Ehlana and Ethan:
Happy 25th Birthday, Adaira Reynolds!
We don’t actually have a lot of news to offer so far today, but then this is an early update while we have a little break between adventures and work. Today, it feels a bit strange to us to be visiting our third Province so far on this trip. Yes, these are also the three smallest Provinces, but the Maritimes region also has some of the longest colonial history in North America. Ethan is having the most fun with the ongoing, daily history lessons that are included in a lot of our sightseeing, but everything is special getting to do this with our best friends, Cassie, and Michael.
As for today-so-far, we’re getting similar weather to home with a high that will flirt with ninety and some off-and-on rain. The weather isn’t getting in the way of our work or fun. We’ve had two meetings and a working lunch already today; we’re in-transit to a work site visit now as we’re writing this; and we’re booked for the rest of the day with a mix of work and sightseeing and play time. We’ll share at least some of those stories with you tomorrow, but we don’t plan on doing any of this kind of computing for the rest of our Friday. Along with our work this morning, our top sightseeing stop was Science East – a science center housed in a historic jail. We didn’t have time to explore everything, but had fun with what we did do and see; and that will be what a lot of our sightseeing will be like as we fit in that fun with the work that actually makes the trip possible!
The rest of our own news can wait for the next report. On the world news front, the NATO summit has wrapped up; a lot of money was spent to put on that show; and nothing good came out of the meetings. As always, the leaders talked big; changed nothing; and did more harm than good while trying to show off for the media and masses. For the record, most people in the world don’t care at all about these meetings because everyone knows it is just theatre while they also hope that no harm will be done by those leaders. That’s a hope too far, but we’re optimists; and will hope for the best too. We aren’t getting that in the Middle East or Ukraine today, but then we haven’t spent as much time looking up the world news; so maybe we’ve just missed out on the good news – or not. Instead of looking into the war stories; let’s switch a bit and write about economics from the perspective of American visitors to Canada. The exchange rate for money is certainly in our favor because the current rate is around seventy-one cents to buy each Canadian dollar – though let’s also add that our family businesses have significant financial interests denominated in Canadian dollars already. Costs of everything can get challenging to calculate for a lot of reasons that start with measurements in metric instead of U.S. Standards, but we’re having fun with the math – and the shopping too! Since I did suggest writing about this instead of the wars, though, the example I’ll use for expenses will be fuel. Michael needed to fill the van this morning, and local prices for gasoline is around $1.75 per liter. That translates to around $4.90 per U.S. gallon – and around $1.50 per gallon higher than at home. As with the United States, prices in Canada have a wide range from high to low across the country, so that difference isn’t shocking to us, but it is something that a lot of Americans don’t think about that does have a significant impact on all lower-income people in those higher-price regions. That doesn’t mean that everything is more expensive here, but since fuel is needed to transport everything; it does have a major impact on other regional prices.
That’s all we have time for today since we’re nearly to our next work stop; so we’ll hope that you’re ‘now’ is awesome too as we get back to living the adventures we’ll write about tomorrow.
Until next time, live with love, fellow Magi of the Light!
