While sitting outside the local Wawa waiting for Rebecca and a friend to buy copious quantities of junk food, the sign on the ice machine outside the store finally registered with me. "Packaged ice is a food." Is this to ensure that ice is not taxed, since most food is not taxable in PA? To remind us to buy and consume more ice? Does this mean that the ice my refrigerator makes is *not* a food because it's not packaged? Or is it just a really bad marketing tag line?

I am just back from a trip that, if it was not from hell, was from a close suburb. Although every kink in the travel road did have its benefits My flight to Toronto was cancelled last Friday, requiring me to take an earlier one. The stinky part: Getting to immigration and facing a crowd of about 500 people, all waiting to convince the Canadian authorities that they were not smuggling drugs into the country. The even stinkier part: Getting to taxi line and finding that all 500 of those immigrants had successfully evaded the drug sniffing dogs and were now waiting for taxis. The woman in line in front of me did tell me the story of her life, which kept me distracted for 10 minutes or so. The good part: I got to the hotel early enough that the art show in the plaza across the street was still open and I wandered around for a while, marveling at the variety of, uh, stuff, that passes as art.

My trip consisted of two parts - a conference in Toronto and then a quick visit to our Rochester office to attend the annual picnic at an amusement park that reminds me of something out of The Truman Show. There are few options when traveling from Toronto to Rochester. As I discovered, you cannot rent a car in Canada and then drop it off in the US. Flights require you to connect in Minneapolis or Kansas City, all for a trip of a couple hundred miles. I decided to try the new "Fast Ferry" service across Lake Ontario, a bargain at $35 one way. I got a call the day before I was to make the crossing and learned that my ferry had been cancelled (this is the same ferry that was delayed going into service for months because it sideswiped a dock in NYC as it was being prepared to be launched). I opted for the flight option, forcing me to travel through Pittsburgh (and taking a plane with propellers, usually on my black-list of travel choices) and taking the better part of the day to get to Rochester. The weather took a turn for the wet as soon as I arrived, and the picnic was in the process of being cancelled yesterday. I decided to get out of Dodge early and took the 7:30 flight home this morning (delayed until 8:17 so that the flight crew could get their required 9 hours and 15 minutes of rest time). My goal in life is to get to a job level where I can be whisked away and not have to worry about any of these travel details.

Books: Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman. I'll admit that I fell for the title, expecting a story full of air and a "wife gets even" plot. Instead, this is a richly amusing story of a woman who loses both her husband and her job to her much younger, greedily grasping assistant. The revenge is couched in terms of moving on with her life, and having her ex-husband and other woman realize that neither really got what they bargained for in their new relationship. And the prospect of twins being bestowed upon a 50-something man who had gladly settled into his post-children life is, of course, the best revenge.