Like Deni Bonet, I can't seem to manage to get arrested. No, I don't have pictures from Canadian immigration or U.S. customs in Toronto. Maybe if I'd tried to "declare" half a pound of cannabis, I could have gotten arrested for a false customs declaration, and gotten to skip a day of work. The truth is that I only bought a beer on the flight back to Newark, and by then we were over U.S. airspace.

Hmm, Blogger is tagging my posts on West Coast time, because they are all three hours behind. I'll have to look into fixing that.

Regarding the trip, however: "Victory!" "Tricky Dick" does it! My trip to Toronto wasn't for naught. The industry association's research committee to which we presented, discussed our methodology after we left, and approved it. Now our stat model and SQL database are into the loop for the computer programmers. My analytics department will need to fill in a few holes in the database, with surrogate regressions for similar demos/regionality, etc., but that won't hold up the programming aspect, because the majority of the database is already there, and its structure won't change with any additional data to plug holes.

Actually, I didn't provide any false answers to questions I got during my portion of the presentation, so I'm not really a Nixon-type, lying then stating: "I am not a crook!" But I'd rather be called "Tricky Dick" than "Slick Willie," when it comes right down to lying U.S. presidents. "Tricky Dick" has a better ring to it.

Do I sound cynical? I am. I'm a tail-end baby boomer. We haven't seen it all, but we've seen enough, and we still have 15-20 years to retirement, assuming we can retire at roughly the age our parents did, which I think unlikely. I pretty much have approached retirement with the attitude that Social Security will no longer be around when it comes my time to collect it, even though I've already paid heftily into it for 25+ years, and even if it is still around when I retire, it might pay the grocery bill for a week.

Alright, enough on that tangential topic. I need to stay awake enough to pick up Steve when he calls to say he's gotten back. Hope his cell phone hasn't lost all charge by now, and if it does, he has the change or credit card to use a pay phone to call me. There still are pay phones at train stations.

Must stay awake . . . dunno how, but must do it for another few hours until I pick up my guy and get him home safely.