Work, work, work.....
Well the project I'm running is approaching the deadline. Two months from today it will be live or we will have failed, the deadline can't be moved for business reasons. So the whole team are busting their butts.

I wanted to pick something up from the Hudson Bay Company in North York and a colleague, Rodrigo from Costa Rica who is also working in Toronto and I strolled in. There weren't any customers, but it is a very cold day with a nasty wind blowing so I figured they must all be at home. There weren't any people at the checkouts, curiouser and curiouser. We seemed to be the only people there. But the flat screens were showing commercials for this and that, and the escalators were running, so we hopped on the escalator. My Costa Rican buddy remarked "Mae, this is crazy, these Canadians are so trusting, in Costa Rica this shop would have been cleaned out by now." There were no checkout assistants upstairs either, Rodrigo repeatedly enquired "Hello?" in a loud voice, but there was no answer. I said "Rod, I think it might be closed, all the lights at the end of the room are off." We went downstairs. Still no-one, I walked to the end of the store that adjoins the mall and has floor to ceiling reinforced glass doors that are open and rolled into the wall during opening hours. "Rod, the shop is closed, let's leave." We walked back out the entrance we had come in and I looked at the opening hours on a sign, Saturday they close at 6:00pm, I looked at my watch which read 6:30pm. There was a police car near the entrance we had gone in, I walked over to it, but there was no policeman inside. My natural paranoia cut in and I immediately assumed that CCTV had picked up two handsome, rugged, beasts of men (Rodrigo and myself) strolling around a locked shop and the cops had come to investigate. We got in the car and I drove to one side of the mall looking for someone in a uniform to talk to but no luck. I drove to the other entrance of the store and as I passed the unlocked entrance, a large white van with two ugly and hairy characters inside that had slowed sped off. At the other entrance the last of the store workers were leaving, so I went up to a man who seemed to be in charge and told him about the unlocked doors. He said they had been locked earlier and someone must have unlocked them, then he ran off to sort things out.

We drove away, joking that about all the unguarded plasma screens and how my boss probably wouldn't cover bail money on expenses anyway with the final thought that just perhaps we had spoiled the shopping trip for the two ugly guys in the white van. Seeing two young(ish) guys with cropped hair in a new Buick Allure (called a Lacrosse in the US) and thinking to themselves, "No regular guy under 50 buys a Buick, they must be cops!"

As I write this, I'm sipping at a cup of ginseng tea sweetened with maple syrup. Very healthy! It's amazing the rubbish you'll drink when there's no whisky in the house!