I have discovered a new reason why Canada rocks, and it ranks right below universal health care in reasons to move here: Canadian Idol! That's right, instead of going cold turkey like all you American suckas, I have a whole new round of reality show goodness to see me through the summer. There's Canadian Idol on Mondays, and then there's Canada's Next Top Model on Wednesdays. (And if you thought Tyra liked her ribs, you should see Canada's version! She could fit BOTH Miss Jays under her muumuu in the promo I saw!)

So I watched tonight's Canadian Idol -- which is a carbon copy of American Idol, except that instead of Ryan Seacrest they have Ben Mulroney, who is the telegenic son of former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, so it's like if Ron Reagan Jr. hosted American Idol instead of a crappy talk show. And they have no Paula equivalent, because everyone else who mixes that many pills with that much booze is dead. But those aren't the only differences. I noticed Canadian Idol lacks some of AI's coldhearted cruelty -- like if the Canadians show you a little sad backstory on some teenager with a dream in her heart who sings while taking care of her ailing granny and whose father sold his teeth to buy her plane ticket to the auditions, you don't have to worry -- she's in. Whereas on AI, they'd occasionally pull the tugging-heartstrings fakeout. "She's just a poor kid with a dream ... that's not gonna come true! Sucks to be you!" Also on CA, and to me this speaks very highly of the quality of teenagers they grow up here, there's none of that backtalk. When the judges informed contestants that they were very, very bad singers, there was none of this, "You don't know NOTHIN'! I'm gonna be a STAR and then you're gonna be sorry!" They just cried a little and left, which I found very refreshing. The sense of entitlement among really awful singers is one of the more alarming aspects of AI, and I'm tempted to blame the well-intentioned but overboard self-esteem movement in American education.

I can only guess what surprises await on Canada's Next Top Model. Perhaps the models are not functionally illiterate, as they are in the U.S. version? Perhaps when they are told that ALL they have to do in a given week is memorize three lines of text, one of which is invariably "Easy, breezy, beautiful -- Cover Girl," they actually are able to accomplish the task? Ah, the suspense of reality TV -- thank you Canada!

I am not cut out for public transportation. I took the streetcar to work yesterday, and while it was nice to be able to sit and read the newspaper, what is a 20-minute car trip took an HOUR and I barely got to work on time. So I'll be investigating the parking options near the newspaper.

I am realizing the fundamental angst of copy editors is that no one will ever notice the mistakes you DO catch. Last night I changed a "bid her time" to "bide her time" and corrected the spelling of Louisville, Kentucky and made various and sundry other changes that saved the newspaper from complete humiliation (complete humiliation on page B-13, but still...). And no one will ever know. Of course, the slot editors (who are the top copy editors who check everything before it's final) noticed where I failed to put the right tag on a wire story, twice, and when I failed to lowercase chief executive officer. I'm beginning to see why most copy editors tend to be a tad grumpy.

I'm also learning why bad things happen to good wire stories. I had to cut about 75 percent of a story about a Florida lawyer being charged with fraud to fill some hole on a page. I don't feel like it was any great crime against journalism, since how much do Canadians really need to know about some Florida fraud case, but my apologies to Curt Anderson, AP writer, nevertheless. However I didn't just cut from the bottom up, and I did manage to keep in the detail that the lawyer allegedly paid his ex-wife's alimony with money that was supposed to go to asbestos victims. Doing my best to preserve wire-story integrity, one story at a time.

One thing that might tempt me back on to the streetcar is the transportation union leader's announcement, widely reported this morning, that streetcar, bus and subway operators don't have to and shouldn't confront people who don't pay their fares. This is part of some long-running union dispute about bus driver safety, but all I have to say is, God Bless Canada. Only here would it be official policy to not stop fare-skippers because it might lead to an unpleasant scene. If the price of a round-trip streetcar ride just dropped from $5.50 to zero, it might be worth my while to leave earlier for work.

I took a quick trip to D.C. (the other Washington, as it's called in the Evergreen State), and the first thing greeting me when I got off the plane was a McDonald's. Then, when I got into a taxi on the passenger side dashboard was a red-white-and-blue sticker that declared, "I AM COVERED IN THE BLOOD OF JESUS." Welcome back to the USA! Appropriately enough, the taxi driver belonged to the "Jesus, take the wheel" school of driving, as his hands were often both busy taking calls on his cell phone or changing the dial on the transistor radio he carried on his lap. (I want to write a hit song called "Jesus wants you to be an attentive driver and He says to steer into a skid.")

However, I arrived in one piece and got a chance to walk around the White House, which is always a nice antidote to cynicism. Because no matter how McCrazy and Jesus-Freaky America gets, there are always people taking pictures of the White House and the different monuments, and they're speaking a dozen different languages. And even if the current administration sometimes forgets the principles of democracy that these trappings of power represent, I think the tourists speaking Russian, Farsi and Chinese never will.

Later, I started my copy editing job and did my first act of violence to an AP story ... more to come on that.

One fun fact about my work training this week that I forgot to mention: I'm being trained by a Scotsman on how to use a crazily complicated system invented by the Danes. According to the Scotsman, it all makes sense in Danish. Unfortunately we're in Canada. So the tutorials consist a lot of the Scotsman explaining, for example, that "Unbind elements from articles/pages" means "delete," and saying, "Well, that's the Danes for ya," or if something freezes up, "Fockin' Danish!"

I feel like I've been given a tour of the sausage-making factory. I always knew a newspaper was wicked complicated to produce every day, but I knew it in a vague sort of way -- I write a story, and then a bunch of people do things to it (and hopefully don't screw it up too badly), and then my name shows up in the paper the next day. (Unless a copy editor erases my byline and then rewrites it without checking and replaces my last name with the name of the murder suspect in the story, thank you very much Charlotte Observer!!) Now I'm learning exactly what happens to a story behind the scenes -- the coding, the layout, today I even saw the room with the big computers where they transmit the stories to printing plants across the country, that was pretty cool. And you know what? I think I was happier thinking that magical fairies picked up my stories and spirited them to the printing plant on wings of gossamer newsprint. However, it's certainly a learning experience. Now if I could only speak Danish...

Well, I'm back in the laminated life again. I am the proud owner of a new ID badge, featuring a photo of me smiling far too widely. I wish I could master the art of not smiling in photographs -- I can't seem to help it, and when I suppress the instinct the photo comes out looking like I've just taken a heavy sedative. So I go with the grin. I am enjoying a whole luxurious week of training, which beats the five-minute "here's the printer... good luck" orientation I've gotten in previous jobs.

I obsessed over what to wear my first day, which is my nature. Since I'll be working with a cohort that includes several recent university graduates, I wanted to wear an outfit that sent the message, "While I am older and wiser and far more mysterious than you, as you can see I also have a devastating sense of style." I ended up wearing a lovely fitted light blue wool suit that said, "I shop at Ann Taylor." However that was fine, as apparently to this group, dressing up for your first day on the job means throwing on jeans and your cleanest golf shirt. Or, for the gals, how about a white wife-beater tank top over a red bra? (Of course, maybe she knows something about dressing to impress that I don't.) This is not an age thing, I don't think -- if anything I was more clothing-obsessed when I first started working after college than I am now.

Aside from my fashion statements, the other important question about this new job is, how is the Wonder Dog taking it? She seems a bit peeved, having gotten used to frequent walks and tummy rubs on demand while I worked from home. Of course, it is literally true to say she's taking the change lying down, since sleeping does occupy about 80 percent of her time. I think she'll be just fine.

Today I was watching The Price Is Right while folding laundry. Yes, it's an embracing-my-inner-housewife sort of day. Unfortunately my inner housewife is as slovenly as my outer housewife, so I'm here blogging instead. But I did get to thinking about what an amazing show The Price is Right is. It first aired in 1972, two years before I was born, so that's 34 years of Bob Barker and "Come on down!" Bob Barker looks fantastic for 114. I love the pure joy of the people who are chosen to come on down -- if you could just bottle the excitement and glee of that moment, Prozac would totally become obsolete. Even the showcase models who cavort with the brand new cars, hideous living room sets and grandfather clocks, harken back to a simpler time -- job qualifications being long legs, big smiles and bigger hair. I would love to spend a week on the set of The Price is Right and write an article about it. I could go undercover as a showcase model! If I can't do it, I want Hank Stuever to write about it. Or even better, since this is my daydream, I would do it but I would write exactly like Hank Stuever and I would have his job at the Washington Post, and Hank Stuever would be my houseboy and do my laundry. Now, that would be a fabulous prize.

Sometimes I think I must have lived through the Depression or was forced to eat raw turnips while wearing a dress made of curtains in a previous life, because I love (North) American grocery stores. There is something about rows and rows of neatly stocked food that fills me with a great sense of contentment and well-being. I'm feeling happy right now, just imagining a walk through aisles of floor-to-ceiling food.

Maybe this has something to do with happy childhood memories of riding through the aisles of the Four Corners Safeway in my mom's cart. I can still picture the layout of that store -- meat on the right, produce on the left. My sister and I treated the sacks of dog food as our own personal tree house, climbing behind them to amuse ourselves during the boring minutes of checkout time, which I'm sure the cashiers appreciated.

Canada has never felt more foreign than when I was navigating unfamiliar grocery store aisles. Their ideas about food organization were all different than what I'd come to expect from my trusty Seattle grocery stores (shout-out to PCC, Larry's and Albertson's!). And by different, I mean wrong and bad. Dried cranberries in the produce section? That's madness!! They should be with the nuts, which should be adjacent to the baking supplies. Even a child pretending that bags of dog food are a pirate ship would know that.

But, much like the first immigrants who endured much hardships as they crossed the Great Plains in wagons and were chased by bears and whatnot, I too have endured. And I was filled with a warm glow this week as I cruised the aisles of my local Price Chopper and realized that I know where everything is. Maybe it's a reincarnation thing, maybe it's a touch of OCD (in which case I'd really appreciate having a form of OCD that would get my house a little cleaner, because the kitchen floor could really use a scrubbing), but I feel so much happier knowing where all the food is stored at all times.

I realized I also know the soundtrack at Price Chopper, which is not Muzak but some Golden Oldies compilation that includes "96 Tears" and "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)." It makes for some great singalongs in the aisles. I think they must play the same dozen or so songs over and over in a continuous loop all day, which explains why the cashiers all wear expressions that say, "As soon as these drugs wear off I am going to STAB someone."

The Price Chopper is an interesting place. I once saw a man in a full-length fur coat (beaver maybe?) comparing prices on day-old, marked down meat. And there's a security guard who never, ever moves. He must have the good drugs. So yeah, Price Chopper has its quirks (and it's no Larry's!), but at least I know where the dried cranberries are.