take a penny, leave a penny

I <3 commercial drive

I recently stumbled upon a guerrilla back alley library about a block away from my apartment. It was full of odd titles, mostly romance novels and soviet tracts, but sprinkled liberally with terrible summer beach books, too, the sort you buy at the airport for the flight then never read again. I borrowed a copy of The Third Policeman and left behind A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six, one of my favourite books from early childhood. If you would also like to donate, or even just browse, it can be found in the alley between Francis and Pender, a half block west of Commercial Drive.

nevermind that time I was kidnapped in L.A., just remember the time I was in a wedding dress instead

I dragged 40 pounds of books over to Pulp Fiction on Main St. yesterday, only to have them buy two titles, basically reducing my trip to $8 for an hour’s work. Boo. Then, on the long walk home, after a lovely streetside conversation with BJ, one of my cart wheels snapped off. Double boo. Luckily, after about half a mile of unsuccessfully attempting to drag a broken cart, some very nice guy on a bicycle pulled up and said, “Did you lose a wheel? Yeah, that’s ruined. Hold on, stay here, you going far? I’ll give you a ride home.”, spun away, then came back and picked me up in a big shiny jeep with a canadian flag on the back. (Turned out to be Oliver’s neighbor, because this city is small like that.)

So that was my tiny, merry adventure, and once again, like many of them, it involved hopping into a car with a total unknown. Thank you random man, for making my day so much better!

New score – Jhayne: 1. Stranger Danger: 0. Win.

The other exciting thing that happened yesterday was that I recieved my very first HST return. Not a huge chunk of money, not even remotely enough to get me in the clear, but enough that I’ve been able to kill some of my debts. I paid off the $70 I owed on taxes, set aside what I owe Karen, and half of what I owe Paula, put some cash towards my EI debt, and today I’m paying off the ICBC transit tickets someone put in my name while I was in Montreal, so I can continue working on getting a driver’s licence. Sounds mundane, perhaps, but it feels bloody brilliant all the same.

the future as sexy

Ed and I have made a new futurism community, techno_fetish, for scrying the internet for morsels of knowledge and skirting the singularity.

Drop by with whatever’s new, whatever’s neat. Think DiePunyHumans, think cyberpunk. So far I’ve been cheerfully using it as a tab-dump. We’re looking for information, science of all kinds, gadgets of interest and critters that fascinate.