Psychotic breaks and big box stores

So what have we learned in our travels today?

1. You don't fuck with Ottawas bus drivers. They will take you out and not give a shit. I noticed on the back of the bus they have a little sticker advising drivers to yield for buses when they pull out. What it should say is if you value your life and insurance premiums, you will yield because they aint stoppin' for no one.

2. Our Garmin (lovingly known as "the Bitch") seems to be having a small break with reality. A warning pops up now when we turn it on letting us know that the map we're using is out of date and we need to buy a new one. We laughed, figuring how much has Ottawa changed in the past 18 months.

Well, apparently enough to give the Bitch several psychotic breaks with reality when driving around town today. I swear to God, the bloody thing actually sounded frazzled. I think it will get us through the rest of the week without melting down, but I guess we'll have to look at updating it the next time we do any serious driving down south.

3. We did do some serious beating around today, catching up with a couple of Cathy's friends in town. And in our travels we noticed that, man, Ottawa has a lot of Big Box Lands. And they all look alike. Hell, they look like Stavanger Drive or Kelsey Drive or places I've seen in Edmonton. It's like there's a single prototype for what a Big Box Land must look like and they all must follow it.

Which is a bit of a pity, really. It's taken a bit of a bloom off of Ottawa for us. Oh, we're still doing our best to stimulate the local economy, but there's just something about all those big box stores and seeing all that farmland being plowed under for subdivisions that's kind of depressing. Although we're still trying to figure out where all the people are coming from. Is there a mass immigration to Ottawa that nobody has told us about?