Herbal Garden 2 weeks later

2 weeks after planting my herbs are ready for using. I made Chicken Parmesan tonight
for supper and my Basil, and Parsley came from these little beauties! Fresh herbs at my
finger tips, what a cool idea!

Found Money!

Maybe some of you have heard about this story as it was in the news a couple of weeks ago. The Bank of Canada has a database that is accessible over the web where you can search for "unclaimed bank balances." The Bank of Canada website explains:

"The Bank of Canada maintains custody of all balances of $1,000 or more for 100 years, until they are claimed. Unclaimed balances under $1,000 are retained for forty years (ten years from the date of the last owner transaction at the Canadian bank, plus an additional thirty years at the Bank of Canada). Consequently, in the case of balances under $1,000, a written claim must be received by the Bank of Canada no later than December 31 of an account's last year (that is, the year of the last transaction date + forty years). "

Just how much unclaimed money does the Bank of Canada have?

"At the end of December 2007, approximately 938,000 unclaimed balances, worth some $320 million, were on the Bank's books. Over 86% of these were under $500, representing 19% of the total value outstanding. The oldest balance dates back to 1900."

I went to the site and started inputing various surnames and we found unclaimed amounts totalling about 40 dollars so far for poeple we knew. Wow! Reading this blog pays!

Anyways, click the link below and see if you have any money on that 320 million dollar pile.

http://ucbswww.bank-banque-canada.ca/scripts/search_english.cfm

Good luck!

Aerial Shots

Just when you thought we were done blogging about our trip, I went to google earth and found aerials of our hotels! (You may have to enlarge them to see the writing.)
Here is The Majestic in San Fran



House on Bayou Road New Orleans






The Jurys Washington DC




Hotel 31 In New York (Manhatten)

Parish vs. County

Last night we watched "Runaway Jury" it's an older movie, (maybe 2003?) starring John Cusack, one of our fave actors. And although I have seen this movie before I never noticed that it was filmed in New Orleans! So as John was running down the streets we noticed places that we had been. Very cool! We also heard a term that bugged us for years not quite understanding what it meant. Whenever they talk about areas in New Orleans, they are always called parishes and not counties like seemingly everywhere else.

What the heck does that mean? We have the answer to that question, and you don't even have to do a poll! New Orleans is a very religious place, not just any religion, but Roman Catholicism. Hence, no cemetery tour on Good Friday when we visited :-(

The catholic relegion permeates New Orleans, yes, right down to how they name their geographical areas. Instead of calling it "Orleans County" they call it "Orleans Parish" referring to a county like a church. Churches are also known as parishes. When the seperation of church and state is a very important distinction everywhere today, it is quite amazing that to see this such a display of a church in state domain. But that's New Orleans - a very cool place - every single parish.

The answer to .... how many people sent pics

Of course! The answer is ALWAYS not enough! Thanx again to those who have, here are 2 more pics, 1 from Katieface, and 1 from Marni. :-)

"I don't want to be late for church"

From the Lost Blog files - another taxi theme, this time from New Orleans - our taxi ride to the airport leaving for Washington, DC -

Selena writes from her old school real paper journal in an entry titled Sunday, March 23, Happy Easter:

"We called for a taxi and were picked up - the perfect send off from New Orleans, a veteran Creole, wearing slippers + combing her hair. We were entertained by her stories while she ate bacon crisps + searched her purse for her medication. You see, she'd left in a hurray because she needed to get us to the airport + get herself back in time for church. In between stories, she'd mumble the time + count backwards making sure she had time to change + get to church. We talked food, flood, police all the while going a steady pace toward the airport (she doesn't speed). She was a sweet lady when she pulled away from the airport she honked + waved. Perfect send off."

I am glad Selena wrote that entry down - that was quite a taxi ride. It was the most emotional roller coaster ride I have ever taken in a taxi. The ride went from funny: She wore pink slippers and then said if I had known us folks were comin', she would have brought some crawfish. Then to kind of scary: She told us of how she'd been robbed and that's why she carries a gun in the cab. We never saw the gun but I totally believe that it was there. To sad: We passed a cemetary where she said her 16 year old son was there, he had been shot in a case of mistaken identity. Back to strange: She showed us a tape recorder she uses to record some of her rides to guard against unruly passengers that complain to the cab company about her. Back to funny: The multi-tasking was hilarious, eating pork rinds while digging in her purse to find her meds, while combing her hair, while making perfectly sure we not going a mile over the speed limit. It was a truly great send off from New Orleans and a total fluke that we met her as she doesn't usually doesn't take airport rides on Sundays as she doesn't want to miss church.

So, thanks sweet cab driver lady, we will never forget that ride!

Air Garden

Ok this is one of the coolest indoor gardens I have ever seen!! It was a wedding gift from my wonderful husband! Aww :-) and it is so neat, I thought I'd drag you all thru' the progress with us! The way it works is, you take a seed pod, place it in a water bed, which is auto watered and auto day light-ed and voila my herbal garden is grown! This is after 3 days and we can see sprouts already...

Taxi Killer!

Well, it is a good thing we didn't see this episode of CSI: NY before we visited the city!

This scene is actually pretty cool because it looks like an actual NYC Taxi cab. The "Passenger Bill of Rights" is the real thing as we have got a partial picture of it here to the extreme left:


I can maybe see this scenario playing out at night on a side street somewhere but NYC is truly one of the safest cities in the world and this taxi killer would have been arrested in a New York Minute because there are cops everywhere in NYC - take a look:

The above pic is right smack in the middle of Times Square showing you that New York's finest are on the job 24 hours a day.

(0ver to Selena)

True the cops are everywhere... but... there are so many cabs and people hustling about that I think this scenaio could get lost in the bustle. It's kinda hard to see into some of the taxi's and depending on how fast carbon monoxide works you wouldn't be thrashing that long! Anyway, i'm glad we are home safe and sound now, and even though we met alot of Taxi drivers that didn't speak english... nobody tried to kill us!

(over to Dean)
True - no cab driver did try to kill us. But even if he tried we wouldn't have understood what he was trying to do. Our tour guide was right when he said, "Cab drivers speak over 60 languages here. None of them english". I had a lot of trouble understanding them if they asked a question - Selena was somehow able to translate though...hahaha.

And from the clip Det. Flack uses the correct figure of 11,000 cabs in NYC. We even cited that figure in the post titled "New York Factoids for the Day". It is really nice to know that CSI:NY is using authentic New York cabs, locations and facts in their shows. We like the show even more now!

"No Internet!"

The title of this post are the two scariest words that people hear these days. As an IT guy, it probably ranks up there with the gravest of news I have to give to a client. It drives people crazy to be disconnected. Even in the house here, sometimes the wireless router will go down and it will cause a mini-panic and because I hold the title of House Network Administrator, the panic reports hit my desk first! One time, SOMEONE even let out a blood curdling scream when she was knocked off-line. Haha. Leave it to the brillance of Matt Stone and Trey Parker to perfectly capture what happens when people go off-line these days.

this just in....

another person off my list! Hahahaha Kathy just brought me
her camera to download! bada ba ba ba I'm lovin' it......