Min had her interview at York first thing this morning. Just after she got back I had to take off to Batavia to get my foot checked up on. The weather was absolutely dreadful and I ended up stopping at dad’s house because I couldn’t keep driving. The wind was so bad that there were white outs and horrible drifts. I finally made it around on back roads and up to my appointment. Everything was fine and they looked at my foot for about thirty seconds. So it was a lot of driving for not much being there.
I spent the day working in the basement. I got a lot done. A good productive day.
I decided that our Canadian content has been running too thin so, in celebration of Miranda being with us this week, we are making today Canadian day. Which I thought of after noticing Miranda reading the book, “How To Be A Canadian”. So I decided that we all needed to learn a bit more about Canada (especially since the book tell us that the number one reason that Canadians hate Americans is because Americans know so little about Canada but in my experience, Americans are often annoyed by Canadians who don’t know much about Canada 😉 So we will start with a simply geography question. We all know the easy ones like the US and Canada share the world’s longest undefended border (running the incredible distance from Washington to Maine and then again all along Alaska.) And we all know that Canada is the second largest country in the world by land mass coming in just after Russia. So here is the first question: What is Canada’s second nearest neighour? This is an easy starting question. The second closest country to Canada is Denmark since Greenland is the largest land mass of Denmark. This, of course, discounts the very tiny area annexed by Holland in Ottawa but that would be just silly to include here. Okay, question number two, what are the five largest cities in Canada? Toronto is obviously the largest, then Montreal (although Montreal is more densely populated), then Vancouver (recently declared the second best city in the world to live and work in losing to Zurich and tying with Vienna), then Ottawa and finally Calgary. The really interesting part is that these rankings are by metropolitan area and if you were to include American cities, Rochester would just edge out Ottawa and Buffalo would come in just behind. Ok, number three: What year did Canada become a self governing dominion (called the Dominion of Canada – the name was changed later)? This was 1867, 91 years after the US declared total independence from England. Instead of using July 4 like us, Canada decided to be wildly different and go with July 1 and called it Canada Day instead of Independence Day since they didn’t actually get to be independent. Canada recently renamed itself Canada. So it is really easy to remember. Canada’s Chief of State is still Queen Elizabeth II. You can look up most of this information yourself from the highly reliable and official government source, the CIA World Factbook, just in case anyone was thinking that I wasn’t accurate. Lastly, Canada is still a Commonwealth – part of the British Empire. Zimbabwe just declared itself independent in December from the Empire. You can learn all about the Commonwealth at www.TheCommonwealth.org. Isn’t it cool what you can learn on SGL?
Min and I watched The Apple Dumpling Gang, the 1975 Disney classic and then we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark which we both watched recently but Min didn’t get to see on the big screen yet. Does anyone out there (Nate you MUST remember watching this with me years ago) remember Disney’s Gun Shy television series based on the Apple Dumpling Gang? Only six episodes ever aired but my dad recorded them the one time that they were on and these must have been the most watched recordings in our entire VHS collection which I was young. The short lived series aired in 1983, so I was just seven years old and the Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again had been released just four years before. If anyone knows how to find some digital copies of these six episodes, I would really like to find them. They would be great to have. I doubt that Disney will ever release this series on DVD. It would make a great single disc buy thought.
I ended up staying up really late tonight and working on certifications. I didn’t go to bed until 6:30 am. I got a ton done though.