Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

Yesterday’s word:

histrionic \his-tree-ON-ik\, adjective:1. Of or relating to actors, acting, or the theater; befitting a theater; theatrical.2. Overly dramatic; deliberately affected.

The kids have done a fabulous job of lobbying to go to the movies to see Pirates of the Caribbean. The started off by talking about it all the time for about two weeks before its opening and telling me how much they would like to see it. Once it opened, they would point out any advertising they saw about it and remind me that it is now playing. And Morgan seemed to continually be asking me, “Will we be going to the movies today?” I would usually answer, “We are definitely going to see it but we need to work it into all the other things we want to see and do, and since we can go to the movie anywhere we will work it in when a time slot opens up. Well, today I finally broke down and succumbed to the two very experienced negotiators.

But first, we made our way to the Royal Canadian Mint for a tour of the facility that generates all the coin currency for Canada. (Before I continue I should let you know that they did not allow people to take pictures on our tour so there is not as much to "show" you as normal. Thanks a lot mint people!) There is also a Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa which was build in 1908 and it was the only mint until the mint in Winnipeg was build in 1975. When the second mint came online they decided to only use the Ottawa mint to do the designs for all coins made by the mint in addition to creating high quality specialty coins for collectors. But Winnipeg does all the “hard labour” and the facility pumps out 15,000,000 coins a day! They not only make all the standard currency coins for this country, but they also create coins for 60 other countries including Australia, Norway, Costa Rica, Israel, Fiji, India, Turks and Caicos, New Zealand and many more. I was surprised to hear that the Winnipeg mint typically achieves a 99% defect-free production. However, that means that approximately 1% of all coins created here contain a defect. It way not sound like much until you consider that it works out to about 150,000 defective coins every day! Believe it or not, that is world class quality as it is not easy hammering out perfect coins when you are smashing metal against metal and you only have one hit per coin. This reminds me of a story I heard when FedEx was one of my customers. A representative from FedEx did a presentation and one of the statistics they mentioned was that they aim for 100% of all packages to be delivered on time. He said they typically reach about 99.9% success. This sounded pretty dang good until he said that they deliver 20 million packages a day and that 0.1% translates into 20,000 unhappy customers every day! It’s tough to be in a business where 99.9% is just not good enough. I also heard a couple of other interesting facts on our mint tour. I did not realize that the Royal Canadian Mint only creates coins. All the paper money in Canada is created by Canadian Bank Note. It makes sense now that I think about it but I guess I had not really thought about it before. Also, about 5 years ago Canada changed the way they create some of the Canadian coins. One of the negative side effects is that some coins have trouble being accepted by certain vending machines. It turns out that there are apparently 3 main properties that are used by vending machines to detect the authenticity of a coin. One, is it’s size, two, is its weigh, and three is its electromagnetic signature. So when the mint makes any changes to the metals that are used in a coin, they spend a lot of time trying to ensure that the above 3 properties are retained as best they can. Now that has got to be a challenge. By the way, if anyone else out there can fill in some details on what vending machines really use to detect which coins have been inserted, do share with us by leaving a comment on the blog.

The kids had some fun in the main area where they had a bar of gold on display that was worth $330,000 (CDN) and you were welcome to pick it up to see what it felt like. Personally I thought it felt rather restrictive given the chain attached to the bottom and the armed security guard standing beside it. They also had a neat little contraption that would tell you what you would be worth if you were made of different types of coins. That seems like a whole lot better way of dealing with getting on a scale, eh?

After that is was off to see the previously mentioned Pirates of the Caribbean. The kids and I really enjoyed it but Chantal was not as enthusiastic about it. One thing that made the movie less enjoyable to watch was the fact that we were watching it in a meat locker! It was freezing! Morgan was actually sitting on top of me trying to stay warm! But the part that I liked best about the movie is that I will no longer have to listen to questions from the kids about when we will be going.

On our way home we stopped by an RV store to pick up a few maintenance items we require. So far so good on issues with the MoHo but yesterday I uncovered our first item that requires more than a trivial fix. I am hoping not much more. Originally I thought that a brake light bulb had burned out but after having tried two separate new brake light bulbs with still no brake light coming on, it looks like it might be a loose wire issue. I am not liking the sound of that but with any luck there will turn out to be a practicable solution. I’ll keep you posted on how things go as I try to deal with this.

Today also marked the first day since before Chicago that I can remember where I didn’t end up with a completely sweaty shirt by the end of the day. A pleasant change yet also an indicator of the great sunny weather we have been experiencing. Thank goodness it is only a brake light, and not the air conditioner, that is malfunctioning.