Another Monday washout

Yesterday blogging wise was a wash-out. I went into work with a bit anxiety due too a fellow staff employee I had a run in with Saturday. But that got blown over quickly. Everything’s all right on the job front now. A minor hiccup.

Monday night Raw was great. Next week William Shatner will be guest host. I’m looking forward to that one. Last night Raw was hosted by one of the guys from Phsyc. Everyone is getting “Psyched up“, pardon the pun. Apparently John Cena had something to do with the show. Or maybe he was just featured in one episode I‘m not sure. I haven‘t seen the show so I can‘t say.

Today it’s a Tuesday night on the job. It’s also game day as I’ll be “watching” the Oiler game in between calls. No Oiler rumours about any trades. Though there has been mumblings about trading Sheldon Souray to a Southern California team.

We’re -15/-22 wind chill out there. Not looking good. Time to breakout the old face mask and scarf. That’s ok, Day light savings time is just 8 weeks away, March 11th. And April is just around the corner from that.

Now that I have Friday nights off, once a month I can go Lodge visiting over there at Strathcona Lodge at Acacia Hall every Second Friday. I didn’t know this but Ye Old Craft meets there on a Saturday. Most likely they tile at 7:30pm like most Lodges. Lodge Saturday’s I can work just half days. I can leave about 5:30pm go to Chapters, get a book relax over an Apple Cider. I’d like to go to Lodge at the festive board saying how I visited Redwood(date), Strathcona (date) and Ye old craft (date) One of the big parts of Masonry is visiting other Lodges. Now that I can mix and match my mornings/evenings, I can go out to more Lodges. Next week, I’m working Wednesday morning and maybe the afternoon for Redwood and Thursday morning for my own Lodge and Friday. But I’ll also be working Friday morning as well for my usual.

I’m still reading 2006 Best of SF and a real long story about some kids getting Polio in the 1950’s. I mean these stories are well written and all but don’t do anything for me. I don’t like reading 2 books at once because it slows things down but the way I’m reading this thing, I probably won’t have it read until mid February. If that.

Tonight, or I should say later this afternoon, I go in for my afternoon commute for the 4 hour job thing. I need to work some serious afternoons as well this week for a special project I’m working on. Anyway, that’s all for now.

Monday wan't bad

Yesterday on the job was slow because we had limited numbers on WCS. Odd that there were very few empties around. Then again we had a low turnout as well for the afternoon shift. During the 2nd half we did some shuffling and some of us did WCS others like me did AES and I did a lot better on AES pulling in about $620 for the whole shift and just 1 credit card sale for $20.

I was glad to get out of there and on the train where I read a couple of pages of “Rainbows end” on the way home. If all goes well I should have this book read by Sunday night. If not earlier. I spent so far 25 days reading this. The best book I’ve read so far this year has been the first book in January, Eric Brown’s “Helix.” Speaking about books, I still haven’t received my contest wining book give away from Pat’s fantasy hot list. I’m sure it’s on it’s way.

They had their “Slammies” on Monday night Raw, so it was a 3 hour “award” show. On a scale from 1-10, I’d rate the show about a 7.5. Nothing special.

Anne’s watching “Star Trek academy” on the DVD we rented from last night. I’d like to see it again but it has to be in by this afternoon. I saw 2 first run movies this year: “GI Joe” and “Star Trek academy.” Both were fun movies.

Over there at Goodreads in my Sci-fi/fantasy book club the January book to read poll, has a nice list of the books to vote for the month of January. The theme for January is SFF books by a woman author. I polled Karen Travis’s “City of pearl” as I own the whole series but haven’t read them yet. So far Margrett Atwood’s (uggh) “Oryx and Crake” are in the lead with 10 votes. My sellection has only 5 votes.

I just checkd this on the Coast site and apparently there’s been another spiral light that’s been spotted in Norway. What the heck is really going on over there? Ok the first spiral being a Russian rocket out of control I can understand but 2? This is getting silly now.

According to SF Signal on Interzone, the magazine has some stories about Sky pirates, witches and other good stuff. I’ve been trying to locate a store that sells Interzone locally so I can pick up a copy once in a while. I mean you can’t go wrong with a story about sky Pirates, right?

And finally the Oiler‘s play host to the LA Kings coming to town tonight. I‘ve got a $5 bet on the Oiler‘s losing the game with one of the guys from work. Sadly, I think the Oiler’s luck has run out on that last 5 game winning streak. I believe that last 5 game road trip has run its course with the Copper and Blue. Anyway that‘s all from me for today.

Anne made me a nice

lunch yesterday afternoon. I had a small wait for my bus in a beautiful autumn like Monday afternoon. It was warm out there I had to take my jacket off in the train on the way in. I did some more reading on JU. It’s coming down to the wire now with about 50 pages left to read. I should have it read by Friday if not sooner and a “Review” of sorts by Saturday. I got to my station in the office and settled into have a nice day. JT is still pouting and has been very quiet when I’m there. I’m still finding this funny. I wonder who’s going to cave in first. It certainly wont be me. I had a slow start and managed to get a CC and up to $360. I tried calling Anne on my break but she wasn’t answering. I didn’t get a chance to check on my CC total to see if they all kicked in. The first hour after break was really slow. I got 2 more CC’s and even closing in on a CC as well for 3 on the night. There was a $20/$40 up for grabs. Not for a $640 total. But I left feeling happy with that.

It was warm when I left out of there at 9pm for the train at Corona. Down at the lower concourse I was trying to read my book when a couple of mothers with small children were jumping all over my immediate space. I wanted to catch the first train home for wrestling. Any train home but the University train came so I caught that one and just to get out of the way of the kids. Sure it was the long way home but I did get some more reading in. I ended up getting in around just after 10pm missing a bit of Raw. Anne made some great lasagna (frozen but it was good.) I was having fun with Raw when I developed a toothache. It was really hurting me bad but Anne gave me an Advil. I mean it wasn’t scoring pain but pain bad enough. Finally after about 20 minutes the Advil worked and I felt a lot better. I still feel better. And Anne bought me a big old bag of cheese pleasers as well.

Work was tough going last night. I wasn’t having a very good go of things and I so much want to get out of Telemarketing, even if it’s just an inbound call center. I don’t like security because I’m always on my feet. This is why I’m going to book for an appointment this week for a employment councilor. I don’t see going back to school at my age but I need to get out of the company I’m currently employed with. I want something else but I want something that is easy, pays well and lets me work days. No evenings/weekends. So I’m going to call a number this week.

Some 10 hours later from the above, I checked the markets and oil took another $4 hit bringing it down to $91/barrel. It's still got about 6 more months before it drops to as low as it can go befor making any seasonal adjustments. If there is such a thing.

As for right now, I'm nursing my first coffee. Anne is sleeping away. She goes back to Pizza tomorrow. I've still got to call an employment councilor. The office is open until 4:30pm. but I'll most likely get up early tomorrow.

Anyway Bloggers, that's all for now.

e. Jim

Another Monday

We were in bed by 4am listening to a bit of Coast. I slept until noon to catch some weekend news and some markets. Raw is on tonight.

Speaking about wrestling, yesterday WWE had its big “Unforgiven” PPV in Cleveland Ohio. Seems initial ticket sales were not going so well before show time. The Quicken Loans Arena max capacity holds something like 20,000 people but the week leading up to Unforgiven about 6,000 tickets were sold. To make it appear less empty local radio stations were apparently giving tickets away. Personally I think the WWE has way to many pay per views. They should have 4/year and concentrate on their tv shows. They are stretching themselves to thin. Now if the Raw announce table says that Unforgiven was sold out, this would have really left a bad taste in my mouth about the WWE. I liked wrestling when it was the WWF but thanks to the environmental group World Wildlife Fund’s lawsuit, they had to change the name to the WWE. The name WWE is more accurate anyway. I really enjoyed wrestling back in my early 20’s living in Coquitlam with the NWA. Me, Dave, Bob and Gord would pile into Bob’s car and the 4 of us would drive over to BCTV studios (still in that location) and watch the show almost every Monday night when I had money. I even recall attending the larger shows a the Gardens. I recall it cost $2 to get into the BC TV studio wrestling shows. The crowds were small, no flashing lights or pyrotechnics and intro music in those days. Ron Morrier would host the show and he’d always start off by saying something like “Hello to all the seniors and shut-ins..” Gene kiniski was the Triple H of his day. But back then and even when good ol Ed Whalen was running Stampede wrestling, wrestling was fun. The story lines were good and engaging. You felt a part of the going’s on. I recall how Ron Morrier would have this little old lady around his announce table hassling him and some of the wrestlers. She seemed to be a fixture to the show and always getting mixed up in the show somehow. When Stampede wrestling folded in 1989 I got into the WWF but I didn’t have cable so all I got was s magazine type hour long show.

Ok, moving along, today is the day we here in Alberta go to 10 digit dialing. I don’t know if we can load the 10 digits into our cell phones. The other thing is, how is this going to impact where I work? In the 80’s and most of the 1990’s we here in Alberta had just one area code (403). Then it was moved to (780) North of Red Deer. Now another area code has been introduced. I think it’s 587. But now we need to dial the 1 (area code) and then the number for local calls. Should be an interesting day today. At work were an outbound call center so I wonder if the tech guys have addressed this issue? I haven’t seen any tech guys in the verifiers room. Maybe this is just a software upgrade and we won’t notice anything.

I’m not much of a video gamer. These days being a gamer means someone that plays video games on the Xbox etc. If I was going to play these console games, it’d basically be in the SFF genre. Most action adventure games are first person shooters like “Doom” and “Halo,” they don’t do anything for me. I’ve had my eye on the new “Elder Scrolls” series for awhile now. I was enjoying the “Ultima” series a lot in the early mid 1990‘s and the “Bards tale” computer games before that. I even have a couple of the earlier “Elder Scrolls” games here for the PC but my graphics card at the time was hardly up to speed to enjoy the game. I enjoyed playing “Everquest” but it was to expensive playing this online game every month. I wouldn’t mind getting “Morrowind” and its sequels and “Oblivion.” But I only have so much time in a day. When Sony released its PSP I thought, “Hey, Everquest mobile.” But the tech to play Everquest on the PSP isn’t quite there yet. I’ve seen the YouTube hacks for this. People insisting they’re playing Everquest/Oblivion on their PSP. Yeah right.

Anyway Bloggers, that‘s all for now

e. Jim