Beware the law of unintended consequences...

A few random thoughts today:

I peeled a carrot with a spooon last week. Worked better than expected.

I recently mentioned that someone installed 3 flood lights in the alleyway/arch that leads to my apartment door. In theory, this was done to ward off crime, or maybe make is less convenient for the homeless people who regularly dig through the garbage. As it turns out, the homeless people really like the lights. Since the alleyway is now so bright, they have no problem digging through the trash at midnight and being able to see everything they are picking at. Last night was the second time this week I've come home at night to people digging through the garbage.

Did you know the value of the US dollar is tanking? Unless you follow the financial markets, you probably wouldn't. Not unless you live in a city like New York, Washington DC, or a list of other touristy attraction-esc cities. The dollar is doing so bad right now that the canadian dollar is almost at parity. This is a currency that calls its 1 dollar coin a "Looney." Ridiculous.

The point of this is that because you don't know, you don't constantly worry about how much more broke you just became every day. In Kiev, almost every bank has a display letting you know the current exchange rate from local UAH to USD, Pound, and Euro. Last month, every day the value of the local currently slowly lost money to every other currency - which totally sucks for the locals who have most of their major bills like home and car loans written out in DOLLARS even though they are paid in HRYVNIA.

Oh, and as for my report writing .....I'm averaging about 3500 to 4500 words per day of typing. Basically I'm writing 90% of a report each day. I've got 3 more full reports to write, and 2 half reports. After that, its just going through them all and dealing with page numbers and loose ends. No weekend for me this week.