Next Explorer Breaks Everything. Brutal. Let’s hope a way is found to overturn the Eolas patent, since they don’t seem to be ready to license on reasonable terms.
Archive for November 12th, 2003
Fife 2000 Mendocino Uplands Zinfandel
Man it’s been a brutal week. And it’s only Wednesday!
I’m unwinding with a glass of Fife’s 2000 Mendocino Uplands Zinfandel. This is a beautiful bottle. Big floral nose. Dark, deep red color. Raspberry jam and black current on the tongue. Long, smooth finish with just a bit of tannin to keep it interesting.
The wine isn’t pure zin. It’s got about 9% each of carignane and petite syrah. The carignane gives a bitter edge that really brings out the black current in the wine.
$34.95 at the LCBO Vintages shop.
As jokes go, this is a pretty good one…
I got a letter in the mail today from Human Resources and Development Canada. That’s a government department, for you non-Canadians, that deals with training and pensions and stuff like that. Anyway, the letter I got was my Canada Pension Plan Statement of Contributions. I’ve been contributing to CPP since 1982, except for the six years where my income was wholly earned in the US. And since 1987 I’ve been contributing the maximum allowable, with the exception of 1991 when I quit my job and started a company that went belly up a little while later.
So, I’ve been a pretty good little beaver about making my contributions to CPP. And if I continue to earn at my current level, and contribute at my current level, 26 years from now, when I turn 65, according to this letter I just received, I could receive a retirement pension of …. (drumroll please) … $489.64 per month. And if I was to keel over dead right now, tomorrow each of my kiddies would get $186.71 per month, and my darling wife would get $293.78. So, in our case that amounts to $1600.75 per month. Not sure if that’s tax free or not.
The irony of this is that my US social security (on contributions I made for just the seven years that I lived there) would pay the wife and children around $2400/month. The reason for this, of course, is that the maximum annual social security contribution in the US is around C$4200, versus the maximum annual CPP contribution of around $1675.
When all’s said and done, though, I prefer the Canadian system. At the end of the day, I don’t believe that either CPP or Social Security are going to be solvent when I retire, so might as well pay the least in that I possibly can.
That’s our social safety net. Large weave… lots of holes.
