OH.....CANADA.

Best Buy, eh? Picked up my new Canon across the border. Out of boredom mostly...How come our Best Buy uniforms don't have US flags on the sleeve? I thought we were supposed to be patriotic.

I've been in Toronto, Canada for the last few days. Most of my friends have pretty negative connotations of Canada and Canucks. I personally, have never had beef with them. In fact, all my experiences with Canada has been pretty good. It's a beautiful country with a lot of variety in their landscapes. (But y'all are missing, like, a warm place.) And the people are really nice and hard working. I work with a lot of different vendors in Canada with pretty good results. Anyway, the main purpose of the trip was to visit my grandparents who retired in Scarborough, a mainly Asian-Indian populated suburb 30 mins outside of downtown Toronto.
My grandfather has Parkinson's and is being looked after by my Grandmother alone so its pretty rough. We try and go up as often as possible to help out. My gramps is in a really good senior citizen home. You spend 4 days with people who are dying and it really changes your perspective on life. You start asking yourself grandiose questions like "what are you working for?"..."what's the point of all this?"...shit like that. And you wonder how you yourself will go. Or want to go. In a senior citizen home, you get to see every single possibility. Its a tough choice that probably for the better, we don't have a say in.
Other than that, I learned how to play Mah Jong from my grandmother. Nothing like the age old ritual of passing a vice from one generation to the next. Its really addictive. Like Poker, but WAY more complicated. The challenge is now finding people in NY that play also. I snagged one of my gramps extra sets of Mah Jong tiles so if you're game let me know. Also got a new digital camera to replace my Sony. Sony digital cameras really really suck. Mostly in the ease-of-use department. I used to have a Canon that I loved back when 3 megapixels was the shit....so I went back to Canon and I immediately fell in love all over again. Sony's are like the Windows of the camera world while Canon's are like Macs. (Funny thing is, Sony execs are reading that and not realizing it is in fact, an insult.) I came across another grandiose conundrum when trying to figure out how to shoot my digital camera for the blog. My mind got all MC Eschered out and I decided to forget it. So here, I got this one. I highly recommend it.

My gramps. (He strong. It's where I get my confidence from.)

Like Poker...but...thicker. And considerably harder to read.

These helped to kill the time. World Series of Poker on the PSP is like cocaine...along with the Crackberry, I was pretty jacked up.

Oh and one more weird thing. We did this ad for one our clients, Starter, (a division of Nike) a while back. It was a ridiculous rush job...like ONE day to shoot, retouch, layout and upload a billboard ad. I just remember being so glad it was over and done with. Lo and behold as I'm driving in from Toronto Airport, I see it! I must say, even though the billboard is pretty remedial in design, it's kinda cool to know some shit you had your hand is being witnessed by millions of hockey fans everyday.

Sometimes, design doesn't have to be great. It just has to be done. (But for real, Jiffy Storage even looks OK in comparision. Damn...)