A strange and slightly unsettling day

As I said, a strange and slightly unsettling day. I slept really well – back in the basement – and awoke just as Mrs. Ottawacker was returning from her early morning trip to burn cash, otherwise known as taking the car in for its service. This has been precipitated by the recent upturn in weather, and the arrival of the sun, which is currently shining up above us as if it had never been away, means it is time to remove the winter tyres from the car and put on the summer ones. Oh yes, the joys of living in an Arctic climate.
 
After Ottawacker Jr. had left for school, the first of the phone calls arrived. There is a problem with the ABS sensor on your car – that is why all of the warning lights are on. I know of the importance of warning lights; one goes off in my head every time I see the words “Bank Street Hyundai” appearing on my phone screen. “We don’t have it in stock,” said the annoyingly upbeat voice, “so we’ll have to order it in. That’s a good thing,” added the annoyingly upbeat voice, “because we can put on the new tyres you will need to purchase, as the ones we have here [we store our tyres at the dealership] are rather bald.”
 
As if that was not enough, there also appeared a long list of other things that seem to have gone wrong with the car. You might remember that we had a series of incidents with the dealership earlier in the year, which left us both impecunious and irritated. The same feeling – that a 2019 Hyundai is nothing but a money pit – resurfaced today. Maybe we should just bite the bullet and buy a new car. Or find a local Central European car theft ring and put our name down for an opportunity.
 
After the call, I walked up to Second Cup on Bank Street to meet a former colleague (Wafa), who was back in Ottawa for a quick break from her glamorous lifestyle as a UN consultant in Abu Dhabi. I waited outside in the sunshine while she made her way through the chronic Bank Street traffic (see blip). It was good to see her, and we hatched plans for my getting rich on lucrative UAE contracts. As far as I can tell, there are only a few flies in that particular ointment. First, I am far too lazy to get onto any government lists (plus it takes an eternity for any applications to come to fruition, c.f., my recent attempts with the Government of Canada); second, all the kind of work I do is being outsourced to AI bots with names like Omega Six; third, I am not especially good at dealing with people who consistently move the goalposts; and, four, I have little desire to be summoned to the Middle East to explain why paragraph 9 of the PowerPoint slide is indented 0.24mm to the right. But it was useful, and I have several ideas to help my future domination of the world’s economy.
 
Home, where I did very little. I have a series of stomach cramps occurring which leave me somewhat incapacitated. I suspect that I am having a little bit of a diverticulosis flare up. The protestant in me suspects that it is caused by the visit to the Shawarma Palace the other day. (I knew I’d pay for it, in more ways than one.)
 
I might just have gas. Today is the general election day, which is as good a reason as any to fart, and while the results haven’t come in yet (I write this at 5:40pm), the general consensus is that Carney will win. I hope so – the idea of the Trump-Poilievre nexus is too horrible to contemplate – and I hope we begin the long process of cutting a number of ties with the US. It’s impossible to contemplate a time when we can trust them again. I mean, why negotiate and sign a trade agreement when in four years time it’ll potentially be worthless. Best to deal with countries that understand we no longer live in the Middle Ages. Anyway, only time will tell.
 
I’m also still coming to terms with what happened in Vancouver yesterday at the Filipino Lapu Lapu Day celebration. It seems as if the perpetrator was mentally ill (although I suspect you could make that argument about all perpetrators of violent crimes) and it had nothing to do with terrorism. While this is a blessing, it won’t bring back the 11 dead. It seems to be a truism that violent crime doesn’t happen where you are – so, this is too close to home and too upsetting to be not taken seriously. Let’s hope it is a one-off.