trip heading into work this afternoon. I bought a 6/49 ticket and had left over Pizza from last night for my lunch and a large diet Cola. Good stuff. The guys were doing FASB and the women were doing Rainbow. We had the game on and I watched a little of it following the scores. Jerry and I had a $2 bet. I took the Flyers. I won 4-3. Boston was up 3-0 and then the Flyers came back. They even had a game that was dissalowed. It took the officials a long time to decide if the Flyers go ahead goal was allowed but it wasn't. Philadelphia got the go ahead goal and the 8th place in the East (Flyers) make it in.

I headed up to my bank barely catching the bus. I did my banking and got all my vacation pay on my paycheck. Excellent. I headed home on the train without incident.

Anne was on the balcony planting flowers getting ready for summer and the cats out and about.

As for me, I'm going to do a bit of reading and have some supper and then try and go to bed. Anyway, that's about all for now.

I'm enjoying the weekend

I got up early having the usual 2 hours sleep overnight for a Friday night. Although I was feeling good heading into the office. I was actually feeling happy, knowing I had just the 4 hour shift ahead of me. It was partially overcast out there under somewhat sunny skies. I bought some Tim's on my way into the office.

Work went well. We had a light shift. Maybe 12 tap shooters and about 8 in the back. We covered 3 campaigns and I got 5 cards for $145 on card. Jerry brought in a couple of bags of empties for me. I was glad to get out of there with about the lowest total I had for the week.

I went to my bank got my $20 for my book for latter and the train home. It was mild going home. Not warm but mild. I got home as Anne was getting ready trying to clean up before she left for her job.

The only casualty for the day was not being able to go see RJS as Anne needed the bus pass to get to work. Anyway, that's about all for now.

I had a decent evening tonight on the job

and I'm grateful I'm able to just sit by myself on the train ride home.

We were watching the Chicago/Vancouver game. When I left the office late in the 2nd period it was Cicago 3/Vancouver 1. Yikes. Hawks lead 2-1 in the series.

I'm off work tomorrow night as I have an oral exam I'm giving one of our Lodge brothers tomorrow night. I know my material and I'm looking forward to it.

I think on Friday night I'm going to put my bid in for my vacation pay and this way I'll have it on my pay check next week for something special. Anyway, that's about all for now

We got snow in May

couple of days here. Yesterday afternoon I finished reading "Crossing the line." I enjoyed it and I'll return back to the Wes'har series later this year. I'll have a bit of a "review" of this book later tonight when I get home from work.

Right now I'm reading something a little out from my usual comofrt zone of SFF. "Night Shift" by Lilith Saintcrow is my first stab at reading urban fantasy and as I'm 20 pages into this thing, its not too bad. I like the writing and its in first person.

Over night we had a whack of snow on the ground. We're getting what Calgary had over the last weekend. I'll try and get a photo up. This early May snow storm is not uncommon this time of year around here, anything can happen.

Podcasts are great. I've got about half a dozen on my ITouch right now. I'm subscribing to "Starship Sofa," "Mysterious Universe," "Aware," "Logans run," "Slice of Sci-Fi," and of course "Puck daddy." I like Starship Sofa the best and ITunes lets me subscribe to these podcasts. I hook my ITouch to my PC and after a brief sync ITunes opens up and searches for new episodes and downloads them right to my ITouch, for free. I haven't figured out how to delete podcasts I no longer need to free up space on my ITouch. I've got about 6.5 Gb/7.1Gb of space left. I think when I get a second part time job I'm going to get the 64Gb ITouch.

This weekend Robert J. Sawyer is coming to Audrey's books for a reading and a signing. I'd like to get Robs's "Watch," but I'm so short of descretionary funds this year and I'm lucky if I can get 1 book/month. Anne wants me to put in the extra 2 hours for Saturday but even though I can't buy "Watch" at least I can to go to the reading after work. I'll try and do the Friday afternoon shift to make up for Saturday afternoon. It's the Lodge night thing that is getting in the way of things this month. .

Speaking of podcasting and the playoffs, Montreal won game #2 with the Pens, their series is tied at 1 as they go into the Bell center tonight. Go habs go! Last night Chicago split a home at home and they tie their series at 1. The Flyers and Boston are I think tied at 1. Red Wings/Sharks, Sharks are leading that series 2-0. If the Habs can take out the Pens -yeah, right- and SJ can take out Detroit, then we got new Stanley Cup champs this year. I'd love to see a Habs/Vancouver match up in the finale.

Tonight, I'm at the 5-9 for a snowy Spring evening but luckily for me we got monitors all over the place so I can get an occasional glimpse of the playoffs in between calls. I had a great site line to the monitor above Jerry's desk at the end of our tap dialers but for some reason as soon as Patrick left that dialer and I settled in the last 2 systems went and crashed on us. Something to do with the power grid. Why those two systems, I don't rightly know. Maybe its because we're using very old computers. Anyway, that's about all for now.

It's been a busy couple of days here

Most of my free time over the last few days has been eaten up by trying to get the wifi on my Itouch to get fixed up. I opened up an ITunes account. I’m checking YouTube and the Forums and learning a lot of information on routers. My router did not come with a password when I got it last November. It’s a Belkin N150. For the most part it’s a decent router but has the tendency to suspend my Internet Explorer occasionally. I’m using my laptop to type this with my router on Wifi. I’ve tried all kinds of things and all kinds of password schemes. I tried admin, 1234, take my system off line for 30 seconds and reboot. Since my router didn’t come with a password, it allowed me to make one up. Nothing. I even went into the routers admin page and got the Wep key and typed that into the Itouch. I tried a dozen different things but still I can’t get onto Safari I even toyed around with changing the DSN settings. All I get is incorrect password for my network. The thing is the ITouch at least recognizes my network name but no matter what I do, I access the Internet from my Itouch. I got the 3rd gen version. I know this works because other people I’ve met and know, tell me it does and I‘ve seen the browser work on YouTube.

Other then that not much else is going on. Weather wise here it’s been very dry here in Northern Alberta and on the rest of the prairies. We really need rain. Back in the 1980’s we used to get a lot of rain. Sometimes it would last for 2 solid days or more, now we’re lucky we get a weeks worth of rain in a year.

Anyway, I’m going back to play around with this thing. Vinny from work says there’s a free says there’s a free program he wants me to download. He’s going to gain access to my laptop (the one I’m using now that he fixed for me last month) from home. I guess I’ll be plugging in my ITouch USB cable to call up ITunes and he’ll help me set things up from his location. We’ll probably do this on Sunday or Saturday night. I hope. Anyway, that’s about all for now.

I love Sundays, even though I

with a spitting headache.

Anne gave me an Adville and a few minutes later I felt a lot better.

Seems Boots had jumped off again over the balcony about dusk this morning. He loves doing stuff like that and most likely he will be doing a lot of this during the summer.

Anne and I were about how the Mp3 player I want to buy but the Pay Pal way/EBay might take a month or more to get here. So shes going to give me the $200 to go over to Future Shop when she comes back from the bank tomorrow and I'm getting the 8 Gb version. I mostly want this for the pod casts I subscribe to and listen to a bit of music and play a few games from the apps store. I discovered that the Itunes gift cards don't work here in Canada but are sold here. Go figure. I can access the app store and download content using one of those disposable credit cards anyway. Well I'm pretty sure I can. I'm almost certain that I'll be getting my Itouch tomorrow. I'm looking for ward to it, although I wont have much time to play with it.

An update on the UFO story from yesterday. Ian Punnet had Nick Pope on the show last night and the guest said that the video seemed to be a hoax. He sited the almost perfect condition of the trucks in the photo, the absence of people nearby etc.

The Penguins/Sens game wasn't bad. I was hoping for a Sens win so now the Pens lead the series 2-1. I'm happy that Phoenix is leading 2-1 in their series with Detroit.

Despite having too much hockey I had a good day. Anne made a nice breakfast brunch. I'm going to post this and get some of my music converted over to the Itouch for later. Anyway, that's all for now.

I love Easter weekends

Yesterday I got my pay check and was having a decent night. Gerry let us out at 8:30pm. I was hearing we were going to work until 10pm but I kept on hearing this voice in my head that this was April fools day. I got my check as right as usual but still no bonus money. Last year I made an average of $25/week in bonus money, now I’m down to about $16/week. In this line of work where its sales related you need a bonus structure of some kind to keep the staff motivated. Gerry’s been giving out $20/night in cash but of course we have heavy hitter Patrick who gets over $200/night in cards. I was lucky to get 2 cards last night for $45. But the $20 isn’t just for the night shift it’s for the whole day. But if you know how to get into the lists on the computer in the back, you can skim through the source and pick out the large taps that pay on card. That’s why I see so many blanked out names. Somebody’s been tampering with the lists to get the large credit card taps. You write down the information on an off sheet and then erase the name and then during the shift you use the land line phone to call the customer back and then you get the credit card # write everything down and then the next call you get on the computer say a 2006 $10 tap, you erase the screen info (F6=edit) insert the new info phone numbers etc and enter the credit card. I don’t have the capability to accomplish this back end stuff but I know the people that do.

After work I took my bag of empties and went into Audrey’s and couldn’t find Trevor. He special orders my books for me. Apparently he left Audrey’s for other opportunities. I was in shock but I picked up C.S Friedman’s Book 2 of the Magister trilogy. I still have my Fantasy Rich Horton anthology there, nothing else came in for me. I also noticed a huge tick hardcover: George RR Martin’s “Warriors” anthology. I’ll wait until it comes out in Trade. Also, SF Signal released a table of contents Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology “Wings of Fire.” I guess Russell taking over for Trevor will order my books for me. He’s pretty good at doing this. Sigh, it’s the end of an era.

This weekend promises to be a pretty good weekend. I‘m off today as it‘s a paid stat holiday as long as I work tomorrow, which is penciled into my calendar anyway. Tonight the Oiler‘s have a pay-per-view game on TV in Dallas but Saturday night the boys will be playing in Phoenix. They have 6 games left to wrap up a disastrous season that (mercifully) ends Sunday April 11th on the road in Anaheim.

So, we‘re getting ready for bed earlier this morning. It‘s 4am and am I hearing this right? I already had one shocker yesterday and at the and on Coast they were talking about a major format change to a radio call in cooking show. WTF, am I hearing this right? I‘m thinking it has to be an April fools joke. So I went to bed with that. This morning in my Inbox I scanned for the Coast Zone email newsletter I get every morning that recaps the show from the night before. Apparently George said in the last hour of the show, he reminded everyone that it was April 1st. Relief. That was a pretty good April fools joke. I love this show and I’d really feel empty inside if the show was dropped or changed in any significant way.

Over the next several days Coast has some great shows: Tonight they are going to be discussing the return of “V” the TV series from the 1990’s. Saturday Ian has another boring show: Man’s brain vs. Women’s brain. Yeesh. Sunday: The Shroud of Turin. I love stuff like this Monday: Xenothon returns about spirituality 2012 black holes etc. Tuesday: TBA Wednesday: The economy and military hot spots: Thursday: Science and the Cosmos, Friday with Art Bell life on other planets. So Coast is pretty decent this week. Of course when we go to bed we listen to the first hour where we get the news of all things strange, weird and great.

And finally, say, if you need a laugh check out today’s SF Signal. There’s a funny YouTube video “Advice from Aquaman.” Lots of fun. Anyway, that’s about all for now.