moved in!

I'm all moved in. It only took me 90 chilled minutes of unloading, planning, rearranging, etc. My housemate got me an Ikea shelving unit with 12 square compartments (4 rows x 3 columns), and now I'm trying to find a logical way to organize my garments. I've also installed a plastic coat-hanger on the wall.

I really like the place, and if I can negotiate the rent down to $800 or so, I may consider staying longer than just 4 months.

To Do:
* get some bookshelves (hopefully cheap, e.g. from someone's garbage)
* my bed is a size Double, but I bought Queen-sized sheets, which therefore look crumpled. The difference is only ~15cm in each dimension, so I'm trying to come up with something for stuffing the sheets with. Any ideas?

Canadian English

washroom(CA) = bathroom (US). When I hear "washroom", I instinctively think of "laundry room", and have so far failed to unlearn that.

The pronunciation of "ou/ow" is sometimes counterintuitive, e.g. "Howe" is [ha^w], "Lougheed" is [lo^whid], "Kelowna" is [kəlo^wna].

I met someone from Prince George, BC, and couldn't understand half of what he said. "Oh, he's Irish! Um, no he isn't. What the heck did he say??". Apparently, Atlantic accents sound even more Celtic.

The Canadian raising feels natural to me, as does the "eh?" (meaning "don't you think?"). "eh" (meaning "by the way") feels less natural (lesson).

Wikipedia tells me that the raising allows one to distinguish "writer" from "rider" (my gut says it's [rʌIɾər]/[ræIɾər] and [raIɾər] respectively), a distinction most US dialects do not have. I suspect that US ears can unconsciously get the intended meaning conveyed by a Canadian speaker but not US speakers (since US speech makes no distinction, i.e. leaves it ambiguous). Whether this ability to understand is due to exposure to Canadian speech or to some a priori linguistic plausibility is an interesting question.

Worst Captchas of All Time

Worst Captchas of All Time surely has some ideas for a SigBovik paper.