Moving With Room to Spare

Mammoth Moving Company

In order to make my move last week as smooth as possible, I needed to rent a moving truck. I had planned on getting a 10- or 15-foot truck so that I could do the move all in one shot, and made the reservation accordingly. However, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, the rental company was able to take the reservation, but they weren’t able to hold the reservation. So, I arrived at the truck rental place and they had no clue who I was or why I was there. (Hint: I wanted a truck.)

Well, after some head scratching and obscenity sharing behind the counter, they came to the conclusion that all of the 10- and 15-foot trucks were rented, and all they had left was a 24-foot truck. Doing some quick math in my head, I realized that the truck was probably two times larger than what I needed, but it should work out. I was not ready for Big Bertha, though.

The woman escorted me out to the truck and started it up. It took two people – armed with flags, mind you – to back the truck out of its holding cell and get it prepped for me. There it was — a 24-foot dock height diesel GMC C7500 truck, complete with two steps to get into the cab, and a GVW of 26,000 pounds. (Apparently, that’s the maximum weight for a class D license. One pound more would require me to attend trucking school.) There is nothing like overkill for moving a small amount of stuff.

Long story short, it was fun to drive around and see the tops of the SUVs, and even more fun to drive a vehicle with air brakes, but I think I’m all set with dock height trucks for the near future.

The House Always Wins

Seneca Niagara Casino Logo A few friends and I wanted to try our hands at the casino tables this past weekend, so we headed to Niagara Falls and the newly constructed Seneca Niagara Casino. It had been a while since I was in a casino, so it was a cool refresher of just how riveting the whole environment is. Lots of glitz, lots of people, and lots of money traveling from people’s wallets to the casino vault. Yes, the house always wins.

However, I was most entertained by the people who were completely stone-faced at the slot machines. There they were, with their little frequent gambler cards plugged into the machines and attached to their hips by curly cords, just hitting “bet one” and “spin” over and over and over again. (I think pulling the slot lever is half the fun, but apparently that’s too old school for these seasoned slot machine pros.) One guy won 600 credits – about $150 on a quarter slot – and barely moved a muscle on his face. Now that’s excitement.

Anthony, one of the guys who went, taught the rest of us how Craps works (somewhat), which has got to be one of the more confusing – but fun – table games. As a matter of fact, I think it’s more fun when you have no idea what’s going on. We just kept moving our money around the table, following the other players who seemed to know what they were doing. We fit in just fine!

Big Mac Index

Italians like their coffee strong and their currencies weak. That, at least, is the conclusion one can draw from their latest round of grumbles about Europe’s single currency. But are the Italians right to moan? Is the euro overvalued?

The Economist‘s Big Mac index (see table below) suggests they have a case: the euro is overvalued by 17% against the dollar. How come? The euro is worth about $1.22 on the foreign-exchange markets. A Big Mac costs €2.92, on average, in the euro zone and $3.06 in the United States. The rate needed to equalise the burger’s price in the two regions is just $1.05. To patrons of McDonald’s, at least, the single currency is overpriced.

The Big Mac index, which The Economist has compiled since 1986, is based on the notion that a currency’s price should reflect its purchasing power. According to the late, great economist Rudiger Dornbusch, this idea can be traced back to the Salamanca school in 16th-century Spain. Since then, he wrote, the doctrine of purchasing-power parity (PPP) has been variously seen as a “truism, an empirical regularity or a grossly misleading simplification.”

Big Mac Index

Source: The Economist

Language Skills Improving

After a day in Venezia and a day in Ferrara, I must admit that our Italian language skills are improving a bit! This language education via immersion is paying off. For starters, people used to ask us if we had a lighter and we would try our best to answer in Italian, probably saying something like “yes, I will shave your goat.” But now, we are even better and can respond with “yes, I will light your goat on fire.”

Seriously, though, I conversed entirely in Italian with one of the tourist board people (she did not speak 700 words a minute like most of the locals) and I walked out with a map and a lot of information, so I’m guessing I asked for the right things. (And no goats were harmed in the process.)

Venezia and Ferrara were both wonderful, and Aaron and I are trying to figure out what to do for our last night here in Bologna. Tomorrow afternoon we head off to Milano to wrap up our trip, so this will probably be the last post from abroad. The whole experience is passing by all too quickly!