Would you like an extended warranty with that?

I picked up a plant for my apartment today. It's a 6 foot tall tropical Yucca with four canes in a 14" pot. It really adds character to the apartment, and it looks really cool walking into the dark apartment at night and seeing the silhouette of the plant against the window.

I noticed a sign when I walked into the nursery that all their plants come with one year warranties. I forgot to ask what the terms were, but I thought it was odd that a plant would come with a warranty.

I never understood the need for dishwashers. It takes 90 minutes for a dishwasher to do what I can do in 15. However, when I was sick earlier this week, I was in no condition or mood to be cleaning up when there were no clean dishes left. It's those times when having a machine to do the cleaning for me really saves the day.

I stopped at IGA last night to get some groceries for dinner. They had these boxes of frozen breaded fish fillets for $4, and if you buy a box, you get a free 1kg bag of frozen vegetables to go with it. That's enough food for at least 4 meals. You really start to realize the value of things and eating out becomes more of a luxury when you have a mortgage to pay.

It's a good pain

I'm still aching from Aikido on Friday. This shows how out of shape I am. I think it's more from the stretching exercises we did for the first 25 minutes than the actual moves that we learned. We were doing some really intense stretches and I am not flexible.

As part of my company's acquisition, they plan to move all of their merchants onto our gateway system. It's the reason they bought us. However, our system only processes credit card transactions, not debit cards or EBT cards. I've been assigned to lead the design and implementation of adding debit and EBT card functionality to our system so that the merchants can be migrated to our system. The impact of this project is not small, our new company processes US$100 million of transactions each month through just the one processor being affected.

I'm very excited that I get to lead this project, I love building things like this.

I headed up to the Tuesday SFU swing dancing tonight. I wasn't expecting much of a turnout since it was Valentine's Day, but we had an excellent turnout and lots of non-SFU people showed up too. It was a great night, and I ended up staying until 11:30 (it normally starts dying down an hour earlier).

The best part is that I didn't feel any pressure about Valentine's Day. After the amount of emotional effort and money I put into my last relationship, I actually feel relieved that I didn't have to figure out where to take someone and then spend $60 on flowers and at least another red on dinner. I just did what I normally do and enjoyed myself.