So so very very angry over $40.17

I got home from my trip to Europe a few weeks ago and got my credit card bill, only to see that I was charged $40.17 for a phone call that lasted less than 5 minutes. I called my credit card and the customer service rep I spoke to said not in so many words that she sees people upset about this particular company's charges all the time. Seriously, I once called a friend on a cell phone in rural Togo and only got charged a dollar a minute. Even if I had used the whole 5 minutes I was charged for, the cost would have been 8.34$ a minute!

The company is International Satellite Communications and they're in San Ysidro,CA, so essentially, they're in Tijuana - and they charge credit cards for payphone calls in Spain... don't you just loooove globalization?!

Anyway, I'm furious. I kind of disliked Spain to begin with, it was hot, it smelled bad, the people we dealt with were rude and/or shady, the only nice Spanish speakers we met there turned out to be from South America.

I rarely travel anywhere that I don't find anything to like about a place... but I actually can't think of much that was good about Spain.

Well, it was kind of fun watching the pickpockets and hookers plying their trade on Las Ramblas.... but that's a bit of a stretch as a good quality about a place, isn't it?

I won't even bother getting into my frustration with the ridiculous service charges the landlord for the flat we rented levied on us. But at least I had the option to walk away from that shady deal because it was face to face. I never agreed to pay this amount for that phone call, and I'm going to have to pay it whether I like it or not.

I'm so fucking angry right now!!!

Top 5 Celebrity Women

Dita Von Teese

Jennifer Connelly

Scarlet Johnasson

Marilyn Monroe

Top 5 Celebrity Men

Some girlfriends and I were talking about our top fives last night and I was about to email them some pictures, but then I thought, why not post about it instead. I have pretty conventional taste, no?

Elvis Presley

Brad Pitt

Robert Redford

George Clooney

Scott Bakula

More restaurant closures in Toronto's Chinatown

Some of my favourite restaurants in Chinatown have been closed down in the last week by a rat infestation that is plaguing the neighbourhood.

My poor knees

I got the coolest new thing for my birthday - a spin dryer

My aunt had one of these things in England when I was young. She lived in a 200 year old farm house.

On days when she wanted to do hand washing, she would wash the clothes in the sink and then spin the moisture out of them with the spin dryer.

Then if it was too rainy or cold to hang the clothes outside she would hang them in the kitchen. She had an AGA stove in her kitchen and so it was always the warmest room in the house. She also had such high ceilings, that she had a rack for drying the clothes that was on a pulley. She would lower the rack down to hang the clothes then pull it back up to the warmest driest most out of the way spot near the ceiling. The whole set up was ingenious.

I think a lot about energy efficiency, I also live in a pretty humid basement and I really like to do laundry, but I don't like to use the dryer. So, when I found one of these babies on the internet, I knew I had to have it.

I asked my mom and my godfather to go dutch on it for my birthday and it arrived yesterday. I tried it last night and I'm sooo pleased. I wish all my clothes and sheets were dirty so I could wash them all.

Here's how I'm using it. I put the clothes in the washer (cold water of course). Then when the washer is done I take them out and put them in the spin dryer. It spins them waaaaay faster than the washer does and it a few minutes it's extracted a whole lot of extra water (and suds, which lets me know that the washer doesn't do a great job at rinsing, or I use too much soap). The clothes come out almost dry. Then I either put them on the line or put them in the dryer for a few minutes to finish them off.

The thing is brilliant. Hanging clothes in my basement is often really frustrating for me because anything like sweaters or jeans is musty before it's dried fully - but putting sweaters in the dryer often wrecks them too. I'm anticipating never having to deal with musty clothes again!

A really great gift.

Listeria stupidity - why don't people have common sense?

For those of you not following the Canadian news. One of our major meat producers here had an outbreak of Listeria in one of their plants a while ago. 20 people died. Now this seems like something to get all up in arms about and you would imagine that I'd be flipping out because I'm such a nut about bacteria but I'm not.
Here's why:

- if we hadn't started tracking outbreaks so closely here, then we likely would have never linked these 20 deaths to each other

- if you cook your meat properly you won't get listeriosis from buying listeria tainted meat

-listeria is extremely common and exists everywhere including your pet and probably your kitchen

I think that people are flipping out about this for a couple of reasons:
-people aren't savvy consumers of sensational news stories

-people think that living in a first world country magically makes them immune to disease.

The plain fact is that you need to cook meat before you eat it, you just can't eat hot dogs straight from the package. If you want to take the chance and eat sandwich meat without cooking it yourself, then do it while you're young and healthy and not pregnant.

Burnt Toast!

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and I smelled burnt toast! It made me think of this.

Bounty hunter coming back to the small screen

HONOLULU, Hawaii (AP) -- TV bounty hunter Duane "Dog" Chapman is preparing a return to the airwaves.

Duane "Dog" Chapman's show was pulled off the air in November.

The Chapman family confirmed Thursday that filming is set to resume on the A&E show "Dog the Bounty Hunter."

The show features Chapman and crew in pursuit of bail jumpers in Hawaii and other states.

It was the highest rated show on A&E before the network pulled it off the air in November.

Chapman was heard in a taped phone conversation using a racial slur in reference to his son's black girlfriend.

Chapman has apologized and tried to make amends with the network and the black community.

Network officials say that since the show is about second chances, they decided to accept his apology and resume production. No air date has been announced.

Goal #43 - Change Banks

The banking fees of most of the major banks in Canada are daylight robbery. It's really shocking that anyone puts up with it, yet I put up with it for years. As of yesterday, I'm not gonna take it anymore. I signed up for an account with PC Financial. I went whole hog and got all the services including overdraft protection and all that shiz. And something really interesting happened when the lady credit checked me. I think this may have been the first time in my life that I was credit checked, that I knew about. Apparently, I have perfect credit, how about that! My boyf and my mother, possibly the two most fiscally responsible humans on earth, would have you believe that I'm a fuck-up when it comes to my cash. And, yeah, maybe I don't balance the books all that much, or know my bank balance at any given moment in time. But, I did set my bank account to pay the minimum balance on my credit card every month, whether I remembered to do it or not. And voila! An A+ credit rating. Sure sometimes I forget/can't pay off the balance, and so sometimes I pay interest on my credit card purchases... but, I'm that much closer to Goal #1 Buy Property.
Big pats on the back for me!