Kilogram heavy.

We've been doing a lot of cooking lately. This weekend we used the the carrot pulp that we strained away from the carrot soup and made veggie fritters and carrot cakes. Nothing like adding some sugar and frying to make a healthy thing tasty. We picked up a last minute ingredient, oats, on the way home from meeting some friends downtown for dinner on Friday.

Me, sitting on the tram, not much else to talk about: "Oh, it's a kilogram. If feels heavy."

Tom: (Lisa Simpson-type voice that is apparently me when I say something dense) "'Kilo heavy!' That's going on the blog."

Well it's true. We are still pretty vague on metric and other conversions...and they warned us this was coming all the way back in 3rd grade, that we'd need to learn metric. But we just aren't thinking that way yet. Still.

And as for money, well we just used to think of the Australian dollar as funny money. No point in trying to transpose everything...if you need something, you buy it, there's not much you can do about the price, and it was hard to do in our heads anyway. As it stands now, 1 Australian dollar is worth $.87 in US currency. That's darn near the same. Let's not get into that silly old Australian dollar which we could have bought for $.63 on the day we decided to move here last October. It's going to bounce back. But for now, we more just think of everything as "kind of expensive".

Anyway, for the record...

1 mile = 1.6 kilometers - speed limits for "built up" areas (in town) is 50 kph, or about 30 mph. I am certain we could walk that fast. And I am beyond certain that it's easy to get a ticket here.

1 pound = .45 kilograms - we prefer to be weighed in kilos, the number means little to us and sounds comparatively low.

1 gallon = 3.76 liters - gas is currently $1.19/liter, so that's about $4.50 a gallon, yikes.

It still gives us shuddering chills to think we considered doing all this in Spanish.