Labourious Spelling

Monday is Labour Day here in Australia. Fortunately, growing up in world where we could get books printed in Britain, I'm familiar with the concept of extra letters in the words. On the other hand, the rest of the English-speaking world wonders why Americans shorten everything by dropping a vowel.

There's a lot of things the U.S. does differently. While everyone else has adopted decimal measurements, the U.S. still uses miles and pounds. Interstingly enough, the currency is decimal-based, and that was introduced in the 17-somethings.

In any case, according to the metric system, I actually walked four and half kilometers the other day. Part of the reason was that I missed my bus, and the trip to work became, well, interesting. I just started walking in the direction of work and figured I'd eventually find enough buses and/or trains to get me there. It worked, and I got a bit of additional exercise as well. Four and a half kilometres sounds impressive, but I don't want to spoil it by checking how many miles that is, in case it the numbers go down.