despite hearing bad news about an incident that happened to a Co worker and his wife.
It unfolded unknown to me at the time as I usually see B leaving out the office or on his way to the train. I didn't see him Friday night. Saturday morning after I had left Tim's with my breakfast, there was no B to meet me out by the front entrance of the office. I didn't think anything of it at the time.
I sat at my dialer and had my breakfast and took my insulin. The phone was ringing off the hook and no B around. Then one of the guys came by and told me that B came home Friday night and found his wife dead on the floor. Cause of death unknown. We'll find out more details over the next few days but it put me in a downer and my performance on the job showed. I think it affected the whole office.
When I left out of the office at 2pm Saturday I just about passed out on the train I was so tired. The redi mart was closed so I couldn't get my 6/49 ticket for Saturday's draw. I played a bit of Oblivion for while and had a nap for a few hours. I played Oblivion while Anne called a couple of times to keep me company.
I took my sleeping pill about 3:30am Sunday morning and getting up here and there to use the bathroom but I woke up about 1:30pm in the afternoon. I feel a bit better about the weekend.
The the Oiler's had to lose of course. Even if the Oiler's don't make the playoffs and there's a good chance they wont get there, then I'll be rooting for Vancouver. After Vancouver then the Flames. After that any Canadian team still in the playoffs. This year I think it's going to be Washington and Calgary. Calgary deserves to win it all but if by some small miracle the Oiler's do get into the playoffs, then it'll be Washington and Edmonton in the finale. If they can get in but I doubt that's going to happen.
Some other disturbing local economic news here. It seems that Atco I-tek their customer care call center here is going to out source their part time call center work. Yes I'm all in favor of the market place but out sourcing our jobs to Mexico, China and or the Philippines, well just annoys me to no end. It's our politicians letting us down again. I once heard that no credit card information can leave the country. I don't know if this is true or not or impacts these offshore jobs at all, it should. And to think, I was almost close to getting a job there last October.
Friday I picked up Steven Erikson's Book 2 in his Malazan series. It looks like a really good series and I'm going to order the rest. I ordered the first 3 in the series.
Sunday afternoon Anne and I talked about me working at her place of employment 3 days a week but I like working security. It's 3 days more money and I can read and do work on my writing and bring a along a lap top. So I think what I'm going to do is to apply when I get my income tax because I'm going to need $50 to get a security clearance. If I don't get that then Pizza is my next source.
I'm still reading Timothy Zahn's "The third Lynx" and its way better then the first one. I'm about 60% into the book. This is really good.
I'm kind of looking froward to the new Star Trek movie "Academy." In a way its kind of silly to see the Enterprise looking more sophisticated in this movie then in the original series. I'm not going to go and spend $12 to see it though. I'll wait until it comes to the dollar theater.
If I do get the security guard job I'm going to apply at WH and see if I can get the site at Pacific Rim Mall. It's a small site and the only thing open after 7pm on a Saturday is the resturaunt upstairs but that was 1994 and they might not even have that site anymore. As long as I don't have to do apartments. The only reason why I didn't keep up with that job back in 1994 was because all WH could offer me was the shifts but I didn;t think about getting on with GWE at the time again.
The other thing is with WH I can get into playing ASL again and I'd insist Rob let me have Thursday's off and I wont work Sundays. I'd have WH Sunday night.
Anyway gang, that's all for now.
e. Jim
Monday, March 30, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Must be a Wednesday
In business news the CBC is about to lay off 800 people. Something is wrong with this picture. Do not adjust your set. They (the CBC) site dwindling audience and lack of advertising dollars. And other networks are going to feel the same pinch. I heard CanWest Global could be next. The problem stems from what choices people have to watch on TV, when 80% of modern programming is reality TV type programming or rehashing game show ideas or spin off’s of The Simpson’s. I don’t watch a lot of TV anyway, except the Oiler’s the evening news and wrestling. The only thing I like to watch on CBC is when there’s an Oiler game on. But I smell a Boondoggle here with the CBC, with their expecting layoffs and maybe closing down stations and insignificant programming the CBC still receives about a $1B budget from the Canadian Government.
Also Stats Canada went and released unemployment numbers but these were reflected at least here in Alberta by the downturn in the construction industry. I don’t know what March unemployment numbers are like but for February we were at 4.4% yet with about 550,000 people are on EI and that’s a significant number. Meanwhile oil dropped down to $52/barrel. Everything else like the Dow and the S&P is went up. But with the US Government now owning about 80% of AIG there is very little good economic news on the horizon. Except Saskatchewan, go figure.
More closer to home, our office still isn’t full after 7pm. We have a good 4-8 empty dialers. It’s still nothing like it was a year ago when we had a crew of about 8 tap shooters after 7pm.
I played some more Oblivion last night but the game froze up on me and I haven’t played it since around 3am this morning. I was trying out the bribing tool in the game and at the end one of the characters just went nuts attacking people. The guards came out and killed them. So once again I need to go back to an earlier saved game.
In SF Signal they are talking about the most funniest authors in SFF. I didn’t comment yet but for the most funniest SF author would have to be L. Ron Hubbard and his “Mission Earth” series. It was meant to be funny. I’m not a huge fan of comedy in science fiction literature but if I stumble upon something that looks good I wont turn it down because it‘s a comedy. I’m not a funny kind of person. I mean I consider myself likeable and I’m always friendly to people but I’m not one that has a library of jokes I can pull out of a hat. That’s not my personality but comedy and SF somehow kind of goes hand in hand. When “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” came out in 1978 it gathered a bit of a cult following but hardly registered a pulse beat under my thumb. I did like “Ghostbusters“ and “Back to the Future” and of course “Austin Powers” while not really science fiction, it has some SF concepts in the series etc but that’s Sci-Fi. As for the written word there are lots of SF comedy going around. I hear Terry Prathcett’s “Disc world” is supposed to be pretty good and Robert Sheckley is also pretty good from what I hear. I’m not about to turn down a good book because it’s a comedy yet I haven’t read a good SF comedy since Mission Earth.
L.E. Modesitt, Jr in his blog post yesterday had an interesting entry called permanence. He began by various upgrades of Word and how technology changes can often lose data. He also made a good point about paper and how we can read scrolls hundreds of years old but who in say 300 years from now will be able to even find my blog entries and email’s? He also talked about how in the US medical records will be made electronic but those medical records can be venerable no matter how much safety encryption measures are in place. And what about medical bracelets and even pacemakers and other items electronically connected to the hospital. Imagine if say terrorists broke into a universal set of standards for hospital wards and launched a virus into hospital equipment currently being used. Thousands of people could be at risk. It seems the more and more we use computers in our everyday lives the more venerable we become.
This got my warped imagination to think that this current economic crunch the world is currently in is brought to you from the folks at El Qaeda. What’s my basis in this? The fact that the economy changed so abruptly makes me believe this was a terrorist attack on a global scale.
My wife left out of here about 3:30pm and I left out of here at my usual time at 4pm. I was able to read a bit on the way into work.
I collected a good amount of cans and bottles before the shift began. DC wasn’t into work and apparently JT is on stress leave? Must be nice work if one can get it. Super wanted me and a few others in the back to do CCSD taps and I was about $230 and a CC by the break. I made another pass at the cans and bottles during the break. In the 2nd half I did a lot better doing CBF and I got another CC sale and a total of $530. No bonus money for me at all but that’s ok.
I got my 9:20pm Corona train into Clairview, another curling event? I just about missed my bus as the thing pulled out of Clairview making an exit but I was able to catch the bus on the exit swing and home.
Everything was as I left it and I turned off the radio and began to get into playing some “Oblivion.” The game after it crashed this morning worked just fine and I found a couple of new areas as well on the map. According to Yahoo answers there are about 330 different locations like Temples, caves, shrines that sort of thing. It’s a big game. Then there is the expansion pack “The Shimmering Isles” and that’s already available.
And finally no we didn’t win the big one on Anne’s 6/49 quick pick draw tonight. Somebody won $3.9M however.
Anyway, gang that’s all for now.
e. Jim
Also Stats Canada went and released unemployment numbers but these were reflected at least here in Alberta by the downturn in the construction industry. I don’t know what March unemployment numbers are like but for February we were at 4.4% yet with about 550,000 people are on EI and that’s a significant number. Meanwhile oil dropped down to $52/barrel. Everything else like the Dow and the S&P is went up. But with the US Government now owning about 80% of AIG there is very little good economic news on the horizon. Except Saskatchewan, go figure.
More closer to home, our office still isn’t full after 7pm. We have a good 4-8 empty dialers. It’s still nothing like it was a year ago when we had a crew of about 8 tap shooters after 7pm.
I played some more Oblivion last night but the game froze up on me and I haven’t played it since around 3am this morning. I was trying out the bribing tool in the game and at the end one of the characters just went nuts attacking people. The guards came out and killed them. So once again I need to go back to an earlier saved game.
In SF Signal they are talking about the most funniest authors in SFF. I didn’t comment yet but for the most funniest SF author would have to be L. Ron Hubbard and his “Mission Earth” series. It was meant to be funny. I’m not a huge fan of comedy in science fiction literature but if I stumble upon something that looks good I wont turn it down because it‘s a comedy. I’m not a funny kind of person. I mean I consider myself likeable and I’m always friendly to people but I’m not one that has a library of jokes I can pull out of a hat. That’s not my personality but comedy and SF somehow kind of goes hand in hand. When “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” came out in 1978 it gathered a bit of a cult following but hardly registered a pulse beat under my thumb. I did like “Ghostbusters“ and “Back to the Future” and of course “Austin Powers” while not really science fiction, it has some SF concepts in the series etc but that’s Sci-Fi. As for the written word there are lots of SF comedy going around. I hear Terry Prathcett’s “Disc world” is supposed to be pretty good and Robert Sheckley is also pretty good from what I hear. I’m not about to turn down a good book because it’s a comedy yet I haven’t read a good SF comedy since Mission Earth.
L.E. Modesitt, Jr in his blog post yesterday had an interesting entry called permanence. He began by various upgrades of Word and how technology changes can often lose data. He also made a good point about paper and how we can read scrolls hundreds of years old but who in say 300 years from now will be able to even find my blog entries and email’s? He also talked about how in the US medical records will be made electronic but those medical records can be venerable no matter how much safety encryption measures are in place. And what about medical bracelets and even pacemakers and other items electronically connected to the hospital. Imagine if say terrorists broke into a universal set of standards for hospital wards and launched a virus into hospital equipment currently being used. Thousands of people could be at risk. It seems the more and more we use computers in our everyday lives the more venerable we become.
This got my warped imagination to think that this current economic crunch the world is currently in is brought to you from the folks at El Qaeda. What’s my basis in this? The fact that the economy changed so abruptly makes me believe this was a terrorist attack on a global scale.
My wife left out of here about 3:30pm and I left out of here at my usual time at 4pm. I was able to read a bit on the way into work.
I collected a good amount of cans and bottles before the shift began. DC wasn’t into work and apparently JT is on stress leave? Must be nice work if one can get it. Super wanted me and a few others in the back to do CCSD taps and I was about $230 and a CC by the break. I made another pass at the cans and bottles during the break. In the 2nd half I did a lot better doing CBF and I got another CC sale and a total of $530. No bonus money for me at all but that’s ok.
I got my 9:20pm Corona train into Clairview, another curling event? I just about missed my bus as the thing pulled out of Clairview making an exit but I was able to catch the bus on the exit swing and home.
Everything was as I left it and I turned off the radio and began to get into playing some “Oblivion.” The game after it crashed this morning worked just fine and I found a couple of new areas as well on the map. According to Yahoo answers there are about 330 different locations like Temples, caves, shrines that sort of thing. It’s a big game. Then there is the expansion pack “The Shimmering Isles” and that’s already available.
And finally no we didn’t win the big one on Anne’s 6/49 quick pick draw tonight. Somebody won $3.9M however.
Anyway, gang that’s all for now.
e. Jim
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monday wasn't a bad day
after all. I got up around noon and watched the markets. Wow, the Dow was up by almost 500 points. Pretty amazing. Oil is just over $53.
At work we did semies all night, I didn't mind too much. I ended up with a $7.50 bonus and I got line hour and had a pretty good shift pulling in $330 and a $50 CC sale. I got a bunch of bottles and cans to take home on the train and I read a bit more of "The third lynx."
I got home, 10 minutes before Monday night Raw. It was a great show. on a scale from 1-10, I'd rate it a 9. Good stuff. The main event was very interesting.
I still haven't found time to do much memory work on my Lodge stuff but I hope to get that taken care of this week but I have no printer to print out a hard copy and I really need this. I hope I haven't taken on more then I can handle.
After Raw, I ended up playing some "Oblivion." I'm still at level 5 but wondering how many Save games I have left. I'm at 455 save games. I hope it just resets itself. It's a fun game with a lot of character.
Anyway gang, that's about all for now
e. Jim
At work we did semies all night, I didn't mind too much. I ended up with a $7.50 bonus and I got line hour and had a pretty good shift pulling in $330 and a $50 CC sale. I got a bunch of bottles and cans to take home on the train and I read a bit more of "The third lynx."
I got home, 10 minutes before Monday night Raw. It was a great show. on a scale from 1-10, I'd rate it a 9. Good stuff. The main event was very interesting.
I still haven't found time to do much memory work on my Lodge stuff but I hope to get that taken care of this week but I have no printer to print out a hard copy and I really need this. I hope I haven't taken on more then I can handle.
After Raw, I ended up playing some "Oblivion." I'm still at level 5 but wondering how many Save games I have left. I'm at 455 save games. I hope it just resets itself. It's a fun game with a lot of character.
Anyway gang, that's about all for now
e. Jim
Sunday, March 22, 2009
This Saturday morning felt good going into work for a change.
I was feeling pretty good going into work Saturday morning. These pictures were taken while waiting for my bus about 9am to Clairview station. Looks like a typical winter day doesn’t it? The first image is looking West towards the Manning bridge. My Saturday #11 bus shows over that bridge all the time at 9am towards me. I’ve shown this before but this is supposed to be Spring!
e. Jim
I was feeling pretty good for the trip in. I managed to read a bit and stretch myself out on the decorative pedestals at Corona and got the tightness out of my back and neck a bit. For the first time in a long time I wore my green bomber jacket into work. I had a good start to the shift as well for a Saturday morning. Team India is back. Nice to see them return. We had a shorter crew as well. I got a couple of CC sales and my last sale was a CC sale but at least now I know how to ask for the CC sale. JT wasn‘t in to pay me the $4 so I offered DC to go double or nothing for the game this afternoon since he didn’t have any change on him. I walked out of there empty handed but I got a $5 bonus for next week.
Next week I’m expecting $46 in bonuses on my cheque and a full week. I kind of dozed off on the train there for awhile on my way home and once inside my place I was hoping have a bit of a nap but best I could do was to doze off. The next image is the walkway right behind our apartment. In a couple of weeks all that snow will be gone. I love April out here because everything has that dead feeling of renewal before the leaves pop out. There are no bugs hanging around. By the end of April all the leaves on the trees are budding.
This is a view of our balcony. The white vertical board at right covers our BBQ. See the two (birch?) trees almost side by side? The evergreen between them is “The Boot’s tree.” The window beside the white board is my office and the next window is our bedroom. I love our balcony because it’s so long and enclosed to give us some privacy.
And just for fun the last image is of my job workbook. I keep my nightly records in here. The green strokes are $800-$1000+ nights. I’ve had 4 so far in March, Five in February and 12 in January.
All in all I had a nice day for Saturday. The only hic-up I had was Anne telling me this morning when I locked up I failed to close the lock properly leaving our apartment unlocked while she was at home sleeping for 3 hours. First time that’s ever happened. That and the blow up just now she had with me leaving out of here to Walmart over chips no less.
Since I’m still on Saturday time here, I spent about 3 hours playing Oblivion. I’m still at Level 5 and I’m not able to use any magic yet. I’m finding the Quest bosses really hard to eliminate. Journeying through the game this evening I discovered about 3 new forts a shrine and a couple caves as well. This game is going to take me awhile to complete.
Providing Rob pays me all my bonuses I should get an extra $46 on my next cheque. Since I only bought 2 books so far for march, I can get 2 more next week.
What would make my weekend complete is if the Oiler’s go into Minneapolis and win the game. We Didn’t get that 6/49 win Saturday night. There was 1 winner claiming (6) $4,448,017.00 and someone won (5 + bonus) $317,715.40. Also, 144 people won (5) $1,822.60 and finally 6,486 (4) people won $76.60. That’s 6, 5+, 5, 4 respectively. Of course even if I won the big one, I wouldn’t announce it.
And finally Sci-fi guy and Sci-fi chick are still reviewing Urban fantasy books. What science fiction and urban fantasy have in common, I Haven’t the foggiest idea.
I just did a rush edit on this post and we're done for the night.
e. Jim
Thursday, March 19, 2009
I don't really have a lot to say today
but at least the weather is getting better. I've got my window opened up. Boots is sleeping beside me peacefully. And, I'm ready to go into work in about an hour or so.
I woke up at noon with a headache and I decided to sleep for a bit longer, headache gone.
Still reading "The third Lynx." I wanted to have this thing read by now but it's been tough finding time to read an hour and really get into reading an hour. I read about 10 pages/day mostly on the way to and from work. but at least I'm almost at the halfway point in the book.
Anyway gang, that's all for now
e. Jim
I woke up at noon with a headache and I decided to sleep for a bit longer, headache gone.
Still reading "The third Lynx." I wanted to have this thing read by now but it's been tough finding time to read an hour and really get into reading an hour. I read about 10 pages/day mostly on the way to and from work. but at least I'm almost at the halfway point in the book.
Anyway gang, that's all for now
e. Jim
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Today is a lame day for a Wednesday and not a lot is going on
at the moment. Anne's out of here for her 3pm start. It's my usual line up for me.
But I have a work related issue that needs to be addressed on the job. Most businesses pay out vacation pay. Since the place I work at pays weekly hence my vacation pay is paid out on a weekly basis. Right now it's at 6% of my weekly gross pay. I think it caps out at 8%. However, I have my vacation pay accrued every week. That means my company holds it back for me, like a bank account upon my request. It's a release form I have to fill out. I can take out as many "draws" as I want. Usually I do this twice a year, at the end of June and just around Christmas time. Last Christmas when I tried to take out my vacation pay I got a memo from head office saying there was an "overpayment" and so no vacation pay will be released. This kind of took me for a spin. Huh? I never saw any increase in my rate of pay since last June till December. Last time I took a draw was last June. I figured well, ok. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Then a few months back I heard that this happened to other people in the office as well. Some of them were saying I should do something about this. I thought, well lets see if they do this again and site an "overpayment" when I take out my vacation pay in June.
The thing is, there's no explanation as to where the overpayment came out from. Then my wife looked at my pay stub last week and discovered my vacation pay is not showing up on my pay cheque. it should show as a running balance. Uh-oh. I've been so worried about my job lately I was to timid to rock the boat and say something. Now that everything is more or less ok, I need to find out what's going on with this.
The first thing I'm going to do is contact Rob this afternoon if he hasn't left the office when I get there and say that my vacation pay is not showing up on my pay cheque. Could he ask HO what's going on? If a memo comes back saying again about an overpayment without an explanation, then I'm going to ask for a history of my "overpayment." Could they email Rob. If they don't do anything for say the rest of this month then I'll ask one more time with a push: Something like "Or James will bring this up with Alberta Employment Standards if this isn't resolved." AES is the labor board. Their lawyer's will most likely open proceedings to do an internal audit of my company and that could be a big headache they don't need. I need to be careful here as I'm in unfamiliar waters. What I think? HO is confusing my bonus money as an overpayment. last week for instance I was expecting $35 in bonus money. This is for things like CC sales etc. Imagine my surprise when I got $5. That kind of told me that it's HO fouling things up again. I asked Super to make sure that $30 gets on this cheque and he placed it on the attendance sheet. It sounds like they're trying to get rif of me. Force me to quit.
Tonight, is the Old Timer hockey game. or OTH as we call it. Odd how my wife got a couple of vouchers from her place of work. I know business trades ad space in the hockey programs and my wife's place of employment might be one of the partner companies.
Speaking of companies and such AIG as everyone knows is in the news again. Politicians are passing blame and pointing fingers. Basically they're showboating more then anything. Right now the banks need trust. If there's no trust, credit can't circulate. Trust is a two way street folks, it works both ways.
I'm still reading "The third Lynx." I'm really enjoying this book. I like books that are in first person. There are so few first person books these days.
Last night on Coast they had Gregg Braden on again. He's got a whack of YouTube videos on spiritualist like topics. He's a great speaker and a favorite on Coast.
Also, it seems that Robert J Sawyer is coming to Edmonton on one of his book tours promoting Wake. Most likely this will be at Audrey's again. The date will be Thursday April 23rd. I don't have a copy of Wake yet but he'll have a lot of them in hard copy on his table. I'm not a 100% sure he'll be at Audrey's but he was last time to promote Rollback a few years ago. I'll email him when I come home tonight and I'll have an answer most likely tomorrow.
We're still getting some cold weather around here. Too cold for Spring, which begins on Friday. But we're going to see a lot less of the -15C's and crap like that out here. By the end of march early April the snow should all be but gone.
Anyway gang, that's all for now
e. Jim
But I have a work related issue that needs to be addressed on the job. Most businesses pay out vacation pay. Since the place I work at pays weekly hence my vacation pay is paid out on a weekly basis. Right now it's at 6% of my weekly gross pay. I think it caps out at 8%. However, I have my vacation pay accrued every week. That means my company holds it back for me, like a bank account upon my request. It's a release form I have to fill out. I can take out as many "draws" as I want. Usually I do this twice a year, at the end of June and just around Christmas time. Last Christmas when I tried to take out my vacation pay I got a memo from head office saying there was an "overpayment" and so no vacation pay will be released. This kind of took me for a spin. Huh? I never saw any increase in my rate of pay since last June till December. Last time I took a draw was last June. I figured well, ok. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Then a few months back I heard that this happened to other people in the office as well. Some of them were saying I should do something about this. I thought, well lets see if they do this again and site an "overpayment" when I take out my vacation pay in June.
The thing is, there's no explanation as to where the overpayment came out from. Then my wife looked at my pay stub last week and discovered my vacation pay is not showing up on my pay cheque. it should show as a running balance. Uh-oh. I've been so worried about my job lately I was to timid to rock the boat and say something. Now that everything is more or less ok, I need to find out what's going on with this.
The first thing I'm going to do is contact Rob this afternoon if he hasn't left the office when I get there and say that my vacation pay is not showing up on my pay cheque. Could he ask HO what's going on? If a memo comes back saying again about an overpayment without an explanation, then I'm going to ask for a history of my "overpayment." Could they email Rob. If they don't do anything for say the rest of this month then I'll ask one more time with a push: Something like "Or James will bring this up with Alberta Employment Standards if this isn't resolved." AES is the labor board. Their lawyer's will most likely open proceedings to do an internal audit of my company and that could be a big headache they don't need. I need to be careful here as I'm in unfamiliar waters. What I think? HO is confusing my bonus money as an overpayment. last week for instance I was expecting $35 in bonus money. This is for things like CC sales etc. Imagine my surprise when I got $5. That kind of told me that it's HO fouling things up again. I asked Super to make sure that $30 gets on this cheque and he placed it on the attendance sheet. It sounds like they're trying to get rif of me. Force me to quit.
Tonight, is the Old Timer hockey game. or OTH as we call it. Odd how my wife got a couple of vouchers from her place of work. I know business trades ad space in the hockey programs and my wife's place of employment might be one of the partner companies.
Speaking of companies and such AIG as everyone knows is in the news again. Politicians are passing blame and pointing fingers. Basically they're showboating more then anything. Right now the banks need trust. If there's no trust, credit can't circulate. Trust is a two way street folks, it works both ways.
I'm still reading "The third Lynx." I'm really enjoying this book. I like books that are in first person. There are so few first person books these days.
Last night on Coast they had Gregg Braden on again. He's got a whack of YouTube videos on spiritualist like topics. He's a great speaker and a favorite on Coast.
Also, it seems that Robert J Sawyer is coming to Edmonton on one of his book tours promoting Wake. Most likely this will be at Audrey's again. The date will be Thursday April 23rd. I don't have a copy of Wake yet but he'll have a lot of them in hard copy on his table. I'm not a 100% sure he'll be at Audrey's but he was last time to promote Rollback a few years ago. I'll email him when I come home tonight and I'll have an answer most likely tomorrow.
We're still getting some cold weather around here. Too cold for Spring, which begins on Friday. But we're going to see a lot less of the -15C's and crap like that out here. By the end of march early April the snow should all be but gone.
Anyway gang, that's all for now
e. Jim
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
March madness at it again.
I was very apprehensive leaving out of the apartment yesterday afternoon. This grew more evident the closer I got downtown. But in the office I asked DC where do I sit? He said something like “how about in your usual spot?” Really? Bud moved and W was also leaving. Then JT said that the morning tap shooter crew are still working. It’s just the back 20 not working mornings. Instant relief. Rob said nothing to me. Everything is business as usual. JT etc stayed until 7pm. I decided to gather a bunch of cans and bottles for home. I did ok in the 1st half but only one CC sale. I think I was at $250 in the first half. I felt a lot better.
I tried calling Anne about the job situation but she wasn’t answering the phone. I had a slow 2nd half and the source we were doing was drying up and we had to do semies in the last hour. This is usually a 2 week campaign anyway. I made a 7pm pass at the bottles and cans and got a few more. I ended up with a $350 total. Nothing stellar that’s for sure.
I had a quiet train ride to Clairview and a brief wait on my bus. Anne was busy with housework when I came in. It was -10C on the way home. Not bad. I’m just happy I have my job, everything’s fine.
Monday night Raw had a few surprises in store. On a scale from 1-10, I’d rate the show about a 9, Anne made us a great dinner of pork chops and her tin foil wrap potato’s and ET. This was a great way to wrap up a day that had a bit to much drama in it for my liking.
I mentioned before this week has a lot of things going. My wife’s birthday yesterday, Saint Patrick’s day today, tomorrow is OTH, Spring is on Friday. It’s going to bean busy week…………1:10pm> The cat woke me up around 11:30 this morning. I could have slept for another hour, easy. Then my wife had to get up a couple times back to back. All the cats come in and I’m up feeling cheated of potentially an extra hour of sleep. Anne felt a need to go over to the pet store to get a cat house or some damn thing.
Again the local issue of homelessness was in the news this afternoon. Beware of rant: Apparently between the province and the City of Edmonton, there is now $3B put out to get rid of the homeless problem. But wait now, the same story said there are something like 3,000 homeless people on the streets here in my City. I don’t know how many in Calgary but I image it’s a bit more then 3,000. So, lets say there’s 8,000 homeless from all across the Province. That’s about $375,000 per person. I wonder how many of these homeless people have jobs? Maybe a year ago I’d guess maybe 2 thirds. Now I’d say about half. How many of these people are from out of Province that recently arrived? How many of these people were in halfway houses? Probably most of them in the major cities. So what happens when the City finds these people a home? Their monthly rent is going to be as high as ours. Is the Province going to pay for their rent as well? That’s a pretty good deal rent free and a new home. Most likely that comes with lights and water. What about food? Easy, that’s why we have food banks. Wait now, a roof over ones head, free power and water, free food! Meanwhile the working poor (Which I consider myself and my family.) are paying $850 rent on a 2 bedroom apartment. My wife has to go to the food bank down the street at least once a month, We have jobs both working part time hours and like most families were just getting by. Pardon me if I sound like I’m whining here. That’s not what I’m attempting to say but it seems to me that $3B is a lot of money for about 8,000 people that are homeless here in Alberta. Yes I can work more hours at 56 years old being diabetic and having scoliosis of the spine might be hard on me. My wife has her own health issues and it’d be hard on her but we shouldn’t have to when all these homeless people are getting such treatment. People may ask me if I’ve ever been homeless? Yes, once around 1976 for a few weeks in between the job I had at the Army & Navy store in New Westminster BC. But I was housed up in a big room with about 4 other guys and we got meal vouchers for the pacific café 3 times/day. I was waiting for my unemployment at the time. Sure I’ve never had to sleep on the streets or anything but that’s only because I’ve got to much pride in myself. Don’t get me wrong, I feel for homeless people but I have to wonder about this “$3B plan,” to eradicate homeless people here in Edmonton/Alberta. Of course there’s a lot more to it then that. More on this later.
Ok, onto other things. There’s been some discussion going on about the Sci-Fi channel and it’s seemingly lack of SF content these days. I don’t know about this since I don’t watch a lot of TV. I’m too busy doing other things like piano practicing, Lodge work, my job, reading and finding time to play some Oblivion etc, to really notice. Yes, I’ve noticed “Space,” our version of the Sci-Fi channel here in Canada, has been running some monster movies and other stuff not really related to Science Fiction. For example right now Space is running a STNG episode “The most Toys.” The only problem I have with these specialty channels is they seem to have about 10 episodes of anything. Except the new stuff and even then. I mean you can only run so much of anything but with so much Sci-fi out there you’d think that Space could just stick with SF content. There’s enough SF movies out there they could run those in the evenings and all the rest during the other times. I think it has something to do with licensing agreements here in Canada or Canadian content.
Anyway, as for me…I’m in for my usual 5-9 and hopefully they’ll have the hockey game on. I get to watch a bit of that. Then it’s home and more of the same. Sorry if this reads choppy today I‘m not quite awake.
Anyway, gang that’s all for now.
e. Jim
I tried calling Anne about the job situation but she wasn’t answering the phone. I had a slow 2nd half and the source we were doing was drying up and we had to do semies in the last hour. This is usually a 2 week campaign anyway. I made a 7pm pass at the bottles and cans and got a few more. I ended up with a $350 total. Nothing stellar that’s for sure.
I had a quiet train ride to Clairview and a brief wait on my bus. Anne was busy with housework when I came in. It was -10C on the way home. Not bad. I’m just happy I have my job, everything’s fine.
Monday night Raw had a few surprises in store. On a scale from 1-10, I’d rate the show about a 9, Anne made us a great dinner of pork chops and her tin foil wrap potato’s and ET. This was a great way to wrap up a day that had a bit to much drama in it for my liking.
I mentioned before this week has a lot of things going. My wife’s birthday yesterday, Saint Patrick’s day today, tomorrow is OTH, Spring is on Friday. It’s going to bean busy week…………1:10pm> The cat woke me up around 11:30 this morning. I could have slept for another hour, easy. Then my wife had to get up a couple times back to back. All the cats come in and I’m up feeling cheated of potentially an extra hour of sleep. Anne felt a need to go over to the pet store to get a cat house or some damn thing.
Again the local issue of homelessness was in the news this afternoon. Beware of rant: Apparently between the province and the City of Edmonton, there is now $3B put out to get rid of the homeless problem. But wait now, the same story said there are something like 3,000 homeless people on the streets here in my City. I don’t know how many in Calgary but I image it’s a bit more then 3,000. So, lets say there’s 8,000 homeless from all across the Province. That’s about $375,000 per person. I wonder how many of these homeless people have jobs? Maybe a year ago I’d guess maybe 2 thirds. Now I’d say about half. How many of these people are from out of Province that recently arrived? How many of these people were in halfway houses? Probably most of them in the major cities. So what happens when the City finds these people a home? Their monthly rent is going to be as high as ours. Is the Province going to pay for their rent as well? That’s a pretty good deal rent free and a new home. Most likely that comes with lights and water. What about food? Easy, that’s why we have food banks. Wait now, a roof over ones head, free power and water, free food! Meanwhile the working poor (Which I consider myself and my family.) are paying $850 rent on a 2 bedroom apartment. My wife has to go to the food bank down the street at least once a month, We have jobs both working part time hours and like most families were just getting by. Pardon me if I sound like I’m whining here. That’s not what I’m attempting to say but it seems to me that $3B is a lot of money for about 8,000 people that are homeless here in Alberta. Yes I can work more hours at 56 years old being diabetic and having scoliosis of the spine might be hard on me. My wife has her own health issues and it’d be hard on her but we shouldn’t have to when all these homeless people are getting such treatment. People may ask me if I’ve ever been homeless? Yes, once around 1976 for a few weeks in between the job I had at the Army & Navy store in New Westminster BC. But I was housed up in a big room with about 4 other guys and we got meal vouchers for the pacific café 3 times/day. I was waiting for my unemployment at the time. Sure I’ve never had to sleep on the streets or anything but that’s only because I’ve got to much pride in myself. Don’t get me wrong, I feel for homeless people but I have to wonder about this “$3B plan,” to eradicate homeless people here in Edmonton/Alberta. Of course there’s a lot more to it then that. More on this later.
Ok, onto other things. There’s been some discussion going on about the Sci-Fi channel and it’s seemingly lack of SF content these days. I don’t know about this since I don’t watch a lot of TV. I’m too busy doing other things like piano practicing, Lodge work, my job, reading and finding time to play some Oblivion etc, to really notice. Yes, I’ve noticed “Space,” our version of the Sci-Fi channel here in Canada, has been running some monster movies and other stuff not really related to Science Fiction. For example right now Space is running a STNG episode “The most Toys.” The only problem I have with these specialty channels is they seem to have about 10 episodes of anything. Except the new stuff and even then. I mean you can only run so much of anything but with so much Sci-fi out there you’d think that Space could just stick with SF content. There’s enough SF movies out there they could run those in the evenings and all the rest during the other times. I think it has something to do with licensing agreements here in Canada or Canadian content.
Anyway, as for me…I’m in for my usual 5-9 and hopefully they’ll have the hockey game on. I get to watch a bit of that. Then it’s home and more of the same. Sorry if this reads choppy today I‘m not quite awake.
Anyway, gang that’s all for now.
e. Jim
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
