Oh, no, don’t do that… your hair will catch on fire.

I’ve been thinking that there’s absolutely no reason for this website to stay up any more. I don’t write too often. I don’t have anything interesting to write about. I don’t have a lot of spare time. There’s all those applications on line to stay in touch with people (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

So do you want to know the only reason I’m keeping this website up? It’s the name. I like the idiotonastick domain and I don’t want to lose it. I don’t know what else I’d use it for, other than this, but still I don’t want to lose it for some reason.

I have other domains like that too. I just like the names – and a good domain name is hard to find since there are millions of people out there trying to register their domains daily.

So, boring or not, the name will still be here. Hopefully once in a while I can write about something.

I was thinking the other day about our portable air conditioner in the bedroom and how it’s not really portable. It’s portable in that it’s on wheels and you can take it down and put it up more easily than a regular air conditioner, but it’s not portable. You have to attach the hose to a window and duct tape it to the window and not move the air conditioner til the end of summer.

That’s not portable to me. I was thinking that what I want is a really portable air conditioner… one that you can turn on, move from room to room – whichever one you’re sitting in that’s hot, and then move it back to the other room – like the bedroom at bedtime to cool things down.

With the exponential growth of electronics over the past 10 years, you’d think that someone could have done some R&D on air conditioners and how to come up with this product. If I were an inventor, I’d try to come up with it, but I’m not.

So this is my plea to inventors. Please create a really portable air conditioner. And maybe make it so that it has apps – then you’ll get everybody buying in (as if really portable is not a big selling point). You’ll have developers creating new apps for you, and maybe even give it WiFi – that’s gotta be how it becomes portable.

I was thinking about the many variations we have for words in English, such as throwing up (I thought of this because I wasn’t feeling well yesterday – not that great today either). We have puke, vomit, hurl, throw up – those are the ones I can think of, feel free to give me more if you can think of them.

I just started wondering if they do this in other languages too… whether they have all kinds of slang words for one particular thing. Oh, that reminds me of the penis. Does it? Does it remind me of a penis? The word penis and all the euphemisms for that one; most of which I find quite amusing, although right now the only one I can think of is Johnson.

If you speak another language, please let me know whether you do the same stuff with your language as we do with ours. And if you just speak English, tell me some funny names for things that I may or may not know.

Well the cold is not quite all gone – I have a cough now, just like when I smoked, but at least it’s a helluva lot better. I even went to work out again last night for the first time in a week. I took it a bit easy and just did a little warm up and then the machines – gotta build those muscles if I ever want my body to turn into a fat burning machine. I hope the cough hurries up and goes away – its kinda disappointing to have a cough again. I’d gotten used to it being gone.

Anyway, I’ve got a meeting tonight at 7:00. The good thing is that I don’t have to go all the way downtown for it, they booked a spot up here close to me. According to google, the fastest route for me to get to the meeting will take 8 minutes, and the longest route will take me 12 minutes. So I’m taking my sweet time, having a tea and dinner (I had a turkey breast sandwich on whole wheat) and then I’ll probably head out around 6:30. These are those meetings with the yappy people. But I think they’ve given the boot to one (or at least that’s what we all agreed to at last meeting) and one is away on vacation, so perhaps things will go quickly.

The problem when I get home around 9 or 10:00 at night is that I start my 8 or 9:00 routine of sitting and relaxing in front of the TV. So all of a sudden it’s 11:00 and I haven’t had enough time to relax in order to go to sleep, so I have to stay up til at least 12:00. It screws my timing right up.

Oh, and BTW, I’ve never liked whole wheat bread. I’ve never liked the taste of it although I’ve eaten it before they came out with multigrain, just because it was supposed to be ‘good for you’.

The last couple of days for lunch I’ve had a tuna sandwich on whole wheat bread and, you know what? It was delicious. I’ve been liking this whole wheat bread. It’s Wonder bread! Wonder Plus, 100% Whole Wheat Bread! And it’s got 190 calories for 2 slices with 4 grams of fibre there and only 4 grams of sugar. That’s not bad. There’s another kind of bread that I’ve been eating mostly – I think it’s called Body Wise – which has fewer calories and more fibre, but as far as a whole wheat taste goes, I think I’d stick with this one for a change every now and then.

Ok, I guess somebody better start paying me sponsor money or something for those kind of plugs

As you know, not feeling good over here, but I guess I’m better today than I have been. I’ve stopped taking all the medication, just because I’d like the stone out of my system before I show up for work on Monday.

Anyway, last night, while I was sitting here minding my own business, there was a knock on the door. It was my daughter and she was in tears, and there was my ex-husband behind, chasing her up the stairs.

There was screaming and yelling – I told them to come in, I’m sure the neighbours didn’t need to be part of this. As I gleaned what the story was through all the yelling, it turns out that the drunken ex-husband (who not only drove here drunk with my daughter in the car, but also had an accident earlier on in the evening), was accusing my daughter of stealing all his roaches. Supposedly he had about 10 roaches in his car and they were gone, so he was accusing her of taking them.

She told him he could search her, she didn’t take them, but he was having none of any normal conversation. As a matter of fact he once grabbed her and made like he was going to punch her – while half falling over my furniture, and I pulled him off. I also asked him if he wanted me to call the police.

There was another altercation when he came back screaming for her to give him his house keys, he wanted her out of there, she could go live on the streets. I told him that she wouldn’t be giving the keys back, that all her stuff was there and that she’d need to go get it.

So, needless to say, my daughter stayed here overnight, we got calmed down, watched some TV and all went to bed.

As I think back on it, it’s not that I was surprised by this outburst, nor even him showing up here – I seem to be the go-to person in bad situations.

I was just thinking though, what a big fucking nerve he has to show up at my house, drunk, putting me in the middle of his problems – not even thinking about me being sick, although he knew I was sick. It’s all about him. What a pathetic loser he is. While he wasn’t this bad when we were married, the potential was there and is there in full force now that he doesn’t have a wife to tell him what’s right and wrong. And how sad is that for a 47-year-old man?

I got a phone call from him this morning, which I didn’t answer. I was trying to sleep in some more for my cold. Then another call later which I answered and he proceeded to tell me that “I guess I overreacted a bit last night”. Over reacted? A bit? WTF is wrong with you is what I wanted to say. WTF is wrong with you?! However, he probably doesn’t even remember half of it, but he wanted me to tell my daughter to give him a call later on because he’d left some money for her at home since he was going away for the weekend.

It’s very hard for me to believe I was ever married to that guy. I tried for 8 years, and I’m very thankful that I got out.

Yes, it feels like all I do these days is try to fit in things I need to do in between when I’m supposed to go and work out. So tonight I’m taking a break. I’m going to sit at home, listen to some music, drink copious amounts of beer (probably 6-8 and then I’ll start to fall asleep), and perhaps order some fattening chicken wings cuz it’s too damned cold to go out and get anything.

I think I may just play some Wolfenstein soon. I want to go download a non-CD version cuz I can’t stand playing games where you always have to put the CD in. WTF are they thinking with that crap?

And I’ve got lots of work to get done on the computer – let’s not even think about how much I still haven’t installed.

I did put on the Adobe Design Premium CS4 package but I get some crashing using Photoshop, then I get a message that it’s my video card and I should check that I have 128 mgs on the card, yada yada. The stupid card has 512 mgs so I don’t understand what the issue is here, and I don’t want to buy a new video card since that one was just replaced for free after my last one conked out. Who knows about that. I may contact Adobe and see if they’ve got anything else to say about this issue.

Anyway, for now I’m going to finish my tea, and if I’m lucky, by then it’ll be beer time. No it probably won’t be, it’s really early still. I may just make it beer time. WTF do I care? It’s Friday night. I can have a beer at 3:00 in the afternoon if I damned well feel like it – I don’t have to report to anybody. Ok, 6:00 pm it is then. Official beer time tonight (if I don’t feel like having one more tea). There we go.

Yes boys and girls, just one more day of work, and *woohoo!*, off for 10 days (if I count the weekends). I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this break… 10 days in a row, I’ve been counting the minutes.

My only plans, other than a commitment on the 30th and a guest on the 26th, are to try to sleep in, perhaps finish a necklace I’ve been working on for weeks and will take at least days more (one of those really involved, piddly little stitching things), and drink copious amounts of beer, and Panama Jack, and wine with dinners.

I’m sure we’ll rent many movies and stay up until 3:00 in the morning. I may even get laid a time or two in there *ha ha in advance*… which reminds me, I never got my birthday boink – we pencilled that in for Saturday because we were so busy.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll write something else within this time, even though I’ve been fairly lackadaisical about writing lately. So we’ll talk soon.

I can’t believe it’s 6 days since I last wrote, but it is. That’s what happens when you’ve had a website for years and years, you forget about it sometimes.

I was doing stuff every night – mostly working on jewellery, cuz my jewellery website is also suffering from my lack of work there.

I can’t be everything to every one. I’ve only got so many arms, legs, eyes, noses.

This weekend I’m having my jewellery open house, so there’s some cleaning to be done. I’m hoping my snookey will take care of that tomorrow while I’m off at work. He’d better. I don’t have time to do it.

Anyway, right now I’m just working on another necklace cuz I’ve got a really difficult one in the works and I’m sick of working on it. Tonight is TV night, but I betcha the shows won’t be on because it’s American thanksgiving and they’ll probably have football all over the place or reruns of my shows. With that I guess I should say Happy Thanksgiving Americans! Did I even remember to say that for our own thanksgiving? I don’t think so.

Ok, so I’ve got things to do, places to go, people to see. Or else it’s just my usual hibernating in the computer room with my Mafia Wars or jewellery. Same thing.

Ok, I told you about how hard it was to find a rug that I liked to fit the studio, so I figured I’d show you what we finally chose and how the room ended up. What you can’t really see in these pictures are the ‘real’ colours on the walls. You can see the yellow ceiling, but then it’s not as deep a yellow either as it looks in these pictures, so everything’s not quite ‘actual’, but it shows you how much time, money and work I spent doing this. Pretend you like it. Here goes:

Walking into the room, this is what you see.

Turn to your left.

Close up of the rug that looks like it doesn’t match, but it does – there’s a tie in with those blue-ish curtains and blue in the rug.

Over in the corner, let’s not forget that there has to be a computer in there too.

I got this fat, old, ugly broad to come in and take a picture of the mirrored doors where those who want to see how the jewellery looks on them, can look.

So that’s it. Over $1000 in the hole now just so I don’t have to go out and do shows. Then I got an email today that I’m accepted for a show November 21st. I was hoping that I had been missed on that one, but no. So now I’ve got a whole bunch of plans to change cuz I can’t cancel it (they’ve already cashed the cheque).

After my accolades the other day about the great service I got from Sears, let me tell you what’s going on now with them.

I’ll start with the fact that I’ve ordered two rugs from them recently. They arrived in good enough time, but when I put them down, the colours weren’t good with the room, no fault of Sears other than I guess having better pictures, but I’ve returned them both.

As of last night, the Sears website was down for their “brand new and improved” website which would be open this morning.

Ok, so I had to wait. I couldn’t order yet another rug last night, so I went to the site this morning. I found a rug that I thought might be the last one, I figured the colours ‘should’ be perfect for what I want and tried to order it. That’s after I got a little used to the changes and tried to figure out how to find what I was looking for.

What it looks like they’ve done is tried to implement some Ajax for ordering – I guess so that customers are not taken from page to page in ordering and that the little ajax pop up will do the work on the same page.

Guess what? Their Ajax was not working… just kept doing the spinny loading circle and when you’d finally try to click on a link to order the damned rug, it took you to a page where you input the catalogue number. How the fuck would I know a catalogue number?

Since this wasn’t working (and I want it ordered fast so it will get here in time), I called them. Well, waddayaknow… their staff also use the website to fulfill the orders when it’s not a catalogue order. So their staff could not help me either; but they did tell me that they were aware of the problem and to try back in half an hour.

I tried back in half an hour, and an hour, and a few hours later. It’s now after 6:00 pm and their website is still screwed, still takes you to a catalogue ordering page.

But, you know what? I stopped at the Sears store today as well. The rug I wanted was not available in any of the catalogues. The only way to order this one is online. Maybe. Who knows if it’s even in stock – I’ll only find that out when their website is working.

Which brings me to another thing. I had ordered blinds from Sears. A new set for the living room, and a new set for our bedroom. Wouldn’t you know that the living room ones were out of stock. But I didn’t find out til yesterday when I went to pick up the bad rug #2 and got the blinds for the bedroom only.

So I called up Sears and said that since these blinds were on back order, if I switched colours, were the other ones in stock? They were, so I told them to send me those ones instead, whereupon the woman taking the order and cancelling the other order, told me the price. These new coloured blinds were going to cost me $40 more.

Oh no they were not. I told her that I had used this ‘Sears coupon thing’ when I’d ordered and I wanted the same discount applied. She asked me to hold, then came back to tell me that the discount was finished and I’d have to pay this full price.

I then told her to cancel both orders. I said I wasn’t paying more for the blinds when it was their fault I had to order a different colour just to get my blinds in time. I was no longer interested and would take my business elsewhere. She asked me to hold and then came back with a discount where I’d be paying the same price as I was supposed to for the other colour.

So, this has been the long tale of my recent interaction with Sears. Not only that, but when I was at the store today, I noticed they had a sign up that said they will no longer call you when your order has arrived. All I could think of was that, in this day and age of stores not having a price differential, they’re usually trying to flog their great customer service that will keep you coming back. Sears newest approach is to tell you that you’re now going to get less customer service.

Big mistakes going on here Sears. I can’t even imagine how much money they’ve lost today with the website down and their customer service reps not being able to ring through a sale either unless someone’s got a catalogue number.

UPDATE: It’s 7:25 on Sunday and the site is still fucked up.

I got up around 7:00, and the furthest thing from my mind was painting. My snookey painted the second coat on two of the walls yesterday, but without the edging, which means I’d need to do the edging. And I tell ya, I’m not in the mood for edging. I’m not even in the mood for rolling.

Now that I’ve wasted an hour doing pretty much nothing, I suppose I’d better go do something productive… like maybe go to my facebook and play that Mafia Wars game. I’m having fun with that.

If I go now, my energy should be built back up and I can kill off some more people and get more points.

Yes. Then I’ll use up all my energy, and maybe by this evening I’ll have some more and play again.

That’s the kinda stuff to do on a Saturday. Not this painting crap.

I’ve just gotten up before my snookey on a weekday. Usually he’s up before me getting breakfast ready, making my lunch, turning off my alarm clock that I somehow didn’t turn off properly.

In his head I think he thinks that this is like one of those days where I work at home and he sleeps til God knows when. He’s going to get a big surprise after my shower is finished and I run in there and turn on those bright lights.

I’m just so happy that it’s Friday. We’ve been painting all week and I gotta say that I’m sick of it, even though we’ve still got to put another coat on all the walls and I think I’m going to switch colours on the bulkhead (I painted it the same colour as the ceiling – yellow). I think it dominates the room though, and I don’t want yellow to be the most noticeable colour.

Anyway, I’ve gotta run and have my shower, get to work so I can get home in just 9-1/2 short hours.

I know, I know, I keep writing about the jewellery and the shows and yada, yada.

But I can’t remember if I told you that someone had asked me about making necklaces for her daughter’s wedding.

Tonight we had the third and final meeting, and, yes, I’m a go. I shall be making 9 of these necklaces for the daughter’s wedding – the bridesmaids, the bride, the mother, and the mother-in-law.

The good thing is that these are fairly expensive necklaces, so it will be nice to get some money in my pocket. And the only bad thing is that I guess I’d better get busy. Although I do have some time. It’s not like they asked me to have them finished tomorrow.

Tonight I’m gonna relax a bit cuz I guess I’ll start getting busy again on the weekend. I might be able to do two or three of those necklaces, as long as I have all the right beads. Right. I’ve got to check that, I may need to buy some more.

But tonight I’m going to spend my evening vegged out in front of the TV, watching The Office *woohoo*, and 30 Rock, and WvTF else is on.

Tomorrow’s Friday and I’m damned happy about it.

Ok, just about all the work is over with for now, except for a meeting tonight, dentist and another meeting next week.

I just thought I’d give you an update since I haven’t posted much recently. Maybe tonight I’ll be around and can actually write about something.

Over at Mommyknows.com, she’s got a huge Kraft Foods giveaway basket for some lucky reader to win. The post is here: http://mommyknows.com/huge-kraft-foods-gift-basket-giveaway/.

I, of course, have to enter that giveaway because Kraft peanut butter is the only kind I eat. Yes, boys and girls, I am a peanut butter snob. I’ve tried other peanut butters, and they just don’t compare. And when your dinner, most of the time, consists of a spoon of peanut butter, you become a very discerning peanut butter eater.

So I’m blogging about the giveaway cuz that will give me two entries to the contest. You can enter too – find out how at her post. There’s more than just peanut butter in there. But I don’t think you should even try… fewer chances for me to win that way.

I can’t believe it’s been 5 days since I actually blogged about anything. That’s busy for ya. However, after next Saturday (the 18th), the madness will stop.

In case I didn’t tell you, I’ll be doing a show at the Thornhill Festival, so those of you in and around the Toronto area, come and buy some jewellery (or at least come and say hi and look at the jewellery pretending you’re gonna buy). I’m gonna be close to Yonge Street (probably the very first jewellery vendor) and you’ll recognize me cuz of my short hair and the way that I look just like my photo at the top – only a little less purpley.

Ok, enough propaganda. I spent my entire day today taking my daughter to go buy her school uniform and various other sundry shopping so that she’d be prepared. I took off Friday so I could go to her old (uniform) school in case it was any help in her getting back in there. Something worked – she got in. But, of course, I’d forgotten all about the uniform stuff – and this at a point where I don’t get paid til next week.

Anyway, roughly $500 later, everything’s all set and, boy, am I tired. I feel like I’ve been doing the breast cancer walk all day – and, as a matter of fact, that was going on today, which screwed us up royally heading out to that uniform place and having the streets closed off and trying to find a reroute.

I do not know that area of the city – Etobicoke – thank God for my little Australian boyfriend in my car, giving me alternate routes as I headed back the wrong way.

Oh, and I stopped at this garage sale along the way… they had a big sign that said “jewellery”. So I thought, “hey, maybe I can find some retro beads”, you know, old jewellery that I can take apart and remake into something current, even if just for me.

So we stop at this ‘garage sale’ and look at the jewellery. It’s some woman selling her own hand-made jewellery. And not cheaply either. I’m looking at stuff and she’s got it for $35. I think, “hmmm, this doesn’t seem like a garage sale”, and I was right. It was a venue for her to sell her jewellery. I felt ripped.

She started telling me all about the special beads in the pieces. “Oh, this is my bestseller, these beads from Brazil, yada, yada”, so to shut her up as I inspected her jewellery, I said, “ya, I make jewellery”. Ok, that killed the sell job, she obviously figured I wasn’t about to buy the jewellery. But then she wasn’t too forthcoming with information when I asked what something was – don’t want to give away secrets to the competition.

Anyway, enough yapping. This is not a catch-up for five days of saying nothing. I’m done, but I’ve got a movie to watch – that priest one where they think he’s a pedophile, I forget the name of it. I’ll let you know if it was any good. It didn’t really appeal to me, but there was nothing else cuz I didn’t get over to the movie place til after 5:00 and my zip movie wasn’t here in time for this weekend.

I have found that,

1. When you’re making a tea, it’s better to have a teabag in your cup, rather than just pouring boiling water in there
2. When you’re wearing a white shirt, no matter how careful you are, something will always hit it… even just a little splash off your salad dressing
3. If you’re running late for work, you will always hit every red light on the way in
4. The day after your boss tells you what a good job you’re doing, is the day that you’ll screw something up royally, and your boss may even be the one to point it out to you
5. When you have something that needs to be printed in a hurry, you will run out of toner. That toner will not need replacing for another year.
6. When you try to use your coolest, newest gadgets in front of others, you will forget how to use it, or where the key is to show them how cool it is
7. On the day that you write your longest blog post, when you go to post it, instead you’ll be asked to log in, and you will not have copied the post (for safety’s sake)

These are just a few of life’s lessons. Feel free to add your own.

Ok, I’ve been a little bit slack in posting – and I’m still gonna be a little bit slack. I’m really busy. When I have a minute to myself, I’ll write about some lame thing as usual.

Or should I say out. Holy crap I can’t believe how long this stupid back problem is lasting. I think it’s been two weeks of back trouble.

Just when I think everything’s ok again, two days later I’ll have trouble.

As of yesterday, when I started getting up from sitting down, there was this pulling in my right hip. And I know it’s not my hip, it’s actually whatever to do with the back. Today when I stand up, my right hip is all stiff.

I have to walk it out in order to be able to walk semi-normally again.

Tomorrow I’ll be working from home again. Not that that helps my back any, it just saves me walking length to the washroom, or to get a tea or coffee. Frankly, my snookey usually makes those for me anyway, so working at home at least gives me that bonus.

Let’s hope things aren’t too busy tomorrow. Like that ever happens.

Oh, another thing… somebody got the boot at my work yesterday, so our whole floor is all antsy. The morale not too good. I guess everyone’s wondering if they’re next.

A guy commented here on one of my posts, and he didn’t put his real name, he put his name as “Bill Collector”. While I was wondering why he didn’t leave his name, I thought, “hey, wait, what if that really was his name?” What if he was a bill collector and his name actually was Bill Collector? Wouldn’t that be neat?

Of course that got my mind to take a stroll (when isn’t it?) through what I lovingly call my ‘brain’. I started thinking of other names that would be neat, or funny, ot sadistic to the poor kid, and came up with a few:

Phil Errup (he’d be a gas jockey)
Bob Inforapples (owns a grocery store and supervises the hallowe’en activities)
Jack Uvolltrades (no description necessary)
Willy Doit (Evil Kneival’s stuntman)
Peter Offwithastick (gigolo)

That was all that came to mind. C’mon, it was only a fleeting thought. You come up with some.

As I mentioned the other day, my back was screwed up, so I worked at home from Wednesday to Friday, just so I wouldn’t have those as sick days, and have the girl who covers for me have to cover for me some more – she usually screws up something anyway… more work for me.

I needed some stuff from Staples. I could have had my snookey go buy it for me, since he’s been running out the whole time getting me stuff, but after three days holed up in the house, I wanted to go with.

We jumped in his car (well, I wasn’t really ‘jumping’ – and I probably couldn’t call that ‘walking’ to his car either) and headed off to Office Depot – just to see if they had more stuff than Staples. We were making a turn and all of a sudden, his signal light was clicking really fast. I said, “how come your signal light is going so fast?” but he didn’t know.

Then, on the hottest day we’ve had this year, his air conditioning turned off. Then started. Then turned off. Then started. Off, on, off, on. The ‘on’ part wasn’t really on since it kept conking out.

As we drove closer to Office Depot, suddenly he had no dashboard lights. This was a really freaky thing. And the windows wouldn’t go up . Hey! The door locks wouldn’t work either.

We got to Office Depot, went inside and looked for the stuff I needed. They didn’t have it all, and I was thinking that their prices weren’t that good, so I decided to just leave so we could go to Staples.

When we went out to the car… of course it wouldn’t start. It would make this funny clicking sound, but that was it.

So we had to call CAA and sit in the car without air conditioning, with the sun blazing down on us on his black leather car seats and wait for them to arrive.

And not only was my back still screwed up, but the medication I’d been taking for days for it was making me feel ill. I had a pain in my stomach and thought I might puke. Maybe I took those pills on an empty stomach – I couldn’t remember eating. You’d think I might be skinny with the amount of food I eat, but, no.

Anyway, the tow truck driver arrived. He took us over to the mechanic’s place and we asked him if he’d also give us a lift home. He said it wasn’t policy but he’d lie to the dispatch and tell them he had to go to ‘our address’.

Turns out he didn’t lie. He called in the job to clear it and told them he’d be another 10 minutes or so because he had to drive the “elderly couple” home.

Elderly couple? Who was he going to drive home? I didn’t see any ‘elderly couple’ there. Now wait a minute… elderly, hmmm, was he talking about us? Was he including me in that elderly couple? Me? Elderly? Get outta here. This guy wasn’t too much younger than me, WTF was he talking about?

As he was driving us home, I said to him, “I’ve never been called ‘elderly’ before” and he said, “oh, I just said that so they wouldn’t say anything about me driving you guys home”. Nice comeback. But now I don’t believe it. I’m thinking that I look elderly. I’m part of an elderly couple.

I guess I gotta rethink myself. Maybe I’ll let my hair grow. These spikey things aren’t appropriate for an elderly woman. And my clothes…. WTF should I be wearing? I should get a shawl. I might just feel cold for no reason. Take that nail polish off my toes. That looks gross on old people. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do here.

Got a call from a telemarketer the other day telling me that I had won one of five prizes. I didn’t have to buy anything, nothing required on my part, just go to this location at 216 Chrislea Road out in Woodbridge for the draw and watch a presentation from a ‘travel’ company.

Even though we knew it was probably a scam, I thought, “what the heck, might as well” and took down all the information. I was guaranteed to win one of these:

1. 50″ plasma tv RCA
2. $1000 cash
3. All inclusive royal caribbean cruise including 2 weeks accommodation, flight included
4. 1 week at Hilton Head, South Carolina for two, including airfare, meals
5. 8 days in Orlando, Florida or Cancun, Mexico for whole family (up to 8-10 people he told us), private Ramada Inn suite including meals, airfare and flights are not included in this package

I told my snookey right then that the ‘prize’ we’d win would be the trip to Florida or Mexico where we had to pay our own flight. However, all I had to do was to go to The Vacation Store location dressed in business casual attire, fill out the gift claim form (see Barbara, he said), show them two pieces of ID, make sure I showed up with my husband, and enjoy a complementary dinner and watch the presentation for one hour (say one and a half hours to be sure).

We were all excited about the presentation. Maybe they’d talk us into some fabulous vacation package. We showered up, dressed in business attire and headed off to God’s country out at Hwy. 7 and Weston Road – quite a hike.

They’d called us about an hour before we left to confirm whether we’d like chicken or roast beef for dinner. We both chose chicken – figured you can’t screw that up as much as roast beef.

We arrived early but were told not to show up til 6:20, so we waited a bit in the car.

We approached the desk where a couple of skanky young girls in cheap clothes glared at us. We showed ID, filled in a form. On the form they asked when our last vacation was. I wrote down that it was 13 years ago and that, obviously, vacations weren’t that important to us.

On the front of the form, where they listed all the prizes, I drew an arrow to that ‘vacation package where you have to pay for your own flight’, and put a little note that said, “this is the ‘prize’ we’ll win”.

A couple of the skags came over to us a couple of times to ask about our last vacation and whether or not we ‘planned’ to take a vacation soon. I said we had nothing planned (but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t take a vacation if something great came up). As a matter of fact, I’d love to take one of those Alaskan cruises – or any cruise for that matter.

They shuffled my snookey and me off to a room to wait to draw our winning ticket. What do you know? We drew the ‘vacation package where you pay for your own airfare’. Then they thanked us and told us we could leave.

Scuze me? Leave? Where’s our dinner? Where’s our presentation? How much did it cost me in gas to get to Woodbridge and I’m not even getting my chicken?

And that prize we won… we’d only have to pay a $14 processing fee to ensure that the prize would be available to us for a year. Send your cheque and a self-addressed stamped enveloped (they’re so cheap that they won’t even mail out your certificate, you’ve got to pay for the stamp yourself) to:

1673853 Ontario Inc.
7700 Pine Valley Drive, Box 72029
Woodbridge ON L4L 2X0 (registered mail not accepted)

Do you think we were racing to send our $14 (and stamped envelope) to hold a vacation package for one year? We were not. Especially not after seeing the terms and conditions on the rear side of the offer:

Funny, not once did they mention to us that our 7 consecutive nights of vacation would be 4 nights in Orlando and 3 nights in Daytona Beach or St. Petersburg.

And on the phone we were told that the package was good for up to 8-10 people, in the terms it tells us two adults and three children staying in the same room.

Did you happen to notice that it says, “airfare, transporation, hotel taxes, administrative fees and services charges, meals, roll away beds, etc. and items of a personal nature are not included in this offer and ‘arte’ the responsibility of the user. Florida room/country taxes, administrative fees and service charges are paid in advance of confirmation”.

What a prize! How come I’m not coughing up $14 for that?

I won’t forget to mention that, when I was unemployed, I took a telemarketing job where it was my job to sell these ‘vacation packages where you just pay for the airfare’. I actually sold one to a couple planning their honeymoon. I felt so bad at that job, I quit the next day.

For those who don’t get enough YouTube, my daughter sent me the link for Sick in the Head.

I particularly agree with my shoes are made of dreams.

So I got my car back on Saturday and drove it to work today. The air conditioning seems fabulous – very cold, never turning into heat. Just the way I like my air conditioning to work.

The good thing was that it didn’t cost $529 after all. The bad news is that it cost $800 instead. Yes, boys and girls, $800 because not only did he replace the clutchy thing, WvTF that was called, but there was also a problem with one of the hoses, and being the proactive mechanic that he is, he got his welder to fix that up before it needed replacing.

It’s really too bad that bicycles don’t have air conditioning. I’d ride mine to work and forget about my 12-year-old car.

What else is going on with me, you ask? Well I managed to kinda fall down the stairs at work again. Those big cement stairs in the stairwell with the big cement walls and iron railings.

It seems that the heel of my shoes kind of caught on my pant leg and swung me around a bit. While I was already holding the rail, I had to grab onto the rail with my other hand and that swung me totally around with my head smack into the cement wall.

Boy am I happy when there’s no one around to see me go face first into a cement wall. Something straight out of America’s Funniest Home Videos, where the audience is either going ‘ohhhhhhhh’ or laughing their faces off (probably the latter).

Needless to say I didn’t realize that it put a big scrape on my head. And when I look at it now I see a lump has also started forming. I wonder if that’s gonna bruise up. People will be looking at me then with those questioning eyes that show they’re thinking, “hmmm, did her husband do that to her?”, without ever saying it out loud of course.

Anyway, that’s my big excitement. Air conditioning for the cement-face woman.

I got an email from Rogers the other day. In it they told me that Flickr Pro accounts would no longer be free – we could still have a basic Flickr account for free. Well, big fucking woo, everybody can have a Flickr basic account for free and only be able to show 200 pictures.

This pisses me off a bit, well, a lot. I pay $175 a month for my Rogers cable and internet. You think it would kill the big monopoly to let us continue with a Flickr Pro account for free?

I can’t stand the way that as soon the words ‘recession’ were uttered, everybody and their dog jumped on the band wagon to say, “oh, we’re in bad times, can’t offer anything free to our customers any more”.

One of my Flickr Pro accounts was already paid for, by me, because I’d bought it before finding out that Rogers’ customers could have them for free. So I guess I’ll be keeping that one.

But when I think of all the stinking money I pay to that company, especially considering that I might watch under 10 channels on TV and yet pay out the nose for all kinds of channels that come ‘with the package’ that I don’t even watch or want, you might think they’d stop thinking about getting more profit and just do a little something for the people paying their exorbitant rates.

Now I think I might just call them and look at switching to some basic package. All I really want are the high def channels, but I suppose I can’t get just those.

Assholes. Rogers sucks.

I told you I had that ADW_PATCHOU on my computer? I think I did. I spent days trying to get rid of it and I still don’t know if it’s gone… I’m just hoping so.

Another funny thing about it was that I was unable to type properly using IE. I’d have to hit a letter 3 times sometimes, then 1 time the next time in order for it to show what I wanted. Very frustrating and time consuming if you want to write anything at all. However, that wasn’t happening in Firefox. I figured I also had a keylogger on my computer somehow.

Then just yesterday after my regularly scheduled scan, didn’t it tell me that I had a trojan that it removed. Some worm, I forget the name.

But seriously, tell me, how in this day and age with firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-adware, and protection on everything in sight, do you end up with any of this crap on your computer?

It makes me mad. What the hell are they gaining?

I’m now going to try the PCdecrapifier to take off anything useless on my computer too. Hopefully I’ll be running good as new.

UPDATE: Once I installed the decrapifier and ran it, all of a sudden I had another Trojan on my computer. Don’t go near that one, boys and girls.

I was driving home from Best Buy with my honey and for some strange reason I started making up a song.

Yes, boys and girls, that’s what my brain does in its spare time, makes up songs. Of course I didn’t get finished the song, I had to say it out loud so my snookey could revel in my geniosity. It goes something like this:

When I get old, I’ll have Tourette’s – just like my mother
When I get old, I’ll have Tourrette’s – unlike my father
Mild and meek, afraid to speak, so he wouldn’t be a bother
When I get old, I’ll have Tourrette’s, I’ll be the same as now

Am I not fabulous?

I was out at Yorkdale tonight. I was looking for a case for my iPod Touch. Yes, I bought one of those the other week, because I figured it was safe now that my daughter’s moved out. I wouldn’t want to buy one and get it stolen, like my good camera.

One of the reasons I bought it (not just because it’s cool) is because it had 32 gigs of space. That’s more than enough for all my music to go on there, so I’m happy about that. I’ve got it filled up with 2000 songs and I’m listening to music most of the day at work. WTF, I sit all alone in a corner with very little interaction with the rest of the world, so why not listen to music? And this way I’m not disturbing anybody by playing a radio.

I’ve got some fantastic little headphones now that I bought for my old MP3 player since my headphones (and that MP3 player) mysteriously went missing too. I did get the MP3 player back, but never any of my headphones – for that player or for my cellphone.

The headphones I’ve got fit right into your ears AND stay in there – not like the little buds that come with the iTouch. They’re great… the sound is good, they stay in place, and nobody else can hear your music so there’s no disturbance.

Anyway, I’m happy with my purchase. I’m ecstatically happy that the iTouch has my name engraved on it. I think I’ll also put a password on it. Why not? It’s mine, I love it

The only thing I couldn’t find was a little case to hold that and the headphones in one place. A small little ‘purse-like’ thingie to put in my purse. I did buy the hard protector case for it and some anti-glare film for the front that also protects it from scratches.

I looked at small digital camera bags but, of course, they don’t have any holes in them where you could actually play music and wear the thing strapped around your neck.

Apple store didn’t have anything. The Source didn’t have anything. I’m gonna have to do some scoping out to find something akin to what I’m looking for.

If anybody’s got any ideas, please let me know. If you find me the perfect thing and I buy it, I’ll give you 500 entrecard points. How’s that for a deal?

Ok, gotta run. I only have 15 or so minutes til TV night starts.

Orange Necklace

Last night’s class was learning how to make beads. This was my first attempt at it, and so I made a little necklace that I thought was fun and bright. Since I wasn’t listening to some of the things she was saying (I was busy making beads), I hope to learn a little more on the technique side next week, although she said that we’d be too busy on our next project so I might have to wait for the following week.

Anyway, I was surprised to learn how easy this was – not that it looks great or anything, but, with practice, who knows, maybe I’d come up with something interesting.

Blue Necklace

I didn’t make this one 3 strands on purpose, but wrap-around 3 strands, only because I wanted the option of wearing a long, 2-strand necklace if I needed it.

So that’s it for what I’ve been doing lately.

Yesterday when I came home from work and turned on my computer, my computer wouldn’t turn on.

Well, it would turn on but it wouldn’t get past the BIOS and then it told me I had no hard drive. Great. I automatically called my computer guy because I thought I’d get it fixed, but then I started thinking about buying a new computer.

So I went to Dell’s site to check out what that would cost me and for under $2500 I could have a really fast computer with everything I wanted. I told them to go ahead with it and he said he’d call me back with the terms in half an hour.

He didn’t call me back in half an hour but I did talk to him today. And today I asked a few questions whereupon he told me that if I made any changes to the system, my warranty would be voided. If I wanted to put in a new video card – bzzzt, warranty voided.

I didn’t like the idea that I couldn’t do what I wanted when I wanted with my own brand new (expensive) computer, so I told him to cancel the order.

Now I’m waiting for a quote from my computer guy (Yow) to see if he can give me everything I want for a lower price. He’ll get back to me tomorrow, and he only takes about 2 days to build the computer (as opposed to Dell’s minimum 10 days with their special free shipping right now).

Yes, I know, I could get my old computer fixed, but I’m kind of sick of fixing and reformatting and yada yada. I think I’d like to go with brand new even though that would add quite a bit onto my credit card – yet again.

And another thing? Tonight my computer turned on and is working just fine. I’m using it now even though my laptop is sitting here staring me in the face saying, “hey… you liked me last night!”.

So anyway, by this time next week I hope to have a new computer which will be running only Vista Ultimate – I’ve told Yow that he needed to find me a sound solution since Vista doesn’t seem to handle sound well. If that means a new sound card as well, I don’t mind – I’ve never been fond of onboard sound cards.

I came home from work – yes, had to go back into the office as opposed to working from home – and strated getting ready what I was going to wear to work tomorrow.

And this happens to me a lot… although I have a kajillion necklaces, I didn’t think that I had a suitable necklace to wear with my clothes tomorrow.

That, of course, means that I had to create a new necklace. I decided that I had to create a really, really, really long necklace that I could wrap around 3 times. Yes, 3 times, not twice, it had to be 3 times.

Do you know how long a necklace has to be in order to wrap it around 3 times? Well it has to go down past your crotch if you’ve only got it sitting on your neck. Do you know how long it takes just to string beads on a necklace that long? Without even having any design ideas?

It takes from the time you get home from work, until about half an hour before your Monday night TV show watching is going to start.

So that’s what happened to my night. I’ve got my new necklace (and matching earrings) and will I say it looks fabulous? Nah. It’s ok. It’s what I was looking for to wear with those tomorrow clothes but, eh, it’s nothing spectacular.

Every now and then I get a good idea and then there’s the rest of the time that I just want a colour match. And after tomorrow I may just take the stupid necklace apart and reuse the beads for some other necklace. Christ knows it used up my supply on a few of those beads.

Maybe I’d better keep it. I wouldn’t want to have to make another necklace with those colours. I may need it again.

It’s almost time for Heroes. Then there’s True Beauty. I also have to iron my pants and sew the button which got loose in the laundry. See? It’s always work, work, work, even when I’m just going to watch television.

I don’t know if it’s my computer (and I don’t see how it could be since it’s only at my site) that makes me think this site is loading really REALLY slowly.

I know I said I was going to switch over to the new host with this site, but I don’t have time for that now since I’m busy with the one site right now and still have four more to set up that are already moved there.

But is it loading really slowly for everyone out there? It’s pissing me off to visit my own site because I’m doing a countdown on how many seconds it takes.

Let me know.

Why not?

Your result for The Great Minds Advice Test…

Do Good Works

42% Mother Teresa, 25% Franklin, 17% Freud, 17% Wilde and 0% Leonardo!

Your life advisor is Mother Teresa. She has the philosophy of living life by a spiritual commitment for the benefit of the masses.

With this in mind you may be well served to do more charity work and live your life simply with regard not to self gain but to do what is best for those that are less fortunate than you.

Remember to greet each person you meet with a smile. Love of others is your goal.

Take The Great Minds Advice Test at HelloQuizzy

I switched some of my sites over to BlueHost from Netfirms last night. I was just sick of how long it was taking pages to load.

So I’ll be pretty busy for the next little while, while I get things set up. I do intend to move over this site too, but first I’ll have to get some of those sites up that make me money. Then I’ll be able to gauge whether or not BlueHost is faster.

If it is, look out idiotonastick, here I come.

I’m not normally too excited when it comes to the idea of watching TV, but this week some new stuff starts, and I’m going to give it a chance.

Tonight I’m going to watch True Beauty at 10:00. From what I saw of the commercial, these people think they’re being rated on their ‘gorgeous’ looks but they’re really being rated on who they are. And from the look of things, it doesn’t seem that who they are is anybody you’d want to know.

I hope it’s good – or interesting, or some gorgeous people get their come-uppance for being the snotty, self-absorbed assholes that they are.

I’m not saying all gorgeous people are as above… look at me… I’m pretty darned friendly and nice.

Apart from that, my first day of no smoking went pretty well (except that I’d love a smoke right now).

And nobody at work said a damned thing about my new, shorter, copper-streaked hair. You know what that means. They hated it and they’re too polite to say anything at all. Don’t care. I like it.

UPDATE: Watched the True Beauty show and liked it. I especially found it amusing as women were in the bottom two for the night and ranted and raved about how good looking they were, and that they weren’t ugly, and were amazed to be in the bottom two when other women there were obviously ‘uglier’.

Happy New Year

I was going to write about my accomplishments for 2008, but if there were any, I can’t remember what they were.

So I guess I’ll go through the usual resolutions, like everyone, and probably the same resolutions I have every year. It would be good if I actually did them one of these years.

1. Quit smoking (that starts on Monday, Jan. 5th)
2. Lose some weight (I’ll start off with the South Beach diet for a couple of weeks to fast track things, then switch to Weight Watchers for some semi-normal eating).
3. Get some exercise (that’s why I got that Wii Fit, and my back seems to be getting better so I should be able to start that soon).
4. Drink less (easy to do when you’re dieting).
5. Find a new job (this may not be easy, but I’m at least going to look for something that may be less boring and pays better).
6. Stay out of debt (since everything’s already paid off, I just have to remind myself to keep it that way).

That’s pretty simple isn’t it? Nothing overly dramatic or spectacular. Anybody got any interesting resolutions?

Well, I’ve bought everything for everybody except for my son’s Christmas present. He told me he’d like a pair of shoes, so I guess one day we’ll go off looking for shoes for him. I hope that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg considering that he wears size 15 shoes, EE width. So, of course, we have to go to Dack’s to look for shoes. You just can’t find those kinds of sizes anywhere else.

And I recently paid off all my bills except for two. And I’ll get to those this week and then I’ll be debt free. The only thing I’ll have to watch is that I don’t slowly start running up my credit cards again (as I’m apt to do). I’ll just have to remember that I have everything. And I do. WTF else could I possibly need?

So I’m feeling good. You feel good too, feel good for me since my pay cheque will finally be my pay cheque. Uhoh, then I’ll actually see how little I make. But it will be mine, all mine. Except for the monthly bills. Then it will be mine, all mine.

A la Lyndon, I’ve decided to do this book meme too. Mostly cuz I didn’t feel much like writing after my two-and-a-half-hour dentist appointment. Here are the instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Up to this point, the only data items we have seen are simple variables declared with var. Each of these typeless quantities can hold multiple values, so that a group of related data elements can be associated with one another.

What JScript calls an object is called a data structure (or class) in many other languages. As with JScript functions, there are two aspects to JScript objects: creating them and using them. For the moment, we will defer the question of how to create objects and concentrate on how they are used. We will also see that a Jscript-capable browser will provide a number of its own, built-in objects.

A JScript object is made up of a set of component parts, which are called its properties, or members.

Whew, that was exciting now, wasn’t it?

Some little bastard Mom on the Run tagged me, so what am I gonna do? Well, I’ll link to her website once again, so often that you’ll think she’s paying me for that

1. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? I’m told that I was named after my father – but at the time I was told that, I had a totally different father now, didn’t I.
2. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED? Can’t remember when but not too long ago – watching a movie of course.
3. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? It’s legible; it almost looks like printing.
4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCH MEAT? I like pastrami – especially if it’s hot.
5. DO YOU HAVE KIDS? One son and one daughter – but they’re fairly old to be called kids.
6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU? I doubt it, I’m too impatient to put up with my selfishness.
7. DO YOU USE SARCASM A LOT? No, not at all.
8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS. Yes.
9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP? Nope.
10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL? I don’t really like cereal.
11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF? Not usually – unless they’re tied so tight that I have to untie them.
12. DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG? Yes, and I think most others think that too.
13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM? M&M Caramel Praline.
14. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE? Their clothes and shoes.
15. RED OR PINK? Red.
16. WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF? I’d have to say that big pot belly I’ve got, although it’s almost a tie with those huge, honking thighs that serve as pillows.
17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST? I don’t miss anyone, but go away and we can put that to the test.
18. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO SEND THIS BACK TO YOU? No. I’d just delete it thinking it was spam.
19. WHAT COLOR SHOES ARE YOU WEARING? My feet are bare.
20. WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU ATE? Louisiana chicken wings.
21. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW? I was listening to that Elf thing with the different versions… country music, charleston, classic.
… There are 47 of these…

22. IF YOU WHERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOR WOULD YOU BE? Purple.
23. FAVORITE SMELLS? Dune perfume, Christian Dior.
24. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE? Telemarketer.
25. DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU TAGGED YOU AND GUILTED YOU INTO DOING THIS? Yes, I feel like I know her, I’ve been linked to her for years.
26. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH? I don’t watch sports.
27. HAIR COLOR? Brown with blonde streaks on top now.
28. EYE COLOR? Brown.
29. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS? Nope.
30. FAVORITE FOOD? Scallops.
31. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS? Scary movies.
32. LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED? Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
33. WHAT COLOR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING? I’m wearing my robe.
34. SUMMER OR WINTER? Summer.
35. HUGS OR KISSES? Hugs.
36. FAVORITE DESSERT? Cheesecake and carrot cake – can’t decide which I like better.
37. MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND? Anybody who wants to.
38. LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND? About 300 of the visitors who come here every day and never say a damned thing.
39. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW? I’ve been too caught up in other stuff to read for quite some time now.
40. WHAT IS ON YOUR MOUSE PAD? It’s a blue colour gel pad with nothing on it.
41. WHAT DID YOU WATCH ON TV LAST NIGHT? I didn’t watch TV, we rented a movie.
42. FAVORITE SOUND? I don’t think I have one, but years ago I’ll bet it was the ice cream truck.
43. ROLLING STONES OR BEATLES? Beatles.
44. WHAT IS THE FARTHEST YOU HAVE BEEN FROM HOME? The Maritimes.
45. DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT? Yes.
46. WHERE WERE YOU BORN? Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
47. WHOSE ANSWERS ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO GETTING BACK? I’ll be interested to see if anyone else does this and trackbacks me.

Now you can go visit Mommy Knows site who started this. All comments and back-links on her post will be entered to win one of two Power Ranger action figures (includes shipping and handling) in her ‘Power Ranger Giveaway’. If you comment and blog about the Giveaway you’ll receive two entries (too easy). She’ll randomly choose two winners on December 1st, 2008 @ 9 p.m.—> make sure to stop by and enter often.

I’ve really gotta check my emails more than once or twice a week. I’ve got it set up so that I use my Outlook 2007 for about six different email accounts at once. It takes forever just to send/receive. I’ve got 673 in one account, 891 in another, and I can’t be bothered counting how many in the others.

It’s a big pain in the ass just to check emails and get rid of all the spam that didn’t automatically get sent to spam.

And you know what? Those emails that aren’t spam… I usually just delete them without reading them anyway. So I don’t even know why I bother to check my emails at all. If I have 200 emails sitting there, I might read 3.

So with that said, I can’t honestly tell you what the best way to communicate with me is, since I don’t like the phone either; not if you’re one of those yappy, long talkers. I cannot stand being on the phone for hours with somebody, doing the polite “uh huh”, “yuh”, “ok”, “ya”, “I know what you mean”. And then when you finally say something like, “Well, I guess I better go, I’ve got to… [fill in the blank]“, they spend another 20 minutes yapping about something else they hadn’t got the chance to say yet.

Maybe I’m a little antisocial. I don’t mind responding to comments on my blog, and I don’t mind responding to emails if it only takes a second for a two-line response, but other than those things, I guess I’m not really attuned to the outside world.

I saw this over at Lyndon’s site and figured I might as well do it (it’s not like I’ve got some excitement going on here other than dentist appointments).

If you’re using Firefox, you can just copy the list, right click and choose ‘View Selection Source’, then it will copy the actual links (not just the names below), and paste them into your post.

I’m interested in seeing what this actually does – it’s kinda like a pyramid thingie.

Here are the rules :

Start Copying Here:

1. Copy The List Below into a blog post on your blog(s).
2. Add Your Link(s) To The List on your website.
3. Comment On This Post stating the blog address(es) you want listed so I can update the list to include your link(s).
(Comments on this blog are moderated. I will add all of the waiting links once per day so come back to be sure you have the full list and your blog is listed on your blog as the correct number)
4. Watch Your Authority Rise!

1. Idiot on a Stick
2. Lyndonology
3. THE MOM WITH BROWNIES
4. Our High School Homeschool
5. THE BIG DOG
6. ARE YOU PART OF THE SERIOUS BLOGGER ADlog?
7. Thoughts From The Front Porch
8. My Opinion Counts
9. The Pond
10. Your Fun Family
11. 1stopmom
12. Juicy Alligator
13. Coupon Queen of Corning
14. Life Of A Star
15. The Life Of A Mom
16. Not Just A Mom Site
17. Red Dahlia in Bloom
18. The Natural State Hawg
19. All Arkie Army

Don’t forget to comment on Brownie Mom’s Original post to add your link.

End Copy

I was actually thinking of wearing a Halloween costume to work on Friday. I don’t know why, since I haven’t done it before, but I just felt like getting into the spirit of things.

And then I thought, maybe I’ll just buy a wig and go as Jafer with long hair – that would be a different look. And I thought maybe I’d go to a real wig store and buy a real wig rather than those shit acrylic hair things you get at Party Packagers.

Then I realized that that would be stupid because WrTF would I ever be wearing a wig again. So I decided to go to Party Packagers. And my daughter, who is dressing up as Amy Winehouse, also said that she needed a couple more things.

I was all set to head out in rush hour to Party Packagers, but first I checked my bank account since pay day is not til tomorrow. That’s where I found that I’m $968 into my overdraft. That’s where I got to see how I live beyond my means. That’s where I got to rub it into my own face that when my pay cheque comes in, it will be going out.

Perhaps I don’t need to dress up for Halloween. Perhaps I need to curb my spending. Perhaps I need to start dressing up as someone who can live on the money she makes. I am pathetic.

I am the volunteer for my floor. I volunteered to save the admin. assistant from having to run upstairs to do all that coordinating stuff for our floor and her floor.

It’s a good thing I did, too, since I’m not overly busy at work right now. I keep wondering if they’re going to think that they no longer need me there. That’s all I’d need… to be out of a job again.

Anyway, I did my part, I pledged just over $1000 to be coming off my pay. I didn’t do that because I’m so altruistic, really I did it because my accountant advised me it was good for my taxes. While I believe in what the United Way does, and have done lots of work for them throughout the years, it all boils down to my selfishness. I suppose that, and the fact that, who knows, maybe I’ll find myself without a job and need their services.

So, rubbies on the street who are looking for my money, you’re not getting a cent of it, it’s already gone to a noble cause. Get a job. And get your bloody hair cut. And, BTW, being a drunk doesn’t mean you can’t wash once in a while, does it?

I made quite a few mistakes making this. Let’s start with the errors:

1. It didn’t tell me to melt the butter, so I added butter and made the crumbly part akin to a paste.
2. I saw that it called for white sugar and thought I’d forgotten to put it in so I added that to the crumbly part. It was only later in the recipe that I saw you were supposed to add it to the apple part. So this had twice the white sugar it was supposed to have.
3. I put a cover over it while cooking even though it didn’t say to do that. I took the cover off with 20 minutes to go, but that didn’t help it become crumbly.
4. Where it said, add nutmeg, we accidentally added more cinnamon, then nutmeg once we realized we had the wrong spice.

How did it taste? It was delicious even though the texture was not right. We’ve been eating it all yesterday, there may be a bit left for tonight’s dinner in case my son wants to try it.

So the mistakes didn’t matter much as far as the flavour was concerned. I think I’ll try to make it again with a different recipe. Lord knows I could use another 10 pounds on me.

Oh, I’m so domestic. I just made an apple crisp – it’s in the oven cooking as we speak. A girl at work saw the recipe in The Toronto Star, and passed it on to me, even though I had been telling ‘the girls’ that my aunt just gave me a recipe that I was going to try. Some people don’t actually pay attention to what you’re telling them.

Anyway, I’ve got 40 minutes to go and then we’ll do the taste test. If it’s good, I’ll even let people have some for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow night, even though I’ve got a pumpkin pie.

Yes, I’ll be doing the big turkey dinner tomorrow night. I hate doing the dinner. I can’t stand all that stupid preparation time, I never could have become a cook. I do love the stuffing, however, and that’s the only thing I look forward to at Thanksgiving.

Let’s hope I’ll also be thankful for some delicious apple crisp. Anybody else stuck with making the meal?

I was all set to go to the meet up tonight but instead I left work early. And why did I leave work early? That would be because I found out my credit card had been breached.

Who was it who used my credit card? Some criminal. That criminal would be my daughter. I guess her phone plan just wasn’t good enough for this high roller, she decided that she needed to add $50 onto her cell phone so that she could have her ‘fave 5′ and unlimited texting.

She would be the one who put my credit card $50 over its limit because it was maxed. Guess who is going without TV or computer this week? Guess who will no longer have cell phones with automatic top ups any more? Guess who will not have a cellphone to use any more?

I was astounded. Disappointed. Hurt. Angry. Enraged. Like I don’t do enough for this kid, she’s supposed to have more. She’s supposed to have more than me, even though I’m the one coughing up all the money for it – money I can’t afford.

I need to think of other things now. I am trying to be forgiving and yet I’m finding forgiveness a difficult concept when I think of how much I get screwed by the ‘people who love me’.

I don’t know about you, but I belong to a couple of online meet up groups. The thing is, I’ve never gone to any of these meet ups.

I started feeling guilty. There’s a meet up tonight and I said I’d go. The problem is, it’s way down on Roncesvalles. From Markham to Roncesvalles is going to be a very, very long trip for me. I imagine it’ll use up all my gas.

However, then I can show my face online again because I’ll actually have gone to one of the meet ups. Let’s hope it’s worth the price of admission.

Does anyone else belong to one of these groups? And is it fun?

I almost forgot that today is Talk Like a Pirate Day! It’s my most fun blogging day, and I almost missed it. Never mind I forgot to wear my t-shirt or to remind my snookey to wear his (or my daughter to wear hers).

I feel like such a jerk. Yar.

I went to my courses today. The first course didn’t have time to teach us how to finish what we were working on (smooth move, Ex Lax), and the second course really didn’t have anything new to teach me. I’m happy I paid all that money for courses and kits and came away with nothing I can use. Yes, pirate happy.

Anyway, I’ve got work to do, a car to load up and another 6:00 rising in the morning. WyTF isn’t sleeping my hobby?

We went to dinner here for the first time on Sunday night just because we kept seeing signs for pasta and we don’t have a close pasta place to us. We used to have Picasso’s down the street which was fantastic, but, alas, they went under.

We found the place – it was in a little mall-like spot where the Rogers wireless location is (beside the Golden Griddle) at 1118 Finch Avenue, a little west of Dufferin.

It was a clean looking spot, not over-the-top in decor but more modern and crisp looking. Oh, and the washrooms were clean too… I like that in a restaurant.

Anyway, we were there for pasta but they had a variety of different things on the menu, so I assume they’re not trying to be just an italian style spot since they had a thai dish, they had buffalo wings, they had steaks, japanese noodles and korean short ribs (I know Chef Gordon Ramsay would overhaul the place with that variety of foods and make it simply Italian).

I ordered the Rigatoni Vinni which was rigatoni with peameal bacon, sun dried tomatoes, and onion, sauteed in garlic. My snookey ordered Linguini Carbonara and my daughter had Fettucini Alfredo.

There was only one problem and that was with my dish. The rigatoni was like cardboard it was so ‘al dente’. They had also fried it after cooking so it had a crispiness to it. The crispy aspect was nice and I would have liked it had the rigatoni been cooked.

I ended up sending it back so that they could cook it some more. Then they brought it back to me and it was still undercooked the second time around.

The good thing? The executive chef (I’m assuming owner) came to me and said that he would recook the meal himself, and he did. This time I got the pasta back cooked – not under or over cooked. I wish he had fried it a little too since I had liked that but I was just happy to have the food cooked properly and the flavour was great. After tasting my daughter’s and my honey’s food, I think I got the best dish there with the Rigatoni Vinni.

For dessert I had a neapolitan cheesecake just because I’d never tried that before. I didn’t much care for the chocolate sauce over it, but then that’s not because there was anything wrong with it, more so that I’m not a big fan of chocolate sauce.

My snookey had the caramel praline crepe and it was fantastic. My daughter had the fresh fruit sorbet which was made with raspberry and had some strawberry on the side – also good.

Overall, I think the service was excellent, especially considering that they cooked my meal for me three times. Not a lot of restaurants will do that for you with a smile on their faces and a willingness to please the customer.

The food was good, and we’ll go back – next time to try some of the dishes other than pasta. You can check out their menu at their website: http://www.dwpastangrill.ca.

Lyndon keeps posting these things, and I keep following. These are the rules if you want to do it:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results. Or you can leave me a comment so I can check out your list as well.

Ok, so what I’ve eaten, I’ve bolded. What I’d never eat is stricken out. And there may be some really gross things there that I’d never eat but I just don’t know what they are, so I’ve left them alone.

The Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat (I like curry, I don’t want to try goat)
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel (don’t want it again)
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly Pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8%
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain (don’t want it again)
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish (I’m not too big on any kind of fish, really)
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

There you go Lyndon, I think I’ve eaten less than your 49.

August 16/08

Last night we went down to Queen and Bathurst to see Thank the Academy. They had a good show, although it seemed short to me.

This is my son’s band which explains the reason why we’re hanging out with 18-30 year olds, not that we’re trying to recapture our youth.

Rannie, over at photojunkie.ca, got some great pics and even video of that explosion the other day.

Rannie’s a great photographer. I’ve been to his exhibits and followed him on the net. I really admire his pictures, so go look at what he got on this, they’re much better than the pic I put up here because I optimized it for faster loading time – only because my site seems to be intermittently loading quickly – the rest of the time still loading slowly. I’m working on it.

Someone in the WP forums suggested that maybe my theme was slowing things down, so I’ve put the default theme on to try.

I’m not seeing some greatly increased speed happening here – although I think it probably is a bit faster since there are no graphics. If I keep the theme I may have to ‘graphisize’ it a bit. Or maybe I’ll look for a new theme.

Lord knows I can’t live without the purple.

I saw this quiz at Lyndon’s, so I did it too. It’s been a while since I did a quiz.

You Are 86% Real

There’s hardly a person on this earth more real than you are. You have no problem showing people who you are, flaws and all. For you, there couldn’t be any other way. Because it’s way too stressful to live an inauthentic life. You’re very comfortable with yourself. And because of this, you’re able to live an exciting, interesting, and challenging life.

My daughter is back home – has been since the day after she got kicked out. There seemed to be quite a bit of intervention from my ex-husband and afterwards I ended up talking with my daughter who promised me that she will steal no more and lose the attitude. I’m hoping that’s true, especially when she knows that I’m serious about calling the police and kicking her out if it happens again.

So what have I been up to? Well, need I say that my computer conked out yet again? The other night it wouldn’t stop rebooting itself and, so, for what I hope is the final time, I took it over to Yow to fix.

At the same time my daughter was getting a message that her drives were full on her computer, plus I think she had some spyware on there that my machinations didn’t seem to be getting rid of, so I took that to Yow to have a new hard drive put in. It’s only 80 gigs but that’s good because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money and you could get it for $30.

My snookey also decided that he’d had it with his computer, and so he bought a brand new one, so Mr. Yow was a busy man having everything ready for us on Friday. And he made close to $1000 from this little family, although he only charged me half price for my additional reformat, but I really thought it should be $0. And my daughter’s computer ended up being $100 when I was expecting a simple $30.

I’ve installed a few things like iTunes so I can sit here and listen to music as I type this. Got my PSP X2 on here, Filezilla, and Crimson Editor along with the Microsoft Office 2007 suite. That’s all for now.

I haven’t even plugged in anything into the usb ports yet, so I’ve got no printers (there are 3 to install), no camera, and no WvTF I usually plug in there and use them all up.

I spent my entire day today working on the jewellery site. I had paid someone to do a fix to one of the ‘gold’ programs for me, and $150 later I see that I don’t want it because it made the site too slow loading. So I took that off but the site was still slow loading.

I was prepared to redo the entire database (big pain in the ass) but instead I tried switching themes and it seemed to speed up a lot. So all day I’ve been trying to configure that new theme to look as much like my old theme as I could and I did a pretty good job of it. There’s nothing too slow loading on there now – and who wants to shop at a site that never loads?

Soon I’m going to have copious amounts of beer, a bunch of junk food, and watch a movie (The Bank Job with Jason Stratham). I’ll let you know what I thought.

BTW, all the talk about my new pink laptop, here are the specs (like you care). However, I did say that I’d tell you more about it. I didn’t know that it was “flamingo” pink. I feel even more special now.

223-5898 XPS M1530, C2D T8300 (2.4GHZ)
009-8170 3 MONTHS SYMPATICO AT HOME SERVICE
310-9516 VISTA PREMIUM STICKER, XPS
310-9764 DELL RESOURCE DVD,BACK-UP,XPS-M1530
311-7823 4GB, DDR2, 667 MHZ,2 DIMM, XPS M1530
312-0638 56 WHR,6-CELL,LION,PRIM BATT,XPSM1530
313-4783 HD AUDIO 2.0
313-5820 8X DVD+/-RW SLOT DRV, XPSM1530
320-6082 256MB NVIDIA GEFORCE 8600M GT
320-6758 FLAMINGO PINK MICROSATIN FINISH
320-6759 15.4 PINK WXGA, M1530 W/C
341-5632 250GB HARD DRIVE,5.4K,XPSM1530
410-1837 TREND MICRO,16.6,PC-CILLIN,ENG,15M,XNB
420-5769 ISP SEARCH ASST PORTAL,DIM/INSP
420-5924 ICON CONSOLIDATION APPLICATION,DIM/INSP
420-6436 VISTA,PC-RESTORE, DIM/INSP
420-6995 DELL SUPPORT 3.4,DIM/INSP
420-7468 ADOBE ACROBAT READER 8.1,DIM/INSP
420-7590 MEDIA DIRECT 3.5,XPS M1530
420-7715 CAMERA SOFTWARE XPS M1530
420-8183 ROXIO CREATOR DE 10
420-8566 WIN VISTA SP1 HOME PREM,ENG,INB
430-2338 INTEL 4965AGN WIRELESS-N MINI CARD, ROW
463-2282 THANKS FOR PURCHASING YOUR DELL
901-0160 RTD,INSP M1530,SOL,INIT YR
901-0187 HW WRTY + SVC,INSP M1530,SOL,INIT
901-0523 CC ACC DAM SVC,XPS NB,3YR
920-5070 XPS WARRANTY SPRT, INSPIRON, INITIAL YR
901-0168 HW WRTY + SVC,INSP M1530,SOL,EXT
901-0352 RTD,INSP M1530,SOL,2YR EXT
920-5072 XPS WARRANTY SPRT, INSPIRON, 2 YR EXT
420-8051 MS WORKS 9.0,ENGLISH,INSP
009-6800 SHIPPING FEE
310-9348 INTEL CENTRINO DUAL CORE LABEL
420-7091 DATASAFE ONLINE DIM/INS/XPS
420-7092 DATASAFE ONLINE DIM/INS/XPS,1YR-FREE
987-4817 INSP DATASAFE 3GB,1YR(INCL IN PRICE),DHS
988-0099 DATASAFE ONLINE BACKUP ACTIVATION, INFO

Did you remiss me? har, har har, I am so damned funny. I guess you’d have to miss me in the first place in order to remiss me.

No, I’ve been remiss in writing. I don’t know why. Oh, wait, yes I do, I’ve had a really busy week.

I wrote on Monday, so that obviously wasn’t too busy. Tuesday night I met with some people who wanted a website done. I got home in time to do a quick veg to try to relax and get to sleep by midnight-ish. Wednesday night I had one of those meetings that have to do with networking in one of my jewellery memberships and my volunteering to help with their website and other graphics related endeavours. Last night I was trying to sort out beads and started making some lower-end jewellery for the next ‘garage sale’ type street festival. Tonight I was making more of said jewellery, and now here I am.

So I’ve been remiss in writing, but those sounded like good excuses didn’t they? Well, didn’t they? Sure they did.

Now I’m just having some brewskis and I’m gonna go out and try to find anything on television to watch. How pathetic. $181 a month for the Rogers services and I don’t know of more than three shows a week that we watch. If The Office, Apprentice and Earl were still on, that would put it up to a whopping 6 shows a week. WTF am I paying all this money for?

I was just dying to leave work today – leave as in leave early. At one point I said to my boss, “y’know, when I used to be a boss, I used to let some of my staff leave early sometimes”. Of course I have to say things like this with a smile on my face. To which he responded (also with a smile on his face), “well, your staff must have liked you”. “They did”, said I. And then he conveniently changed the topic. So much for leaving early. I took off about 7 minutes early. I thought, ‘fuck it, I’m here half an hour early every morning, I’m leaving’.

So that’s the big news in the Jafer household. See… there wasn’t even anything worth writing about for all these days that I missed. I did get my new mouse already – the one for my new laptop. Did I tell you they’re pink? Ok, so come on with the laptop already. Apparently it only weighs 5 pounds. I’m looking forward to that. I think my old laptop weighed about 143 pounds, this will be a refreshing change – who knows when I’ll use it though.

Do they update the add-ins for this browser enough? Every time I open Firefox (which isn’t all the time), they’ve got some update to something and do I want to install it and relaunch Firefox. Of course, I do. I’ve gotta have the latest stuff.

Speaking of latest stuff, I ordered a laptop tonight. From Dell. It’s pink. I would have preferred it in green, but they didn’t have that model in green, just black, blue or pink. So I thought, WTF, pink will be cute. It has a matching pink mouse. Of course I had to get the matching pink carry case for it too.

I plan to use it at work since they can’t seem to muster up a laptop for me. They thought there was a spare on another floor, but apparently it’s a spare that they can’t spare since I said I’d want it for a few months til another one becomes available. So I’m gonna take my new pink laptop to work and stop my stupid tennis elbow (shoulder) from hurting.

The big deal will be getting the IT department (yes, my department) to configure it the way they configure the work laptops. I did get it with Vista so I’ll be able to see how Vista works compared to my regular XP computers at home. I also got 4 gigs of memory, I don’t imagine I’ll need that but I got it anyway.

It’s supposed to arrive by the first week of July. I want it now. I’m not that good at waiting. I’m the type who needs immediate gratification. Pink laptop – how dippy. But different. I’m such an easy mark for some stuff. But I figure I’ll use it for the jewellery stuff, you know, a whole separate computer.

I suppose I’ll have to buy another Microsoft package – or maybe you’re allowed to use it on a computer and your laptop too since they’re not being used at the same time. I’ll have to check that out. If I can’t, I don’t care that much since I can get the whole suite for $30 through a package deal thing we have at work. That’s how I already got the Microsoft 2007 suite for this computer. $30 for everything, who can beat that?

So that’s my latest news. I’m just listening to some tunes til Canadian Idol starts. Funny thing though, my newly updated Firefox has all the tabs jiggling. It almost looks like they’re keeping time to the music. What up with that? Good thing I’m not looking at them. They might make me seasick.

Image by jacob.burke via FlickrOk, my prediction (oooooh, the suspense), I predict that David Archuletta is going to win it. David Cook has a great voice but I don’t know WTF he was thinking with those shitty songs he sang last night. On the other hand, David Archuletta picked some great songs to showcase his voice.

So for that reason alone, I think the little guy is gonna win it

I’ll be watching this two-hour episode – but ironing at the same time. After all, I have to look nice for work now, don’t I?

So here’s the poop that I haven’t gotten around to writing about.

He brought pictures that I’d asked for. There were two of him younger, one as he is about now, and one really young one of my mother. Therefore, I knew that he had at least proof of knowing my mother.

I met with my new dad last Tuesday at Coffee Time. Things got off to a strange start when I went to buy us the coffee and tea and realized that I didn’t have my wallet with me (I have been locking it up so that my daughter stops stealing my money). Therefore, my nice gesture turned into an, “oh crap, sorry, I don’t have my wallet” (ya right), ‘that’s ok, I’ll buy it’, situation.

We discussed things for about an hour and a half. And keep in mind that, in the meantime, I had ordered a paternity test for us to take that was going to cost me $500. I never even got around to that discussion. I believed him. I started off believing him when I looked and saw his BROWN eyes. I know we’ve all heard those stories about the two blue-eyed people producing the brown-eyed baby. The ‘recessive gene‘, sure, recessive gene, did the recessive gene also make my son oriental, honey?

He told me that he met my mother at a dance club that she and her friends (and sometimes her sister) used to frequent in the neighbourhood. He went out with her for a while. And by ‘a while’, I think he mentioned something like two years, but I suppose I could be wrong about that.

Anyway, he wanted to get married and settle down, while she was already married and, in those days, unable to get a divorce, being a good Catholic, never mind waiting around 16 years to try for the annulments. They kind of drifted apart a bit, until one day he went to see her and she had just upped and gone.

He didn’t know WrTF she’d gone or how she’d be able to find another teaching job quickly, he thought that maybe she’d moved back to PEI. At some later point he’d heard that she was pregnant, or had a baby, but by that time he’d already gotten married. As a matter of fact, from the way he told it, he was just itching to get married. It was so fast that he’d married someone else, I was thinking that ‘love’ never entered his mind, this was just a guy who was dying to get married and have kids.

He said he ran into her a couple of times. Once when I was young and I happened to be playing in a recital where his own kids were playing, whereupon my mother said, “there’s Jafer over there”. Another time about 30 years ago, he said he ran into her at a Harvey’s where she and (another teacher) had just finished their lunches and were going back to work.

The next thing you know, the mother is dead and the biological father is showing up at the funeral.

One more thing that made me believe he was my father? He didn’t want anything. He had given me $5000 on our first meeting, but it wasn’t a scam and he didn’t want anything from me. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t even want a relationship with me. He said that he’s unable to tell his wife of 50 years because he didn’t know how she’d handle that 50-year-old secret. But he gave me one daughter’s phone number in case I ever needed to get ahold of him. He’d only told the one daughter because he felt that he could trust her with the secret.

So, that’s the story of my dad. He gave me a hug (and teeny air kiss on the cheek) upon departure. I felt kinda abandoned. Not only had I just lost my mother (although I don’t think I ever had her), but now I’d just lost my dad. It was a weird feeling, this abandonment. But I said I accepted that was the way he needed it to be. I had also been looking forward to meeting my four sisters having been an only child my entire life.

Now I’m supposed to meet with my aunt on the weekend. I’m dying to hear what she has to say. If she doesn’t confirm what he’s told me, I’m going to whip out a picture of him when younger and say, ‘recognize this guy?’, especially when you consider that he said that my mother at the dance club was sometimes with his sister.

I’ll write about that part too. Now I’ve got to go do something with myself.

I was over reading Lyndon, and I saw this link under his post that said he was “zemified”. I, of course, being the curious (nosy) person that I am, had to check it out.

It was a link for Zemanta. What is Zemanta, you ask? How the hell would I know. I don’t pay that much attention, I just download new stuff. Apparently (if you use Firefox) it will add content to your posts – pictures, tags, maybe more, who knows?

Image via Wikipedia

So I figured I’d try it and open up my Firefox and post something. And whaddayaknow, there’s a whole bunch of different stuff in my WordPress where perhaps I can add a picture or something.

I have no idea what the picture has to do with what I’m writing, but I’m adding it anyway.

So, there, I’ve tried it. I’m Zemified.

Did you know that we had a monorail in Toronto? I didn’t know. But here we were, when waiting for our flight, and there was a big monorail staring us right in the face. Look at the progress we’ve made. I suppose it wouldn’t kill me to get on a flight more often than every 20 years.

And it occurs to me that I never showed you any of the pictures I took on my trip. I think I took more aerial shots on the plane than of anything else.

Well, what pictures was I gonna take… the snow covered PEI? Perhaps I would have if it hadn’t been too damned cold to go outside without a big fur coat on.

The second day I was in PEI, I had the low battery thingie on my camera. You know why? Well, one reason was all those aerial shots on the plane. Another reason was because I kept taking videos. Stupid videos. Unimportant, walking down the street videos. Oh well, live and learn. Next time I’ll bring my charger with me. I didn’t this time because I’m an idiot.

I haven’t been writing a lot lately, mostly because I feel like my life is just too damned busy. I’m trying to get jewellery together for this upcoming show, but I haven’t even started tagging, listing, pricing, or uploading anything to that website. I just don’t feel like I have the time to do it all.

Is this when people have heart attacks? They’re too busy with everything and their bodies try to say, ‘hey, enough, relax’. I don’t feel like I’m stressed or anything, just not having enough time to do everything. I won’t mention when it was that I last cleaned up my place. Let’s pretend it was a month ago.

I missed work today. I was going to work from home but the stupid remote connection is sketchy – sometimes some things work and sometimes they don’t. Today was one of the don’t's. So I guess I’ll just take it as a sick day or something. Maybe they’ll fire me for missing so much time. After all, I was just off a week for my mother’s death, then I was off a day and a half to fly down to PEI. Then today I had a sick day. Quite frankly I wouldn’t give a shit if they fired me. Maybe I’d feel like I had more time.

Now I’m going to watch that movie we rented – yes, on a Friday. I can’t remember what it was called but I think it’s a horror movie. There was something on the front of the box about “thrilling” or “thriller”. Let’s hope it’s interesting.

There’s something soothing about eating Kraft Dinner. I don’t know what it is but it’s probably the most pasta I ever eat is when we make some Kraft Dinner. Pasta usually sits heavy on my stomach, so I don’t eat it too often. Not Kraft Dinner though. I could probably eat a whole box of it myself.

It’s not soothing because I’ve been eating it since I was young. I never even heard of Kraft Dinner until I was 14 years old and visiting PEI. My aunt told me we were having Kraft Dinner for dinner and I had been expecting some special dinner – which turned out to be macaroni and cheese. My mother never made that. She would make macaroni casserole with cheese sauce and bread crumbs on top. That was good too, but it wasn’t the same thing.

Which reminds me, I can’t remember the last time I had a macaroni casserole with the bread crumbs on top. I was probably still a teen. I should try making it. My mother never taught me that one.

Anyway, I just gorfed down my Kraft Dinner, now I’m waiting for my honey to get home so we can watch a movie. We rented Sleuth, which I assume is a remake of the original. This one is also starring Michael Caine. I hope it’s good.

Last night we rented Dan in Real Life. What a piece of shit. We turned it off. Because Steve Carell was in it, I guess I was expecting a comedy not the ultimate chick flick of all chick flicks. I couldn’t hang around to watch more of the family interaction with the conflict of liking his brother’s new girlfriend. Not funny at all and just not in the mood for dippy family conflicts.

Well, I went to my courses today – two different ones to replace the one that was cancelled on Thursday.

The morning class was good but, of course, something always screws up and the necklace I made for the class got torn when I was about finished with it (thread, donchaknow). The teacher managed to save it, but during her saving she was knotting the thread and so when I was just about finished another time, I saw that all the beads weren’t sitting together – because of the knots and so I walked off with no necklace created and I’ll have to redo it here at home (now that I know how to do that style).

The afternoon was some wire crocheting class and it wasn’t looking good for me. I tried for about half an hour and finally I thought, ‘what the hell am I doing here?’, I’m not going to be using this and I don’t like it. So I told the woman I was leaving and she was nice enough to give me back the kit fee (the money you have to pay to the teacher ON TOP of what you pay for the course). So I wasted money on the class fee but at least I got that kit money back.

Then it was off to visit my mother in the hospital. I can’t believe how much it’s costing me in parking every day. Every hour is $7.50 or you can get a day pass for $15 which is good for 24 hours. But really that’s no cheaper because if you go back within 24 hours you would have paid $7.50 each day for an hour and that’s the same damned price now, isn’t it?

I don’t know how long you’d stay but an hour is about enough visiting time for me to be in a room with a woman who’s sleeping the whole time I’m there. Well, sleeping or just zonked out from the drugs.

I don’t believe in paying for parking at a hospital. It’s such a big money grab to me. And who can afford it? Those who can’t afford it are not going to be visiting their sick relatives too often are they? What if I was unemployed? Should I be using the 50% of my salary that they give you to pay for parking at a hospital? Doesn’t this limit visitors?

It really sickens me that you can’t go and visit a sick person without having to pay for it. And if I didn’t drive there, then what… I’d be paying for TTC tickets to go there. There’s always some money grubbing ‘big guy’ there living off your dollars even though your taxes are supposed to be paying these things.

How about our next step is to get rid of all the fucking administrative people making the big dollars and stop charging the poor working man on top of all the money he’s paying in taxes.

Ok, don’t get me started. I want my dollars. I’m the one who works for them.

How come NOT using turn signals at all has become more the norm than using them?

Every time I’m driving these days I notice that nobody’s using their signals lights; not to change lanes, not to make a turn, not for anything.

I was in a line up at some lights. There were two left turn lanes and one right turn lane. I was the only stinking driver in three lanes who had her turn signal on.

It pisses me off. I wish the police would start handing out tickets to everyone who doesn’t put their turn signals on. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing seeing that so many different cultures now live in Toronto, but if it is, I think they should take their bad driving habits back home with them.

Show me the signal!

I don’t do it often but I checked my facebook today and there was some ‘click here to see what your birthday means’ thingie, so I did. This is what it said about me, based on my birthdate:

You are prudent, circumspect and take things seriously. Before you make any move, you will think of a few alternatives that might take a while. You are patient, imaginative and target oriented. You value friendship more than anything else.

Your Love: You usually study your partner carefully before making any move. You never demand anything beyond the natural quality of that person. Your sincerity doesn’t bring excitement in your love life but it brings deeply grown relationship.

Your greatest STRENGTHS …
Humorous, conscientious and principled.

Your greatest WEAKNESS …
Being hesitant, they often lose great opportunities.

Jobs you should pursue …
Social work, counseling, agriculture, care and prevention of cruelty to animals.

So as I read that through I thought, ‘that is not the least bit like me at all’. Where do they get this stuff?

Patient? Me? I don’t know if I even know anybody who’s more impatient than I am. One of the keywords in my prayers is to help me be more patient.

And the target oriented stuff, I’m lucky if I can complete a task so that I reach the target. I have a tendency to start 20 things and maybe finish 10 of them. How is that target oriented?

And what’s this about ‘my sincerity doesn’t bring excitement in my love life’ stuff? I’ll have you know that I’m damned exciting. Damned exciting. Remember those crotchless underwear? How’s that for excitement? Not too? Well, it doesn’t matter cuz I’m damned exciting.

Now I do value friendship. I don’t know if it’s “more than anything else” unless they mean that relatively speaking as in I value it more than I value a can of corn but I certainly wouldn’t die or anything without friends. As a matter of fact I have no friends. Nobody can stand to be around me for too long because I’m so damned exciting. I wear them down.

Alright, enough. It was only a facebook thing. Who can take that seriously? Not me.

Over at Blogeois there was a Year in Review for 2007, which I thought was neat and interesting reading. It occurred to me that, in all my years on the net (my first site back in 1998 when there were no blogging tools or any such word), I have never done a review.

So for your reading pleasure, oh, who am I kidding… so, if you’ve got nothing better to do, I’ve posted my year in review below. It’s hidden so you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. The rest of us will just have a sing-a-long.

Every morning I would see her waiting at the stop
sometimes she’d shop and she would show me what she’d bought
All the people stared as if we were both quite insane
some day my name and hers are going to be the same.

Now you have to guess the song since you weren’t interested in my year in review. These things get harder. Next time you’ll want to read it.

January:

• I bought a new hard drive cuz my old one went kaput
• I bought a new car battery cuz my old one went kaput
• I quit smoking for a few months and even cleaned the walls and ceiling of my home so they were no longer yellow
• My credit cards were all maxed out (that was 5 of them)
• And during my quit smoking phase, I found Fire Dancer Jalapeno Nuts (which I loved)

February:

• Updated the site for faster loading
• Ate more jalapeno nuts
• Had to buy a new coil spring and front brakes for my car
• Someone gave me a used filing cabinet which I’ve yet to take out of the garage
• I added a shelf to hold more on my desk

March:

• I started sneak smoking again without my snookey’s awareness
• Had to get a new, rebuilt transmission put into my car
• Started the South Beach Diet to lose the 14 pounds I gained by eating all those jalapeno nuts
• Mourned the suicide of a favourite comedian: Richard Jeni

April:

• I took a course and started making jewellery
• I left the car running with the keys in the ignition at Costco and when I came out, the car was still there running with the keys in the ignition
• I started a permanent job after who knows how long with a huge company

May:

• I created a gigantic jewellery board which is almost full now
• I bought a rice cooker which I probably haven’t tried since a month after I bought it
• I had my very first spa day ever
• Found out my colours: Tied on green/orange
• Purchased a new exercise bike which I’ve used for a total of 25 minutes to date

June:

• Had to have my rebuilt transmission rebuilt again
• My daughter graduated from grade school
• I had beer for the first time since starting the South Beach Diet

July:

• I went to see The Donald presentation at some hotel and walked out
• My snookey got a job where I work

August:

• I had to order a special adapter for one of my monitors in order to set up two monitors at home, the way I have at work
• I took over the work of a consultant they didn’t want to pay big bucks to any more
• My daughter started a telemarketing job and lasted for about a day or two
• I got a new-to-me cellphone that had a keypad for letters, not just numbers

September:

• My daughter came to live with me
• My daughter got appendicitis
• My snookey passed his exam and got licensed at work
• My special adapter arrived so I set up dual monitors at my desk

October:

• I passed the course I took without even studying
• I had a visit from my grandson who I hadn’t seen in at least a year
• I bought a sewing machine
• My honey lost his job with me
• I started to create a jewellery website

November:

• I bought new glasses
• I bought new snow tires
• I had to redo the jewellery website I had finished because it didn’t show up properly in Firefox
• I had to password protect my phone for long distance calls, my TV for video on demand, and cut off text messaging on my daughter’s phone

December:

• I worked on the jewellery website
• I created a website for my son’s newly named band but have to redo the thing because they want it in Flash
• I took two weeks’ vacation at the end of the year

There we go. That year just whizzed by. Ok, you stopped reading after the first month and just skimmed through a couple of lines here and there. See, that year went even faster for you.

I’m another year older and closer to dust, but so are you so I don’t feel that bad.

This year’s resolutions? Quitting smoking again. Losing weight again. Vowing to work out again. Seeking a way to get a better job at work (or at least more money).

I guess I could honestly say that this year I had the shittiest birthday and Christmas ever. Shitty as in, “couldn’t you at the very least have bought me a card?”.

My kids, whom I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on for their birthdays and Christmases, couldn’t even buy me a card, let alone a present, for either occasion.

When I asked my daughter about a birthday present, she said she had no money. And it’s true that she lost her allowance that week to help pay off some of the videos on demand that she had ordered without my knowledge, but what about the rest of the year when I give her allowance every week.

I asked her why she didn’t even make me a card and she came up with the excuse that I wouldn’t like it.

My son didn’t even remember to call me until the next day. He apologized and said that he had thought that day was the 19th. There was no card, no gift, no nothing.

And for Christmas, both showed up empty-handed. The gift I did get for my birthday (from my mother and aunt) was money, and I used that money to buy the Christmas dinner. So my one of three gifts turned out to be for someone else. There’s real Christmas spirit for ya.

I understand that my son has not been working a lot lately. But on those days that he did work, could he not have taken $5 of his money because his mother’s birthday was coming up? Perhaps buy a card at least? Even inviting me over for dinner would have been an option for someone with no money.

I feel like I’ve been making excuses for these kids (kids… one is 14 and one is 27) for years now over their thoughtlessness and selfishness. I’m not going to do it any more.

Christ knows, that even when it’s my birthday, I’m hearing from my daughter about what gifts she wants for her birthday – in May.

You know what my kids are getting for their birthdays this year? The same thing that they’re going to get for Christmas, which is double what they gave me. Two times nothing equals nothing. And if they don’t know why, I’ll be happy to let them in on it.

I will wish a happy birthday to each of them, twice, because they did wish me a happy birthday.

I guess I’m mad about this because I’m hurt; hurt that I mean absolutely nothing to these kids. Oh yes, give me everything and anything, mom, I’ll take, take, take. But don’t expect me to spend any thoughts or money for you.

The gifts I did get were from my snookey, he’s always caring and thoughtful and thinking of others. He got me just what I wanted, which was a jewellery course in March. I’m signed up and ready to go to that.

Then he also surprised me later on with this digital gauge. This thing measures bead sizes. I had looked at one myself, but I couldn’t afford to spend that kinda money on myself, just to measure beads.

I was quite surprised and thrilled that he’d gotten this for me, all because he saw me looking at it one day a few months ago. He always amazes me.

And for Christmas he got me the gift of beads online, I told him about some beads I wanted to get, so he’s buying those for me.

There is something nice in my life. There is someone who cares about me. I have to be happy with just that because I’ve given up on everyone else.

I didn’t wear my white shirt today and I didn’t wear the new white necklace.

I went to my course, brought up a conflict, got off early and went home and made a matching white memory bracelet.

Now The Office is on (at 8:00 for some reason) so I’m off to watch it. Film at 11:00.

Saw this over at Mom on the Run so I figured I’d check it out. While lots of people have my first name, and lots have my last name, none, ZERO, zilch, nobody has the same name as me. Probably none in Canada either.

And it said that 99.9 percent of those with my first name were male. Hmmmph.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I found this neat website that has all the Heroes episodes on it. You may or may not watch Heroes but we started watching it a while ago. We missed the first parts of it – mostly because we forgot it was on or what night it was on.

Somehow “heroes” popped up in my google and I saw it listed there. They also have a neat Firefox plugin – DivX Web Player – that dims the rest of your screens while the TV episode is playing.

I started to watch the first episode. But I’ve got stuff to do. I can’t be wasting my night away watching television shows. However, at some point I think I will… perhaps when I’m on my two weeks of Christmas holidays.

Go. Watch Heroes. Watch it at www.watch-heroes.com.

Well, I just had the, “so you failed your exam boink”, ha ha. That’s about all I’m ha-ha-ing about.

I honestly have no idea how I did on the exam. It didn’t seem that hard but then maybe I was just too stupid to realize where the ‘trick’ questions were. So I’ll find out in a couple of weeks how I did.

It was a one-hour exam and I finished in 15 minutes – my usual, considering that when I write two-hour exams they usually take me half an hour. One programmer guy finished about 2 minutes before me. Pissed me off. I’m usually the first one finished. Show off.

Did I mention that I did not study at all? WyTF should I have when I realized that it would just be hours and hours of trying to memorize crap (that I wouldn’t have remembered the meaning of), only to try for a passing grade. Instead I watched Earl, 30 Rock and The Office. What. Am I supposed to waste my life away studying?

The teacher did say that if you failed the exam you could take it again so….

When I go back to work on Monday I’m not mentioning a thing about anything. If I happen to get any time at all (which I usually don’t), I may try to guess at some of the terminology I’ve learned seen.

I understand that what I wanted to use this for can be done. Figuring out how to do it will be the tricky part… unless, of course, I can google something out.

Now I’m going to sit back, drink copious amounts of beer, relax, perhaps find a movie, or even make yet another stretchy bracelet. It’s helping me get rid of a lot of beads.

This weekend I’ve got to do more work on that jewellery site, I didn’t go near it all week. The funny thing though is that I have a better idea of what they’re looking for in that site now that I’ve taken the course. Good after effect.

I was gonna write something earlier and then I got to doing something else and now I see the time and it’s time for Earl and then 30 Rock and then The Office and so I’ve got to go now to watch my favourite TV night.

Ciao.

I found a picture of this stranger morphing into Uma Thurman and thought it was kinda neat, so I posted it. I know the table says “see ME morph”, but that’s obviously just a part of the table. Those are some damned fine looking women.

That title reminds me of something. Oh yes, Mr. Ed:

A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And no one can talk to a horse of course
That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mister Ed.

Go right to the source and ask the horse
He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse.
He’s always on a steady course.
Talk to Mister Ed.

People yakkety yak a streak and waste your time of day
But Mr. Ed will never speak unless he has something to say

A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And this one’ll talk ‘til his voice is hoarse.
You never heard of a talking horse?

Well listen to this: “I’m Mister Ed.”

Isn’t it wonderful that I can remember the words to some 30-40 year old TV show but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you my middle name? Alright, that had nothing to do with anything except that I don’t think that I told you about my free course. When I was on that course a few weeks ago, they had a draw where you could win a free course for yourself and two others. Guess who won?

I never win anything (pretty much) and I won a free course for me and my honey and I put in another cohort’s name. So today I booked my course, it’s from October 16-19 and it’s actually something I want to learn… somewhat work related inasmuch as it’s computer stuff, but really I’m taking this course because it’s stuff I want to learn – not something that my bosses decided would be good for me to learn. Hmmm, gotta update my resume.

I’m pretty excited about it. I can hardly wait til mid October. Watch me get run over by a truck before then and be dead, thereby missing my exciting FREE course.

In other worlds today, my snookey had his exam this morning. His two-hour exam. He failed. He needed to get 70% and he only got 55%. So much for that four weeks of studying. Christ, four weeks of studying, can you imagine?

So now, after seeing what the exam was like, he’s decided to take a different learning tactic. Before, he was studying all kinds of sample exam question and answers, now he’s going to go memorize the books, because apparently the exam was based more on stuff he vaguely remembered reading a month ago, but being old, promptly let go of the old stuff once the new stuff came in.

He’s able to write the exam two more times but now he has to pay for it himself. His next exam is this coming Monday. That boy’s gotta lot of memorizing to do.

I’m gonna go out and see if there’s anything on TV for tonight. Hell’s Kitchen is over so now I don’t know if there’s anything else to watch.

Last night I watched a new (to me) show. It was called Brothers & Sisters, and the only reason I watched it was because I saw that Ally McBeal and Sally Field were in it and I wanted to see what they were up to these days. I thought the show was lame. It’s not something I will make my own.

It seemed they were trying too hard to have a whole bunch of ‘current’ topics within it, such as setting up the gay brother with the boyfriend’s gay brother, having the half-sister from the father’s mistress who some of the family wants to accept while others don’t, the adult siblings who fight with each other but deep-down really, really love each other and compete with the Joneses to beat them at a long-standing competition. Zzzzzz. Enough of that crap.

Ok, let’s find a television show to call my own.

I got a call from Rogers last night, supposedly the “Rogers Customer Satisfaction Survey” people.

She asks my name and I confirm it. Then she asks if I can tell her my postal code in order to verify who I am. I say no. She says that she needs me to tell her my postal code in order to verify that she’s speaking to the right person. I say, “you called me”. “You called me and you think I have to tell you my address, my postal code, I don’t. You want to ask me something, then ask me.”

She says, “well I can’t continue with this phone call unless you confirm your postal code so that I know I’m speaking to the right person”. I say, “well, I guess you’re not going to continue with this phone call then”.

She says, “fine, have a nice evening”. Thank you. Good-bye.

So WTF is that? Every time I call Rogers they have to verify my name, my address, my date of birth, my phone number, my mother’s maiden name, my cup size. That’s just to make sure that no mysterious stranger is calling to tell them that my internet is down or my cable is not working. I bet they get a lot of strangers calling to them about other people having cable trouble.

So then she calls my home and thinks that I have to go through this verification shit on my own dime? When she wants to ask me questions and do a survey?

I think not.

The last time I took this test it said that I was gonna die at 69 – I had a link right over there under the bloggie stuff. For some reason I decided to take the test again today and now it said I’m gonna die at 84.

WTF? Am I getting healthier as I get older? What’s going on here?

Go take it for yourself here.

UPDATE: My snookey took the test and it said he’ll die at 81. The problem with that? He’s 10 years older than me which means there’d be 13 years of me living without him. WTF? I’ll have to be offing myself around 70.

That’s right, you should have remissed me, I haven’t written much all week. Ok, ok, I’ve been remiss in writing. But my site seemed slow and I didn’t have a fuck of a lot to say anyway.

Tonight I’m just waiting for my daughter to come over. I don’t know where the hell my ex is, but he should have dropped her off already. Probably gone to buy some dope. Only dopes use dope. Stinking dopehead.

That reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend when I was teenager. It was a big philosophical discussion about how, if it started raining dope, the only ones that would be safe would be all the dope freaks, because they’d have already built up an immunity to it and, so, wouldn’t overdose.

Do you see what a true genius I was when I was a teen? That was no short discussion either. We were quite the thinkers back then. I certainly don’t have any conversations quite like that any more.

So I’m glad the weekend is here. I was having a good week up until today when someone threw a wrench into what I was working on… some different aspect to what I was doing that I’d never heard of before. Just when I was feeling confident and knowing about what I was doing, something totally foreign was added. Great. I felt like saying, “hey, where did that part come from? How come I never heard of this before?” Instead I did an, ‘ok’. Make me feel like a fricking moron.

Now I just want to relax. Some dinner would be nice if my daughter would hurry up and arrive. My stomach hasn’t been feeling too good for the last couple of days. I dunno what that’s all about. A nice long sleep in would probably help but, no. I’ll be waking up early for the two hours of piano lessons, then heading off to McCarthy’s to get my daughter’s new school uniform. Ah what a wonderful day that’s gonna be.

I’m off to see what food we might cook up. Ta ta me loverlies.

I didn’t tell you about my daughter’s grade eight graduation on Friday night. Let me just say this: you’ll be happy that my post is not one-kajillionth as long as that stinking graduation ceremony was.

If she was getting her doctorate the graduation couldn’t have taken longer.

We had the pleasure of all these big important people speaking there. There was an MPP, there was a city councillor, there was a trustee, there was the principal, the vice-principal, the priest, and let us not forget that every stinking teacher in the school had to get up and speak too.

Amidst all that pleasure there was a 52-page Powerpoint presentation, various kids getting various awards, the diploma presentation, kids reciting a Dr. Seuss book in pairs.

Shall I talk about how I caught my snookey dozing off a couple of times? I was too far from him to poke him. My ex was also there. He said he couldn’t make it to the dinner afterwards because he was falling asleep. That was just as well because I wasn’t going to invite him in the first place – my snookey talked me into it since “he’s her dad”.

I had to call the restaurant about 3 times to say, “we’re going to be a little later than we thought, but it’s almost over”. Problem was, it wasn’t almost over.

And when we got to the restaurant, it, too, was shit. I’d never been there before and only picked it because Bill’s Pit Steak House (which was right across the street from the church) had moved out to Woodbridge and I didn’t know of any other restaurants nearby. Let me tell you that Mastro’s restaurant on Wilson Avenue is in sad need of a restaurant makeover. A little help with the food wouldn’t be bad for them either.

All in all it was a dreadful night. I didn’t even get any good pictures because for some reason, every time I turned the flash on in my camera, the picture would go really dark as if we were outside. I then took a few pictures with the flash off and they seemed to show up, but now I’ve got to go through my manual again and see WTF I’ve done with my camera.

I guess the good thing for the night was that she got to dress up, and had some people telling her that she looked good. Other than that I’m very thankful that there won’t be another graduation taking place for four years.

Well, you’re gonna think this is strange to say, but I’ve come to like green. My daughter used to tell me it was one of her (if not “the”) favourite colours but I never much liked green myself.

Lately I find myself drawn to green. My beer glub is green, kinda lime-y slash filthy therefore darker, and a lot of t-shirts I have are different shades of green.

About the only green I don’t like as far as clothes or wearing green goes is the forest green.

And I guess this affinity for green didn’t just happen overnight, it kinda weaseled its way into my wardrobe. I also have about 3 or 4 purses in green. Funny, I have 2 pairs of green shoes that are almost the exact green colour, and then another pair of green sandals that I recently bought, and, of course, the khaki.

I’m finding something cool in the green. And it has nothing to do with my Irish heritage that goes back to when? When does it go back to? WoTF knows? Maybe my mother just told me that cuz she liked the sound of her own voice, Christ knows she was all about the lectures and yapping when I was growing up. Children soon enough learn how to drown out the drone but that’s another story.

And, BTW, this has nothing to do with having my colours figured out, even though I was the half green (half wit). I’m liking the orange half of me – I think it’s probably more me than half.

So green it is. And that doesn’t mean I’m environmentally friendly cuz I’m not. If it wasn’t for them forcing this recycling crap upon us with 8 zillion bins in our kitchen for all different things, I’d still be shoving everything in the garbage can like I always was.

Ok, I’m getting off topic now. Green it is. Wear green and like it! Be green with envy (at my green). Alright, now I’m just getting stupid. Be green with stupidity. I am.

So I took the car back to the mechanic’s this morning and phoned him around 8:00 to tell him why it was there. I called him this afternoon and what he said was that somehow some rust had fallen in by the rotor (I guess when they were putting things back together) and that was the problem. I’m assuming that problem is fixed cuz I’m gonna go pick up my car in about 15 minutes. I’m just waiting for my snookey to arrive with the Tim’s.

Tonight we’ve gotta go pick up some groceries for dinner. We’re having some people over this weekend for a meal and I have absolutely no idea what to have (or buy).

Last night I tested the rice cooker once again, only this time I used brown rice (not parboiled cuz I figured I’d try regular first and see if it worked). I put in two cups of rice cuz I read in the cooker instructions not to make less than 3 cups of cooked rice and since one cup of uncooked rice equals two cups of cooked rice, I figured I was safe putting in two cups.

Well, boys and girls, it worked. I had to cook the bejeezus out of that rice – I think it was on for an hour in the rice cooker, but the rice cooker actually stayed on cook rather than warm – unlike the time with too little rice when it only stayed on cook for about 10 minutes.

The rice turned out well except that, since it was a test, I didn’t put any flavouring in it at all, so there’s a whole bunch of cooked plain rice. I think tonight I may cook up some garlic and onions and vegetables – probably meat too, and add it to the rice. Then we can take some more rice for lunch on Friday. We’ll have rice coming out of our ears because the test was to see if it would turn out ok so I could make some rice for dinner with our guests. I don’t even like rice that much. It’s alright.

I don’t know what else we’re gonna do tonight since Earl and The Office both had their season finales last week and the week before. I have no idea whether they’ll just have reruns on or other shows that we probably don’t want to watch. See! I’m missing my The Office fix already!

So I’m off. Ta ta, dahlings, time to shop

Ok, what the hell have I been doing that I haven’t written since Monday? Lazy bugger. Nothing much. I’ve felt really, really busy. I made another necklace, nothing special but I wanted something to go with what I was wearing today, and just making food and lunches and yada yada.

I did watch American Idol voting results last night and I couldn’t believe that Blake didn’t get the boot, although that Lakesha girl was certainly a hard site on the eyes. While she had a good strong voice, I could hardly stand looking at her when she’d open her mouth. You’d see this mile full of tongue and I’m happy not to have to look at that any more.

I actually have a small mouth. The dentist said so. So for anyone thinking I’m a big mouth, you’re wrong. That reminds me, I made a dentist appointment for next Wednesday on my lunch hour – some place close to where I work so it won’t take me too long (5 minutes) to get there.

I’ve got a lot of work to get done besides cleaning. There’s that root canal. There’s that capping of the previous root canal. There’s more capping of the current root canal. Who can afford a dentist for Christ’s sake?

Anyway, I didn’t have anything to say (obviously) so I’m just gonna take my small mouth into the other room and watch me some TV. Perhaps I’ll play a little FEAR before I do that, I haven’t played that in a while since I installed it either.

What the hell have I been doing all this time not writing? Nothing. Oh, I took my car back cuz the service engine soon light was on. They told me it was an oxygen sensor that needed replacing. Sorry, I don’t have $100 for that right now.

I’ve been shopping. Grocery shopping. Yes, still doing the South Beach Diet and still shopping, and chopping, and preparing, and cooking at every waking moment that I’m home.

I haven’t been taking any pictures cuz the weather’s been dull and grey, other than the weekends when I’m waking at 5:20 and 6:30 for no reason on God’s green earth.

I’ve got the day off work tomorrow to go for all those tests as a result of my physical that I had the other week. Not that there’s anything wrong with me (physically that is for all of you out there who were going to say, “nothing wrong with her!!!???, are you mad, man?!?!?).

Tomorrow I’ve got to be at the lab at 7:30. Who knew places like that opened so early, not me. I’ll have blood tests, bone density, mammogram, ultrasound. I think there was something else thrown in there too, but I can’t remember what it was. WTF, I didn’t know there’d be a quiz later.

So I’ll have to get up around 6:30 and start drinking water. Isn’t that special? I’ve gotta be dying to pee in order to have that ultrasound which comes after the blood tests but you can’t just drink the water and be ready, you’ve got to drink the water, wait, then wait some more as your bladder starts feeling like it’s going to explode.

That’s my exciting day tomorrow. Then my daughter’s coming tomorrow night. I have a little surprise for her. Which reminds me, I had my son’s easter bunny over here and he never showed up. Stupid ass. Never called to say what happened, just never showed. I thought I had instilled ideas of dependability and reliability. I guess I did not.

Y’see? I want to write but there’s too damned much cooking to be done. This morning I got up at 5:20, how’s that for a Saturday sleep in? I probably got up that early because I went to bed so early last night. Ooooo, aren’t we the rockers heading off to bed at sunset on a Friday night. Ok, maybe not sunset but not too damned far away from it.

Last night was the only night we didn’t have to get the next day’s lunches and snacks and things ready from our diet so it almost felt relaxing.

This morning at 5:20 I rose and shone, gathered up my clothing (so as not to wake my honey) and headed off to do some sunrise pictures. I figured that sunrise had been coming earlier lately so it wouldn’t kill me to get out there and wait.

And I waited. Went to Tim’s, I was surprised they were open so early. The woman said, “coffee madame?” and I said, “yes please”, not realizing that I had to tell her of the change to my coffee to decaf no cream. So I drove off with the way I used to drink my coffee and had to drive all the way back when I realized it cuz I didn’t want to cheat on my diet.

Then I headed east cuz I was thinking, ‘the sun rises in the east’, and I wanted some sunrise pictures. Well I got some. They were nothing special. Maybe I’ll get some other pictures later, depending on the weather.

Right now I’m headed off to pick up my car avec new transmission so I’ll probably write later – or tomorrow – but at least I’ll have some time to write… I think.

Since I hardly ever check my comment moderation (because I know most of the people who comment and you don’t get moderated), I found this comment made the other day in response to my Denise Austin post.

A Corner Wino | fucku@aol.com | IP: 68.252.103.69

we only want to see densie austin bouncing those firm tits and hot tight ass wish she did this nude…oh you are a fat hippo

Mar 2, 7:18 AM

Why would anyone bother making a comment like that? And of course they’re too fucking weeny to leave any real email address.

But since I have their IP number I contacted abuse@swbell.net to report the spam. I just don’t see any need for it, or for calling me a fat hippo either – fucking limp dick freak

Tell me, isn’t this the cutest thing you’ve ever seen? Yes it is. It is. No you haven’t. This is so damned cute. Click on it to make it bigger so you can see just how damned cute it is.

A monkey holding a stuffed monkey… isn’t that precious? I love this bag. I’m not even taking my normal bag to work any more. Ever since I got this bag from Telus (we were looking at buying my honey a new phone), I had to switch over all my stuff and use this bag.

I have to go walking around with a picture of a monkey holding a stuffed monkey. I just have to. Professionalism? *pfft* I’m gonna take this bag with me on upcoming job interviews. I just don’t care. I’ll do it. Want me, want my bag, that’ll be my new motto. And since I’m a monkey in the chinese zodiac, I guess there’s a certain “something” (can’t remember the word I’m thinking of) that fits here too.

I haven’t done a meme in a while and I saw this at Mysterious Cloaked Figure’s Nexus of Improbability and figured I might as well do it – it’s not like I had something else to talk about that may have been interesting.

You have to answer each of the questions with one word only. Here I go.

1. Where is your cell phone?
Purse

2. Your girlfriend?
Heterosexual

3. Your hair?
Shaved

4. Your mother?
Vegging

5. Your father?
Dead

6. Your favorite thing?
Prohibited

7. Your dream last night?
Precoital

8. Your favorite drink?
Beer

9. What?
Huh?

10. The room you’re in?
Computers

11. Your ex?
Idiotic

12. Your fears?
Monetary

13. What do you want to be in 10 years?
Dead

14. Who did you hang out with last night?
Honey

15. What you’re not?
Satisfied

16. Muffins?
English

17. One of your wish list items?
Technological

18. Where you grew up?
Toronto

19. The last thing you did?
Shopped

20. What are you wearing?
Nightgown

21. Your TV?
Apprentice

22. Your pet?
Forbidden

23. Your computer?
Dreaded

24. Your life?
Wary

25. Your mood?
Bored

26. Missing?
Hedonism

27. What are you thinking about right now?
Cigarettes

28.Your car?
Guzzler

29. Your personality?
Selfish

30. Your Summer?
Cold

31. Your relationship status?
Taken

32. Your favorite color?
Black

33. When is the last time you laughed?
Today

34. Last time you cried?
Yearly

35. School?
Money

Done.

Oh what a busy girl I’ve been, I haven’t written anything since Thursday.

Well on Friday our office was closed due to a power outage. The problem with that was that I had already called in to say I wouldn’t be there. If I had shown up I might have been paid for the day, not being able to work and all, but I didn’t, so I guess they’ll just deduct that – one of those *doh* moments.

I did go for a long walk on Friday and I wore my pedometer thinking that I’d track the steps. Since we’re supposedly going to start this walking 10,000 steps a day program, I figured I’d see if a trip to Tim’s would suffice. It doesn’t. Walking to Tim’s, and to the plaza to talk about my dry cleaning, and to the Shoppers Drug Mart to see if I needed anything, and home, only counted as 7760 steps. So obviously I need to go half as far again to get it up there. Perhaps a trip to Costco would count.

Speaking of trips, yesterday we went to this store called Hedonics. I had no idea what they sold there but I wanted to go in because another of their signs said, “Really Really Neat Stuff”. Who can resist a store that says, really, really neat stuff in their title?

And they did have some unique things there – one of them being the Buttoneer. Remember the buttoneer? I was talking about it just the other week to my honey because I wanted one. I wanted something that would fix a button without having to take out the sewing kit, find the right coloured thread, thread the needle, knot it, and sew on the button.

I had never seen the buttoneer sold anywhere, but all of a sudden I found it. And I bought it. $20. I had a pair of pants with a loose button, so I tried my handy dandy Buttoneer to fix it. Didn’t work. Tried again. Didn’t work. Tried again, couldn’t get it working. Again, nope. Keep in mind that each time I’m trying this I’m using up one of the plastic thingies that holds the button on.

I finally got this thing working. I think I know how to do it for all those other pesky loose buttons. I’m keeping this and probably going back to hedonics for more refill plastic thingies.

What else did I do in my time away from you? Well, you know. Ha ha. And probably again today if I have any say in it (and I do).

I also spent different parts of my time washing that living room/dining room ceiling and walls. Have a look at this picture and tell me if my work has been fruitful. See the difference in the “we used to smoke” ceiling and wall compared to our new and improved “we’d love a cigarette but we’re not having one after all this cleaning” ceiling and wall.

It really is horrible to think that everyday we were living in and with this and not even noticing it. However, I’m sure all those non-smokers noticed it… smelled it, saw it.

The funny thing is, even when I see this, I still think, “man, a cigarette would be good right now”. This is our eighth week and I still want a cigarette. But I know that feeling will pass – only to come back again at a later time. I suppose I’m expecting a lot to think that after 35 years of smoking, 8 weeks would clear up that little problem, but I am getting better. I don’t think I think of it as often now as I had been.

Last night we rented a movie – oh yes, The Guardian with Kevin Costner. Friday night we rented a movie too… Flags of our Fathers. I won’t even bother rating these. Not that they were soooo bad, but they were pretty damned boring. I find it hard to sit through 7-hour movies. What? Not 7 hours? zzzzzzzzz.

Maybe today I’ll do more cleaning. The commitment I’d have to make to the living room ceiling is a big one though with lots of moving around of furniture, so I need help with that one. We’ll see about it.

Oooh the big snowstorm tonight. I actually left work an hour early for it to take me two hours to drive home when it normally takes half an hour.

This was a picture from my balcony just to show you how much snow we received from 2:00 in the afternoon when it wasn’t snowing at all until 5:15 when I got home from work.

The streets were a little slippy but the big reason for the slowness was that everyone was driving 20 km. Lots of people were sliding around, some unable to get up the hill that we have to go to get to my place. That’ll teach em for not buying snow tires.

Then when my honey got home and pulled into the driveway, didn’t he get stuck in the snow (our stupid ass landlords hadn’t had the driveway cleared out yet). My honey has this “traction control” stuff on his beautiful new car but he has no snow tires. So he went and got the shovel out to shovel away some of the snow so he would be able to pull his car in, I guess.

You can feel so superior when you have snow tires on. And you deserve to feel superior. After all, it cost $700 for that feeling of superiority (plus you won’t get stuck in the snow). I’m feeling superior. However, with that said, and the weather that’s supposed to continue tonight, I don’t know if I’ll be going to work tomorrow or not. We’ll see in the morning what the weather channel says.

You’ll see that a lot of the changes I had put on my site before have been taken off. That’s not because I don’t like them, I do, it’s just that there were some errors that I couldn’t figure out and so now I’m going to have to implement the various plugins one by one. I want everything working properly and not slowing down. I especially like the Ajax Comments so I’m going to put those back on. I think I can probably live without the snap preview, that seems to get tiresome after a while.

Just thought I’d let you know. But I don’t feel that I have time to read through the instructions again, especially for new versions of plugins that work with WP 2.1 Ella, so you’ll see those plugins when I get around to it.

Have I told you lately how fucking bored I am at this job? Yes, I have, I know, but let me tell you again. I’m sure I won’t be any more excited once the job is finished (especially knowing that I’ll be home all day and night without cigarettes), but I want to be home in my boring house – perhaps then reading up on the new instructions to put my plugins back on.

I suppose I should start looking for a job now but I am feeling lazy lately. It’s caused by not smoking. Don’t tell me it isn’t. Ever since I quit smoking all I’ve wanted to do was sleep – not even “wanted to”, just started conking out.

I do have a little pact with my honey though. If I end up having cancer at any point, I am going to take up smoking again. I figure that if I’m going to die from something like smoking all my life, I’m at least going to die enjoying the thing I did all my life. Fuck health. But that’s a big “if” so I can only fantasize for now.

Tonight we’ll watch Earl and The Office and Scrubs and 30 Rock. Two whole fricking hours of TV, and really the only ones I love are Earl and The Office. The other two are ok, amusing some times so we might as well watch them since there’s little else that’s as consistently amusing.

We had a Costco dinner (mmm, giant hot dog) and they finally had my gum there. WTF is so hard about carrying the only gum I chew? They’ve been outta this stuff for months now, I didn’t expect to find it tonight either. Last month I ended up buying the Clorets gum since they didn’t have this, and that stuff is putrid, man, I’ve got to throw them all away.

So we stocked up a bit. Bought two boxes just in case they decide to be all out again. And the store owners all around us? We bought out their supplies too, so I know they didn’t have any more to buy at Costco. I left everyone high and dry.

Ok, so what. I’ve gotta go play some of the FEAR game now before Earl comes on. Gotta get me some gaming going – good, go girl, giddyap – galliteration.

We were pretty busy on the weekend as you can see by looking in the computer room.

This is my little area of the room and you can see that we built a shelf. Relatively cheap compared to buying a new desk, and I did see a new desk at Staples that had a shelf connected right to the desk. It was on sale for $130 so I thought that we should get two new desks to replace what we’ve got now.

That’s me. Impulse buyer. But my honey, Mr. “We’ll think about this and come back in a couple of days”, took the sheet with the measurements and we went off, talking about going to Home Depot and buying the stuff to build our own shelf for the desk.

That cost a total of about $60. The shelf itself was only about $15 (pine, a little lighter than our birch desks but the closest match we could find). It was the legs for the shelf that were $10 each. Those are some honking expensive legs let me tell ya.

Anyway, the shelf is up high enough that the fax can still fit underneath. I had planned on putting it on the shelf, but I had not taken into consideration the shelves I have on the wall behind me, so the fax paper would have been cramming into the wall shelf, so I left it on the desk.

I can fit a bunch more stuff here with the shelf than I could before. I’m actually feeling like my desk is spacious. I’ve got room to write. WoTF writes anything? Not me. If there’s anything to be written, it’ll be typed up on the computer with an electronic signature so I don’t even have to write that.

So that was part of our busy weekend, boys and girls. You can easily see why I had no time to write.

Thinking of that, we also bought some new surge protector power bars – one for each of our desks. They have 10 plugs in them, four of them spaced widely apart for those honking huge plugs that take up the space on all the other plugs. Those things were $70 each.

Let’s hope that the next time there’s some power out, that these $70 surge protected plugs prevent me from having to buy a new hard drive.

Ciao for niao bellas/bellos – I’ve gotta have some dinner (or jalapeno nuts – same thing).

I picked up my computer tonight with the new 320 gig hard drive, yes, partitioned so I’m now a CDEFG girl.

I have installed absolutely nothing yet except my Avant Browser and it doesn’t look like I’ll get around to installing anything else this evening cuz Earl and The Office should be coming on in about 6 minutes.

We’ll chat later.

Who knew that I had the one special car in the universe that has a battery with reverse terminals? I didn’t realize just what a find I had when I bought my beautiful car.

Costco doesn’t carry those types of batteries. Neither does Canadian Tire. The dealer does. WoTF is going to go to the dealer to get a battery when the dealer will charge one-and-a-half times more than any other store?

Who had a battery for me? Wal-Mart. Yes, boys and girls, Wal-Mart saved the day. And, the battery at Wal-Mart was only $84 as opposed to Canadian Tire’s batteries which were going for $104. How about that… a $20 savings. Almost makes you wish you had more batteries to buy, doesn’t it?

So I got to drive my own car to work today and it fits me like a glove. It’s funny how you grow so accustomed to something that every other one feels foreign. ← (foreign, har har, get it? foreign… as opposed to domestic, oh I am so witty, I kill me.)

Right now I’m just waiting for my daughter to arrive. My honey went out and picked up some chicken wings at M&M’s and they’re cooking right now. I hope she arrives in time to have hers hot, but too bad if she doesn’t cuz I’m starving and I’m eating in 17 more minutes when they’re ready. She should have been here already now anyway, so I’m not Mrs. Cleaver, no sir, that’s not my style. This is no restaurant.

Tomorrow morning we’ve got piano lessons again. It’s been about 3 weeks since my daughter was here so I’ve had the sleep-in opportunities a couple of times to no avail.

Perhaps what I should do tonight is load some games onto my computer. I really haven’t done dick other than what I told you I’d loaded before after the reformat… just the basics. I can hear my honey playing Painkiller right now and it makes me want to play something. Maybe I’ll start off with FEAR just to see if it will load this time. After the last reformat I had it wouldn’t work on my computer but then I may have had 8 zillion versions of DirectX by that point. I’ll have to test that.

Alright I’m just yammering now, and I’ve got wings to turn over so I might as well stop.

I was headed off to work this morning (running just a little late cuz I didn’t get my clothes decided on last night) when I went out to my car and it wouldn’t start. The stinking battery light came on and I didn’t have a sound at all – I don’t even remember hearing a click.

So I figured I’d take my old car to work – after all, I’m paying the farging insurance for it for no good reason since my honey bought himself the new car.

The Lumina had some ice on the windshields since nobody’s been driving it, so I started scraping and digging and chopping the ice off. Well, wouldn’t you know that I knocked something off one of the windshield wipers, so I was a little afraid to drive that car with this unpredictable weather.

My honey offered up his new car for me to drive, so I took that to work. That is one beautiful car, let me tell ya. Have I mentioned it already? It’s a Grand Marquis with black leather seats and this big dashboard full of green digital lights. It drives very smoothly, however, I was then scared shitless that some careless driver might run into me or something when my honey hasn’t even broken the car in.

Anyway, tonight he’s trying to get the battery out of my Taurus so we can go have it tested to see if it’s the battery that’s screwed (as opposed to the alternator). Let’s hope it’s the battery since that’s a helluva lot cheaper.

I’d also like to go get my hair cut again, even though it was just two or three weeks ago that I got it done. They did a shitty job and I want it fixed.

Ooops, gotta run – my honey got the battery out and we’re headed off for a new one. Later it’s Earl and The Office… oh, what a night.

Minna, where are you? I am looking somewhere to find you.

I saw this one over at Accordion Guy’s site, so I figured, “why not”?

Your results:

You are superman

Click here to take the superhero personality quiz

The phone rang around 7:00 this morning. My first thought was, “who the fuck is that, calling at 7:00? What if I was sleeping in?” But I wasn’t. And it was my daughter to sing me happy birthday, so that’s a nice thing.

And what about those of us born today? Especially those of us who have just turned 50!!!!! 50. OMG. 50′s the new 30! No, really. It is. Except for looks, I guess. My horoscope says this about me:

Born today, you are one of the most determined and strong-willed individuals born under your sign, and if you allow your ambitions free rein, you’re not likely to encounter much in the way of obstacle or challenge in your lifetime. Indeed, you are so eager to accomplish so much in your lifetime that, at any given time in your life, you should be able to accomplish at least one of your goals while falling short of the mark somewhere else. You are rather opinionated, and you share your thoughts and feelings with those around you almost all the time — whether your comments are solicited or not.

You are not always as romantic as others may wish you to be, for the most part because you are always so concerned with one project or another at any given time. However, when you take the time to tend to the romantic needs of a loved one, you have what it takes to be quite successful.

What do they mean by that? I’m damned romantic.

For today it says:

The emotional climate may be unsettled at this time, and you’ll be in a position to keep a coming storm from breaking at the wrong time.

And here’s the same old tune I play year after year.

C’mon, you know you like it.

Download audio file (HappyBirthdayJafer.mp3)

UPDATE: BTW, guess what I got for my birthday?

Yes, boys and girls, my honey got me just what I wanted. I am so damned happy.

So far I’ve just been reading the manual. There’s a lot of learning to be done here.

I wonder how he knew what I wanted? He knows me like a book.

I am gonna be a camera fool now. La, la, la, I’ve got the Lumix. Leica lens, did I mention that?

Now the only thing more for my birthday is the birthday boink. Not til tonight though. At lunch time my aunt and mother are taking me out. Free food too!

What a fabulous birthday. Y’see, 50′s not so bad. I guess I’d better update my sidebar.

I saw this one over at Mark’s, and figured it’s been a long time since I did a meme, so WyTF not?

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?

Egg nog avec rum. But only on one day (or night) interspersed with beer, of course.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?

What are these “presents” of which you speak?

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?

Coloured on the tree when I put the big tree up (not the mini tree like this year and last), and the outside lights used to be white, but now with the new “energy saving LED lights”, they’re blue.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?

No. Why would I? I’ll kiss whoever the hell I damned well feel like kissing.

5. When do you put your decorations up?

Usually on a weekend in December when my daughter’s here. I think kids like to get into the whole Christmas-y spirit.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish?

Stuffing.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child:

I got that “Baby Pat-a-Burp” which was a good time. One year I also got the budgie I had been asking for but my cousin came in and told me about it and ruined the surprise (even though the surprise had been well hidden in my aunt’s closet).

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?

I was in grade 3 (yes, I was a little naive) and one of the kids at school told me he wasn’t real. I went crying to my mother (who taught at the same school at that time) and she told me they were lying. I don’t think I really believed any more, though.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?

Sometimes we do, but I think that started with my daughter being so anxious to open presents that we’d allow one to be opened. When I grew up, it was only on Christmas Day, and I’d be up at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning having to wait for the entire family to get up before we could start opening presents. That’s not to say I didn’t go scope out the presents and see if they felt like what I had asked for.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree?

With whatever decorations I’ve had for the past umpteenth years. After so many years I decide I need a change and then those new decorations last for umpteen years.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it?

I hate all weather – snow or heat. Give me spring or fall where it’s just kinda nice out.

12. Can you ice skate?

I took figure skating as a child and was pretty damned good at it – you know, all those twirling, circly thingies, leg up in the air, whatever. I can still skate (or I could when I took my kids skating), however, it killed my ankles and somehow I couldn’t really remember how to stop.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?

I suppose the budgie was my favourite gift, that is unless somebody gets me that 10.1 megapixel, 12x zoom Lumix digital camera that I’m lusting after *hint, hint* (I’m so subtle).

14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you?

Having a holiday is the most important thing about the holidays. Since I don’t usually get many presents any more, I have to count on the fact that I’ll at least have a little vacation.

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert?

I like pumpkin pie. I dunno if it’s my favourite, but I’m not thinking of anything else at the moment.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?

I don’t have a favourite tradition, it’s really just a big pain in the ass with all the decorating and cleaning and spending money and cooking.

17. What tops your tree?

There’s some kind of wiseman I think it is. I had a star, I had an angel. I don’t have any idea where those things went.

18. Which do you prefer giving or receiving?

Receiving. Come on. I could say giving but we all know that that’s just way too pretentious.

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song?

Do You Hear What I Hear – Vince Gill version even though I hate country music.

20. Candy Canes! Yuck or Yum?

Ooook.

Yes, I heard back about the job I had applied for at the two-month place and they told me I didn’t get the job. Apparently the guy was “pursuing another candidate”. Pursue this you fuckhead. I could have done that job blindfolded, and the only bad thing is that I don’t get to say, ‘told ya’, because the guy will never know what he missed. Oh well. I didn’t really expect to get it, I was just hoping to get it so I’d have 9 months more employment.

In news elsewhere, when I was at my aunt’s the other day, she gave me some pictures. I had told her that I was about 24 years old the first time I had ever seen a picture of my father, and she had a picture of my father (the same one I had seen – apparently there are not too many pictures of him available from others and my mother had poked his eyes out in any pictures she had).

So this is him. I tried to modify the picture a bit to remove all the scratches from the image, but this is about the best I could do.

Apparently this picture is from their wedding day. I can look at the guy and see my eyes in his. He looks like a friendly-enough guy but then I’ll never know. He and my mother split up when I was a baby and I had no contact with him my entire life. As a matter of fact my mother told me he was dead, so imagine my surprise when I was around 12 years old and family friends told me that he had died when I was about 8 or 9.

I cannot believe the total disregard my mother had for her child. Would it have been ok to leave a picture around in a picture album that she never had to look at so that her daughter could at least know what her father looked like? Didn’t even know when he died – virtual strangers knew more than I did about him.

This was a picture of my mother in her 20s – before I was born, so I know that she was younger than 28. Perhaps it’s from her wedding day too, but then she looks like she’s wearing some summer ‘frock’ in this, so I don’t know and she’s too brain-dead to ask. She’d probably tell me it was her neighbour or something.

Now I have no idea if my father had no interest in his offspring and my mother did the ‘right thing’ by keeping me uninvolved with him, but even if that were true, I can’t help but feel hostility towards her about the way she handled things. She could have at least taken me to his funeral since I can remember the time when she was going off to the ‘mysterious stranger’s funeral’.

That was at least a learning experience for me. When I split up with my first husband I kept his pictures, not because I gave a flying farg about him, but so my son could see what his father looked like and hear whatever stories went along with those pictures. And I never said a bad word about his dad. I never gave my son a dose of reality until he was an adult, and then I actually let him know (when he asked) about some of the things that went on. Still not bashing, cuz who gives a shit, I just wanted him out of my life, but more to give my son some insight into the person his dad was and maybe explain why I had left him.

Anyway, enough about the parenthood shit and who did wrong and who did right. That’s life, I guess.

This is the newest addition to the jafer stuffed animal family. Ok, ok, that’s only 4 stuffed animals for me. This one is named Andy. Why Andy? Cuz that’s my honey’s name, and this is my honey.

He’s got a big nose (like my honey’s always saying about his nose). He’s got a whole bunch of really soft, furry white hair. And he’s got a little cushion for a belly, just like my snookey.

He was at the tuck shop at the home where my mother lives when I was there the other day and he was the only one like this. I wanted him but he was $10 and I thought it was an unnecessary expense.

Then some guy came in and bought a bear and a candle (I thought it was my bear and I kinda freaked, thinking my sweet little bear was gone). At that point I decided I was gonna buy it. Then my aunt said, if you want it, I’ll buy it for you as your Christmas present. I said, “ok”, and she bought it for me.

End of stories, boys and girls. This Andybear sits on the tray beside my monitor where I can see him all the time and be reminded of my Andy (who I usually can only see peeking out from his monitor, over my monitor). I’m not a total basket case. I’ll intersperse bear hugs with real hugs. I’m such a big fucking mushhead.

I forgot to tell you about the phone call the other day. I had a great time, it was all just a matter of enthusiasm.

I was at my aunt’s house, sitting in the kitchen beside the phone. The phone rang, my aunt saw the caller ID which said “Quality Custom Doors” and didn’t want to answer it, so I did. The conversation went a little like this:

Her: Hello, my name is Barbara, am I speaking to Mr. or Mrs. (misprounced last name)
Me: Yes, that’s me.
Her: I’m calling from Quality…
Me: Hi, Barbara! How are you today?
Her: I’m fine thank you, how are you?
Me: I’m pretty good. Except I have this pain in my stomach. I just ate a piece of cake and I don’t think it sat well with me, so I have this big pain in my stomach. And I just had some coffee. That means I’ll be up half the night. Up half the night with a pain in my stomach. I probably shouldn’t have had that coffee. I shouldn’t drink coffee late at night. So, Barbara, what are you calling me about?
Her: I’m calling from Quality Windows & Doors and today we’re in your neighbourhood…
Me: Oh, where are you, Barbara? What neighbourhood are you in today?
Her: Uh, we’re in Toronto.
Me: Well, that is in my neighbourhood. That’s great, Barbara. What is it you’re calling me about?
Her: Today we have a special on doors and windows, yada, yada, for only yada, yada.
Me: Well, Barbara, I live in an apartment. I’d like to change my doors and windows but I don’t think that they’ll let me. And it’s too bad, I need new doors and windows.
Her: Oh, I didn’t know you were in an apartment. I’m sorry. I’ll take your name off our list.
Me: Well, that’s ok, Barbara. Thank you for that. But you can call me anytime.
Her: Ok, bye.

I had such fun talking to Barbara that I think I’m going to do that to every telemarketer that calls. It makes for a pleasant conversation – a win:win situation where we both enjoy ourselves.

Now I just have to come up with some really long lines and get a little more interactive with the telemarketer. Perhaps I can gain some advice on how to get rid of the ‘pain in my stomach’. I wonder if Barbara drinks coffee late at night. I wonder if it gives her gas?