I just finished a three-day course downtown and I’ll actually be happy to go back to work tomorrow – I’m just all coursed out. It was a lot of information packed into 3 short days. I’m sure I won’t remember half of it, but I did learn some neat little shortcuts I can use – love the keyboard shortcuts.

Anyway, since the course was at Yonge and Bloor, I decided to take the subway down since it’s only about half an hour that way. I parked at the subway for $5/day and bought $25 worth of tokens, and, voila! There I was downtown, early. Thankfully for me there were no hold-ups like I remember happening all the time when I used to take the subway.

Tonight was the only night I had a bad time on the subway and that was because some asswipe had his music on so loud I could hear it halfway across the car. I had decided not to use my iphone this evening, but after listening to his crap, I just put my own music on to drown it out.

There was some fat woman collapsed on the stairs (which caused me to miss my train). I don’t know what happened to her, but everybody had to walk up and down on the stopped escalator while they had the stairs blocked off with ambulance workers and her laying in the middle of the stairs. What was holding us up on the stairs was all the gawkers who were over on our side making sure they had a look at the woman while we were all trying to get down the stairs. Again – asswipes.

That was about the worst of my days downtown though. So that’s not too bad. Today was so cold I ended up going into H&M (across the street) and buying a sweater. I figured that wouldn’t kill me since I didn’t have a sweater that colour anyway.

I took a few pictures, but not that many since our lunch hour was only half an hour. So I didn’t really get any interesting shots. And I would have met up with some former coworkers for lunch, again if my lunch hadn’t been only half an hour.

Let’s just hope there’s some stuff I can remember to take back to work with me. My next two-day course is in mid-September and that’ll finish off all levels of this course. I’ll be the big expert which I suppose means that I’ll then be supplied with more work to do.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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?

Oh, impatient ones, you don’t know the sound of one hand clapping. Go ahead, try it, learn something every day. It probably sounds the way you thought it would sound, but you’ll never know unless you try.

I had a boring day and it’s farging freezing in here. I suppose I should close the windows and the balcony door (or put on my woolly robe) so that I’d actually be able to move my fingers to type.

I got an email from my old boss telling me that she’d be in touch with me around Wednesday or Thursday to discuss that work she wants me to work on. The good thing is, the two weeks’ notice period is up. So if she thinks she’s going to get some work from me, she’s damned well gonna pay for it. And I think I’ll have a minimum one-hour charge for any work cuz it wouldn’t surprise me if she sent me a page here and a page there to make it difficult for me to calculate my time.

At the new job I’m still waiting to hear about a one-year contract that they’ve got coming up in a different department. I’m hoping that I’ll at least manage to get an interview but it’s not a department where they have any idea about WoTF I am. I’ve got recommendations from the people I’m currently working with, though, so I would hope I stand a chance at that.

Other than that I’m just disgusted with this 5 pounds I’ve put on. I keep trying on my clothes to wear the next day and finding that something is just a bit too tight. What a cow. It’s enough to make you want to eat… you know, some comfort food or something – like Mr. Sub or chicken wings

I’m gonna go now and see if there’s anything on TV. Oh, Denny Crane is on tonight. There’s some good news – unless they’ve pre-empted it for some stupid reason or have a rerun on. *woohoo* there’s something to watch!

Every morning the alarm goes off and I jump out of bed at 6:00. Today was no exception, except that no alarm went off, but for some reason, I needed to get up at 6:00. I suppose if my honey hadn’t been snoring away when I came back to bed from my pee, I might have gotten back to sleep, but, no. He, at least, got to sleep til 8:00.

And last night, when I was determined to stay up late, I was conking out by midnight, doing the one-eye-open move and trying to watch TV. We watched some movie, can’t remember what it was, but I do remember that we’ve seen it a zillion times before. How come the name won’t come to me? Jennifer Aniston and somebody, oh yes, Jim Carey, Bruce Almighty. Ok, we haven’t seen it a zillion times. I think we saw it once, but we watched again anyway.

We’re going to look at cars today. My honey still needs a new car (his is totally conked out). In the meantime he’s driving my old car… you know, the one I lent to my son… the one that he got at least 3 tickets on, the one he had impounded and they wanted over $500 to get back, the one I’m trying to sell. That one’s got the best snow tires on it – the Goodyear ones. My car has the Uniroyal snow tires on it but I wasn’t as impressed (even though I think I paid about $700 for them) as I was with the Goodyear ones.

“Drive it”, “Drive it into the ground”, I say to him. “Then look for a new car after that. Christ knows you’ve got the good snow tires on it”. Oh no, he doesn’t want to drive that one. He needs a new to him car, after all, he’s got an inheritance coming in soon… who needs a free car?

I’ve had no luck in selling anything. It cost me $38 to put an ad into the Auto Trader and I haven’t even had a single phone call, even though I said “obo (or best offer)”. WTF? We picked up two For Sale signs to put in the windows of that car. I think I need to buy a new muffler for it – it’s sounding pretty loud.

Anyway, my honey’s just making me a tea. Then we’ll go to Tim’s for coffee and I think I’ll have their delicious breakfast sandwich. I found out they sell those ‘homestyle biscuits’ in their outlets separately from the sandwich. I’m thinking I might buy some one of these days just to try with some butter.

After this exciting post, you’ll be going back to sleep yourselves.

We lost the consolation round yesterday. The good thing about that is that we only had to play one game instead of three. The bad thing was that we played just as pathetically as we did on Thursday night.

Ehh, I’ll go to the baseball party anyway and watch everybody else get a trophy. So what. Once again I don’t know whether I’ll play again next year, but let’s at least hope that we or they get it together enough by then.

Everybody seemed to like the cinnamon crumb cake that I made and so I brought home an empty cake dish from the game.

While we were down there, we also went looking around at the Queen West Art Crawl. WTF not… we were there.

There were some interesting pieces of “art” – it wasn’t all just paintings and photography, there were also crafts and books. We just walked around looking at everything since, you know damned well, we had no money to buy.

There was one spot that had buttons (and more) but my daughter of course had to get a button. She’d earned $10 from the game by watching one couple’s daughter, so she bought a button. She’s the only one who bought anything at the crawl.

I’m just thrilled she didn’t want to buy the button that said “fuck you”. I don’t know how much I’d like to have a 13-year-old running around with a fuck you button – she got something fairly innocuous (I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be on the button).

After all that we went home. Well, up to Canadian Tire to pick up my old car which is now (almost) my son’s car as soon as he gives me $200 for it and changes the insurance and ownership on it.

On Friday night my son was coming to dinner and we got a call saying that the car had stopped in the middle of the intersection at Leslie and Finch. He, of course, had no car-fix things left on the plan he has with his cellular, and I called CAA to get help on my membership only to find out it had expired.

My honey had to renew our membership, and he and my ex (who also stayed for dinner) went off to pick up my son while they towed my old car to Canadian Tire.

Apparently there was a fuse blown in the old car and so that was only about $10 (out of my son’s pocket). It also cost $60 to do the check up on it but my ex paid for that for my son, which was mighty white of him, especially considering that I didn’t have the money to help him out.

So it was an interesting and busy couple of days. My daughter has a birthday party to go to at 3:00 today so I’ll be dropping her off early and then the rest of the evening is to myself.

I guess I’ll do some ironing – I’ve got lots of fall clothes to get ready to wear, although today is almost summery again.

I had an early day today. I needed to drop something up at Yonge and Bloor and so I just went home from there. It was great. I was home by 5:17.

Since the wife of the guy who rear-ended me was supposed to call by 6:30 and didn’t, I called them.

She said, “well, you’ve already reported it to your insurance company, so it’s a done deal now, it’ll go through them”. Well thanks for calling me and letting me know.

Apparently she thought that by my saying he could pay for it himself if he wanted to, that I wouldn’t make a police report or notify my insurance company (in case their intentions fell through).

So that was a short phone call and then I called my insurance company to tell them to go ahead with the claim and I got some guy who sounded like he was making his dinner, there were plates clanking around, all kinds of noises that didn’t sound like an office. So I said to him, “who is this?”, and he said, “Chris, CAA Insurance”, and I said, “are you making your dinner or something?” and he said, “oh no, sorry, I was just doing something”. After a couple of minutes he told me to call back during business hours because he was the ‘emergency’ claim line and he couldn’t access any of the computer information.

So tomorrow I’ll call back and go ahead with my insurance claim and get me a brand spanking new ‘fixed up’ bumper.

That’s all for now. Canadian Idol – the girls’ edition – is on now.

When you get old, do you feel like having a nap at lunch time? Or is that something that only young people feel like doing *wink, wink*.

Lately, when I go off for my lunch half hour and head over to pick up some Tim’s, I find myself getting back in my car and closing my eyes. Thinking about a little snooze.

I don’t have a little snooze because I’m afraid that if I fell asleep I wouldn’t wake up until 5:00 and people would be saying to themselves, “hey, where’s that idiot gone?” “Wasn’t she supposed to be back in half an hour?”

It’s not that I’m getting less sleep or anything. I have my usual 5-6 hours a night. I don’t know if it’s the sheer boredom I feel everyday and the ultimate pleasure of taking half an hour for lunch – you know, so you don’t have time to do anything at all except run to Tim’s and back to the office.

On another note, that doctor’s office receptionist did remember to phone me back today. She phoned me around 4:00 p.m. I actually did remember her myself and almost phoned the doctor’s office but I said, fuck it. I don’t care if they don’t call for a month, cuz if they don’t, then I’m going to call the doctor and rant and rave about why the receptionist couldn’t manage to call me back in a month. But I didn’t get to do that. She followed through. Snotty bitch. She wasn’t overly friendly when she called back either.

Ok, I digress. Tonight I’ll watch the voting results for American Idol. My pick for getting kicked off would be Paris. There’s just something about her that bugs me. I think it’s the squeaky little girl voice when she talks. She can sing like a normal person, but when she talks it sounds like she’s trying to sound like a cute little 4-year-old. I think it’s time to outgrow that stupid habit.

Today’s haiku:

I Worked late tonight
I wasn’t even asked to
Yes, I’m scoring points

On my way home from working late the Queen song came on, you know the one… “find me somebody to luuuuv, find me somebody to luuuuv, find me somebody to luuuuv, can anybody find meeeeee, somebody to love”.

I, for some reason was in a good mood and had to sing along with it. I don’t do that much, sing along, out loud, in my car. You know why? Because it doesn’t matter who you are, when you’re belting out a song while driving, you look (and sound) like a big honking idiot ← oh good one… car pun, must have been intentional.

You can totally ignore the people in the car beside you but my tendency is to look the other way, so they don’t actually see my mouth moving and give me the “what a fucking moron” look.

I suppose I could pretend I’m talking on my cell phone, but it probably wouldn’t look like a conversation when you’re at the “somebody toooooooo luuhuhuhuhuv” part.

Some really strange things have happened to me in my life. And by ‘strange’, I mean things that are inexplicable.

They range from having dreams of things that actually occur in the future, to just knowing stuff.

For example, have I ever told you about the time (it was last year some time) that I was in the bank, waiting in line to deposit a cheque. There was a woman standing at another teller, and when I looked at her, even though I’d never seen her before, I knew she was Tim’s wife. Tim was a guy who worked in the same office building.

I saw Tim later that day and I said, “I think I saw your wife at the bank”, and he said, “that’s possible”. So I asked him what she was wearing that day and he described it. A few months later I actually met Tim’s wife, and it was her, the same woman I saw at the bank.

Isn’t that kinda weird? How would I know that? And why, out of a clear blue sky, would the thought come to me that this was this guy’s wife?

I started thinking about this because at work the other day I saw a car parked by me. I knew that it was one of our employees’ cars… not that she had ever talked about her car, or even mentioned that she owned a car. I just knew it was her car. I didn’t have time to ask her about it for the short time that I saw her, but a bit later on in the day she went running out of the office because she saw that her car was being towed. It was that car.

I can’t understand how this “knowing” happens. But in my life I’ve had dreams of things that actually take place in the future.

I’ve had dreams of places I’ve never been to, and I remember one time where I actually found myself in a place I’d had a dream about. I told the people there. I told them that this is where the washroom is, this is where this is, etc., etc.

I’ve had dreams that I’ve told people about, only there were people in the dreams that I didn’t know. I didn’t know them because I hadn’t met them yet. And at some point in the future I’ve ended up meeting these people, remembering the dream, and reiterating exactly what I said to them in the dream, just to see if they would then say the same thing they said next in the dream.

It’s all too freaky. And maybe it’s something Stephen Hawking could explain; I certainly can’t. And it’s not anything that I dwell on or even think about often. But now while I was thinking about it I thought I’d put it out there for the world to see what a big, honking mental case I must be.

I won’t go into why I was so pissed off two days ago (and yesterday), except for the fact that it was about everything, especially my site being fucked up for 5 days, but I better post fast because even though it looks fixed, who knows how long that will last. I’m saying it now… if this stinking database problem happens one more time, I’m changing hosts.

So enough of that. I’m happy right now, mostly because I’m thinking about my new sofa bed which is supposed to arrive tonight some time between 6:00 and 10:00. Let’s hope it’s not at 10:00 for crying out loud when the moving guys are all worn out and have to lug that 500lb. piece of furniture up 3 flights of stairs (banging it and dropping it and cursing all the way when I’m all vegged out getting ready for my new 11:00 bedtime).

I did get to leave work early today but only because I had to go shop – we’ve got some stupid all-day thing happening tomorrow and I seem to have become the designate to run to Costco for the bulk muffins and bagels – mostly because I drive to work. However, I am getting a little sick of this too. It’s nice to get out of the office but I’m not enamored with lugging back 9000 bottles of water for some meeting (or the 4000 bagels). Send the guy who rides his bike.

At my job there is no cleaning staff, so there’s a rotation of partners to do cleaning each week. This week is the Director’s and my week… of course, just when the place has to be all gussied up for all these all-day meetings. If I had known cleaning would have been part of the job I would have asked for more money – don’t those cleaning ladies make $35 an hour?

Anyway, that’s enough ranting for tonight. I guess I’ll go watch the men on American Idol tonight if they don’t bore me to death like the women did last night. I’ll sit on my snookey’s leather couch and watch TV from a totally different view. Look at me, I’m liberal… new perspectives. Picture of couch to come (like you give a shit; no, I do, I really do!)

Well, looky… this is my new work monitor. I bought it the other day from tigerdirect.ca and it arrived within 3 days *woohoo*.

I don’t know if we can classify it as false advertising, but there was no picture of this broad on my monitor when it arrived.

Why am I buying myself stuff at work you ask? Because I wanted it. I’m working for one of those non-profit places and they have no money, so I bought it for myself. Brand spanking new 19″ LCD with 8ms response and 700:1 resolution.

AND, it was on sale. It only cost me $280.99 with the manufacturer’s rebate. If you’re into it, I’d suggest you go buy one now cuz the special ends at the end of the month and you won’t get the rebate.

Anyway, since I’m buying myself all kinds of office stuff, I also stopped tonight and bought myself a new cordless keyboad and mouse. I figured that my desk was looking pretty crappy with the new monitor and a bunch of cords all in front of it. So tomorrow morning I’ll get those set up.

I don’t know if I mentioned the fact that I paid a bill last week online and I put it towards the wrong account – 1 Rogers account for cable/internet, and 1 Rogers account for telephone. I paid $106 to the telephone bill and nothing on the cable.

Rogers said they couldn’t switch it over, oh no, that would equal some type of work, but my bank said that they could switch it over, I got the letter today saying that they’d done that.

But I had called them yesterday to see why it hadn’t happened already and they said the letter had gone out to me already, so it should happen soon.

And while they were talking to me, they asked me if I’d like another $1000 on my credit card. Well I’m not one to disappoint a bank employee, so what should I have said except yes? So I did.

It never fails to amaze me… 9 months without a dime, 1 month of work and people are throwing money at me (or credit, anyway).

What am I gonna do with my new increased limit? How about some botox? I could use some of that (boy, could you ever!) Oh, thanks very much.

I’m gonna do nothing with it. For now, anyway. All these credit cards are costing me $200/month each, so I think it might be wise to pay down some shit before I can’t afford to pay them down. And I’m not even talking about that tax man from the other day.

While I’m in a yappy mood, did anyone watch American Idol last night? It was two fricking hours long! I didn’t even watch it all, I was channel hopping. There’s another two-hour marathon tonight with just the guys. I’ll watch it, for a bit, anyway.

Ok, this work thing wasn’t too bad today.

Was that because I actually had some input into some of the stuff to be done?

Was it because I told them I was running out to do “X” and then told them I was running out to do “Y” and kinda made my own day?

Or was it because the big boss said to me, “what would we do without you?” *woohoo!*

I actually found that quite surprising having only been there for 2-1/2 weeks. When she said that, I thought, “well, I guess you know what you’d do without me, cuz I haven’t been here for long, so what were you doing without me?”

But, hey, you know damned well I was secretly complimented and probably had a happy, silly, giddy looking glow about me when I answered, “I don’t know”.

Oh it doesn’t take much to appeal to my most base instincts now does it? I’m still feeling happy. But perhaps that’s just the beer talking while my music blares loudly over my fabulous Harmon Kardon computer speakers.

Perhaps it’s just the fact that it’s Friday and there’s no more work for two days. That’s enough to put a smile on your face and think, now that work’s over, it’s not tea bag.

Regardless, I’m a happy, he’s a happy, wouldn’t ya like to be a happy too?

A week or so ago, we decided to buy new cell phones. My honey and I both use Telus, Pay and Talk, but we decided that we were going to go with a plan – a contract – mostly because my son also needed a new cell phone. My son needs a plan where he doesn’t have to buy the minutes, cuz Lord knows I lent him my cellphone and he burned up $18 worth of time in two days (luckily I had built up $78 on my phone).

So we phoned Rogers, signed up for the family plan, and we all ordered the same phone… which happened to be the exact same phone that Minna had bought just a while ago.

We were thrilled – even though we had to change our cellphone numbers. We found some easy 416 numbers and I started memorizing the numbers.

Thing is, the third phone we ordered – my son’s phone – never came. Just the two phones came. So we called back to say “where’s the other phone?” and they told us that they didn’t have another one on order. Ok, fine. We ordered it again and they told us it would take another 5 days. In the meantime I lent my son my Pay and Talk phone since I had the new one.

All was going well. I downloaded some new ring tunes and some images for my new phone. I was all excited about it until we tried some test phone calls and I found out that instead of showing the phone number of who was calling, it showed “no number”.

After calling Rogers I then learned that the Call Display feature cost extra. Voicemail cost extra. All the stuff I had included in my Pay and Talk with Telus was extra with my Rogers plan.

And the worst thing about it? I only pay $11.50 a month for my pay and talk, which renews automatically each month with my credit card so I don’t have to worry about topping up. With the Rogers plan I would have been paying $25 a month (if we split it 3 ways), PLUS…. PLUS… another $10 for a package that would include voicemail and call display. This is before taxes.

I only use my cellphone for emergencies. Hence the carry-over of most of my time from month to month. Even as I was talking to my son about me not paying since I may only make one or two calls from the cellphone per month, that would mean that he and my honey would each be paying about $45 when my honey now only buys two $11.50 cards a month.

So…. I had to cancel the plan. We gave my son the option to keep the phone since he needs it, and he has the choice of paying that much money for a cellphone if he wants to, plus take advantage of 6 months of unlimited calls and text messages.

So I guess it all worked out in the end since it’ll still only cost me $11.50 a month. But, and here’s the big but, after all that research on phones, I think I want a new phone.

This Motorola phone has mobile TV, supports Bluetooth wireless accessories, video messaging, 1.3 Megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom (better than my current phone with 0.3), speakerphone, MP3 player.

The only problem is that without a plan, this phone will cost me $299. The other problem? I’ve got a shitload of ringtones that I’ve downloaded on my current phone and after all the research, I started going through my own phone manual and finding out just how much is offered with my current phone. And… I just found out that I can have a different ringtone for each different person.

This is my current default ringtone that I just downloaded. My phone really threw me off the other day when my son called and I thought, “what the hell is that? is that someone’s phone?” – cuz I had put in a different ringtone for him.

*ooooooo* I’m so excited I could plotz (whatever the hell that means). Tomorrow I start the new job and I think I’m all ready for it. I even made my lunch (and my snookey’s lunch since he won’t be used to coming home at lunch time and making his own grub). But don’t think that that’s gonna become a daily habit. He can damned well make his own lunch, lazy bastard.

Last night we ran over to The Brick with my ex and daughter so he could have a look at a dining room table and a new couch and loveseat that I’d checked out earlier. He wants to buy them using our Brick card since he has no credit. We’ve agreed to it, but we’ll have to draw up a big honking contract, just to be safe.

I want him to buy the dining room set because he doesn’t have one. I especially want him to buy the couch and loveseat because his are a wreck, and I figure if he has a brand spanking new set, people living over there (him and my daughter) might just be a little more careful in keeping the place clean – and perhaps keeping it “a home”.

So today I spent my time revamping one of my company sites. I’d show you where it is, but then I’d have to kill you, so I won’t bother. I’m happy with the new look and making it a little more interactive, so enough said. I just finished now so I don’t have to worry about not being here to work on it tomorrow.

Now I’m just going to go out and watch American Idol. My honey’s working on his resume cuz there’s a job that closes tomorrow. He always waits til the last minute for this stuff. Wait, so do I. We have so much in common, no wonder we’re fabulous together dahlings.

So far, this Weight Watchers stuff isn’t doing a damned thing for me. This counts as my 5th week and I’m still a pound more than the week I started… this week I gained 0.6 pounds. I suppose that pizza last night could account for that, but I gotta start getting serious with this or my 12-week membership will be up and I won’t have lost anything.

Something else that pissed me off was the Battle of the Blogs. I had won 6 out of 6 and then yesterday I lost, so I was mad about that… especially since the blog I lost to wasn’t a blog so much as a pretemplated black website with pictures of things. I’m not a good loser and now I’m not going to do them any more because I can’t stand losing. I’m taking my bat and ball and going home.

For some reason I’m in a pissy mood. Maybe I got too little sleep. We went to bed late and then had to get up at 7:00 this morning for my daughter’s piano lessons. I feel like I could use a nap.

And my daughter wanted Kraft dinner for dinner, so we had that with some hot dogs (crap) and now I feel all bloated and full.

While I’m at it I might as well complain about how nervous I’m feeling about starting the new job on Wednesday. Christ, I’m even feeling bad about having to wake up at 6:00 in the mornings. I’ve gotten so used to the ‘not working’ stuff that this is going to be a whole new direction for me.

Ok, enough whining. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be in a better mood.

Ok, I’m totally useless these days. I hope I’m not as useless when I start the new job, or I may not have a new job for long.

I’ve been working on installing a couple of plugins and I don’t know WTF they’re talking about. I think I’ve done everything they’ve said to do. Even after only half-assed reading of the instructions I thought I had it. But now I’ve gone and read the whole thing straight through and these things still aren’t working. So I’m going to ignore it for now.

Hey. Guess what? Today I got a call from the other job interview I’d gone to last week. They were going to narrow it down to the top 2, unlike the guys who hired me who were narrowing it down to the top 4. Well the guy called me to ask me to come in for a second interview. Can you believe it? It never rains but it pours. 9 months of a whole lotta nothing, and then whammo, two places wanted me.

So I, of course had to say, “sorry there buddy boy but you’re just a few days too late, I’ve already taken another job with someone who was on their toes and hired me right away”.

Ok, I might not have used those exact words, but it’s the thought that counts.

So today I went to Staples to pick up my daytimer refill to take to work. Who knew the stinking calendar would run out at the end of December?

I also did a little gazing around the stores and numerous trips to Tim’s.

I started trying to reformat and repartition my daughter’s computer and wouldn’t you know the stinking CD player wouldn’t work. And when I tried to create a boot disk from a floppy, it didn’t work.

So I took the computer in to Eric’s and left it for him to check out. If the hard drive is ok (it kept getting bad sector messages and having trouble booting) then I asked that he just reformat and install Windows on it. If the hard drive’s no good I said that we’ll take one of the spare hard drives out of my honey’s computer (which used to be my old computer) and install that instead. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Tonight my only plans are to watch Trading Spouses with my daughter. I think she gets a big hoot out of seeing some scummy trailer park mom switch places with some snooty rich bitch. I don’t mind it either, they’re so out of place.

Ok, not funny ha ha, but funny to me cuz I never thought of it. The other day I saw our neighbour, a woman who lives in the triplex beside us (who I only know to see and say hello to).

She was being politically correct as she was opening her garage, and said to me, “happy holidays”. Well, I was having none of that politically correct stuff. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Christmas time, and the statutory holiday is “Christmas”, not “holiday”, so I did my usual, “Merry Christmas”.

Well then she said to me, “Happy Hannukah”, and my first thought was, “I’m not Jewish”. Then it clicked in *duh*, oh, she is.

But I did start wondering why it didn’t just stay like that. I celebrate Christmas (and all you non-Christmas celebrators get a day off work for it), and so I say Merry Christmas, and whatever you celebrate, you say Merry Whatchamacallit, and we all live happily ever after.

I have noticed a trend this year, where people are saying Merry Christmas. I even noticed it on Jay Leno, where I thought, “ho, is that politically correct now?”

It’s never changed for me. And it’s not going to. I’ll say Merry Christmas and you can say whatever you feel like saying.

Ok, I’m busy getting laid. I know, I know, you don’t want to hear about it, but, quite frankly, we’ve only got a few more days til my son moves in, and then we’ve got no space to ourselves. So….

And why does someone always call when you’re in the middle of something. I hardly get any phone calls at all. But it never seems to fail that if I’m involved in something, or if I’m watching my favourite TV show, or any such occasion where I don’t want to take calls, someone calls.

I refused to answer the phone tonight. I cleverly said, “no, I’m not gonna get it, that’s what voicemail’s for”. Of course there is no voicemail. So I’m assuming nothing urgent was going on. There must have been absolutely no reason for anybody to call me since it was not important enough to leave a message about.

I did take a phone call today about my free trip to Disneyworld. I let the guy talk. He went on and on about what I was winning and then said that it was all secured as long as I “signed up today”.

I asked him what I was “signing up for” where he told me that I had to purchase…. to which I said, “I’m not buying anything” and he promptly hung up on me. Not even a bye. No snotty, sarcastic “thank you for your time”. Just a click as soon as I said I wasn’t buying.

Perhaps when people call me I’ll just hang up on them. When I hear, “hi mommy, what are you doing?”, I’ll just hang up the phone. Click. There’s an indication.

Maybe I’ll make it so I never get any calls at all, I’ll just call back the numbers listed on my last call list and I’ll tell everyone that I’ll hang up on them.

I don’t really like phone calls though, getting them or dialing them. That kinda explains why I never phone anyone.

I already told you that I had Thursday and Friday off this week and am only supposed to be working Monday and Tuesday next week.

I didn’t tell you, though, that they sent me home from work on Tuesday and told me not to come in on Wednesday, instead, to make a doctor’s appointment to find out about that nasty cough.

I think I did mention how I can’t seem to stop coughing when I’m at this job; coughing, blowing my nose, all the stuff that you’d have with a cold, and yet my cold was gone 4 weeks ago.

So yesterday I trekked off to the doctor, and off for a chest x-ray, and the doctor seemed to think that it had nothing to do with a cold, perhaps asthma stuff related to my allergies and whatever the fuck is in that work environment. I’m still waiting for x-ray results.

So that gave me time yesterday afternoon to head off to do 4 weeks worth of laundry. It cost me $25, there was so much of it.

And I’ve traded with my daughter for night gowns. The little strappy pink one I had (and bought her the same one in blue) has shrunk up so much now that it looks like a damned belt. So I took another one I’d bought her (it was too big for her) and replaced it with my little strappy thing – then we should both have something that fits.

Today I had to go downtown to the laser doctor because I had that laser treatment for the spots on my nose and it didn’t quite get rid of them (2), so I went back to retry it again, as you’re supposed to do since they say one take is not always sufficient.

Now I’ve got to wait a few days to see if they’re finally faded, but she took out the mega laser today and apparently they weren’t responding the way they’re supposed to, so I may have to do this all over again *ouch*.

I’m gonna head off to Home Depot after my snookey gets home for lunch and pick up some painter’s tape and start taping off my daughter’s room in preparation for painting.

And while we’ve got the bed in the computer room, it seems a little tight. The top part of the image is the way it is now, and the bottom part is how I propose that we rearrange things to give my daughter a little more “space” to move around in, and be able to open the drawers that are in the bottom of her bed.

I don’t want her to feel like she’s trapped in a corner. So we’ll do the disassembling and reassembling after we take all the computer stuff off the desks, and hopefully she’ll feel a bit more like it’s a room of her own.

On Sunday I’m supposed to pick up my son for his birthday dinner, the big 25!, and I’ll also pick up those prints I had lent him, and put them up in the computer room.

It’s a busy time boys and girls. I’m almost hoping that the people at the job say, forget about coming in for 3 days next week, we can manage to finish off everything. Although I do need the money.

Is this not just the cutest thing ever? The cigarette carton is shaped like a giant pack of cigarettes.

I just couldn’t resist buying that for $61. Ok, ok, I bought it because I have been smoking nights since I quit smoking. But just nights. I have quit smoking during the day, and only smoke when I’m back at home. This is good for me since I’m down to 1 pack a day instead of 2, and sometimes it’s even less than a pack, so I figure I’ll have myself weaned off fairly soon.

Regardless, is this not cute marketing?

I found this at mensplayground.com and thought it was cute. So, for your reading pleasure, here is why Men are Just Happier People, from a Woman’s Perspective:

• Your last name stays put.
• The garage is all yours.
• Wedding plans take care of themselves.
• Chocolate is just another snack.
• You can be President.
• You can never be pregnant.
• You can wear a white T-shirt to a water park.
• You can wear NO shirt to a water park.
• Car mechanics tell you the truth.
• The world is your urinal.
• You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is just too icky.
• You don’t have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt.
• Same work, more pay.
• Wrinkles add character.
• Wedding dress $5000. – Tux rental-$100.
• People never stare at your chest when you’re talking to them.
• The occasional well-rendered belch is practically expected.
• New shoes don’t cut, blister, or mangle your feet.
• One mood all the time.
• Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat.
• You know stuff about tanks.
• A five-day vacation requires only one suitcase.
• You can open all your own jars.
• You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness.
• If someone forgets to invite you, he or she can still be your friend.
• Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack.
• Three pairs of shoes are more than enough.
• You almost never have strap problems in public.
• You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes.
• Everything on your face stays its original color.
• The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades.
• You only have to shave your face and neck.
• You can play with toys all your life.
• Your belly usually hides your big hips.
• One wallet and one pair of shoes one color for all seasons.
• You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look.
• You can “do” your nails with a pocket knife.
• You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache.
• You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives on December 24 in 25 minutes.

No wonder men are happier!

Alright, I know I’ve been sickeningly happy all week with the job. So that’s stopping now.

Not that I’m not happy still, it’s just that I’m so damned tired now, I’m fricking worn out from being happy. Enough with the happy already.

Thank you, Friday, for being you. I love you just the way you are.

I’ve been going to bed around 11:00-ish to 12:00-ish at the latest this week and getting up at 6:00. Tonight I’m going to try to last longer than that, drink copious amounts of beer, and sleep til noon tomorrow.

Watch some asshat phone tomorrow morning and wake us up. It better not be you. You know better. Plus, you don’t have my phone number.

I did get to watch The Donald last night and it was fabulous. He fired 4 people at once! 4 people! That was just fabulous. I don’t know why… I just loved it.

Tonight we’ll be having a delicious Costco dinner (hot dog) because we’ve got to pick up a bunch of stuff. I’m trying to remember what that is. Oh ya, breakfast bars, and something else. Hopefully, we’ll remember once we’re there.

I think I’ll just wait for the rush hour traffic to die down a bit though before we go out.

So I’m really done. I can hardly wait to relax and put my feet up, or perhaps put my body up, that’ll be nice. And, no, I’m not gonna get laid. I like to have energy for that stuff.

And just because I’m the nice person that I am, I hope everybody else gets to sleep in tomorrow too.

The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play
But Jafer woke at 8:00 on that cold, cold wet day

She sat there alone, no one else did arise
She sat there with bad breath and sleep in her eyes

Too wet to go out and too early to call
So she stared at her monitor and did nothing at all

And all she could do was to click, click, click, click
Surfing websites until she found one that was slick

And then something went ‘clink’
How that clink made her think

She looked and she saw it above the TV
The movie they’d rented fullscreen DVD

Return it before noon to pay $1 dollar less
On the next dvd rental, she mouthed the word ‘yes’

So she ran to the washroom as quick as a wink
Then got washed, brushed her teeth, to get rid of the stink

She jumped into her car, and started the heater
Stopped at Tim’s to pick up the day’s coffee litre

Jafer dropped off the movie at Rogers and then
Jumped back into the car with the heater again

Now you know why at 8:00 she just had to go out
Saving money is what unemployment’s about

I’m such an idiot.

I just found this yesterday and I was a bit shocked. I’ve never seen this about Sagittarius before. It says that their special colour is PURPLE.

• Your Most Likeable traits: Optimistic, Independent & Adventurous
• Symbol: The Archer (Representing directness, high aims, a love of the heavens)
• Ruling Planet: Jupiter
• Element: Fire
• Dominant Keyword: I See
• Magical Birthstone: Turquoise (Attracts love, protects from harm & gives its wearer the ability to see into the future)
• Special Flowers: Narcissus, Holly & Dandelion
• Special Color: Purple (Uncommon color of royalty and the artistic)
• Lucky Numbers: 5 & 7
• Lucky Day: Thursday
• Part of the body ruled by Sagittarius: The Liver, the Hips & the Thighs

Don’t you find that weird that my special colour is purple and I designed my website with purple?

You’re right, it’s weird. It’s outright spooky. How come I never heard about Sagittarians and purple before either?

And you see how Sagittarius rules the liver, hips and thighs? Well that’s spooky too since, when I gain weight, it’s usually in the hippal and thighal areas. Not to mention that I’m a big fucking alky who’s bound to ruin her liver with the amount of beer that drains through there.

I can’t believe how accurate this horoscope stuff is.

A friend of mine sent me this email, which I think is the closest to friendship that I’ve seen.

Are you sick of all those sissy “friendship” poems that always sound like Hallmark cards, and never come close to reality? Well, here is a series of promises that really speak to true friendship:

1. When you are sad – I will help you get drunk and plot revenge against the sorry bastard who made you sad.
2. When you are blue – I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.
3. When you smile – I will know you’ve finally had sex.
4. When you are scared – I will rag on you about it every chance I get.
5. When you are worried, I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be and tell you to quit whining.
6. When you are confused – I will use little words.
7. When you are sick – stay the hell away from me until you are well again; I don’t want whatever you have.
8. When you fall – I will point and laugh at your clumsy ass.

This is my oath…I pledge it till the end. Why, you ask? Because you are my friend.

It’s nice to have friends.

I went trucking off to my interview in Mississauga this morning. I was a nervous wreck, gripping onto the steering wheel on the highway as if I was choking some bad boy who tried to steal my purse.

However, it only took me half an hour to get there. I was in the Tim’s by me at 8:30 getting a coffee, and I was in the Tim’s over there at 9:00 getting yet another coffee – and let us not forget the fat free raspberry muffin that I had lots of time to eat.

My interview was at 10:00. I went up about 9:45 and the guy saw me right away.

The entire process didn’t give me a feel one way or another, but he did mention that the hours were 8:30-5:00, and with the lower pay that I agreed I would take because they have benefits, I’d be making even less money per day because there’s that extra half-hour from 8:30-9:00 that I don’t usually work.

As I said yesterday, I may end up being offered this job only because it’s 25km away, and I don’t really want to have to take the highway to work, so it would be just my luck that this is the one that I’d get. I guess we’ll see. I won’t be disappointed if I don’t get it.

So I have nothing left to do today. I made my snookey a delicious tuna sammich for lunch and he’s gone back to work now. I could choke my chicken or something but I know that my honey is dying for some action so I shouldn’t be selfish.

I suppose I’ll end up playing some Zuma, or maybe Painkiller. I restarted the Painkiller game yesterday to the easiest of easy levels so I could get past the giant monster guy, and I did. So now I’m at a level I remember having a hard time getting past the last time. But I have taken quite a few screenshots, so if you’re into some game desktops, go to the gallery and save the 1024×768 size pics under Painkiller.

I know, I’ve gotta check out Saturday’s paper for more jobs. You see? I’ve got something to do after all.

I got a message on Friday around 4:30 (I leave for work at 4:00) from one of the agencies, asking if I was still interested in temp work.

So I called back this morning to say *duh* yes. But this is the same agency that had a temp job before, and it’s a matter of submitting resumes to the client to see if they want to bother interviewing you for it. On the last one they had, apparently the client didn’t. So I guess we’ll see about this.

Tonight I’ll be at the new job at the new location. Apparently there’s a Tim’s just past the new location, so that’ll be good for me. I was stuck with a Coffee Time at the other place.

My honey’s had to take the week off work so he can go to Fenwick and make all the arrangements for his mother’s funeral, and gathering her possessions from the home, etc.

His brother’s coming in from the States on Wednesday and will be staying with us. He can have our bedroom since we haven’t stopped sleeping in the living room by the air conditioner. I just got a hydro bill and it was $439 – which is up a helluva lot from the last one which was only $280. We’ve had the air conditioner running on “energy saver”, and have used it the same amount as the bill before – so what’s the extra $150 for? Stinking bastards.

So I’ll be going to a funeral on Thursday. We’ll have to get up around 6:00 (I’m not used to that any more) and leave by 7:00 to get there around 9:00.

I have only ever been to about 2 funerals in my life. It’ll be a bit weird. I hope I don’t start crying or something, since I’d never met the woman, but as I’ve mentioned before, I pretty much cry at anything, commercials, books, sad stuff. Imagine me standing there crying when her whole family is dry-eyed. I’ll have to watch myself.

Oh, last night I watched Moulin Rouge on television (and was crying at it). We had rented this before and I turned it off, so we only saw about 5 minutes of if. Well, I saw it on and decided to force myself to watch it, after all, we’d paid for it before.

That is one campy musical (and a sad love story at the same time). I don’t know what they were going for with that one unless it was to try and make another cult film like Rocky Horror.

And you know what? I hate when people sing with their mouths wide open. It looks really fake to me that anybody’s mouth is open quite that much. I’m no singer but I don’t think my mouth has ever been open that wide for anything (and I mean anything). Perhaps it’s required training for “good” singers, but what the hell is the need for it?

I got up at 7:30 this morning. I heard the alarm going off but somehow incorporated it into my dream as a funny sound. I’m not used to waking up to an alarm clock any more so I didn’t know WTF it was.

Ok, then it dawned on me. Then I remembered that I had to get up and shower and take my daughter to her piano lesson. Ah, yes, stinking alarm clocks.

So we went off to piano. I didn’t shop. Woohoo for me, I was so good. Unfortunately, we were supposed to exchange a pair of my daughter’s pants for school, but she forgot to bring them with her, so shopping then would have been good since we were close to the store where we had to return them.

We had to make another trip out later to get some new pants (and we found some at The Bay) but it cost me an extra $20 over what my ex had paid for the original pants. I’ve got a Bay credit card.

Today I did something extraordinary. I removed all the Tim’s paint off my car. When we were leaving the piano lesson, there was a security guard in the car beside me and he had some yellow paint on his car door. He was cleaning it off with a spray bottle of something that someone had named “degreaser”.

When I saw that I started asking him what it was and he let me try it on my car. All those stops at the Tim’s drive-thru have left white and yellow paint (once they painted the posts yellow) on the front of my car.

Well, my daughter and I sat out in the driveway after that with washing pads and Mr. Clean, rubbing all the paint off the front bumper of my car. We got it all off! I’m sure my snookey won’t recognize my car without the added colour. I’m just waiting to see if he actually even notices that it’s gone.

Anyway, lots of running around today. I ended up running into someone in the Tim’s drive-thru line-up. She was a 40-50-ish woman in a big, brand new, expensive GT. And I just bumped her bumper as I was trying to get up to the speaker and she wouldn’t move up out of the way – I thought I had room.

Didn’t this broad take down my license plate number, get my name, go through some whole big rigamarole when there wasn’t a mark on her car. As she was doing her little tirade about how I’d “hit her car” (which was like a touch), I said, “it’s fine, it’s a bumper, it’s plastic, there’ll be no damage”. And yet she still took down all the info.

I also took down her info because I figured it would be just my luck that this idiot would try some big, trumped up court case later, talking about all the damage done to her car. Believe me, it happens.

My honey had an accident with a woman he barely touched and all of a sudden, 6 months later there was a big court case because she was almost crippled with pain (according to her now but nothing was wrong then) and after she’d apparently had a few other accidents too.

So I’ve got this broad’s name and license plate. Too bad I didn’t think of pulling out my phonecam at the time to take a picture of her pristine, undented bumper, but, of course you only think of things you “shoulda” done when you think back on them.

Ok, enough rambling. I’m going out to watch a movie. I won’t tell you what movie it is until tomorrow when I do my “weekly review”… I know, you can hardly wait.

Guess who this is at 18 years old?

Ok, it’s me. And it took a couple of pics after this for me to find out that the guy who was taking the pictures was a perv.

The story was… once upon a time there was this 18-year-old who used to go to Fuller’s restaurant and sit and drink black coffee with all the rest of the regulars. One of the regulars was a 40-ish mailman named Dave.

Well Dave had this “gorgeous” necklace that he needed someone to model so he could take pictures of it. ???

So I agreed that I would model the necklace for him.

I went to Dave’s basement apartment with him and he put the necklace on me and started taking pictures. However, he didn’t feel that the necklace was ‘showcased’ enough with my clothes, and so he suggested that I wear less.

I ended up with a tablecloth draped around me so that he could get a good, clear picture of the necklace. The tablecloth was my limit in getting undressed for this guy and I was too damned stupid to realize that the guy didn’t need pictures of that stupid cheap necklace. I was very gull-a-bull (as Bugs Bunny would say).

And while I talk about this, it just reminded me of another asshole. There was this drunk at a bar in my neighbourhood. His name was Leon.

When I first met Leon I was sitting at the bar, me being a newbie, and just minding my own business, having a beer. Leon (who was drunk and sounded like it at the time) started talking to me but I wasn’t in the mood to talk to a sloshy drunk that day, and so I ignored him totally.

After that night when I would go to that bar I actually ended up talking to Leon – the polite thing to do, since he was always pulling up a chair beside me and yakking it up. Some days I’m more social than others.

Anyway, what I didn’t know was that Leon was telling everybody in the bar that I was his girlfriend. His girlfriend! As if I’d have a drunken loser as a boyfriend.

And the funny thing is that Leon had asked me about going out and I said no, I didn’t go out with guys like him, guys who rented a room, guys who didn’t even have a phone, guys who were always drunk. So what did Leon do? He went out and got himself a phone. He was quite proud to give me his phone number on another occasion.

But the thing is, I didn’t know he was telling people he was my boyfriend. If it wasn’t for a new bartender (who I ended up dating for a while) coming in, I wouldn’t have found out. On a slow, holiday weekend when I went out for a beer, the new bartender ended up asking my name, and when he found out he said, “oh, so you’re Leon’s girlfriend?”

Imagine my surprise when I heard that. And I knew it was me because he talked about different things that were about me.

All this just goes to show you that I really am an idiotonastick. That domain name didn’t just fall out of a hat

I suppose if I’d get off my lazy ass, and finish reading The Taking (by Dean Koontz), I could get on to reading the 2nd installment of his Frankenstein book, City of Night – I read the first one (Prodigal Son) already and have bought the second.

As I mentioned before, The Taking is not thrilling me. However, the plot has thickened a bit since I last told you about how much it seemed like War of the Worlds and included a whole bunch of “weather talk”.

Right now there’s a visit from the murderer father, so I’m at a point where I think I’ll find out what the murdering bastard wants with the daughter, but, you never know, maybe that’ll just drag on into nothing.

Maybe I’ll just go do that now… read my book. Or perhaps while I’m out in the living room, I’ll happen to look at the TV guide only to find out that there is something on on a Thursday night.

I did go for the test run out to where the job interview is tomorrow. It only took me about half an hour on the city streets. I started out on the highway, but it was so bogged down I got off and went through the city. Not tea bag just half an hour.

So here’s who got the boot last night on Rock Star: INXS.

I feel bad just because she was from Toronto. It would be nice to see a fellow Torontonian succeed.

However, I didn’t vote for her. I just didn’t like her voice too much and I found something not quite ‘real’ about her.

There is still one other Torontonian in the contest, so maybe she’ll be lucky; although she’s not a favourite of mine either.

The interview today went really well – I hope I get the job. Either way, they said they’d let me know. I’m hoping I’m not “too” qualified for their liking because I enjoyed the interview and the people and what the job sounds like. So I’ll have to wait until next week to hear back.

Other than that, my day was spent with only 3 Tim’s – unheard of for me.

My honey’s gone downtown after work to deposit a cheque into his downtown bank account. It’s one of those small credit unions which he likes – unlike me who deals with the major banks.

Speaking of banks, I have a locked-in investment coming due at the beginning of August and I called the big bank today to ask how much money they’d made me and to see what they’d have to offer when this one matures.

They offered me an even lower rate than I now have. I told them that one of the other banks offered the same amount of interest just for a savings account, never mind an investment. They informed me that the rates have gotten lower and I think the best he could do for me was 2.75%.

He said that my two-year investment had earned a whopping $800 *woohoo*. This is a fantastic amount considering that they previously had a 5-year investment on the money and made me $1.45 (assholes) by putting it into the wrong type of investment at that time.

Anyway, I’ll be happy with close to $1000, but I would like to make more on the money I can’t touch.

We watched the INXS show last night only to find out that the ‘performing’ show is on tonight at 10:00, so we’ll be watching that.

And, of course, Canadian Idol is on tonight, so we’ve got the big TV night planned.

I applied to some jobs by email today cuz I couldn’t be bothered printing out my resume for faxing again – I’ll do that tomorrow. I am hoping, however, that I do get the other contract. It sounded like a good place to work. Wish me great luck, boys and girls.

Well today I went to Canadian Tire in the morning to get some coupons for oil changes. Wow, you live for the excitement in my life.

I also went to Costco to pick up the 8-kajillion-pack of toilet paper.

Well, while I was there, I saw that they had an air conditioner on for only $359. It was a 12,600 BTU air conditioner and our fixed one is only 12,000 BTU.

This is a pic of our old air conditioner (peek through the candles and the security cam and you can see it).

Well, since I’m not overly thrilled with the coldness coming out of our newly renovated air conditioner, I bought a new one.

I figure it’s gotta be colder, and the air conditioner guy said that he had no idea whether the compressor would last for one year or 3 on the old one.

So here’s the pic of the new air conditioner.

Obviously I don’t have it in the window yet. The neighbour from downstairs helped my snookie bring it up and we kinda promised him the little 5000 BTU air conditioner in return, since he wanted one for his mother’s bedroom.

I let the guy know that our landlords have said that no air conditioners are allowed in the back bedrooms, only in the side bedroom.

I also let him know that he’d better check his fuses since all of our bedrooms are on the same fuse.

So we’ll see I guess whether he takes the air conditioner or not. He may not be able to use it either.

Other than that, I’m just waiting for my ex to show up to help my snookey put in the new air conditioner since he had to work late tonight. I figure he can help cut the glass in the window again to fit the new size.

My new one has a remote… my old one didn’t, even though it’s only (I don’t even think) 5 years old.

I’m gonna go play some Zuma for about 6 minutes and then go out into the cool living room to see if there are any movies on TV.

I was having a hard time figuring out why no one was hiring me.

Then I saw this sign at the church sign generator. No wonder I haven’t found a job yet.

There’s something about kids that makes them not ever listen to a damned thing you tell them. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to save them all the grief that you experienced yourself, something in them says, “WTF does she know?”.

I’m not sure whether it’s just that you’re too old in their eyes to possibly have any clue as to what they’re going through, or whether they just think that you’re stupid or naive, but kids seem to think that they know things that you don’t.

I have a message to my kids, to the 11-year-old and to the 24-year old. The message is this… you’re not pulling any wool over my eyes. I can see what you’re doing and I know by the way you say things whether you’re lying to me. So why bother? Why not just listen? Tell the truth for a change. I like it, you will too.

And feel free to take my advice, especially when you ask for it. You’ll find out the easy way, rather than the hard way, that it was good advice. Wouldn’t that make life simpler? I’m not your enemy, you know.

On a totally different topic, I got a delivery from Staples today. Just when I was ragging on them yesterday, today a Purolator guy showed up with my (now old) monitor. I unpacked it, set it up and tested and it works fantastically. So there you go, my son, your new monitor is here.

After 6 long weeks of waiting. Can you imagine if I hadn’t bought another monitor? Can you imagine me sitting around for a month and a half without being able to use my computer?

I don’t know who the fuck runs that company, but they leave a lot to be desired on the customer service end. I will never again buy a product from Staples, other than, perhaps, staples. I’ll buy something that fell off a truck before I make another purchase from them. Go ahead, call me up now with a customer service survey.

My car did not get fixed today, so I’ve been inside going stir crazy all day other than the time I was out on the balcony. What was I doing on the balcony, you ask? I was trying to strip the old trunk from my honey’s mother’s farm.

I painted on the stripper, waited 15 minutes and then went out with the honking big scraper to scrape off the paint. That was no easy task let me tell you. We are going to have to get a heavy duty sander going on this thing. The paint’s at least 50 years old.

I was prepared to just paint over it but my snookie said, “no, we’ve got to sand it right down”. Ya, you sand it right down. I’m not a labourer for crying out loud. I go to a gym for that kinda exercise.

So my car needs to have both brake lines replaced, and the guy said he hoped to have it done by tomorrow. That means tomorrow night for me since I’ll have no way to go get it until my honey gets home from work (unless the guy’s finished before lunch and my snookie can drive me over on his lunch hour).

And on a totally unrelated note, I decided that my nail polish needed to be polka-dot (is that a hyphenated word?). It’s time for toes to celebrate their differences and make a statement.

My daughter’s toes are also polka dot – but white with blue dots. We’re so alike and yet different.

Oh, I’m betting the russian blonde guy gets the boot tonight. I hope so, anyway. If not him, then the black girl Vonzell? Vondell? – let’s take a stand against these off-key singers.

The maintenance guy, I’ll call him dickface for short, did not take me up onto the roof today at lunch for the pictures I wanted to take.

Supposedly he had to sit at the front desk and wait for some courier to drop something off, because if he wasn’t waiting there, apparently the guy would just take off without delivering.

So even though it was a beautiful, sunny day, I didn’t get to go up and get those aerial shots that I wanted. If I’m lucky, Monday will be good and we can do it then. Provided I fit into dickface’s busy schedule.

I like the guy, he is a nice guy. Dickface is just a nickname.

I bought a new microphone today – cuz it was silver and black – it would match my computer. I ended up borrowing my daughter’s mic the other day because my old mic was in my old webcam. My new webcam doesn’t have the built in mic, except for videos. ????

So while I was testing out the new mic and getting some really bad background noise, it finally occurred to me that my old webcam is still hooked up – and that’s where the sound was coming from – not the new mic. So I don’t even know if the new one works… I’ll have to uninstall the old webcam to find that out.

I’m just sitting here, vegging to some music. I have the iTunes loaded on my computer now – it came with something else I bought, since you know I didn’t buy the iPod. It’s not a bad music program and you can choose an equalizer effect on each song.

They also have the iTunes working for downloads in Canada. So WTF is with Musicmatch where they don’t have it set up for Canada yet? I got the iTunes free and can buy music, and I paid for the super duper version of the Musicmatch and they’re too stupid to figure out how to Canadianize it. Go figure. I would expect that the second largest portion of their consumers would be from Canada.

Don’t think there’s anything on tonight – being Friday – but I may go watch something in an hour or so. I was happy with the Apprentice last night where the guy (whatever his name is) bit the dust. Only because the ugly broad had brought a lot more to the projects than he and he was so egotistical in his belief that he was so superior.

We’re down to two ‘street smarts’ people and one ‘book smart’ one. I hope the street smart who won last night ends up winning the show.

And while we’re at it, I hope that Carrie Underwood (I think that’s her name, I’ve referred to her before) wins the American Idol thing. She’s got the only decent singing voice on the show.

Canadian Idol will start as soon as that one ends. You know we’ll be watching that again too. We’ve got nothing else to watch (even though we get every stinking channel that’s available).

I am Woman, Hear me Whine.

Ok, I’m not posting anything about daddies, the phrase just popped into my head for some unknown reason. And WTF would I know about daddies anyway, having never had one.

Today I went to Young Thailland again for lunch. I gotta say that there’s nothing really spectacular about their lunch buffet, but WTF, you can have all the spring rolls and hot sauce you want.

I had the lunch engagement with “weezy”, the person who used to have my job. She and I sat and bitched the whole lunch hour away. It’s good to have people who can relate to crap you put up with.

I must tell you that I’ve been a little perturbed that the escalator by the coffee place has been put out of service until June, so every time I buy a coffee I have to walk up the stairs. The funny thing is, I drink so damned much coffee, I’ve noticed my legs are getting in better shape.

Two days in a row now I’ve worn high heels. Today’s choice was a mistake though cuz they were boots. It was damned hot today and I had boots on for crying out loud. Yesterday’s choice wasn’t overly wise either since I had some running around to do and they were kinda spiky heels and also the first time I’d worn them.

Tomorrow Emmett and I are going to head over to the St. Lawrence Market at lunch time, just to look around. I’m not going to shop. Although it doesn’t matter if I do a bit of shopping since tomorrow’s pay day.

And you’ll be proud of me. I was only $4.89 into my overdraft this week. My pay cheque is mine! Take that stinking bank.

Today I also set up my daughter’s cell phone to be paid automatically on my credit card each month. Did I tell you that she lost 300 minutes of time because she didn’t top up in time? I was a little pissed at that. So now if I buy a $50 card I can reduce my minute rate to 25¢ instead of the 29¢, so I think I’ll set us both up with that as a start and then go back to $10 a month. I don’t use the damned phone anyway, I just keep it for emergencies.

You’ll be happy to know that I have not yet bought an iPod/Creative/iriver mp3 player. A friend of mine in Greece has recommended the iriver one, cuz he has one, so I want more info from him cuz he’s the big expert who uses it all the time and I know little except the sales pitches.

That’s it. I’ve got The Donald to get ready for. You’ll also be happy to learn that I did install my drawing tablet and tested it again, but the drawing was so shitty that I couldn’t even be bothered putting it up for you *thank you*.