Blind Date

A friend, "Ashley" the Slore, made this video, entitled 'Blind Date' for a sweet Dorito's contest. Look closely and you may recognize her as Abogado the Russian Superman from our 2009 Halloween bash. And if that's any indication of her creativity, you know the video will be bad ass.

The goal of the Doritos contest, aptly named Doritos Viralocity, is to have your video go "viral". There are some serious prizes awarded to videos that rack up the most points.

Top prize is $100,000 cash, and if your video surpasses the 10 million point max threshold, you win a bonus of $150,000. Points are accumulated through Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Stumble, Reddit, Youtube and a bunch of others.

There's still time to enter a video of your own for a chance to win big bucks. There's even cash prizes for any video ranking from 2nd to 344th place - In other words, the losers. Can't handle being a loser? Not feeling up to the challenge? Go have a nap. Then come back, check out my friend's video, and I guarantee* you'll laugh.

*Disclaimer - "guaranteed laugh" includes smiling, staring blankly, choking on a foot long hot dog, or shutting your computer down.

FAIL

I have failed.

And yet, I'm somehow okay with that. Why? Because while trying to be green, I got me a lot of green! Our Home Energy Audit was completed not too long ago. Last week the government finally got around to mailing out the last cheque.

And today I finally got around to updating my blog.

Thanks to Energuy Canada Ltd., who completed my audit, I successfully qualified for an ecoEnergy Retrofit Grant. "Successful." Now there's a word I'm not often associated with.

The original energy audit stated our house, built in 1939, rates 35 out of 100, sitting nicely below the 1939 average of 44. We were a troll under a bridge, staring up at the 44 enviously. In other words, on the mushroom scale, we were a lug nut. Whatever that means.

First came the notice from Energuy Canada. (Check out their website. I went to college with one of the owners, and designed the triple logo.) Their letter included an awesome EnerGuide/Natural Resources of Canada sticker to affix to our electrical panel. And I'd like to point out that stickers are the best thing ever. I still have my sticker album from when I was 8. It's full of puffies, fuzzies, and scratch 'n sniffs, which I may or may not have spent too much time sniffing. Which is why I often run off on tangents. Like this one.

Moving on...

Had we successfully implemented all of the recommendations, we could have reduced our energy consumption by 24% and increased our home's energy efficiency rating to 51. Our new EnerGuide number is significantly higher than our old, at 47. But it's still four percentage points shy of our goal, and 28 below Ontario's new-home average of 75.

Where we failed was a broken window. The first auditor (from a different company) failed to notice that it was leaking worse than a paper roof, and even told us that it did not require replacement.

But that point is moot, as the next thing to arrive was a juicy cheque from the Federal Government for $1,890 followed by a matching cheque from the Provincial Government for a grand total of $3,780. Which will all be spent on scratch 'n sniffs.