Could not for the life of me get to sleep last night! Read for a while, then tried putting on a story CD (James Lee Burke) but nothing worked, so I decided to go with the flow and finally just got up at 3 am.

There is nothing on tv at 3 am except crime shows on A&E (since when did crime become part of Arts and Entertainment??) or cooking shows on the Food Channel (fois gras at 3 am is not sleep inducing).

So I am sitting here thinking about things, some which I like and some which just piss me off...

On the piss off list, and I mean this literally, is piss. Why do people think the great outdoors is a toilet? I saw a guy uptown yesterday having a leak up against a building. Hello dumbass, we have indoor toilets in this country! What is wrong with you, were you raised by wolves? I found in my travels that a lot of the world believes this is okay behaviour, most offensive countries on the list are Germany and Scotland.

On the list of things I like is books on CD's. It evokes childhood memories of someone reading you a bedtime story. They are great in the car if you are doing a distance run, and although I admit that most nights I fall asleep listening to one, I don't fall asleep in the car - and that is a good thing, the roads are dangerous enough.

Which brings me back to the piss off list. Who taught these people to drive? I live on the west coast and yes sometimes it should be called the wet coast. We get a lot of rain and just recently we had a really great dump of snow. People here have a hard time driving in the rain, so why did I think they would be any better in the snow? Silly me. What was most frightening about our recent storm was how vulnerable our transportation infrastructure is. The buses were abandoned, the sky train malfunctioned, people left their cars where they got stuck, the airport did not function at all.

Things I like definitely include the New Year. Just think, you get a whole New Year, like a blank sheet of paper. It is time to be reborn, to start fresh, to do better, to be better. I love it, it is like a yearly redemption for the soul.

Something that really annoys me lately, since I am job hunting - is the amazing rudeness of companies that do not even acknowledge that you have applied. How hard is it to set up an auto response on email saying "hey thanks, we got it, yadda, yadda". I feel like they didn't even receive it, but then again if they did, and they read it and decided to not consider me, they could of at least said "hey thanks but you weren't quite what we were looking for"