Blessed by the Potato

It’s been pretty dingy here on PEI with cold, cloudy days dominating. Finally after the thunderstorm yesterday we got a bit of warmth and sunshine so Wayfare and I took to the beach. There, we engaged in a game that I like to call “annoy the invertebrates”:

After getting back we found across the way a family of 3 small foxes playing with each other, while mommy watched from not too far off.

I’ve used dial-up before, not just in the distant depths of the 90’s, but also while on the road in many recent years; in Ottawa, Penetang, etc. I’ve even used it when Rogers went down and I couldn’t wait for the high speed to come back up. Dial-up is slow, I get that, but it’s being impossibly slow right now on PEI here. I’m clicking a link over here, and walking away for a half hour or so while I wait for it to load, and often even then it hasn’t finished loading.

I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of line quality issue — even just on the phone it sounds pretty buzzy and staticy, and it’s nearly a kilometer of pretty old copper just to the road from here, let alone to Bell’s modems. It’s still really damned annoying with all the “can’t find server” errors and incredibly slow loading issues.

Compounding the problem is the fact that my computer keeps locking up at random, and I have to reset and reload everything. I find that curious — Firefox thankfully has a “restore session” option so that after a crash I don’t have to remember what I had open, it will just reload it all. However, it goes and loads it from the server again, rather than pulling up the cache. Why isn’t the cache doing its job here?

I know I should probably take it as a sign to ignore the interweb and get back to enjoying my vacation, but damnit, the stock market’s crazy these days and I don’t trust it unsupervised!

PEI has always been a bit of a funny place out on its own. Part of its unique character was the fact that you couldn’t get pop in cans out there. Oddly enough, juice did come in cans, but anything carbonated had to come in a bottle. A lot of people bristled against this, and one of the most common things to buy when on an excursion to New Brunswick was a couple of cases of Coke, but the system worked for the most part. The bottle deposits were fairly hefty — 30 cents for a 750 mL bottle IIRC, and as much as $2 for a 2L (which are no longer around because they were frickin heavy) — which is I think part of why it worked so well. Ontario also has a bottle return system (though it’s been several decades since pop or juice came in returnable containers) run by the Beer Store, which does a half-decent job of reusing the bottles; and reusing them is much more efficient than throwing them in the recycling. However, the deposits have really not kept up with the times, and far too often people simply throw their bottles into the recycling, where rather than be rinsed and refilled, they are smashed, melted down, and reformed (which, as you can imagine, takes a lot more energy). At 10 cents a bottle though, only serious drinkers with a full case (which is, from the looks of the stats, about 90% of beer drinkers) and a car tend to bother bringing them back — I know that even though I’m probably going to be close to the Beer Store tomorrow, I’m not going to bother trying to return the two bottles that were left at my house after the long weekend party for a lousy 20 cents.

The bottles are so near worthless that drunken kids throw them just for the sheer idiotic hell of watching them smash, never mind the dangerous broken glass. Which is, unfortunately, a nasty side effect of a bottle economy, and one of the main reasons PEI is now phasing out its bottle system and allowing cans back on the island (though from what I just saw in the grocery store, the 2L plastic bottles are more popular than the cans). With pop in bottles, the danger is amplified by the fact that kids can have access to them, knock them off store shelves or out of the fridge. Kids are clumsy. Adults (and who else is allowed to drink beer or liquor) should be able to handle not breaking bottles — even drunk adults (ideally, anyway). So here’s what I think: we should increase the bottle deposit to make beer bottles worth something again. The deposit in Ontario has been a dime for as long as I can remember — decades, at least. To keep up with inflation, that should have tripled to over 30 cents by now. To account for the fact that people are perhaps a little lazier and/or more smash-happy these days, and for the fact that the bottle deposit probably won’t be touched (if we do change it now) for another 3 decades, I propose that we increase the bottle deposit to an even buck.

I used to love Hershey’s Special Crisp: a chocolate bar with peanut butter rice crisps, a thin layer of caramel, covered in milk chocolate. It may just have been the perfect chocolate bar. For whatever reason, they discontinued it many many years ago here in Canada. In the States, that bar has continued as the Whatchamacallit. I was in a Rite Aid store the other day specifically looking for this wonderful chocolate bar, and found to my great pleasure that it was on sale at 3 for a dollar — a better deal even than buying chocolate bars in bulk from Costco back home. I bought 15 bars pretty much cleaning them out, and they are every bit as glorious as I remember Special Crisp being.

Now I’m contemplating going back for more, though according to their website the sale ended yesterday, and it would cost me over $5 to take the trolley down. I kind of wish I had bugged the clerk to get another box for me to really clean them out, but there were like 8 people waiting in line behind me that day. So now I’m going to try to see if someone in the states would be willing to buy a box or three and ship them up to Canada for me (I found a company a few years back that offered to this, specifically selling chocolates and candies not available in Canada, and the cost was like $1.50 per bar; it’s good, but not that good).

In other news, the conference has ended and I won a student presentation award :) The internet is back up after going so long without it. I don’t think I’ve gone 3 days without internet access since the 90’s.

We went tried to go surfing yesterday, but were only so successful. The place we went to offered lessons for something like $75 per person, but of course we didn’t make an appointment so we couldn’t do that. However, the rental place did give us a board and a wetsuit for $17 and let us make fools of ourselves. I think we were almost as successful doing that as we could have been with a short lesson, no matter how professional. Nearly everyone managed to get up on top of the surfboard in a standing position, if only briefly, while I alone seemed to have trouble just riding the wave on my stomach. I kept getting off balance and flipping around, sometimes hitting my head on the surf board as I was plunged underwater. Despite stating repeatedly that there were going to be plans to go out last night, everyone just went to bed after getting back from a day of being thrashed by the waves. I’m trying to figure out what to do with my last bit of time here, and I think I’m going to go to the San Diego zoo. I’ve got 600 MB of space left on my camera, so hopefully that’s enough to get a lot of shots of the wildlife :)

San Diego’s been a bit of a hole. We’re staying at the Town and Country Hotel and the place is like a ghetto of little two-storey motel buildings all together. Our room in particular appears to be the worst of all — there is no sound insulation and the blinds don’t quite close all the way. Combined with the fact that we are under the outdoor stairs to the 2nd level and don’t even have the immaculate parking lot view of the other units but instead stare directly into a noisy ice machine and brightly-lit Pepsi dispensary, it made the night rather hellish.

The conference chose this place purely out of cost considerations, so I was expecting it to be a little shabby, but some things go beyond the pale. Internet is running at $10/day, and for a place that’s charging us $150 per night I would have expected a lot more than this. Especially since the internet was down all day after eating my $10, and it was really starting to wear on a lot of people who, well, really need their internet fix. Ok, the staff have been pretty nice so far, I’ve got to give them that, but even the conference facility is a little lacking: the speakers in one room have a terrible rumbling bass distortion problem so we can’t clearly make out what the speaker is saying.

I’ve only been here like 2 days and I’m done with Mexican food, thanks. It is kind of neat/weird that San Diego is incredibly close to the Mexican border, I had no idea — even the trolley system goes right to the border crossing — but this mexican for lunch and dinner got old by lunchtime day 2 (chips and salsa I’m good with, but I don’t really care for anything else on the mexican menu). I’m going to have to stop eating now for the rest of the trip because everything that’s not deep fried is slathered in butter and served four sizes too large (seriously, I only ate about a third of my lunch and I was stuffed, not hungry again until like 8 pm).

So tonight we tried to take it pretty easy, sitting back in the hot tub… until security kicked us out. Ok, it does close at 11 pm and I can see how, with the really shitty sound proofing in the rooms, allowing people to frolic in the hot tub can lead to issues… but we were really super quiet. Ah, well, back to the room, to find this waiting for us:

Quel Horreur!!! The picture doesn’t even do it justice for how shocking and gross it was. I mean we were facing a cockroach that was fast and nearly 2″ long.

I want to go home now, thanks. (Or, at least to PEI)