I just think it's funny that xe.com puts up a little notifier whenever the Canadian dollar overvalues the U.S. dollar and says it's a "rate explanation". I'm pretty sure it's a "rub it in your face" explanation. Jerks. They should have one on the euro. It would say,

Rate Explanation

This rate means that the Euro is worth twice as much as your dollar, 2 and a half times as much as the Canadian dollar, 3 times as much as the Australian dollar, and Hey We in Europe rock!

Anyway, I'm not sure what international exchange rates mean anyway, but I do know that I don't like what I've been hearing on the news lately…

DK

By now you should know that every year around july, I meet with my friends from Camp Good Times for our annual Pedicure. At first I did this as a joke but then I realized that it was a really good idea for a number of reasons:

1. Get to hang out with friends from camp good times
   
2. Foot care, of neglected by males, especially good for a guy who wears sandals nearly year-round
   
3. Get to be "pampered".
   
4. I deserve it.
   
5. You'll understand when you check out these pictures of my freshly "cured" feet. They're so smooth!
   

To make matters worse, I mean more interesting, I always feel compelled to blog about it. But since I know you love feet, I'm sure you won't mind.

Now don't get worried, I'm not going to go get a manicure, start watching pilates tapes, or buy the Sex and the City DVD when it comes out. I'm a man's man if ever there was one. I just like a good lemon scrub every now and again.

To make things even sweeter, this year's was free thanks to a gift card for a pedicure from the students in the college group I lead. See, they really get me, although they don't read this blog. That's probably a good thing J

Anyway, until next year, here are the feet:

In all their glory. You can see my left middle toe got a bit crushed this year. The lady who did my pedicure said I had nice feet!

Audrey came up to Vancouver just for our annual visit.

Rachel's nifty set of toes.

This is my "sexy feet" pose. I always thought I could be a foot model…

In other news, I just realized that I'm instituting a 5 picture-per-entry maximum rule. So if you wanna see the other ones you'll have to check the google gallery I guess. Not pictured, Jane's pedicure, Dane and Ben.

How's that for a Stats suck Sunday Brody?

Digital cameras that take 3 shots per second are a little bit of a new experience too. When you don't have to pay for film, you just shoot away. That can get a little out of control, I snapped 370 shots at the lunch, which leads to about an hour of photo throwaways later in the evening. Worth it to learn, still better to be able to get the good shots the first time round. I don't know if I'm allowed to take pictures of my friends and then post them on my blog, but here are some of those below!

Photo Lessons Re-Learned:

• When you shoot white backgrounds with direct sunlight behind you overexpose or everything turns blue-ish.
  
• Apparently Google Picasa knows how to fix this.
  
• All the really cool little settings on a camera like "portrait lady" and "sports guy" and "landscape" are worthless.
  
• At 1/500s most things freeze but not everything, especially not jump ropes.
  

gold star for buddy.

something about this photo is right for me. Even though mom is out of focus and kid isn't looking at the camera and dad has a weird look on his face. I dunno, it just works for me for some reason. I've come back to it 4 times now and I like it.

He's so expressive.

note: light source behind photographer not subject

Btw – if you're looking at these on my picasa page, if you full screen your browser (f11) they get bigger

In the meantime it will be a fun distraction. Here are some more. I had to run down to the store to get a case, so I didn't make it to beach in time to get shots with any light left. In my defense it was past 9:30, so I'm pretty encouraged. Just getting my feet wet, like that duck.

The duck makes a strong argument to buy a zoom lens. Anyone have $500 I can borrow?

There's this much light at 9:50. Who can complain?

no tripod. No light. 3 seconds. Not good, but not a bad place to start.

This is my ride… Yes that's a pride sticker AND a "one less car" sticker. What can I say, I bought it from a tall hippie lesbian.

- dan

I'm taking a brief moment away from an extraordinarily busy day to blog because due to a combination of tiredness and – well – tiredness, I'm pretty much completely brain dead.

And I'm not saying that to be dramatic or funny, I really am brain dead. Like easily the most brain dead i've been in a long time. It's funny, I'll probably say something stupid. There's a fan blowing down on my head so that's kind of weird. Maybe that's making me more feeling goofy.

I feel kind of like a zombie, which reminds me of a dream I had a few nights ago, where I was part of an organization that hunted zombies. Apparently in this dream the world had been overtaken by zombies, and so the people in my crew would go out once the sun went down (zombies only come out at night) on motorcycles and try to find the zombies, and then lure them into our town square. It's important to note that these were the slow kind of zombies, not the fast ones like on 28 days later or something. These were like the ones in the black and white movies in the 30s and 40s. You know, they were all like, "Brains! Brains!"

So then we would lure them into the town square, and there were six towers surrounding the town square. At the base of each tower was a door that we could drive our motorcycles through. Once we were through the doors would drip and slide down shut. From there we would all climb to the top of our towers, and spend the night taking out zombies with sniper rifles (you have to shoot a zombie in the head or it doesn't die).

The zombies were drawn to some kind of "brain bait" we had in the center of the town square, and I guess there were a lot of them. I think our goal was to eradicate them.

My computer is crashing is some kind of unilateral shutdown. I think this day is meant to be over. Of to bed, I think.

- dan

I love this song.  For obvious reasons.  (Note, this video does acknowledge the existence of sex and may not be appropriate for people who should not know that sex exists.)

YouTube – American Boy – Estelle Feat. Kanye West

BOOOYAH!!!!!!!

Counting Crows Rocket to stardom album, "Recovering the Satellites" has been on my mind ever since I read on Sara Bareilles Youtube page that she considers it perhaps a "perfect album".

No doubt.  It really is one of the best albums of all time, I think.   A nice retrospective for the day.  If you could go back and listen to something from the "old days" that you just know was great, what would it be?

BTW, if you haven't had some quality time with Sara yet, you should.  She brings something new and fresh to the table, easily my favorite artist of 2007.

p.s. 10,000 extra points for the cool title update!