Even Toronto has its problems. While the weather there was just lovely, there was a small difficulty I didn’t know about yesterday — a 2-week-old garbage strike. The lead story in today’s Toronto papers was that the provincial legislature had been called back into session to pass emergency legislation to end the strike.

While I was wandering around downtown Toronto today, I noticed that all of the trash receptacles were overflowing. At least it wasn’t too hot (though apparently last week was bad).

I’m home now, where it is definitely Too Hot. As we were landing at 7pm, they announced the temperature as 94; it’s now down to 77, and so we’ve got the windows open and the fan at full blast. And we’re waiting for PG&E to come and figure out why our lights dim for a second every time our neighbor’s air conditioner starts up, which is not supposed to happen.

I saw, yet again, how inconsistent security is on airplanes these days. On my flight from San Jose to Chicago yesterday, any time the cockpit crew needed to use the lavatory, the flight crew used a cart to block access to the front galley. Coming home today was a different story — near the end of the flight, the first officer spent at least five minutes in the front galley, with nothing between him and the passengers; in fact, they didn’t even ask us to stay seated while he was out there.

We were planning to have some friends over for a July 4th barbecue, and needed to decide what to make. We thought chicken breast would be a good choice for the main dish, but I wanted to make something more interesting than plain chicken. We have a kitchen full of cookbooks, so I did the obvious thing: I sat down at the computer and typed “chicken breast barbecue recipe marinade” into the Google toolbar on my browser.

3 seconds later, we had a bunch of recipes to choose from, and we picked this one because Diane likes cilantro. And it was a good choice — everyone seemed to enjoy it (and most people had seconds).

But that was last week. Now I’m in Toronto, after evading the wrath of Canadian Immigration — I must have answered a question wrong, because I had to go talk to a second agent before being allowed into the country. I suspect “consult” was the magic word; I won’t make that mistake again. But the extra interview only took an extra 90 seconds, so it wasn’t all that bad.

Toronto looked lovely in the taxi on the way downtown; as we drove by the lake, there were people enjoying the beautiful weather and sunset. Me? I’m in my hotel room, looking at a screen and keyboard, waiting for a phonecall telling me my IBM colleagues are here so we can meet in person.