a shirt swap with them.  So, I gave up a Seneca Fire shirt and got back a shirt from Greece!  The tools we used during training were a lot of fun, although they were pretty damn heavy.  You could literally cut through the metal on a car as if it was paper.  It was very therapeutic.  Here are some shots.

*One of my buddies using the hydraulic spreaders

*Another guy using the cutters

*We created a convertible

*We did it again…except this car was on it’s side

*This was my handy work with an air chisel.  The door was unlocked, but I figured it was more fun to open it this way.

*This is one of the massive airport fire trucks.

*Here it is in action

*Here is my Greek fire shirt

Sorry for not posting anything yesterday.  As I mentioned, I spent the day on the fire ground doing live fire training.  I have to admit, it was fucking awesome.  Waking up at 6:30am on a Saturday did suck a little bit, but it turned out to be worth it.  It is amazing how quickly heat can build up in one of these fires.  Even though we are very well protected in our gear you can still feel the heat.  I definitely couldn’t snap any pics of what was going on as we were busy doing stuff all the time and I would have been kicked outta there if I pulled out a camera and started taking shots.  Then in the evening I went to dinner and drinks with the women.  We ended up spending Earth Hour at a bar in the west end of Toronto.  It was pretty cool with all the lights dimmed.  Even driving down the road you could see just how dark the city was.  I didn’t take this pic but it shows the two sides of Toronto.  One is how we normally do things and the other is during Earth Hour.  I think that we should probably try to get something like this going more often!

This is getting ridiculous!  Toronto got hit with more snow yesterday and things got pretty messy out there.  I had to shovel the driveway twice and it still wasn’t enough.  Unfortunately, due to horribly cold temperatures, the snow from previous storms hasn’t melted.  So it is getting a little tricky to see around some corners and to pull out of driveways because of the high snow banks.  I can understand a few fender-benders as a result of that.  What I don’t understand is how many people I saw in ditches.  On the way to the dentist I saw 5 cars in ditches along the highway.  I also saw people in slammed civics driving around like maniacs.  No wonder there are so many accidents.  Every year it is the same thing.  We live in Toronto.  Snow is part of life.  You would think we would have figured out how to drive in this shit by now.  Apparently not.  Now, I have previously posted a video of the funniest crash I have ever seen.  I am now posting a video taken in Portland last year.  This is some crazy winter driving madness!  Even though things in Toronto were bad, they sure as hell weren’t this bad.

We might just have a white Christmas after all.  Toronto got pelted with a good dumping of snow today, so I decided this was a good day to work from home.  Once again I have no trade for you.  I had no idea that market went all screwy.  The spreads are staying wide even during the day right now.  The Euro gained a couple thousand pips on the US Dollar over the last few days as well.  Definitely not my happy time to trade.  So many traders love these movements because they are in for large swing positions.  I look for 2-10 pip gains when the markets are ranging well within reasonable bounds.  When people complain about sideways markets is when I am happiest.  I will have more time on my hands in the new year, so I am planning on moving into stocks as another way of trading (and keeping this blog interesting).  Since I can’t bring you anything Forex related I will stay on the topic of snow.  Below is a pic of Chubbs playing in the snow.  And, because that may not be enough to entertain all of you, I also added a C & H comic.  You can use that as a funny take on the Frosty take.  Or, a perverted suggestion on what to do with all this snow.  Either way.

*Chubbs still doesn’t know whether to walk on the snow, or eat the snow.  Now, lets see that C & H comic…

OK, late post for me this Sunday. For those who were wondering whether I survived Christmas shopping, I thank you for your concern. For those who didn’t notice, fuck you! Kidding. Christmas shopping was insane and tired me out incredibly. I did manage to get pretty much everything I needed, so that is good. Today we have a big day in Toronto. It is the first NFL regular season game in Canada ever! The Buffalo Bills are taking on the Miami Dolphins. In honor of that, I bring you something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything I just talked about. Here is a C & H comic from Explosm. Hey, it’s Sunday. Sunday is for comics and goofing around. I will be making a special effort to trade this week so hopefully I have some good results to show you. Cheers!

It has been a while since I made a massive rant about something. I am now ultra-pissed with the City of Toronto. My issue is with parking tickets. Hey, sometimes I used to park illegally and when I got a ticket I just dealt with it. Lately I have been getting tickets even when I am parking within the rules! What a scam. Funny how the city is also in a constant budget crisis. Hmmm…could it be that the city of Toronto is actually writing bad tickets intentionally? Why would they do that? Because the bitches know that it isn’t worth taking the time off work to go fight. Oh, and the process isn’t easy. You show up one day and wait in line just to have them tell you to come back another day to argue your case. I have been paying these tickets for a long time and pretty much allowing the city to screw me. I am getting sick of this shit. Why is it that I have to read the rules and the idiots writing the tickets are fucking illiterate?  What is my issue with the below notice? Well, I got the ticket just after 1am parked on Keele. Why would this piss me off? Probably because you are allowed to park over night on Keele!!! Because of constantly bending the residents over and fucking us in the ass…City of Toronto gets my “FUCK YOU” award.

With the temperature getting up to 24 degrees and the sun shining, there was no way I was staying at the office for a full work day.  Johal and I cut out early and met our friend Eddie at Nobleton Lakes Golf Club.  They have a great deal going on right now, where you pay $80 for a round, but you get a voucher for a free round later in the year.  You can’t beat that!  Considering we are so early in the season, the course was in fantastic shape!  It was a little dry in some areas of the rough, but that is to be expected.  The fairways and greens played amazingly though.  It was definitely worth the trip out.  Johal managed to stay out of the water for the most part this time around.  I had my driver dialed in too.  If I can keep that up all year…well…I will still suck, but I will look more impressive!

*This was the opening hole of the back 9.  HARD!

*Johal teeing off with that fat driver

*Eddie gets into the game

* I get stuck in the neck-high bunker

* Johal killed a fish with his ball the one time he found water