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My sister Virginia blew through here today.  Technically she arrived last night, but I was so sleep addled that I didn’t get a chance to say “boo” to her until this morning.

This was the last step of a multi-phased operation to get her moved back to Calgary.  She’d spent the previous week down in Portland, sowing wild oats or some such.  Now she’s headed back to Calgary to settle in, at least for a while, at my Mom’s place.

Last week’s To Dos included getting me over to Vancouver Island, renting a van from Budget, getting her stuff from a friend’s garage to the Greyhound station, saying goodbye to Dan and his dog Dex over fish and chips in Saanich, taping up said boxes in the back of the van and slapping addresses and such on ‘em, and getting her and me back to the ferry in her beat-up jalopy of a car.

Along the way, we ended up at one point with nothing but a short dresser in the back of a big van with Christmas ornaments in the top drawer.  Well, naturally, it fell over as we were driving up the main road between Victoria and the ferry.  We assumed the glass ornaments were goners.

But in fact, when we stopped to swap vehicles, turns out that the ornaments were fine.  But we were so concerned with the possibility of broken glass in the dresser, that we let a large glass piggy bank fall out of the van onto the sidewalk where it, naturally smashed into a zillion pieces.  (Later Virginia determined there’d been more than U.S. $65 dollars in coins, which is hard to do when $0.25 is the biggest coin the U.S. government sanctions.)

We did pick up most of the coins, wet with rain and thus covered with tiny shards of pulverized glass, impossible to see in the sodium lamp light of deserted downtown Saanich (it was after 7 p.m. so the streets were empty.)  This looks tragic, but it in fact highlighted the absurdity and crazy juggling of her moving schedule, and was kind of one of those “this can’t be happening” things that just makes you shake your head.



 
 

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“Oh boy! Another great opportunity for personal growth!”

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“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. ... She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”

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After over a decade of user testing, it is clear that the way we search the web is similar to the way we would search our home for valuables as it was burning to the ground. Frantically.

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“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value ... The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”

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“We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.”

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Comments

 

 

 

 

 

Actually, the U.S. sanctions $1 coins, too... not to say that your sister had any of those. Hope the rest of the move went well!

 

Posted by hermitdeb
  at 10:02 am on Jan. 17, 2006

 

 

 

Well, I might not be using the word "sanctioned" right -- but what I mean is that the U.S. government doesn't encourage people to use $1 coins, even though, yes, they exist.

 

Posted by Travis Smith
  at 11:33 am on Jan. 17, 2006

 

 

 

So much for that new kidney.

 

Posted by rob knox
  at 9:34 am on Jan. 19, 2006

 

 

 

raspberry

 

Posted by Travis Smith
  at 12:23 pm on Jan. 19, 2006

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