At work we have an ‘intranet’ site where people can put up stuff to sell. So since I got the iPhone, I figured I might as well sell my Keybo since I wasn’t using it.

I put up my ad and picture and said that I’d sell my $300 phone for $50. For that $50 I’d also throw in the leather case, the car phone holder (to hold it on hands free), the charger and the car charger. I figured it was a pretty good deal considering the stupid car charger cost me $30 with tax. I even offered for people to take over my Telus account with its per-second billing if they got in fast enough since my iPhone had a new phone number that was good and I might keep.

Well another billing period for Telus came and I’d forgotten to take my credit card off there, so I figured that before I got billed for another month, the account was off. Then I was just selling the stuff above without the account for $50.

Someone at work contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to let the phone go for $40. I said no and then she contacted me and asked to meet up with me to buy the phone.

She showed up to meet me and gave me $34. She said she had spent too much money that day on something else and she’d make up the difference the next day. However, she told me she was giving me $35 and so when I saw it was $34, I emailed her back and said that it was only $34, and she should bring the other $16 the next day.

She emailed back and said she didn’t realize that I hadn’t agreed to the $40. And she didn’t realize it was a Telus phone and not a Koodo phone, so she’d meet me the next day to return it.

I met up with her the next day, she returned my bag and I said, “not a good reader, eh?” and she just looked at me.

All I could think was ‘WTF was that!’. First off this fucking moron wants to screw me for another $10 like it wasn’t a good enough price, but then saying she didn’t realize it was Telus when it was all over my ad. What an asshole. Maybe I won’t try to sell things with people I work with any more. Perhaps it’s better to keep it with strangers (and reiterate price and provider).

My snookey is now saying he might be interested because he thinks his own phone is too small.

I went to work this morning, but at lunch time I decided I was going to work from home for the rest of the day, so I went home.

I was doing my thing, and since TFB is away this week, I sent something to the acting boss and he didn’t know what it was, so he called me to find out.

In the middle of our phone call, all of a sudden my phone was all echoey. I saw my snookey there with a phone in the hand and I said, “scuze me, I’m on the phone”. However, he was just shutting down his own cell phone – he wasn’t on the phone.

So my phone was cut off in the middle of a work call, nothing in, nothing out, so I emailed and called the acting boss to tell him what had happened and to find out if I had explained what I’d sent him well enough.

Anyway, I had to call Bell. And I had to call them using my cell phone, and you know what that’s like…. “say english”, “please tell us what you’re calling about”, yada yada with the recordings until you finally get put through to someone.

So I talked to a guy, I told him I wanted to be fast because this was using up my minutes on my cell phone. He agreed and yet he then repeated every stinking thing I said during the phone call.

And of course I got sucked into that wire care plan again for ‘only’ $6/month because he said that if the problem was not an ‘outside’ problem, there would be a $57 charge for the service, so I said, “fine, give me the wire care plan” which I can cancel at any time AFTER ONE YEAR.

But you know what? Know what I was noticing? Every time I get my phone service through Bell, I always end up having some problem with my phone, and I always end up calling, and I always end up signing up again for the stupid wire care plan, even though the problem has never been with any of my phones, but somewhere on the outside.

I’m wondering if they do that on purpose… screw up your service in order to get you to sign up for $6/month for a year…. $72 for nothing.

I have this step stool in the bottom of my closet. That’s because all my purses are on the top shelf on two sides, and my snookey’s t-shirts on the top of the other side. We need the stool to reach them. Don’t look at the mess of the closet (yes, there are purses that fell down and I was too lazy to pick up yet).

I was in the closet, getting out the clothes I figured I’d wear to work tomorrow and my foot was underneath the step on the stool. When I moved, the step scraped the top of my foot.

This is what that stool did to the top of my foot.

That stupid scrape wouldn’t stop bleeding. I kept wiping it off with peroxide and sent my snookey out to buy some really large bandaids.

The stool is plastic, for crying out loud. Look at the damage it’s done! And I’m not the very fast healer either, so I’m going to have to wear a bandage on there for quite some time just to be able to wear shoes.

My snookey said he’d fix it tonight. He’s going to put some duct tape on the bottom so I won’t get injured any more.

It’s always something, isn’t it?

More stupid messages from Nigeria:

Dear Ferguson ,

I am Barrister Michael Kwame (SAT)a solicitor at law, personal attorney to Engr.P.B.Ferguson, who used to work with Shell Development Company in Ghana. Here in after shall be referred to as my client. On the 21st of April 2006, my client, his wife and their only daughter were involved in a ghastly car accident along Kalama express road. All occupants of the vehicle unfortunately lost their lives.

Since then I have made several enquiries to your embassy here to locate any of my clients extended relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful. After these several unsuccessful attempts, In my disparate search for urgent assistance, I decided to track his last name over the foreign mission guestbook, to locate any member of his family hence I contacted you.

I have contacted you to assist in repatriating the fund valued at USD$5.5 million left behind by my client before it get confiscated or declared unserviceable by the (SECURITY FINANCE FIRM) here in Accra-Ghana, where this huge amount were deposited. And now the bank has issued me a notice to provide the next of kin or have his account confiscated within the next seventy one official working days. Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for unto 2years now, I seek the consent to present you as the next of kin to the deceased since you have the same last names, so that the proceeds of this account can be paid to you.

Therefore, on receipt of your positive response, we shall then discuss the sharing ratio and modalities for transfer. I have all necessary information and legal documents needed to back you up for the claim. All I require from you is your honest cooperation to enable us see this transaction through. I guarantee that this will be executed under legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. Urgent response to this letter by forwarding your information below will be proudly appreciated.

1. Your full name
2. contact address
3. Direct telephone number
4. Occupation
5. Marital status
6. Age
respond to my private email address:
michaelkwame2@aol.com

Best Regards.

Barrister Michael Kwame,
Tel:+233 241 019 543

And after that, we have one more:

Dear ferguson,

I am Mr. Emmanuel Addo, a solicitor at law,personal attorney to Mr.T.M.Ferguson, a national Of your country and a contractor with Togo Regional Water Scheme in Lome Togo. Here in after shall be referred to as my client.

On the 19th of April 2005, my client,his wife and their only son were involved in a car accident along Nouvissi express Road. All occupants of the vehicle unfortunately lost there lives. Since then I have made several enquiries to your embassy here to locate any of my clients extended relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful.

After these several unsuccessful attempts,I decided to track his last name over the Internet, to locate any member of his family hence I contacted you.I have contacted you to assist in repartrating the fund valued at US$4.9 million left behind by my client before it gets confisicated or declared unserviceable by the bank where this huge amount were deposited.

The said bank has issued me a notice to present the next of kin to my late client or have his account confisicated within the next thirty five officialworking days.
Since I have been unsuccesfull in locating the relatives for over 3years now, I seek your attention to present you as the next of kin to the deceased since you have the same last name, so that the proceeds of this account can be paid to you. Therefore,on receipt of your positive response, we shall then discuss the sharing ratio and modalities for transfer.

I have all necessary information and legal documents needed to back you up for claim. All I require from you is your honest cooperation to enable us see this transaction through.
I guarantee that this will be executed under legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law.Please contact me on my email address emmaaddo1@yahoo.in, for more details,
THANKS AND GOD BLESS
Mr.Emmanuel Addo Esq

Enough already. Obviously these people have nothing better to do with their lives.

I’ve got a stupid meeting to go to tonight, all the way downtown. And it doesn’t start til 7:00 which means I have a couple of hours to kill before I leave.

And the stupid meeting lasts for at least 2 hours – if nobody’s really yakky and stretching out even longer.

But we can’t have these meetings starting at 6:00, oh, no, some people can’t make it there for then. And, of course, we have to have them downtown since that’s a ‘central’ spot for everyone.

Most of us live up in North York. That would be a good location for quite a few of us. But why think of us when we can all meet at a central location?

I’ll be lucky to be home by 10:00. Then I’ll have to wind down to get ready for bed. That means that I won’t get to bed any time before midnight, even if I’m tired.

I’m sitting at my desk today noticing that TFB is a very noisy eater. He was having his lunch, which he takes earlier than I do, and for some reason, always eats at his desk.

He was eating an apple. He eats many apples. Every day he eats an apple.

Problem is: he fucking slurps these apples. So I hear him take a bite and then I hear him slurping up the juices. What the hell kind of apples is he eating that there is so much juice he’s slurping them all the time? Bite, slurp, bite, slurp. I can’t stand it. I walked off to anywhere else today.

When I tell you that I don’t like people eating with their mouths open (or chewing gum), one of the reasons I don’t like it is because you hear them eating. Nothing grosses me out more than (well, maybe something does, but for now…) the sound and look of people’s slurpy, sloppy eating habits.

I guess I have a lot of little idiosyncracies – maybe not so little. This one bothers me to no end, along with tapping/clicking.

And while I’m at it, I was in a meeting this morning and the guy sitting next to me was not only doing the jiggly leg thing, but he kept rotating his thumb. Then he’d switch it up and rotate both thumbs around each other. Then he seemed to be rubbing his leg with his thumb, then, wait…. back to the rotating thumb.

I couldn’t look away from the rotations and jiggling, only because he was in my line of view while I watched the presentation.

Apparently there’s lots of stuff I don’t like happening on my watch. Does this stuff bug anybody else as much or is it just me? I know the jiggly leg drives my snookey nuts.

This is a picture of a microfiber cloth. I usually make my jewellery on top of this cloth – it prevents beads from rolling around. Not only that, but the microfiber cloths are not that easy to find. The one I had before this one was pretty small, not really big enough to lay out a whole bunch of beads, so I scored when I found this at Canadian Tire – something they were selling to wash or wax your car. Not quite as thick as a towel, but something very similar to it.

Anyway, this microfiber cloth now has some burns in it. How would it get burnt you ask?

Have a look at this little baby, right here. This is the lighted magnifier I use when doing close up work. It’s very strong, even a blind old bat like me can see what she’s doing.

Remember science? Remember being a kid with a magnifying glass? Do you happen to remember being outside with that magnifier and holding it under the sun, focused on something and trying to burn it?

Well, I remember doing that. Although I didn’t remember anything about it while my magnifier sits in the computer room, sun streaming through the window, and, somehow hitting that magnifier just right in order to burn my microfiber cloth.

And you know what else I never noticed? The message glued right to my magnifier that says, specifically, “Keep Magnifier Away From Direct Sunlight When Not In Use”. Hmmm. I guess I should have noticed that. And I guess I’d better start paying attention to the position I leave that magnifier in when I leave my desk.

I guess I’m pretty damned lucky we didn’t set the place on fire. Nobody was home. Outside sun, through two panes of glass, into the room…. bzzzzzt, fried. I bet my insurance wouldn’t cover it if there was a fire.

And not with diamonds either.

I don’t think I’ve told you this before (but if I have, so what, just shut up and read it again), but there’s this woman at work who has difficulty with her feminine body parts.

The difficulty is in expressing anything about her feminine body parts. The example I’ll tell you about is that she calls her ‘crotchal area’ her Lucy.

Yes, she has named it. And the only reason she’s named it, is because she finds it difficult, even to say crotch, never mind anything else a little more elaborate, biological or vulgar.

When I first heard this I thought, ‘what are you… 9 years old?’ Although I do find it amusing when I hear terms for men, like when they call it a Johnson, or more general terminology like Pork and Beans. That seems fun to me, coming up with some slang words for the Sausage and Eggs. Giving your crotch a woman’s name because you can’t say crotch, seems ridiculous to me.

And I have to wonder if she’s so hung up on the words, how hung up is she in bed? Or is this supposed to be some indication of her ‘lady-like-edness’?

Problem is that I see this woman a lot. Why just the other day when I said, “fuck”, she tittered and asked me if I could not use that word… to which I said, “screw”.

Whatever the reason, I think the woman is pretentious and socially backwards. And I won’t mention how she’s the first one of the group to start yapping about another as soon as they’ve left.

I’m gonna go now. I’m not gonna think about her sex life and her screaming out to her husband to show Lucy a good time.

I was at my flickr account, looking for a friend of mine who just started her flickr account, and I ended up clicking on a link for the type of camera she was using.

Then a whole bunch of users who were using that type of camera came up, and so I saw some pictures from different people.

Then I saw this thumbnail of an old broad, looked like she was trying to do sexy photos at, what, 65? 68?

I was a little fascinated, since they were all pictures of her in these different sexy? outfits, sexy? poses, and I was wondering what this old broad was trying to accomplish. Back into the dating scene? Look at how good my body is at my age? I didn’t know.

Then after more than a few of these poses, I looked and thought, “hey, that’s not a woman. That’s a guy. And since she didn’t have big boobs I thought that maybe it was one of those guys who’d had the operation to get some boobs.

Anyway, I can’t tell whether it’s a really old woman with too much make-up on and ridiculous poses that perhaps she thinks look “model-ly” or whether it’s some aged transvestite showing how feminine he is.

You tell me. The link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/boobs22/.

I guess I’m getting too old to tell the difference.

Remember back in 2006 (this post) where someone needed help to get their money, and they were going to pay me millions to help them?

I followed up on that email then, just to see what kind of responses I would get. After a couple of responses, I got bored with it and didn’t bother with any more of that nonsense.

However, today, I got a follow up from Susan Walter. She apparently sued them, went to Nigeria, and was kindly greeted by all, and ended up getting her millions. See her email below:

Dearest,

My name is Susan Walter, I live at 8763 Pelican Dr.La Grange IL 60525,United States.

I am one of those that executed a contract in Nigeria years ago and they refused to pay me, I had paid over $70,000USD trying to get my payment all to no avail.

Somebody directed me to travel down to Nigeria with all my contract documents to meet Barrister Mat Oto who is the member of CONTRACT PAYMENT COMMITTEE and LEGAL ADVISER to the COMMITTEE, and I contacted him and he explained everythi ng to me on telephone and advised me to come down to Nigeria which I did.

He said that those contacting us through emails are fake. Then he took me to the paying bank, which is Central Bank of Nigeria, and I am the happiest woman on this earth because I have received my contract funds of $8.2Million USD.

On the process of searching for my file,I saw your information on awaiting pay ment list in the office of Barrister Mat Oto.Though I did not capture all your information lest your fax number.

Am sorry contacting you late as I planed doing it as soon as I arrive back USA.

I have been so busy because we are trying to set up a factory here with the mo ney we received.

So if you care,do contact Barrister Mat Oto with the information below and just explain yourself to him as I know he is honest and humble person.

Alternatively mention my name to him he will attend to you.

Name: Barrister Mat Oto
Email: oto6696@live.com
phone number +234-1-432490123
Address: 123,Palm Avenue Palm Grove,
Lagos Nigeria.

You really have to stop your dealing with those contacting you okay because th ey will dry you up until you have nothing to eat.

The only money I paid was just $8,200 for Federal Inland Revenue Services (F.I.R.S).
So you have to take note of that. You can reach me on this telefax number:1-208-248-3647

Thanks,

Susan Walter

Once again, I guess I should follow up so that I can get those millions. Thanks so much, dearest Susan, for thinking of me.

The other day I was driving somewhere, forget where, and the music that was on the radio was just irritating. I don’t know what station I had it on, but I was thinking about how annoying that song was and after I turned the station, I thought to myself, “I’ll put it on here, maybe they’ll play that Coldplay song”.

Well, the song ended and what came on? Yes, that Coldplay song.

I could think of really psychic things about that, or even some destiny kind of thing. But I won’t. I’ll just think, ‘what a coincidence’.

Yesterday it seemed as if my radiator was overheating, so I called my snookey and asked him if he had put any water in it, as he had mentioned that the other day. He hadn’t.

So he decided that he’d come up to my work and bring me his car and he’d take mine off to the shop. The good news about that was that they didn’t find anything seriously wrong with it and, so, it cost me nothing. I like that. Water is free.

Anyway, when I was driving home with my snookey’s car, and stopped at a red light, and I happened to glance in my rearview at the car behind me. There was this woman there, rummaging for something, maybe in her purse, but I didn’t think anything of it except that she was looking for something.

You know when I thought something of it? When she fucking rear-ended me. I guess while she was rummaging around, her hold on the brake pedal loosened and she came smacking into me… in my snookey’s car… his new car, especially compared to mine.

I got out of the car, went and looked at the rear end. I didn’t see any damage but, then, it wasn’t my car – I didn’t know how it looked before-hand.

So I stood there as traffic was stopping up behind her and asked for her insurance and license, yada, yada. After standing for a bit while cars were whizzing by her, it occurred to me that any of these cars, in their impatience for being stopped up, could hit me if they weren’t too careful.

Then I noticed that she didn’t even have her hazard lights on – so anybody behind her could end up rear-ended her or a car behind her.

I told her to put her hazard lights on. And I watched her carefully as she rummaged for license and insurance. She had a big, red-veined nose, she kept apologizing and telling me how ‘funny’ things were happening with that car. Funny things as in her wipers were going, and, of course, ‘how did her car just bump into me’.

I wanted to say, “well, you fucking idiot, you probably knocked into the wiper switch on impact, because they weren’t going as you were rummaging through your purse earlier”, but I didn’t. I just took down all the information my snookey might need if there were damage to his car.

Then I got back into his car and proceeded to drive home. The worst thing about that? She was behind me almost all the way. AND she was still rummaging through her purse whenever we were stopped. PLUS as we’d be stopped at a light, she’d be inching up on me when I just felt like, “stay away from me! You’re too close!”

I’ve gotta say that I hate drivers. I hate preoccupied drivers, especially those on cell phones, and I’m happy that the new law gets enacted in the Fall that prevents people from talking on their cell phones while behind the wheel.

The only problem with this new law, I think, is that all those people who’ve got their phones constantly glued to the sides of their heads are probably the ones who’ll continue to do it, because what are the chances they’ll get caught?

So how come as soon as I have something to give away, nobody says a damned thing. That happened the last time I was giving something away. And I have more stuff I could give away, but why should I bother… nobody seems to want it or even comment about it, never mind linking to it.

When you read the tips for improving your blog, give-aways seem to be right up there. I feel like as soon as I put a give-away on, everybody disappears into the woodwork.

I was almost tempted to take it down already except that I have it linked on the big list of giveaways.

See if I ever do this again.

I went to my doctor’s office the other day in order to get something for my “thrush” (you know, the YI thing in my throat). I got there at 1:35 and apparently they closed at 1:30. But the woman told me they don’t ‘take’ walk-ins on Saturday anyway. I said, “I just want a prescription”, and she said, “we don’t take walk-ins on Saturday, and we’re closed”. “There’s no one here”.

So I headed off to the drug store and asked them if they could recommend something and he did – a mouthwash called Betadine, but he didn’t have it there so he advised me to go to Shoppers Drug Mart and I did.

They didn’t have any there and the pharmacist there said she had never heard of any OTC medication for thrush. However, she advised me to go to the walk-in clinic up the street. I didn’t even know about the clinic; found out where it was and went there.

Well, my health card expired back at my birthday (that’s December for those of you who don’t know). They’ve seen me all the time at the place I usually go, but at the walk-in clinic, if you don’t have an up-to-date health card, they charge you $40.

What could I do? I had to give her $40. She said if I returned within a few days with a temporary card, they’d give me my money back.

So today, on my vacation day, I was standing in line at the Ministry of Health, waiting to get in at 8:30 to get my health card renewed. I was second in line because I didn’t get out of the car quickly enough to beat out the philippino women who were going to go to Tim’s until they saw that a line-up was starting.

As we got in I revelled in the fact that I was going to be called so soon. But then a staff member told us all that their computer systems were down – all across the city – and that we could wait if we wanted, but they wouldn’t know how long it would take. I heard another staff member talking about how one time it happened and they were down all day.

They told us we could get a “C” number which would enable us to get in with no waiting if we came back. I took a “C” number.

My snookey and I went off and did some stuff, mostly running around stuff, and at 1:30 we decided to get a Tim’s at the Tim’s right beside the Ministry of Health.

I went in with my “C” number but some guy beat me in and got his “C” number first, so I waited for one person and was served next. The woman told me the system had just gone back up about 5 minutes before that. Lucky me.

I got my temporary health card (real one with crappy picture will be mailed to me) and headed off to the walk-in clinic to get my $40 back.

I told her I was there to get my money back and I provided her with the temporary card. Then she asked me for the receipt they’d given me. I said, “I don’t know if I have the receipt, but you have it in the receipt book”. She said, “I can’t give you your money back without the receipt”.

I said, “yes you can, the receipt is mine, it’s not for you, it’s proof that I gave you money; I don’t need it to get the money back because you also have a receipt that you can write ‘paid back’ on”.

She said, “I’m not going to argue with you, you can’t get your money back unless you have the receipt”. I looked for the receipt and luckily it was at the bottom of my purse.

I said, “here’s the receipt, but you could just as easily write on your receipt that the patient lost her receipt but you paid back the money”. She again said, “I’m not going to argue with you”, whereupon I said, “I’m not arguing… just give me my money”.

She did, and I left. The whole point of writing about this? It bothers me how inflexible people are. I did what they asked and brought back the temporary card. It’s my fucking money, give it back to me you stinking bitch and amend your procedure when you have to.

Enough said.

A couple of months ago I switched back to Bell for my telephone. Mostly because Rogers’ phone service was ok, but trying to hear the conversation on the phone seemed static-y.

Every month I talk to Bell; every time I get my bill. Every month I ask them why there are charges for my internet when I’VE NEVER USED THEIR INTERNET SERVICE!!!!

While their representative was pleasant enough, after she’d explained my charges in the same way to me over 3 times, and I explained that she should look at it this way: In October there was a fee, and one in November. I paid those. Then in December I paid that. So there is absolutely no reason for my phone bill to be the amount it is in January.

When I asked why my phone bill in December was $104, she said that was because my two-month promotion was over, so then they charged me the regular charges… $50. So what is the other $50 for? It’s for my regular charges.

She asked if I’d like her to explain it again. I said that explaining it over and over again didn’t make the bill right. She asked if I’d like her manager to explain it. Oh sure, let’s have another person say the same things to me over and over again.

Needless to say, I’m just going to pay my $90!!!!! phone bill and let them start at $0 all over again, hopefully with no internet charges on the bill next month.

I can’t stand big business.

For Christmas, I bought my daughter a laptop since she’s been asking for one. I agreed to get it and split the cost of it with her dad (my ex). So far he’s given me $200 of the $1200 total cost. That didn’t worry me any, I’ve already paid for it.

However, I bought myself a new SD card for my camera… 16 gigs. I went to put it into my good camera (the Lumix that my honey gave me for my birthday a couple of years ago) and my camera was gone – case and all, tripod and all.

Since my daughter has taken it before, I assume she’s stolen it. And because she’s stolen so much from me, I can’t come to any other conclusion, no matter how hard she denies it.

So in return, I took back her laptop. I thought that maybe I’d return it, get the money back and buy myself another good camera. While she says she didn’t take my camera, where else could it be? She always lies about stealing my things.

And I had to wonder how she kept getting into my room now that we’ve installed locks on the computer room and bedroom doors. I decided to monitor things.

Today when we had to go buy a new monitor (one of mine died), there was a recording of what went on in the computer room. You’ll see the time on the video is only about 7 minutes after my snookey locked the door – that would be enough time for us to put our coat and boots on and get out to the car and drive off.

Those knives we kept missing… now we know what they were used for, you can see the knife in her hand. And when she saw the camera on, you can see that she unplugged it. I’ve now installed a camera in my bedroom as well as the one in the computer room.

When I got home and saw the video, I asked her about why she unplugged my webcam. She said she didn’t – she wasn’t in the computer room, y’see. Once I told her I had video of it, and saw what the knives have been used for, there was a different story – she was looking for her laptop.

If there is any more breaking and entering, or missing stuff, this girl is out the door. I’ve had enough. I gave her back her laptop mostly cuz I don’t give a shit. As far as I’m concerned she can take her new laptop to her new group home if this ever happens again. I’ve been more than giving about this shit going on in my own home.

I’m sick of living like a prisoner with locks on my doors and cameras in the rooms because my own daughter steals from me (and breaks and enters).

She does not realize that I could have her arrested for her criminal behaviour – and I just might if it ever happens again, I’m so fucking sick of it.

Anyway, I’m still supposed to believe her that she didn’t take my camera. I’m waiting to get it back – she has a $1200 laptop which she said was the best gift she ever got. I’m without my good camera, which was the best gift I ever got.

UPDATE:

Someone has removed the video from YouTube (not me) and disabled my account. So for those who didn’t see the video, here it is below.

shaynecomputerroom

Why is every stinking beer store out of my beer? I have been to at least 5 different beer stores over the past couple of weeks and not one of them has any of my beer.

It’s made by Brick Breweries and it’s happened before. Who knows, maybe it was around Christmas time the last time. They don’t have enough bottles so I guess they use their bottles up on their more popular beers, I dunno.

Tonight I was prepared to pick up 3 cases of the stuff if this beer store had it but they didn’t. Instead I picked up two cases of Sleeman Clear (supposed to be low carb). I would have got Labatt Sterling, even though it has an aftertaste, but it only came in 24-packs and I wanted to carry 12-packs, so I went with the Sleeman.

This beer is more expensive than mine, so let’s hope it tastes half decent.

Ok, why am I rambling about beer. Probably because I won’t be able to get any of mine now til into the new year. Assholes.

I’m driving home from work tonight and I get behind this white van that advertises Advanced Fire Protection (ARP). And their slogan says, “Our protection is your best prevention”. From behind that van, I can’t tell what it is they’re selling, but obviously something to prevent fires.

So maybe they’re good at what they do or what they sell is good. I don’t know. If you want to find out you can phone them at 1-800-781-FIRE. There’s a free advertisement.

However, what I do know about them is that their driver drove like a fucking asshole. This guy was weaving in and out of lanes – too fast, no signal lights. I saw one car almost rear-end him as he pulled into the other lane right at a stoplight.

And at the stoplights? This guy was searching for something in the back of his van. Luckily at that point I was in the other lane, but traffic was stopped up at that light while this guy searched for whatever, with cars honking behind him to move.

At one point he got ahead of me again and was doing the same search in his van at the lights. I could see the van bouncing around as he was walking around in the back of it. Luckily for me though it wasn’t as long a time as the previous.

What irks me is the speeding and darting in and out of lanes. What maddens me is no signal lights. I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it. Isn’t it the law that you’re supposed to signal a turn or a lane change? And yet each night I’m in a line-up of cars waiting to turn left, and it’s an absolute miracle if in one of those two lanes of turning cars, someone’s got a signal light on.

Anyway, if you happen to see a white van with the above slogan on it, license plate 133 9EN, steer clear of it. Whatever protection they’re providing doesn’t apply to the streets. And their prevention is not going to be from getting hit by a reckless driver.

Aside from the fact that my daughter stayed out Friday night and Saturday night til 11:30 p.m., she was also supposed to make sure that her room was clean on Friday since she had lots of time to do that.

However, that did not happen. And the newest punishment for that (since nothing else seemed to work) was that she would be grounded from the computer. The way I had to do that was to remove her monitor – otherwise, I found when I just removed the power cord, she went into the computer room, got another one and rehooked it up.

Previously I had just taken the monitor for a day, but since this was combined with the lack of responsibility in letting us know she’d be out all night and staying out the next day and night without a word, this grounding was to be until Friday. And BTW, when is it that a 15-year-old tells you that she’s staying out all night instead of asking if she can do that?

I forgot to mention that I managed to break my toe by tripping on shit all over her bedroom floor – that did nothing to make me feel good about the way her room looked.

Anyway, when I got home from my course tonight, there was no sign of the grounded girl.

When she finally showed up at 7:00 she went straight into her room. After about 10 minutes I got up and went into her room to find her laying in her bed in the dark, crying. I asked her what was wrong but she said she didn’t want to talk about it and told me to leave her alone. I persisted, but was told the same thing, and then I thought that it was just another ploy so that she wouldn’t have to clean up her room.

Keep in mind that all yesterday she ‘couldn’t’ clean her room because she ‘wasn’t feeling well’ and slept most of the day. Now today she was crying about something, in essence gone to bed at 7:00, and again couldn’t clean up her room.

I started a little freakfest of my own, letting her know that I was sick of the mess, I wanted it cleaned up and she could cry later, cleaning would take her mind off it. I am so sick of hearing excuse after excuse for not taking responsibility for anything.

I don’t ask a lot from this girl. The only thing she’s required to do around the house is to clean her room. She doesn’t even help with the rest of the housework, the dishes, helping cook meals. She does absolutely nothing.

So then she snuck off to the balcony with the phone and called her friend. A little while later she was sneaking her backpack out to the front door. When I went out to ask what was going on she said she was going out – she needed time to herself because she hates it here.

Why does she hate it here? Because I don’t seem to care about her. I had told her to cry later. After she told me to leave her alone, that she didn’t want to talk about what was wrong, I’m the one who doesn’t care about her.

All I can think of is, who cares about me?

• Who steals money from my wallet and stole all the money I made from the jewellery shows?
• Who only goes out with me to show me the things she wants me to buy her at the store?
• Who drags me in to EB Games to show me the games she wants and how the price has now gone down.
• Who has caused me to put a lock on my bedroom door and my computer room door in the hope that my stuff is still where I left it?
• Who tells me that she can’t stand living here even though I took her from some slum situation where nobody even bought groceries?
• Who doesn’t even have the courtesy to call home to say she’s going to be out late or all night so that nobody is calling the police in case something happened to her?
• Who won’t even do the minimal amount of work required to keep her room clean, even though it’s the only request her mother ever makes?

I’ll tell you who doesn’t feel cared about – and that’s me. If it wasn’t for my snookey giving me some love and respect, I’d run away from home.

I’ve been looking for this lipstick colour that I had bought before and I went to Shoppers to find it last night. I bought two different colours of that “stay on your lips forever and ever and never wash off or rub off even after you’re dead” type and took them home.

I checked the colours against the almost empty one I have and they were the wrong colours, so I put them back in the bag to take back and remembered to take the bag in my car this morning.

So tonight I stopped back over to Shoppers. I picked out two other colours and thought that we might just do a simple swap, but, no-o-o-o-o, we had to refund the first purchase and repurchase the second ones.

What did I find out about the purchase? Well, apparently yesterday was senior’s day at Shoppers Drug Mart. So the two lipsticks I bought had a $2.50 discount on them. Squeeze me? May I ask why I’m getting a senior’s discount?

While I realize I’m the whopping old age of 51, do I LOOK LIKE I’m fucking 65? 65? Come on now, people, 65 does not look like me. Holy crap.

Then to add insult to injury, they were charging me an additional $2.50 on top of each lipstick. So yesterday when I bought 3 things (two lipsticks and one other thing) it cost me $21. Today I was only buying two things and it cost me $27.

I can’t really afford to be buying lipstick now can I? I’ve got to save up for my walker.

I was gonna write last night but when I came to my site it said it was down for maintenance. That’s a good thing I guess, it certainly seems fast to me tonight, but I couldn’t help but think, “hey, do you think you could tell me in advance that my site was going to be down until 10:00?”

Anyway, who knows what I was gonna write about. I’m too old to remember that far back. But tonight was strange for me.

I was sitting in the computer room making a necklace to wear tomorrow cuz I damned well felt like making myself a nice necklace, when I said something to my daughter who was just over in her room.

I said something, she didn’t answer. So I went to her room, she wasn’t there. I thought, ‘oh, I guess she’s in the living room’, although as I approached the living room, it was awfully silent so I wondered what in God’s name my daughter would be doing in a room with no TV on, or games on, or music on.

She wasn’t there. I went to the bathroom, not there. I went back to her room. I went to my room. I went out on the balcony. I started looking in closets while calling her name, as if she’s 4 years old or something and is playing hide and seek.

No sign of her. I texted her phone, saying “where have u gone?” but I didn’t hear back. I thought maybe she’d gone up to the store for something since her key was here and the door was unlocked.

I finally started getting worried because it started to get darker outside and I hadn’t heard from her, so I called one of her friends. Just as I was saying, ‘do you know where my daughter is’, I heard the front door and she had arrived.

Turns out she got pissed off at one of her now ‘ex’ friends. She got mad and went for a bike ride (without telling a soul). Apparently her friend was, in essence, calling her a liar. Here’s the story:

My daughter had been going out with this kid, let’s call him Mrandon. She had started dating him because she felt sorry for him, not quite knowing how to say she was only interested in friendship.

Well, Mrandon, told my daughter’s friend that he was dumping my daughter. And the reason? Because she tried to have sex with him and he didn’t want to. This said just a few days after my daughter told me that she thought she might be gay. With that revelation, I won’t bother saying anything more about how she doesn’t want sex with a boy.

Anyway, her ‘friend’ didn’t believe her when she told her what a bullshit story he was telling, and I have to wonder what kind of friends she has. This is not the first time one of her so-called friends has listened to some crap from someone else and been on their side, not on their ‘friend’s’ side.

I think my daughter needs to find some new friends. And I also get pissed off at guys that age, with their bullshit stories to make themselves look good.

I remember a guy in school who went the opposite way with me by telling everybody that he’d fucked me. I had been friendly to the guy because he was a friend of my friend, and then the next thing you know, he’s telling people that he’d slept with me. This was the ugliest guy in history, and I would not have slept with him if he’d offered me $14 million, and now I had a school of people believing what he said.

I can never get over the bullshit that happens as you’re growing up. I won’t bother to go into the fact that I know there are still people like that as adults.

Let’s just hope that the next time my daughter is mad, maybe she’ll just have a yak with her mother or something instead of worrying her mother to death with sudden, inconspicuous disappearances.

I was going to write about how we were going out to a new restaurant for dinner Sunday night when, as we were pulling into the driveway, some asshole rear-ended us. And I think he had to have been right up our ass if he could hit us that hard while we were in the middle of a turn.

My snookey’s car just had a scratch on the bumper – but he probably needs the whole thing replaced, that’ll probably be about a $3000 repair job. The other guy’s van had a headlight smashed in, the grill was broken and smashed, he’d cracked the radiator and it all leaked out onto the ground.

So instead of going for our nice dinner at a new restaurant, we had to wait around for an hour or so for the cops. I called the cops. You know why? Because I asked this guy for his licence and insurance and he didn’t give it to us. Just looked at us and explained that his English was not too good. He was Russian, of course, in our neighbourhood and he ended up calling a friend to come over.

The friend arrived and said something to my snookey to the effect of…. ‘well, your car’s hardly even touched, so do you want to just let it go – his car is a mess’. Right. Because his van is a mess, we should live with the scratch on our car. My snookey said no.

Anyway, that was all there was to that accident other than the fact that I’ve had a pain in my leg ever since. We went for our dinner. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll write about that.

Did I happen to mention how I stayed at work til 5:00 last night? Not because I was so engrossed in something, or there was some urgent matter that needed taking care of. No, it was because when I went to leave, my car wouldn’t start.

So I sat there for an hour waiting for CAA to show up and give me a tow and a ride home. Instead of taking it to the mechanic I like, I thought it would be good to go to Canadian Tire because they might be able to fix it same day and I wouldn’t have to get a ride to work today.

They did. It was my starter that conked out. The guy phoned me to tell me that it was the starter and that it was going to cost $100. I thought that wasn’t too bad. I’m so used to paying $1000 for whatever’s wrong, I thought, “hey, $100, I can live with that”.

Then he said the labour would also be $100. Then he said the non-refundable test they had to do was $60 and of course there were taxes on top of that. So my measly starter set me back $300. So even though yesterday was payday, I’m already in the hole – and there are bills to pay.

I said to the Canadian Tire guy, “why isn’t it $60? Why is it always $300 or $700 or $900. Why can’t it ever be just $60!?”, to which he responded, “I know”. Ya, that does lots for me. Thanks for the empathy but you know what you can do with empathy.

Anyway, my car is starting magnificently. I could only afford the one-year warranty so let’s hope this is not another one of those things that conks out 13 months after you buy it.

I don’t need any other expenses at the moment thank you, I’m going to try to pay the bills and put myself further in the hole. And, hey, wait… isn’t rent due in 9 days? Oh, that’s ok. I get paid again in 14 days. Math, not one of my strong suits.

Now I think I’ll just have a tea and chill for a bit. Then I’ll have copious amounts of beer and contemplate how I wasted my life away. That’s enough to keep me going on a Friday night.

There’s an ad on TV (or the radio, I can’t remember, maybe both) that is advertising toilet paper that doesn’t leave little bits of toilet paper stuck to your ass.

Have you heard this one?

I don’t know about you, but I have no idea whether or not I have little pieces of toilet paper stuck to my ass. How would I know?

Would I be checking my ass after going to the washroom to see if there were bits of toilet paper stuck to it? And if I were doing that, how would I be doing it? Do most places have some ass level mirror in order for you to try to check your ass?

Or would it be that at the start of making out (doggy-style), my snookey would turn me over quickly because he was grossed out at looking at little pieces of toilet paper stuck to my ass. “Honey, you’re making me not want to have sex…. you’ve got little pieces of toilet paper stuck to your ass”.

At this very moment, I might be sitting here with toilet paper stuck to my ass and not know it.

Luckily for me, there’s a brand of toilet paper I can now buy that won’t leave those unsightly pieces of paper clinging there.

Who came up with this idea? And how? Were they getting lots of complaints from people about this happening? I still want to know how they knew they had this affliction. Maybe when they were making porn films? Uhoh, retake. And get those pieces of toilet paper off your ass, they’re just distracting. Pizza guy, one more time.

Marketing just amazes me.

Not far from where I live, an explosion took place around 4:00 a.m. this morning.

I heard it. It woke me up. I looked over at my snookey thinking that maybe he was having one of those fighting dreams again and knocked the headboard. That was not the case.

Apparently a propane facility exploded. See picture here.

My aunt called me this morning to tell us which areas had to evacuate – our area being part of the evacuation area. So I called my daughter who was staying at a friend’s place even closer to the explosion, and told her to get out and get that family out of there.

In the meantime, my aunt called to say that our area was now safe and then my daughter arrived home safely – the parent of her friend evacuating to her mother’s house.

Now I know what woke us at 4:00 a.m. And the explosion was very close to where my ex used to live, and where my daughter now goes to school. Luckily, schools out. She’s hoping that they have to rebuild the school.

Download audio file (cloud-cult-chemicals-collide.mp3)

As I was headed off to work this morning, all of a sudden my ‘service engine soon’ light started flashing. I was driving, it was flashing. This made me nervous, so I called my snookey and told him what was going on, and he offered to drive up to my work, leave his car and take my car to the mechanic.

The acceleration wasn’t normal. It was a little scary driving, thinking that something might just go kaboom while in the midst of my drive.

When I arrived at work and parked, I noticed that there was smoke coming from under the hood. I was thinking, ‘that’s not a good thing’. Then I thought that maybe it was the heat of the engine hitting cold, air conditioned windows that was making it look like smoke, so I got out and inspected it. Nope, that was smoke alright.

When my snookey arrived we ended up calling CAA and had them tow the car off to the mechanic who fixed my air conditioning. I left too. I decided not to leave my man with no car while he sat around waiting for a fix.

The mechanic just called and apparently the problem is a fuel injector. One needs to be replaced. That’s only going to cost me about $400. And you know why it’s going to cost me $400? Because I just paid off my credit card. I didn’t want that $3000 hanging over my head, so I paid it off and now I have to put $400 on it. Good thing I paid it off, cuz I certainly have no cash left, and pay day is tomorrow, but it’s spoken for.

It’s always something isn’t it? No sooner do I get my computer fixes paid for, then there’s some other expense, and around the same kind of money that I had to pay for my computer. We’re almost at $1000 just to get stuff fixed. The gods must think I have money.

Yao, the computer guy, and I suppose I should be pronouncing that *YOW!@*, tells me that my hard drives seem fine. Of course my graphics card is fine. He says he thinks I need a new motherboard. He also said that my computer won’t be ready today.

So I’m here once again at my snookey’s computer blogging more often than I was blogging with my own damned computer sitting there. I have to take advantage of my snookey’s computer when he’s not here.

So if I need a new motherboard, I may as well just be building a new computer, cuz I’ll need new RAM too. I’ll have to have a PCI express graphics card since they’re no longer making AGP, and I’m assuming a replacement will be ok because he told me to just “try” this lower end one to see if I was happy with it.

The funny thing about it is that I had asked him how much to build me a new computer the other day and he said he’d get me a price. My hard drives are still reusable, or at least one is, and my CPU should be usable. What the guy doesn’t understand is… I HAVE NO MONEY!

I can just wait a week for my new laptop, however, that doesn’t get me my stuff that’s on my computer now, does it? Most importantly, it doesn’t get my my emails where I have all my receipts and licence keys for software I’ve bought, password list, etc. And my new laptop doesn’t have nearly the space as my computer does, and not all the programs. I am so fucked.

Not only that but I met with the woman I’m doing the show with on Saturday and she said I needed to bring my own tables. Huh? You’ve been doing this for how many years and you don’t have other tables? Now I’ve gotta go and buy some foldy tables – or card tables – or something.

And while I’m ranting, let me tell you about how I bought a box of Lune Moons last week. They were on sale and I thought, ‘geez, I haven’t had one of those in years’. I put them away and my snookey mentioned them in front of my daughter, but that was ok because she said she didn’t like Lune Moons *hurrah, we’d get to eat them!*.

So tonight when I was looking for my orange bra for tomorrow, and not finding it, I had a look in my daughter’s room. Not only did I find my orange bra – without the straps on it – but I also found an empty box of Lune Moons hidden behind her bed. I found one of my black, and a white bra in there, and I found one of my skirts which she’s taken time and time again and I’ve had to wash time and time again even though I’ve only worn the thing twice in my entire life. I found my tank tops in there.

I don’t know why I even live here. My clothes are not mine. My food is not mine. Most of the time I get to eat a spoon of peanut butter, when I look for something it’s not there, and I can’t tell you how much money we spend in groceries and never get to eat the fucking food.

I’m not a happy camper right now. I guess it’s time to go make some jewellery, WTF else can I do, nothing on the computer, that’s for sure. Have I said I hate life? Yes I have. I suppose I should narrow that down to my life. Other people certainly seem to have the good life.

First off, thank you very much everyone for your condolences. It was very sweet of you.

Now, I’ve got to tell you about what happened at the viewing tonight, because this is really freaky.

We got there early, my snookey, my daughter and I. We were supposed to get there before it started at 7:00 in order to spend some private time with ‘the deceased’.

So we’re sitting around waiting for the Director to come and take us upstairs when the secretary comes over to us and says that there’s a man who would like to speak to me. I say, “who?” and she tells me his name and I say, “I don’t know who that is… he wants to speak to me?” and she says yes.

I go out to the hallway and there’s this old guy there. Old as in probably 80 like my mother was, so I figure, ‘ok, this is probably somebody who knew her a long time ago and is paying his respects’.

So the guy talks to me a bit and I ask him his name and he tells me as if I should know but I don’t so I say, “were you a friend of my mother’s?”. And he says… get this…. this is really strange… he says, “did your mother ever tell you who your father was?”.

Ok, now that sounds to me like a very strange and leading question. This mystery man is going to impart some secrets to me, so I say no, and he says, “I’m your father”.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. My father. As far as I knew, my father has been dead since I was between 6-9 and my mother separated from him long before I can remember. I know my father’s name and it wasn’t this guy’s name.

So I express how weird this is and he explains to me that he went out with my mother when she was separated from my father and that explains that part, because then I was thinking, ‘was my mother lying to me about Joe Blow being my father?’

So he wants to go up to see my mother with me and I let him. He talks to me a bit about how she was a teacher and he was a teacher too. He asks me if I remember a recital I gave when I was little, down around Eaton’s – he was there.

He tells me that he tried to look up my mother over the years but couldn’t find her, although he told me he found me in the phone book and he recites my address and knows a bit about me, which is kinda spooky.

Also, the guy is wearing a blue suit but he’s got some rubby looking running shoes on with them. As well, he’s a very hard, Marlboro-man looking kinda guy who looks like he’s had a broken nose, and he doesn’t look one bit like me.

I’m remembering back to the time in my 20s when I finally saw a picture of my father, there were only two pictures because supposedly my mother had poked all the eyes out of his pictures when they split up. In one picture he was smiling and I looked at that picture and said, ‘there’s me!’. That father looked exactly like me and I had always wondered about that since I didn’t look too much like my mother. This new father…. doesn’t look a bit like me.

So anyway, before he goes he tells me again that he was a teacher just like my mother and in those days divorces weren’t too easy to get when you were Catholic. He ended up marrying someone else and has 4 daughters of his own and lives in Orangeville.

He told me that he didn’t want to meet with the family, some of whom had arrived by now and were wondering who the old man was that I was talking to. He wanted to be discreet and he knew that this wasn’t exactly the time or place for such a thing.

Then he gave me a gift. He told me he had a gift for me and he gave me an envelope. I said, “why?” and he said, “well I’ve never given you a gift before” and so I put it in my purse. He said he’d phone me again in about a month so that we could catch up on things.

Now, I would like to find out what this guy’s got to say because I certainly wonder why he thinks he’s my father. But then I started wondering about whether this could be some scam. Is there some kind of funeral scam where you find out people have died and think that the only daughter will inherit all the money and so you try to ingratiate yourself into the family in order to pull some kind of con game?

I don’t know. And I don’t know what to make of this. I asked the people at the funeral home if they knew of any ‘funereal scams’ and they hadn’t heard of any. I’m thinking I may go to the TD Bank tomorrow and ask them whether that bank draft with a bunch of money on it is real and who it’s from.

That was my day. Freaky fucking day. Tomorrow’s the funeral.

Not only did I not get that other job I had applied for, but I didn’t even get a stinking interview.

I got a call from the HR woman who had questioned me for 15 minutes and she said, “they’ve decided to go with another candidate”. That’s nice. Why is it that I didn’t even get an interview when that job was more suited to my background than the job I’m in?

I just said, “ok, thanks”, and left it at that, but I find it awfully nervy that they can just decide that I don’t even get an interview.

I want to email her just to say, ‘can you please explain to me why you didn’t find me suitable for that job, especially since it consists of what I’ve been doing for most of the last 25 years’. I know I probably won’t email her, but I’d like to. I just don’t want it to seem like I’m some big trouble maker, causing the HR person to come up with some standard answer.

Anyway, that’s my news. Today I’m off bead shopping. I’m taking a couple of people with me since we’re going to a wholesaler. Everyone should be entitled to a deal, so I’m sharing (since I’m the one with the permit).

It gets harder and harder to stay at work when things are slow. All I can think about is going home. And today I said to my newly appointed boss, “mind if I leave at 3:00″? To which he said, “yes, something might be happening”.

And that just pissed me off. I kept thinking, ‘hey, I’m here half an hour early every fucking morning, which means I’ve already put in two hours more than I’m paid for, and I can’t take one of those hours off’!?!.

But, of course, I can’t self destruct. I’ll need to be careful that I don’t give them a reason to fire me, even though I’d like to be home. That would screw me up for unemployment now, wouldn’t it? I’ve got to check out some job sites.

In other news, I got a call from my aunt tonight saying, why don’t you go see your mother, she’s got pneumonia. The last thing I felt like doing was leaving the house. I just wanted to sit at home and relax, rearrange the computer room to fit the jewellery room in it, but, no. I told my aunt I’d go see my mother in the morning but that, of course, wasn’t good enough for my aunt. She said, “she may not be around in the morning”.

So, being appropriately guilt-tripped, I figured I’d better put my clothes back on and drag over to the home to see the mother with pneumonia.

She was out of it. I don’t know WTF is going on with her but she never stopped talking the whole time. And I don’t mean talking as in a conversation, but talking as in a constant mumbling, or constant saying of ‘oh God, oh God, oh God’ over and over again but in a mumbling kind of voice.

It’s like something has come over her where she can’t stop having to be saying something. What is the cause of that? Her eyes were closed most of the time. I tried to have some conversations with her, thinking that maybe she was half asleep, but even those conversations just resulted in mumbling.

We got home around 8:00 after picking up Mr. Sub, which I only ate half of and figured I’d save the other half for lunch tomorrow.

I’ve got the computer desk half cleared off too. My snookey has the bed pulled apart in here, all ready to take down for my aunt to pick up in the morning to put in her storage area. I’m going to set up the wood dining room table in here to use as my jewellery table for now.

That means that we’ve got to rearrange the computer desks around the room and fit the table in between the two. That will give me lots of space, which I need. I was going nuts with all the clutter in here; I’d finally had it last night when I said, ‘we’re doing this, I’m sick of it’.

So that’s my rant for tonight. Surely to God there’s something on TV to dull my brain to a dull roar. Life sucks and then you die. Just leaving on a happy note.

I don’t even get why people do the sp@mming. Today I found 3 sp@ms in my moderation and blasted them, then deleted them.

Why do they do this? Nobody’s ever gonna see them. Are they so fucking stupid that they just keep trying and trying thinking that one day they’ll get their shit up here?

And if nobody’s gonna read them, WTF good is all their effort to put them up? And they’re always attached to posts that are a year or two old. Like that wouldn’t look too funny that all of a sudden there’s a comment on something I wrote two years ago? My writing is fairly prolific. I can see why people would be poring through every post.

It’s just ridiculous. And stupid, really stupid.

Just a quick update: last night my snookey and I played the Kill Zone game on Playstation 2. We played for about 10 minutes.

That was after my daughter had to show us how to get the game started. I was pushing every button on that stupid thing, or so I thought, and couldn’t start the game.

I also couldn’t figure out how to quit the game.

Just so you know, those little joystick thingies? They are hard as hell to manoeuver with. I was trying to shoot some guy and I’d press the joystick to aim at him and it would move over to the right of the guy. I’d move it to the left… oops, too far left. To the right… oops, too far right. Where is the control on this thing?

So the way I feel now is that I don’t know if I’ll ever even try that stupid thing again. I wasn’t liking it.

Ok, maybe I’ll try that Nascar game. How much preciseness could you possibly need in a joystick in order to be able to drive. Ok, that’s it, I’ll give the game a try.

Apparently during the Christmas season, everyone is giving away free cell phones. Two days ago I got my second cell phone telemarketing call. I was a little snarky that day. It went like this:

Telemarketer: Good evening, is this Mrs. Ferguson?
Me: Yes.
Tele: Well tonight I’m calling for Fido and we have a special promotion, we are going to send you a free Samsung? cellphone, model #. May I know your first name so that I can address you properly?
Me: You can call me Mrs. Ferguson. That would be addressing me properly.
Tele: Oh well I need to know your first name so that we can put that on the package to send it to you.
Me: I’m sure you can address a package with “Mrs. Ferguson” and as long as you have the correct address on it, the phone will come to me.
Tele: Well I need to know your first name to put on the package.
Me: You can put “Mrs. Ferguson” on the package, you don’t need to put my first name on the package.
Tele: We are going to send you a Samsung, model, yada yada.
Me: I don’t need a phone.
Tele: Thank you. Click.

What’s the obsession with my first name? And since when is not calling me Mrs. Ferguson a less appropriate way to address a complete stranger?

If it hadn’t have been for that constant nattering about what my first name is, I might actually have signed up for a new phone. Although I doubt it. Who else is going to give me the great phone I have right now for free? And with per second billing?

Give me a free Blackberry with no 3-year plan and I will seriously think about switching.

I know I’m going to fail that stupid course. I know that because today the guy might as well have been speaking Russian to me for all I was grasping.

Case bla, bla, bla. Dim bla, bla, bla. Private Public application.workbook.worksheet.range bla, bla bla.

See? Isn’t that easy?

While I know what he means by the object model having properties, methods, events, for the life of me as soon as I go to do something, my brain freezes up and I think, If this, then that, else, end if. Never mind I’m just trying to copy some cells for crying out loud.

Msgbox “you are a fucking idiot” – I’ll put that into a private event that starts as soon as I get near the code so I can have the little popup remind me what an idiot I am.

I hate failing. I never fail. I left my binder at the course today cuz it’s so fucking heavy but I should have brought it home to go through all the stuff.

That’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow night when my precious Earl, 30 Rock and The Office are on… trying to memorize bla, bla, bla. Cuz if I can’t learn it, I hope I can at least memorize it.

Woe is me.

Yes, I’m in the middle of creating a jewellery site to sell my jewellery. I’m gonna be rich, I tell ya…. rich!

Right.

I guess I just figured that I spend so much money on this stuff and I’m running out of room to keep it. And apparently this hobby has become my life. I’m a bit of a beadaholic. Everywhere I go (where they sell beads), I’m spending $100 on more.

Does it matter that I’ve already got 3 tackles boxes full of beads? No. They’re not the right ones. What if I need something different? I must have a good supply.

And I’ve started getting really picky. I made a bracelet for a woman at work. She told me how she had this stretch bracelet that broke and how she wanted me to fix it for her. Instead of waiting for her to bring it in, I just made her a bracelet. This was after I’d made a necklace for her since she was talking about how she loved black and white and needed a black and white necklace.

So the woman told me (after I gave her the bracelet) that she was going to bring in her old jewellery so I could have the beads. It was a thank you for making her the jewellery.

Today she brought in a cookie tin full of her old necklaces. She then proceeded to tell me that, “oh, this one is too short, I’d like it longer”. And, “this one is too long. You can make two single strands out of this – one for me and one for you, and you can make me some earrings that match”.

As she went through the repairs she wanted done to her jewellery, I asked her if she’d just brought in her jewellery for me to fix it. “Oh no”, she said, “just those ones, you can have all the rest, I don’t like it”.

Needless to say that all the jewellery was shit. It was some plastic stuff that you might give to kids, although if you wanted your kids to grow up with any taste at all, you wouldn’t even give it to them.

So I fixed one of her necklaces. I added some chain to the one that was too short. I’m going to give the whole tin of crap back to her when I go back to work next Monday.

Which brings me to another good thing – I’m off work the rest of the week on course… a course I wanted to take (but that will also help me at work) *woohoo*. Let’s hope I can learn something. I certainly don’t need any lessons in what crap jewellery looks like.

So how come nobody talks to me any more? I see about one comment every 5 or 6 days and I think it’s just to let me know that somebody’s alive.

I do my faithful readership to others, I comment, even just to say that I’m alive, and yet nobody comes to visit me, nobody says anything, and for sure, nobody new ever says boo.

I’m beginning to wonder why I even bother with this. Christ knows it’s been since 1998 I’ve been doing it. Is that why I’ve got nothing to write about? And most of the people I link to… they don’t write every day. I go day after day to see what’s new and there’s nothing new. I’m linked to someone who hasn’t posted in months, and after apologizing for not posting in so long, cuz it had been months before that when he’d posted, then he didn’t post again.

It would be nice if I had a few links to post – something interesting or free, but I don’t. If my life wasn’t as boring as dirt, I might have something amusing to write about, but it is and so I don’t.

So why do I persist? I might as well be talking to myself, I answer more often.

I would have thought that at least there’d be some sympathy for my snookey losing his job, but nada. There, there, now, now. Fuck it. I’m going to watch Ramsay.

My aunt did a nice thing for my daughter – made up a job for her. My mother has a ‘sitter’ in the home – a woman who comes in every afternoon and does stuff with my mother… stupid stuff like painting her nails, taking her downstairs in the home, doing her hair. Just stuff to keep her occupied, cuz otherwise, I think my mother would spend every waking moment, sleeping.

My aunt asked my daughter if she would be interested in sitting two mornings a week for two hours each day. She thought it would be a way for my daughter to make some money and have her first job. My mother didn’t really need another sitter, but my aunt was being helpful.

So my daughter was supposed to work Tuesday and Thursday mornings. My aunt started holding her money for her since she was spending it all on crap, and my aunt was holding it so that my daughter would have some money to take with her when she goes on vacation to Newfoundland end-August.

Well, on Thursday, my daughter never showed up for work. She didn’t call, she didn’t answer the phone, she didn’t do anything. When I called her to ask about it she said that she wasn’t feeling well that day so she stayed in her room all day. Right.

I told her she should do the responsible thing and call my aunt to let her know what happened since my aunt didn’t know what was going on and didn’t know if she’d quit, or whether something had happened to her that day – that’s why my aunt called me… because she was worried that something had happened to my daughter since she didn’t show.

After that conversation my aunt told me that she still hadn’t heard from my daughter. So I called her again to tell her to give my aunt a call and let her know what was going on. She said that she would.

Early this morning, on my vacation day, I went over to visit my mother. She slept through most of the visit (wasted my money buying her a coffee) and I stayed until 10:10, expecting my daughter to show up for her job at 10:00. She didn’t show. And she didn’t answer the phone when I called.

My aunt once again called me and I called my daughter and told her she’d better call my aunt to at least tell her that she’d quit – apparently she told her dad that she didn’t want to do it anymore. I can understand that. Get a job for a couple of weeks, start no-showing and up and quit with no notice of any kind.

Although my daughter once again said she’d call my aunt, when I called my aunt a little while later, there had been no phone call.

I don’t know WTF is going on. I don’t think it takes a helluva lot of effort to call a family member and let them know that you don’t want to do what you’re being paid to do. And where are the ethics? That’s the part that gets me. Too fucking lazy to get out of bed and go to work for two hours twice a week?

I really hate to think where this is headed. I don’t know where the sense of responsibility is. But this girl better wise up soon, cuz the first time she pulls this in the workforce, she’ll find herself without a job. And rightly so.

So much for my aunt and her favour. It must be true that no good deed goes unpunished.

My site is really slow tonight – don’t know if it’s just my computer or everywhere, but that means I’m not staying.

I’m going to go watch Canadian Idol voting and ignore the net. There’s life off the internet too you know. Well, in a way. Kinda.

Today on my vacation, I decided to go down to Sassy Bead Co. (in the Yonge/Eglinton area) and see just what kind of glue I needed to make necklaces with knots. I had my little excursion and then I headed back home.

I was driving on Eglinton Avenue going up the hill towards Bathurst St. when all of a sudden my car wouldn’t accelerate. Going up a hill. I had taken the Allen Expressway (highway for those of you not in the neighbourhood) downtown and was headed there again when this happened.

You’ll remember that this happened to me once before and I took my car in (had it towed in) to Glenford Transmission where they rebuilt my entire transmission for $1340 CASH.

Well, boys and girls, that was on April 2nd when I got my transmission fixed the last time. You know that a 3-month warranty would expire then on July 2nd. What’s the date today? We’re just a few days short of 3 months on that new transmission. Was that the plan with the transmission… pay $1340 for something that lasts 3 months and then you’re out of luck?

Well, to continue the story, I was going to turn onto Bathurst Street rather than try to get on the highway and then realized that there was a little hill up if I turned, and I didn’t think I could make it up that hill. So I kept going on Eglinton and after a minute or so of driving, it seemed that I was accelerating again.

Great, I thought. I’d get onto the Allen and take the highway right over to the mechanic’s place. Nuh uh. Again I was unable to accelerate, so as traffic was stopped at another set of lights, I tried to pull over into the parking lane, but that wasn’t working well since I couldn’t accelerate, so I ended up with cars behind me honking like mad, as if I was holding them up on purpose. Never mind that you could hear my enging revving like crazy as I tried to get over there, they continued to honk.

I finally parked over to the side, right by a side street, so that was good… nothing could park in front of me.

I called CAA and requested a tow at 10-to-12:00. They told me someone would be there within 38 minutes and would call me 5 minutes before he got there. So I walked up the street to Timothy’s (there were no Tim’s around) and bought myself a mild coffee for $1.95. I dunno why their stinking coffee is $1.95, it certainly wasn’t as good as Tim’s.

I went back and sat on a bench right by my car and waited. I got a call after about 20 minutes saying the guy was 5 minutes away. I waited about 15 minutes and called CAA back to say, “the guy called me 20 minutes ago to say he’d be here in 5, where is he?”. They told me he was right there at Eglinton East.

Earlier, when I’d called them, I told them I was at Eglinton West. She’d said by Don Mills? and I’d said by North York… in between Bathurst and the Allen. So why was this guy at Eglinton East when I’d told them Eglinton West? The woman told me that she’d call the tow truck guy and let him know.

I waited another 20 minutes thinking that traffic was pretty busy. Then I called back the number on my cell phone and said, “where are they?” to which the woman told me, “we don’t service that area, we do Eglinton East, not Eglinton West, you’ll have to call CAA again.

Hey, thanks for letting me know that 20 minutes ago when I called. So I called CAA again and told them the situation. They put me on hold a couple more times (using up my cellphone minutes that I have on pay-and-talk, not a plan) and then told me that someone would be there in 8-10 minutes.

So once again I headed to Timothy’s, hoping to get a coffee and some kind of cookie or something as lunch. The phone rang, and as I pulled it out of the little holder that I was wearing on my pants, it came whipping out and went flying onto the street. Oh, fucking fantastic, now I’d have to buy a new cellphone. It was ok.

It was the CAA guy saying that he was just about there. I said that I was just getting a coffee at Timothy’s and I was about a block away, would be there soon too.

I got my $1.95 coffee and a Rice Krispie square (good, nutritious lunch) and as I left, I saw the CAA tow truck go by, so I ran the two blocks to my car when the guy phoned me again and I said, “yes, I’m right here behind you now”.

He towed my car to Glenford Transmission. The guy I always deal with, Paul, wasn’t there, but another guy checked out my car, smelled the oil dipstick and told me to leave the keys.

At the same time the tow truck guy, Trevor, told me to look at my two front tires. He told me that they’re going to blow any time… see that metal poking through? Oh fucking fabulous. Those are my $700 winter tires that I haven’t taken off yet.

So now it’s going to cost me at least $60 to have my tires changed (which I should have done already). Hopefully my all-season-radials are in good shape. And now I’m fully aware that I’m going to need at least two new snow tires for the winter.

Anyway, while the one transmission guy was taking down my driver’s licence number, Paul showed up. It was not a good thing to hear the first guy telling Paul that the car was “toast”. And I mean that literally. He told him it was “toast”!

And I’m a little concerned that he didn’t give us a receipt or anything the first time – because it was CASH, that he’s also going to tell me that there was NO warranty.

I called them just a while ago to see what the verdict was and found out that Paul had left and they said that nobody would be looking at the car at least until next week. I said, “what about tomorrow”. They’re closed. And they’re closed on Sunday. And Monday’s a stat holiday.

Luckily for me that Trevor drove me home (that was really nice of him to do, he didn’t have to wait around and do that – I suppose except for the fact that he had to get his towing money from me… my CAA “regular” plan only pays for 10 km. of towing). So the tow only cost me $13.50 – but I only had $12 cash on me and he didn’t take Interac. So Trevor said he’d put in the $1.50 himself. Thank you so much, the only nice thing that happened to me today.

As soon as I got home I called CAA and told them to put the Lumina back onto my insurance. Once that was done I headed over to Tim’s to get a good coffee. The Lumina is in bad need of some brakes. Or a brake line. Or something with the brakes. They weren’t squealing but they weren’t doing a great job of stopping either.

So there ya go. That was my day. I have no money, yet it’s going to cost me I dunno how much to have a drivable car, whether it’s for brakes or for transmission or for tires.

I’m not enjoying my vacation so far.

I’ve already told you about TFB at work. I haven’t told you about the loudmouth.

Yes, boys and girls, we have one of those people who never learned the difference between the outside voice and the inside voice. Every place is outside to her and she’ll yell out her conversation for the entire schoolyard to hear.

I suppose if we weren’t all sitting in half-cubicles, her voice might get a bit muffled, but with the seating the way it is there (which looks like one of those telemarketing firms with everyone jammed together), sound seems to carry across the floor.

However, with that said, no one else on the floor seems to need the world to hear about their cousin’s ingrown toenail, or the electrolysis they had done before they switched to laser, or even the ever popular ‘irritable bowel syndrome’.

I’ve been told that she’s a very nice woman. I just find her a crass and classless boob. Maybe she’s nice but I will never know, because I don’t want anything to do with her. I’ve gone so far as to ask TFB for a place far, far and away when our offices move to another floor. Even with that, I’d probably still hear her. Thank God I’m in meetings half the time.

What is it with these people who think that everyone will be enthralled with what they have to say? I need attention… listen to me. And for those of you in the back seats, I’ll speak loudly so you can hang on my every word.

Every day, in between the boring crap I’m doing, my secondary thought for the day is: shut the fuck up.

Holy fuck, we had a mini tornado here tonight.

This is just a quick shot off my balcony when the rain subsided a bit. See the branches that were coming off the trees?

That was across the street from me. That’s nothing. One of the branches off another tree came whipping all the way over to my place and right around my car. I don’t even know if it landed on my car, I haven’t checked it yet for damages.

This all happened around 4:30-ish to 5:00. At 5:00 was when my power went out… for FOUR hours. And my daughter had her friend staying over this weekend. They arrived and we had nothing to do, couldn’t even cook dinner. What an exciting evening.

So we went to the wing place up the street, who, strangely enough, had power. We bought some bags of ice and brought the cooler up from the garage to keep things frozen if the need arose (we remembered that big power out a few years ago where we had to barbecue up all the food in the freezer so that we’d have something to eat that we could refreeze once the power came back on).

Luckily for us I’d bought that two-pack of flashlight/radio/siren/flasher wind-up thingies at Costco a few months ago. That gave us some light and something to listen to while we sat around on the balcony waiting for power. At least it was only until 9:00.

Now I’m listening to music and revelling in my electricity. I think I’m gonna build that hydro bill way up there while revelling.

It seems to be over. There’s a beautiful coolish breeze coming into the apartment. I hope this is not one of those big windy breezes that comes before another storm and that it’s just a good cool breeze, cuz it’s saving us from using the air conditioners.

C’est la vie. Life in Toronto.

Last night I made some chicken and rice is really nice. However, the rice was hard as rock. I cooked that rice half an hour longer than it said to cook it and it was still hard as rock. I put it into the microwave to cook it some more, and it was still hard as rock. So I went out and bought a rice cooker.

After throwing out the remains of last night’s rice, tonight I started all over with the handy dandy rice cooker. Guess what? The rice was hard as rock. I ended up adding two more cups of water to my one cup of rice, and after cooking that sucker for an hour, it was a little less hard, but still hard rice, not like real rice.

So WTF is going on? Why can everybody in the world make rice and I can only make Minute Rice? This was the new fibre-filled rice with a mix of wild and brown and something else rice, but why is that stuff not cooking? Is there some secret to rice that nobody’s telling me? I’m following all the instructions. Tonight I have some more rice to throw out.

Now I’ve got to go buy me a bag of brown rice and try that in the cooker. I’m determined to have some rice that’s cooked. And on this diet we can’t eat just white rice, it’s gotta be lots of fibre. Somebody give me the rice secret. I’ll pay you $240 for that secret. Yep, that’s $240 for the secret to cooking rice. Ok, I’m lying. I’ll think about $240 for the secret and I’ll think about how nice it would be if I could afford to give you $240 for a rice secret.

Anyway, I’ll just wait for that. In the meantime I was deciding what to wear tomorrow and I came up with something to go with one of my new necklaces. So I was trying on everything and didn’t the fucking necklace come apart with beads going everywhere. And that was the necklace that was my favourite, you know, the one with the round ring-y things (oh, you mean beads? No, you moron, the ring-y things).

So here I was all ready to wear my new beautiful necklace and then, poof, it was toast. So I remade it. I remade it and I put two closing crimps on each side to prevent it from coming apart. After I was all finished I realized that I had missed a set of beads to match the other side. And you know what? Too bad. I’m wearing it. I’m wearing it anyway. After making that stupid necklace twice, I’m not in any mood to take it apart and make it yet again.

So tomorrow I’ll be the woman at work with an asymetrical necklace on that doesn’t look asymetrical, just like something’s missing. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Except perhaps gaze at the lovely matching earrings.

I told you how we had set ourselves up with Primus instead of Bell and then it turned out they couldn’t put voicemail on our second line so we cancelled and switched to Rogers.

Well we haven’t had our lines working right ever since we switched. First the voicemail wasn’t working – on any line – and the distinctive rings weren’t ever working properly. Then they told me that because all the provisioning was wrong, this would be started all over again to get it set up properly.

That was supposed to be done by tonight. It isn’t. I called again and was told that the ticket was still open. Nobody can leave us a message, and when my honey’s phone rings the fax picks it up.

Sometimes I wonder why I ever switch anything. Why didn’t I just stick with Bell in the first place? The only problem we had with them was that the message indicator would be on when we had no messages and I’d call and get continual voicemails telling me how to access my voicemail, like I didn’t know how.

Service is shit these days, but they certainly are apologetic about it. And they always thank me profusely for my patience. Little do they know that I am the patient-free type of person.

They finally got all my phone lines working at Primus and I found that out because there was a message on my phone when I got home.

However, after calling my phone from my cell phone, I found out that they had three rings on the line that was supposed to have two, and two rings on the line that was supposed to have three.

I called Primus to remedy this situation. While I was talking to the guy I asked him how we set up the voicemail on each line since it didn’t have it in the instruction book they sent. That’s when I learned that we could only have voicemail on the main line, not on my honey’s line.

So guess what? I told him to cancel the stinking service. They told me that I’d be able to have the same features that I had with Bell, and now the guy was telling me I couldn’t have one of the features. I told him just to transfer me back to Bell because I wouldn’t be using their service.

Oh no, he couldn’t do that. I’d have to call Bell myself and arrange to have all my numbers taken back over there. Well wasn’t that sweet. Fucking assholes.

So I called Bell. Bell’s services were closed. They apparently only work office hours and so I couldn’t arrange to have anything transferred. So what did I do? I called Rogers. Rogers were open. I told them to set up my phone with the three phone numbers and voicemail on two of the lines and give me call display and I’d be a happy camper.

Fine. It’s done. As of Tuesday evening (yes, they’re doing evening installations even) I’ll have my phone switched off of Primus and onto Rogers. Of course there will be no free long distance like we thought we were signing up for with Primus, but we will be getting long distance for 5-cents a minute.

What a fucking mess. I should have known that things were going to go bad when Primus first set up three accounts for me instead of one account with three lines. It just went downhill from there.

Primus, get your fucking act together. You just lost a customer.

Rogers, you’ve got another service to add to my bundle. I guess I’ll call them about that later to see what kinda big bundly savings I’m up for.

P.S. I’ll also be sending back the high speed DSL, Primus. Return to sender.

Holy craparoni, Batman, I just finished getting dinner done and lunch stuff ready for tomorrow. We spent the earlier part of the evening after work just getting more groceries. This is about $100 every 2 or 3 days. I cannot believe the time and the cost of the South Beach Diet.

So we just ate some steak and broccoli and salad and half a tomato?!? ← what’s with the broiled tomatoes, I dunno, and I’m stuffed. We have yet to have our ricotta ice cream (don’t ask), but maybe when we have room to breathe, we’ll glom that down.

I’ve gotta go get my make-up off and get ready to see the voting results on American Idol. I can’t even remember who was the worst last night, so I have no prediction.

The big interview tomorrow… I’ve got me duds all ready to wear, even though the rest of the company will be doing the casual Friday tomorrow because Friday’s a holiday. Who can wear casual for a job interview? I suppose I could but I have no idea what the guy’s like so I’d better just play it safe and dress like I’m going to a job interview.

I was on the computer yesterday, I was updating my resume site and, holy fuck, was the connection slow. It was maddening but it was lucky I did because today I got a call from HR where I’m working asking me if I wanted to come see her about this upcoming job she has.

So I went to see her, I was interested in the job, and she set up an interview for me for tomorrow morning. You know how shitty I am at interviews, lets just hope I can do something with this one – especially considering that this will be another interview at the same place; people will start doubting my abilities if I can’t even do a stupid job interview. Anyway, it was lucky I finally got around to updating that website so that I had an up-to-date resume to give.

I’ve already decided what I’m going to wear tomorrow. Nothing special, just something like I usually wear, jacket, shirt, pants, earrings, necklace, (underwear – but they don’t know that) and socks and shoes. I’ll look like my everyday self… hopefully that’s ok.

Tonight I’ve got to go get some more stinking tax stuff done. I can’t believe how much I’ve had to pay in taxes and this year’s tax stuff is not even started.

I didn’t get my car from the transmission shop the other day. He had called me before it was done and said that it needed a new something, I forget what that something was called, and that something was going to cost $40 more. That really pissed me off because I figure when somebody says your rebuilt transmission is going to cost $1300, that means all repairs and/or parts are included in that $1300. I told him to go ahead with it.

When we got there he talked about how the transmission lines needed replacing. We didn’t need to do it right then since he knew we were “short on cash” but they needed to be done soon. Well you’re damned right we’re “short on cash” when we had to cough up $1340 just a few minutes before.

Anyway, I’m waiting for a phone call and then it occurred to me that I think they close at 5:00. They do on the weekends, I’m not sure about during the week. If that’s the case I’ll be driving my old Lumina all week which will justify that $7.99 I had to spend to put a coffee holder in there. Funny thing is that before I had given the car to my ex, I had bought all kinds of custom fitting coffee cup holders for the front AND the back, but now that I’ve got the car back, they’re nowhere to be found.

So I’m off to do some meaningful things now. Meaningful only involves money. No it doesn’t, I’m just being cynical. I like the government and they must l-o-o-o-o-v-e me.

Got a call from the mechanic today saying that they couldn’t get that coil spring in today after all, it would be tomorrow. So I didn’t pick up my car tonight, with any luck that will happen tomorrow night.

I’m just waiting to drive my new “powerful” car – powerful as in the new starter with the new battery working together and vroom vroom vroom ← much underused phrase, motor on home.

Other than that, I’m just sitting around being a big cow. I gotta lose some weight let me tell ya. I need clothes that fit.

I had signed up for this online Denise Austin “lose weight and exercise, you pig” club, and getting the free two-week trial to test it out, but what I found was that I was hardly ever checking my email where I’d get the reminder to go to the “stop eating you fat hippo” link.

I’d check my email at work in the mornings cuz I didn’t get a chance the night before, and of course you don’t want to spend a whole bunch of time with your emails at work since you’re ‘sneak-reading’ them, so in my 2-week free trial, I may have visited my “get off your fricking lard ass, ya lazy slob” club about 3 times.

I figured I’d cancel since the thing costs about $3 per week, and not much point to it if you’re not using it, so I tried calling yesterday (cuz I thought that was 2 weeks) but they’re only available Monday to Friday after 9:00 a.m.

I finally remembered to call before I left work today (since I tried around 8:00 but I hadn’t listened well when the recording said ‘call after 9:00, moron’ and talked to a woman who told me that she was going to deduct x amount of dollars because it’s all prorated.

I asked her what she was talking about and she said that I had to cancel within the 2 week free trial period. I said, “yesterday was 2 weeks” and she said, “no, you signed up for this on FRIDAY, two weeks ago date” where I said, “but it asked me what date I wanted to start and I said the Monday”, and she said, “yes, but you signed up on the Friday, so it was two weeks on the 5th and it’s prorated so we’ll charge you….”

By that point I was very hostile, especially since after I told her to cancel it she kept trying to sell me on it, “well, I know quite a bit about it, perhaps I can help you, why do you want to cancel”. I told her that I wasn’t using it so I just wanted to cancel it.

When she told me it was going to cost me money now after I hadn’t really used it in the two weeks I felt really mad, and I ended up clenching “just cancel it”, in effect that I wasn’t going to bother arguing about $3 (or whatever the fuck it was). Make sure you’re not open on the weekends and that you can’t leave a message to cancel, and that you ask for a date that people want it to start and start it 3 days before that so they can’t cancel without losing some money you fucking money grubbing asswipes.

So that was my day in a nutshell. Boredom, boredom, anger, boredom. Now I’m headed out to see if there’s anything on TV. I could be exercising but I don’t like to exercise when I’m mad. Or happy. Or bored. Or drunk. Or tired. Or excited. Or smoking a cigarette. Oh ho, who snuck that one in there. I guess I can use all that ‘not smoking a cigarette’ time to exercise. What the hell is wrong with you? What’s on TV on Mondays?

I missed writing yesterday, probably because I was so busy editing pictures. I took my camera to work to get some pictures of my cohort’s last day and the little get-together, but when I uploaded them to my computer, they all looked like crap.

I don’t know what it is about this new camera, but I’m not mastering it. Some days the pictures look great, other times they look blurry. I have no idea why since I’m using the auto feature all the time, and I’m using the autofocus, and even the flash, but yesterday’s pictures only have a couple of salvageable pictures there.

Imagine that… somebody’s got this impressive looking camera strung around their neck. They take picture after picture and you expect to see an array of great shots. Then they email you to say, “hey, I’m really a shit photographer, not sending you any of those”. That’ll be me.

Tonight we’ll be going to that housewarming party I mentioned one day. We’re bringing a bottle of Southern Comfort as the gift and I keep wanting to bring a pack of those jalapeno nuts. I think we should, even if it’s only so that he’ll put them out for us to eat.

I guess we’ve got to bring our own booze, but quite frankly, ever since we quit smoking (oooh, five days ago), I’m afraid it’ll just put us to sleep. Last night we managed to stay up til the wee hour of midnight, but that’s hardly late, and this little party (60 people, little) doesn’t even start til 8:00.

My honey will be driving so drinking’s not an issue for me but I did intend to take some pictures while I was there, and since I can’t master the camera I’m wondering if I should leave it at home. I can just see him waiting for my pictures of his new home and they turn out all blurry and crappy. Maybe I should just go and make some small talk with a whole bunch of people I don’t know, have a few beers and go home.

My beer does not come in six-packs. So do I have to bring a twelve? Maybe I shouldn’t drink anything at all, that would solve that dilemma.

I’m going to wear my new t-shirt that has a logo from one of my other websites. I wanted to have this t-shirt in time for the party. Well they finally arrived at 7:00 last night, a t-shirt for me and one for my honey. Let me tell ya, those t-shirts look like shit. The colour on mine is all ooky in the one spot – green on turquoise didn’t come out well.

I paid an arm and a leg for these t-shirts at Zazzle, where I made them. I uploaded high res graphics, and I paid an extra $29 for the 2-3 business day shipping. Not only that but when they got to the door, because they were from the States, we had to pay a $15 customs fee. So altogether these two t-shirts cost over $80 (and are shit quality). My honey’s fits him but mine is tight, even though I bought large. Normally I wear a size medium t-shirt but I bought large, in case of shrinkage, and it’s tight. Zazzle, I’m not impressed and I will not do any more business. You think they could have told us about the additional customs fee?

We’ll be wearing the shirts anyway. After all they’re high-end shirts once you’ve paid $80 for them.

So I’m just gonna finish my tea and then we’ll get the laundry ready and, hopefully, the laundromat won’t be packed by the time we get there. We’ll stop at Tim’s and get a breakfast sammich and a coffee, then after that my honey wants to go look at cars. An exciting day for one and all.

But I like to smoke. Why shouldn’t I smoke if I feel like it? Who cares if it adds 10 years onto my life, who the fuck wants to live longer when you can hardly move and you’re brain dead like my mother. That’s all I’ll say about not smoking today. Don’t need one.

I realized that tomorrow is the last day for the woman I’m replacing to be around. It seems to me that she hasn’t covered a lot of things, so I’m feeling a little nervous about being by myself on Monday.

She keeps talking about how busy I’ll be and how I won’t have time for this, or for that, and yet I’ve been sitting there with her for almost a week and she didn’t seem overly busy to me.

Does that mean there’s all this hidden work to surprise me with once she’s gone? Crap that I won’t have a clue about?

I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it. My feeling is that I’m going to be bored to tears and reading through the notes I’ve made all week. Then nosing through all her stuff to see if I can make any sense of it, or see if there’s anything I can do.

I’m looking forward to Thursday night TV. I have very little to look forward to at the moment, maybe next week I’ll feel differently about that. I don’t even want to get laid to take my mind off things, mostly I just want to sleep. Let’s hope that Earl and The Office will keep me awake since last night I was conking out about 9:30 (it seems to get earlier each night).

I would have been snoring away on the couch at 9:30 if my honey hadn’t come home from his visit with his son at that point with the front door latch waking me up (by scaring the shit out of me).

I don’t know about you but smoking was a laxative for me… morning tea and cigarette, then *wham* – ok, maybe it wasn’t a wham, but it was something that I could most times regularly expect to do in a day. Now with no smoking, after four days I’m feeling like I would damned well enjoy a visit to the bathroom. For some reason, now that I don’t have a smoke, my body has decided that it better hold onto as much fecal matter as possible. Is there some sense to that?

I know, too much information. But what the hell is that about?

I’ll be quick. I’m driving along today on my way to Henry’s because I got a bit of money for Christmas and I decided that I was going to buy an extra battery pack for my new camera.

So I stop at the lights beside some Jewish guy in the car beside me. I’m watching him for a second or two and I realize that the guy is flossing his teeth. I say to my honey, “look at this – the guy’s flossing!”. And then I think, “hmmm, is that productive? He’s stopped at a light and he’s flossing. Is he saving time?”.

But then as the light changes and this guy pulls away, I drive beside him and glance over now and then to find that he’s still flossing his teeth! While he’s driving! I guess that explained why he was in that lane, then this lane, then that lane.

When you see license AYHH 272 you’ll have to take care not to get too close. You wouldn’t want to distract the guy from cleaning his teeth at the wheel.

Has anyone seen this new show, “Identity”? I’ve seen it a couple of times now; it’s hosted by the big guy from Penn & Teller – Penn.

It’s a show where they give you a bunch of different job titles or something other, like “Donated a kidney”, and you’re supposed to guess by looking at them, who does what.

Now they don’t have the people try to trick you. They don’t have someone dressed up in a doctor’s outfit if they’re not a doctor. It’s just the opposite, if the person’s a nurse, they’ll have them dressed in a nurse’s uniform.

The only hard thing about the show is that you don’t know what a ‘kidney donator’ would look like and so that’s the only difficult thing about it.

This reminded me of those other shows that have come on TV, like Deal or No Deal, and Show Me the Money, and there’s another one I can’t remember the name of.

So why is it that game shows are getting easier? Whatever happened to challenging yourself with games like Jeopardy? Games that actually take a little bit of working the brain?

It seems to me that while people are getting more and more educated (e.g., Masters degree and working at The Keg as a waitress), these game shows are getting easier and easier. (And, yes, I took this picture with my new Lumix camera.)

Every time I’m out of a job, I end up having to spend a shitload of money on something.

Yesterday I pretty much spent my day at the mechanic’s place. I took my beautiful car in the morning for the e-test, and it passed with flying colours. What the hell are ‘flying’ colours, anyway?

Since my honey was off work yesterday, going off to Hamilton to look at a possible car purchase, when he got back in the afternoon, I decided we’d better take the Lumina in for its e-test. I thought I’d be smart and purchase the new muffler before the e-test (so that it would pass). That was $110 at the mechanic’s place (as opposed to Canadian Tire who wanted $150).

Then we did the e-test. Then the car failed the e-test. Ok, so $37 for the e-test and $110 for the muffler. Then he had one of his guys have a look at it, and apparently some oxygen cable(?) was off where it was supposed to be. So he hooked it up. Well, boys and girls, that was another $40, then another $17 for a repeat e-test. All of that just so my honey will have a car to drive to work until he buys another car.

Then today I had to go get the license stickers for the Taurus, the Lumina, and the Windstar – at $74 a pop, there’s another $210. And I’m not going to mention the fact that insurance for these 3 vehicles is $300 a month.

So, WTF do I care about all these expenses? I do not have any more pay cheques coming in. I have no idea when Unemployment is supposed to start – I haven’t heard a word from them. And I don’t think I’m getting any money for a birthday/Christmas present.

I guess it’s a good thing that I pay for websites by the year or I’d be having a little freakfest about paying for that too.

I did go to the job interview yesterday morning. It went well, but, as usual, I probably didn’t get the job. I talked to one of my former coworkers who’s supposed to give me a good reference, but let’s find out if they even call for a reference, then that’ll be a good sign. I would love to work 15 minutes away, though. C’mon, bring me birthday luck. It’s tomorrow for those of you who weren’t paying attention. 20th. 20th. 20th. Is it on the 20th? Why yes it is, kind of you to remember.

Alright, time to get off. I did buy a timer today for the Christmas lights. So they turn on at 5:00 (cuz it’s pretty damned dark here then) and turn off at 6:00 a.m. (don’t want people to think I’m not at home celebrating that Christmas spirit). I’ll go check in the morning to see if they turned off.

*subliminal message through the internet waves* Camera. Lumix Camera. I love that Camera. She would love a Lumix 10.1 megapixel, 12x zoom Camera. *over and out*

I’m writing this more for documentation purposes than for anything else.

My daughter had a friend named Dawn Assels who lives two doors down from her. They’ve had their falling outs and ins but their friendship is finally over.

And the most recent development is that this fat Dawn girl has been accusing my daughter of “hacking” her website (if you can call it that, it’s really some type of chatboard on a profile page and apparently all these 13-year-olds, including my daughter, has one).

So not only is my daughter accused of hacking (which I can see by her computer knowledge level, she is not capable of) but then she’s being threatened by this girl and all her friends. They even posted her address on the internet.

And the mouths on these children? Here’s a sample below. “Kristen” is my daughter’s name on there, and “candy_890″ is her ex-friend, Dawn:

candy_890 said:
ok who r u calling sexy this person is a freaking ugly bitch who needs a life cuz all she does is fuck ppl all the time and she is a lesbain so this bitch needs a life kk
lucente_69 said:
hey sexyy
Venessa_20love said:
HEADAS…ALL THE WAY…..DICK SUCKER……NASTY BITCH
Venessa_20love said:
Who ever is on this,this is not Dawn this is bitch who is jealous of Dawn and found out her password.. This gurl is a headas….She suck dick for money……
giveitUP said:
wat ur to chicken to write back cuzin u know i mean bussiness thats y and that person in the pic is of ur mom not dawn ok or its u in the future so later =-)
candy_890 said:
omg kristen if u fucking call my house again plz dont hang up the phone cuz i want to say sum stuff to u to and trust me u wont like it
giveitUP said:
oooo ya and u stuff more then a turkey and gurl/man we will never let u for get this ever happen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!
giveitUP said:
yo y dont u wirte back wat ur a chicken uh so u dont have to give dawn back her password for untz because guess wat ……………………. ……………………. ..
SHE HAS A NEW ONE BITCH !
but u better give back her msn passwork or i will get alot of people on u and trust me i know alot of people and all of the people i know can kick ur ass and yes u know its ture so u better give back her password and if u dont i am coming to ur house cause yes i do know where u live u live at ATPM #, #### SOMETHING ST and i k easly find out ur phone # by walter , dawn, ver, ooo ya thats the only people who know ur phone # because you have no friends to call u soooo BLAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
and ur a stalker because when u and dawn were friends u stalked her and her dad
candy_890 said:
wow im surprized that u never deleted anything that my friends r saying to u cuz u noe u should be scared and like not show ur face anywhere
candy_890 said:
wait wat a mi saying every one is still going to hate u but u wont get beat up
candy_890 said:
see kristen how hated u r but if u just give me my stupid password then not ever one would hate u
veroniicaah said:
EWWWWWW, yur a dirty fucking SKANK and i’mm going to kick yur fucking ugly ass, yu and that fucking lezz victoria WHU RAPED MY POOR INNOCENT BROTHER STEVEN JUST FUCKING WATCH YURSELF ON THE STREETS THERES ALWAYS SOMEONE WATCHING YU, YUR GOING GET JUMPED WATCH, YU FUCKING LEZZBEN I’MMA SHANK YUR SHIT YU FUCKING LITTLE SHIT, AND I HOPE YU BURN IN HELL LIKE YUR FUCKING MOTHER.
candy_890 said:
hey bich umm u noe who dis is it’s tia i’m comming 2 dawns and were comiing 2 oyur house so stop fucking and get ready 2 get ur ass kicked
candy_890 said:
all u do is have sex and i noe u never went out twith that guy cuz not even ur own mother wants u
candy_890 said:
flat chested booblesss slut <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

After taking my daughter over to feed her cat (because apparently her father did have appendicitis and went into the hospital for an operation last night at 10:00), and pick up some clothes for school this week while she stays with me, I went over to Dawn’s house with a printout of the threats on her website to show her father.

I told her father that if this is not stopped, I will be going to the police about these threats and I wanted something documented in public as proof that I had talked to him and he acknowledged that this would stop. He asked Dawn about these goings-on while we stood there and she admitted to it all in front of us – apparently pretty scared about her father knowing these things. I also brought a screenshot of her site so that the URL would be there for him to check out (if he’s so inclined) so he could see his 14-year-old posing in her underwear for the entire internet to view.

I hope that is the end of it. If anything happens to my daughter I’ll be suing the fucking bejeezus out of all of these kids’ parents. It’s unbelievable the bullying and the headspace that these kids can talk about knifing someone else. I may even go to the police regardless of whether this stops.

Anyway, we’re home now and we had some delicious bruschetta for dinner. My daughter will be staying, probably for the week, while her father recuperates from his appendicitis operation. Ok, ok, I know I called him a fucking hypochondriac yesterday, but he is. The funny reality of it all, though, is that even hypochondriacs get sick.

Hey! I wrote posts all weekends. You didn’t. I don’t have time to post tonight, so suck it up.

Well, you’ll never guess who got another voicemail today telling me that the reason my phone is indicating that I have voicemail is because some people don’t press 1 for someone, or 2 for someone else, that the voicemail is probably going into the main mailbox.

Are they fucking stupid? Did I not tell 3 people now that I have checked all mailboxes? Does this not mean that I’ve even checked the main mailbox? Didn’t they put a note on the file like I asked them to, telling technical support that I KNOW HOW to do this?

I called them again. I got another screener guy tonight. He told me that the problem would be fixed within 2 days (how familiar). He said he would put a note on file that I knew how to use it. I asked him if there wasn’t already a note like I’d asked them to do 3 times already. Then he said there was but it was not really clear. Perhaps it would have been clearer if any of these asshats actually spoke English.

So he told me that he’d reiterate the problem to me and he went through everything and yet he didn’t reiterate any note about not leaving me tutorial voicemails. I asked him if he had put the note there and he said he had. So how come when he’s reading everything else back to me, there’s no note that he’s reading back to me?

I can hardly wait for yet another voicemail telling me how to access my voicemail. This service is disgusting. It seems that no one is able to listen. I’m gonna go get laid.

I found out tonight that my long weekend will be more than a long weekend. I’m now out of a job.

Apparently no funding came through and there’s no money to pay me, so I was contacted by email (thank you for the email) to let me know that there was no job for me to go back to.

They still want me to do stuff for them if the funding comes through that they’re waiting for, but who knows when that will happen. So now I’m unemployed.

I suppose I should be happy. Funding for this job was only supposed to last until July 31st and somehow they managed to eek out paying me until November, but I’m not happy. And I’m really not happy to be hearing this by email.

So on Tuesday I will go to the office, drop off my keys and stuff and take all my things. Won’t that be fun. I’ve asked that they have my T4 ready on Tuesday as well so that I can immediately apply for unemployment. Won’t that be great too? I think unemployment gives you 45% of the salary you were making. I can’t live on my salary… never mind 45% of it.

My long weekend slash vacation has now turned into a piece of shit. Now I have to go applying for stuff again. I hate life.

I can’t believe it’s been 3 days since I last wrote. Yes, I’m a popular girl. At least to those looking to make me part with my money.

I watched something last night because when we were visiting my aunt and uncle they had it on the night before. It was Dancing with the Stars. What a pathetic fucking show. Who wants to watch people dancing around and getting voted on? Not me. But we watched it.

There was some girl on there, I have no idea who she was (now that I think of it…. where were the stars? I’ve never heard of any of those people who were the “stars”). This broad had a lip, let me tell ya.

I think the woman had accidentally fallen on a botox needle 14 times. Her upper lip was the size of a small, third-world country. It was unfrickingbelievable. And every time we saw a close up of her face, my honey inadvertently went, “ewwwwwww”, and would jump in his seat as if startled.

Was that lip natural? I have no idea. It must have been. Cuz WoTF would purposely make their lip the size of a bagel. Yes, yes, we all have different ideas of beauty, so what? Sure, there’s gotta be somebody out there thinking that her honking lip was sexy or something. I vote that it was more the ‘or something’.

Anyway, I’ve got more to tell you later but we taped Earl and The Office so we could watch it at 9:00 and it’s almost 9:00.

I hope you were missing me fiercely in my lackadaisical absence. I was missing you too (see? I take the high road).

I got this email yesterday and I thought, “hmmm, did I order something recently?”, but was pretty sure I hadn’t.

Dear Customer,

Thank you for ordering from our internet shop. If you paid with a credit card, the charge on your statement will be from name of our shop.

This email is to confirm the receipt of your order. Please do not reply as this email was sent from our automated confirmation system.

Date : 08 Oct 2006 – 12:40
Order ID : 37679041

Payment by Credit card

Product : Quantity : Price
WJM-PSP – Sony VAIO SZ370 C2D T7200 : 1 : 2,449.99

Subtotal : 2,449.99
Shipping : 32.88
TOTAL : 2,482.87

Your Order Summary located in the attachment file ( self-extracting archive with “37679041.pdf” file ).

PDF (Portable Document Format) files are created by Adobe Acrobat software and can be viewed with Adobe Acrobat Reader.
If you do not already have this viewer configured on a local drive, you may download it for free from Adobe’s Web site.

We will ship your order from the warehouse nearest to you that has your items in stock (NY, TN, UT & CA). We strive to ship all orders the same day, but please allow 24hrs for processing.

You will receive another email with tracking information soon.

We hope you enjoy your order! Thank you for shopping with us!

I suppose that I was supposed to open the attachment but I didn’t. Ha, ha, they’re sending this to the wrong people. Who has $2500 left on their credit card – it’s not me. If I did I could pay off a cable bill.

I think I told you that my son was gonna buy my old car (for $200), but there’s been nothing but trouble with my old car ever since I got it back from the ex. And I told you how we had it towed to Canadian Tire and they said it was a burnt out fuse, and replaced that for $70 ($60 fee for finding out what’s wrong, $10 for replacing the fuse).

Well ever since that fuse was replaced, it’s done nothing but burn out more fuses. My son bought a box of fuses, and tonight, it broke down once more and he used his last fuse which also burnt out as soon as he replaced it. So he’s headed off to a Canadian Tire out by where he’s broken down to buy another box of fuses. He put in some coolant in case it was overheating and hence the reason for burnt out fuses, but I expect that he’ll get back to the car and end up with yet another burnt out fuse and we’ll have to use another one of our CAA tows to get his car to Canadian Tire again.

Worse than that, as if that’s not bad enough, was that he was calling me from a pay phone – because they cut off his cell phone. His cell phone is under my name (I got it for him on the family plan) and they told him that it was cut off because there’s $440 owing on the cell phone bill.

Well, boys and girls, didn’t I do a big fucking hairy ape shit when I heard that! Not only had I paid my entire Rogers bill ($218.92) on the weekend (even though it wasn’t due until the 29th), but there was nothing previously outstanding either, because I had paid that the month before, and the month before, and the month before.

All my bills have been paid, and yet, here they had cut off my son’s cell phone. I don’t know whether my son believed this or not, because there was one time when I told him he owed $whatever, he paid it but I forgot to pay the bill on time and then he got a call saying that he owed money – so I had to pay it right away, but that’s not usually the way I work.

Anyway, we made a conference call to Rogers Cut-Off Your Phone Department (the only number he could reach on his cell phone when it’s cut off) and the guy said that there was $440 outstanding – the $218.92 (which I told him I had paid) and the $200-and-something for next month’s bill… Next… month’s… bill!

They were cutting off the phone because they hadn’t received this month’s payment, due on September 29th, and next month’s payment, due October 29th? He said that there was a credit limit on my Rogers bill of $400 (not just cell phone, but all Rogers services, including my cable TV and high-speed internet).

I said, “WTF are you talking about… a credit limit on my bill?” and he said that, in essence, he didn’t know about it and would transfer us to the correct department.

After waiting on hold for 14 minutes on our conference call, we finally spoke to a woman/girl in the right department. I told her that I’d paid the bill on Saturday (I always do online banking) and that it had gone through my bank on Monday.

I asked about the credit limit and WTF that was all about, and she said it was just put on, on Saturday. Well, Saturday’s the day I talked to Rogers to say that maybe I wanted to cancel some of these services I have.

I said that since I hardly watched TV, I didn’t think that we needed all the channels and features that we currently have. And I said that I thought the internet service was too high, and maybe we should downgrade. I also said that maybe we should get rid of the PVR (e.g. Tivo) box.

What happened was that the guy told me to just downgrade to Rogers Highspeed Lite – it might seem a little slower at 1MG instead of 5, but if I didn’t download a lot of music or movies, I might not notice a difference.

Keep in mind too, that we’re paying $218.92 a month for Rogers service, so I was thinking that it was way too much, something we can’t afford, and we should be cutting back on everything (especially when I don’t know if my work can afford to pay my paycheque past this week).

The Rogers guy talked me into keeping our existing cable TV services but said that he’d throw in a 5% discount for a year, and since our services are all bundled because we have so many of them, that we really should keep them all to keep getting that bundling service.

So he talked me into it. And that triggered a credit limit on my account that ‘supposedly’ automatically happened as soon as I changed my services on Saturday.

Luckily the woman kept putting us on hold til she could get ahold of a manager in the right department and got the credit limit taken off my account. She then got my son’s cell phone reinstated immediately, and now everything’s just fucking wonderful.

Except for the fact that my son is still stuck out at Neilsen and Sheppard (in God’s country around where he lives) with a car that doesn’t work. Hopefully his little trek to Canadian Tire to get more fuses, will make the car work.

If that doesn’t work, I’ve got to use up yet another of my CAA tows to get the car dragged down to the Canadian Tire down here where he had the service performed the other day (only so he doesn’t have to pay another $60 in an estimate of what’s wrong with the car). If that’s the case, then we’ll have to pay extra for the tow because it doesn’t cover a kajillion miles away tow – since he lives so fucking far away. And then he’d also have to stay over night cuz we’re not driving way out there to get him back home and he’d have to pick it up tomorrow anyway.

And he had a hot date tonight that he had to cancel, and apparently she thinks he’s trying to give her the brush-off.

Isn’t life just fucking wonderful. Who needs a smoke? Not me, baby, not me.

Yes, I have all the time in the world tonight to blog, since I don’t think there’s anything at all on TV on Wednesdays. Am I right? Tell me. Is there some fabulous show that I’m missing? Let me in on it. And don’t tell me it’ll be some Survivor, Great Race, or anything else I wouldn’t watch if you paid me. It’s about time you knew what I would or wouldn’t watch.

Now that you’ve got your duties assigned, just take a minute to visit with me. I forgot to tell you about the guy in Tim Horton’s the other morning.

There was a big line-up at Tim’s and this big, tall, black guy came in to beg from the people in the line up. This guy with one front-side tooth kept staring me in the face, asking me for money. I just looked at him. I didn’t say a thing. He kept repeating himself and I just kept looking at him.

Then he went on to the person ahead of me, then ahead, then ahead. He was getting nowhere with anyone so I guess he figured he’d come back to me. Perhaps my lack of verbal abilities made him think that there was a hope in hell that I was gonna fall for this.

So when he came back to me again, I said, “why are you in here?” – I know that they’re not allowed inside the premises to beg – just hovering outside the door and following you to your car. To that he responded, “fuck you!” and was walking out the door. I said, “sorry, what was that?” and he said, “fuck you!” and left.

I don’t think he’d win any of the “oh that poor guy, let me help him out” vote with that negative kind of attitude, now, do you?

And that was just one of my many Tim’s excursions.

Well, we played baseball last night. Pathetically. Some of our good players weren’t there, but there were still a couple of good ones and we were pathetic anyway. I caught a couple of nice long throws to home but, unfortunately, the players were already at the plate, so, too bad.

Tonight I’m just waiting for my daughter to arrive. I’m feeling hungry (like ‘wings’ hungry), but we’ll have to wait til she’s here because she hasn’t usually had dinner before she arrives.

Aside from that, I just finished talking to the insurance company. I was wondering what policies I still had in effect when I saw the money taken out of my bank account the other day, so I phoned them.

They sent me some paperwork on the policies and then I saw the insurance policy I have on my honey (which is a term policy). I now pay $34.83 a month for that one (in case he dies I wanted to be able to pay the rent). But then, in 2010, the policy goes up to $164.07 a month. $164.07 A MONTH! Then in 2020 it goes to $388.51 A MONTH!

That’s because it’s term insurance they just explained to me. If I’m looking for long term, I should get permanent insurance. So they put me through to another guy who let me know that for $100,000 coverage (which is what I have now), it would only be $198 a month (but it would never go up).

Who the fuck do they think I am… Donald Trump? I can hardly afford the $34.83 a month, that’s why I was checking to see what it was.

So now I have a choice. Do I continue until 2010 to pay $34.83 a month and in the event that something happens to him, I’ll get some money to help me out, or do I cancel it right now and save the $1600 I’ll be throwing away if he stays ok and alive?

I’d really be screwed financially if something happened to him. There’s no way I could afford the rent or the bills so I have a tendency to think I should keep going til 2010. But even that’s difficult considering that the company I’m working for seems to be having payroll difficulties lately.

Money – it’s the root of all evil, and probably depression and suicide attempts (as long as the insurance pays out).

What a boring, farging day today was. The only thing that was interesting (and it wasn’t) was that my son came to pick up the rest of his stuff to take with him to his new place.

All I did there was follow him around, neither of us with much to say, but it was some company since my honey was out golfing with his son.

All the stores were closed (except for Tim’s, but you can only drink so much coffee) so I couldn’t even go window shop. You know I’m all about the window shopping – or perhaps it’s the window spending that’s more like me.

I rented The Hills Have Eyes, uncut version, for tonight. Who gives a shit… uncut. Trimmed, shaven, hairy, just a little bit off the sides. Uncut. pffft. I’ll let you know what I thought of it tomorrow probably.

I’ve moved my site again because of that useless provider, Vistapages.com. They let my domain expire by not answering my customer support question where I asked them, “scuze me, isn’t my domain hosted with you for free now – and yet I’m getting renewal notices”.

I can’t believe it was too difficult a question to answer. And then when I woke up this morning I found that I had no site. I got in touch with their customer support – you know, that live chat crap, that takes half an hour for someone to answer a question, and they said I’d have to talk to billing, who of course are only there Monday to Friday.

So I renewed my domain at the old provider, and then I switched back to Netfirms, with relative ease. I’ve asked vistapages.com to cancel my site and provide me with a refund, since I’d paid in advance for two years. I’ll be anxiously awaiting their response on Tuesday (since Monday’s a holiday).

I just can’t believe how hard it is to find a good provider. It’s disgusting to pay for and put up with the shit. Try our great customer service… submit a ticket and get no answer. Talk to our live chat assistant and wait 13 minutes between answers. When I signed up with vistapages.com they had support staff to talk to. About a week later there were telephone messages that said go to their website – no more staff to talk to.

If I knew anything at all about php I’d set up my own server and host it myself. Unfortunately, I don’t.

Anyway, enough ranting. Assholes at vistapages.com. Want a review vistapages? I’d be happy to give one.

… I just feel so pissed off at the world. Not that I know for sure why, but I just run around at the end of the day feeling mad.

Today I went to report my accident at the Accident Reporting Centre. Someone tell me why in a city of 3 million people, there are only 3 places to go to report your accident. Well, they open at 6:30 in the morning and isn’t that special, but I’m not getting up at 5:00 so that I can go to hell’s acre and back and be downtown in time for work.

I seem unable to get anything accomplished at work because I spend more time running around and working on some new thing that just came up and is urgent than what I had planned to do with my day. All I want is to clear off my desk for Christ’s sake. If I had half the day to myself, I might be able to do that.

There’s some conflict with some co-workers and I have to pretend that I’m unaware of it and not take sides. Well, I have a side. But I just have to pretend that I’m going about my own business and whatever I talk about is inane, solely to do with me just doing my job. However, if I was managing those people, one of them would be gone.

I don’t even want to talk about stuff any more. Although tomorrow I do want to go through my big rant about something else that’s really pissing me off. I’ll save it til tomorrow cuz I have to let go of this anger right now – it’s very tiring. And I need all my strength to drink a beer or 14 and get happy.

This morning I decided to go into Tim’s rather than use the drive-thru because it’s at a gas station and they also sell smokes there (I was out).

So I went up to the woman and said, “A large Vantage 5 king size”, and laid down a $10. At the same time I was standing in the Tim’s line up, cuz that gets very long.

She wasn’t getting my smokes and so I went back out of line and over, and said, “A large Vantage 5 king size”. She started reaching for DuMauriers, then it looked like she finally found them, and laid them on the counter.

At the same time that I was back in the Tim’s line, where they knew my order, another guy went up to the cigarette broad and ordered a pack of cigarettes. She started scanning them through and telling him how much.

At that point, I went back out of the Tim’s line and said, “is there some reason you can’t finish my sale before you start serving another customer?”, and she looked at me. Then she looked at my pack of smokes sitting there. The other customer apologized to me (as if it was his fault) and I pointed at my $10 sitting on the counter.

She rang it up, and before giving me my change, started serving the other customer. I said, “scuze me, can I get my change?”, all the time watching the Tim’s line cuz my coffee should have been ready and the line up was quite long.

She finally gave me my change and said, “have a nice day”, sarcastically. She gets sarcastic with me, like I’ve done something. When what I really should have said to her was, “hey you fucking numbnuts, find the cigarettes, scan them, take my money and give me the change – simple job for a simple person… get it right”. However, since I didn’t say that, she felt that she should be getting attitude with me.

I really should become a hermit. Hermit the frog. No, that might be infringement. Hermit the dog. They might still go after me for that one. Hermit the crab. Very clever. Yes, I will hide under my shell and avoid all assholes.

I almost bought myself a new digital camera tonight, but my honey talked me out of it. Good thing, too, since I have no money. I thought that since I have nothing on my Sears card, and since my battery in my camera was not holding a charge, voila, let’s go to Sears.

But he talked me out of it and instead we went to Battery Plus and bought some new batteries. As a matter of fact we bought 4 batteries so I could have a set charged and ready when the other set ran out.

It’s not quite what I wanted. I wanted a new camera. I want a new SLR camera to be exact. But I was prepared to just buy a new higher megapixel camera if I had to. But I guess I did not have to.

Life sucks. And I’m not liking this pissy money that I make. I gotta find a new job. And then a new camera.

I was in a really miserable mood this morning. Something at work pissed me off. Actually it was one person talking to the Director about something I had brought up. She told me that she’d talked to the Director and that something would be worked out.

What pissed me off was that she went to the Director with my thoughts. If I wanted it brought up with the Director, I would have said it to the Director.

So I ended up telling her that any conversation I had with her, should be considered a conversation with her only, and that if I wanted something brought up with the Director, I would bring it up myself (not being a shy one).

But after that little conversation, I felt really mad and then other things happened after that, that only made me angrier. I was wondering whether or not I’d worked long enough to collect Unemployment – of course not taking into account in my anger that you can’t even get Unemployment if you quit a job.

Then tonight I stopped at Costco to have my glasses refitted (since they seemed tight on one side). While there we had a sample of a cookie. It was a very nice thin butter cookie with almonds and, you know what? Driving home I didn’t feel the least bit pissed (or like going on a big bender as I’d felt earlier).

That’s when it hit me…. the power of the cookie. Yes, boys and girls, I think that when you’re mad or enraged about something you should walk it off at Costco and have a sample cookie. After a while, you’ll be happy. See, I’m in a good mood right now. Magical thin butter almond cookies… Thank you.

I’m pissed off with everything, so I don’t really feel like writing.

Although there is one good thing. The Apprentice starts tonight.

As I was driving home from work today, I happened to see a woman flossing her teeth. She was flossing her teeth as she was driving.

That’s just ingenious! Why, being the ridiculously clever person that I am, have I never thought of this little time-saving idea?

And when we stopped at the lights (on Avenue Road just past St. Clair), she really got into it full force. She even looked over and saw that I was watching her. But that didn’t deter her, oh no, she did it with vim and vigor when she had an audience.

I couldn’t fucking believe it. It’s not enough that people are yakking away on their cell phones, driving with one hand and holding the cell phone up to their ears with the other, but it takes two hands to floss, and I’m thinking that perhaps at least one of those hands should be on that new invention… the steering wheel.

Well, who am I to judge? And in keeping with the cell phone thing, I actually bought a cellphone holder for my car today while I was at Staples. Lately when I get a call in the car, I’ve just put the phone down on the seat and put it on speaker phone (you know, to drive safely cuz I’m so self righteous).

So I bought this holder and it sits up by my dash and holds my phone so that callers will be better able to hear me on speaker phone. You’re asking why I bothered to buy that head set for my phone? Because. You know me, I have to buy everything, including the car recharger. I think I’ve used that recharger twice now and that was only because I had it there and realized I’d never used it, so I thought I’d recharge my phone even though it wasn’t empty.

Shit, what a wasted opportunity, I could have had a photo op – I could have taken a picture of the flosser with my phonecam. I keep forgetting to bring my digital camera downtown with me to take some nice pics.

Today was such a beautiful sunny day that the only time I remembered I could have taken some pics was when I was out on my lunch half-hour, seeing different spots as I was driving.

I could have got some nice shots with a half decent camera, instead I got this shot which just doesn’t do justice to the way it actually looked.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll remember. Although at this age I’m lucky that I remember to take my car keys with me so I’m not sitting there wondering why the car won’t start.

Oh, and my site was down again tonight – some database problem YET AGAIN with Netfirms since my other sites with no database, or the ones on a different server were just fine. I’m starting to think that maybe I shouldn’t be promoting them, it’s like once a month where my site is down. Assholes.

I got this letter from the tax man, yes, as soon as I got a job, didn’t I hear from fucking Revenue Canada, about paying up my back taxes.

All this time without work, I never heard a peep from them. Now the week after, oh, hello Kev, nice of you to keep in touch. Yes I’d be happy to fill out a form listing all my expenses and the money I’m raking in.

Yes, I do owe taxes from last year (and perhaps the year before, who remembers? oh, Kevin remembers), but when I took a closer look at the letter it had a subject line that read “outstanding taxes 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004.

Well I had to call our little Kevvy, and say “scuze me Kev, I paid off all my outstanding taxes for every year except 2004 and maybe some 2003. What is this all about with the 2001/2002?”

“Well our records show… “. You get the gist of that conversation. And while I was explaining to good old handsome Kevvy-poo that I could see in my chequebook the last payment on those taxes because the amount was different – it was just the amount they said was outstanding when they sent their receipts each month – Mr. Kevin got quite snotty with me and said that this conversation wasn’t getting us anywhere and if I wanted to dispute the amount, I’d have to send them a letter. In fact he was so snippy and snotty that I asked him if he spoke with everyone this way.

Now I have to get ahold of my bank to see if they can send me something back to 2001, showing what I’ve paid to Revenue Canada. I don’t know how much this is going to cost me, but you know damned well it’s gonna cost me.

Then I’ll have to look through all my files to see if I kept any of the stupid Revenue Canada statements that showed “amount owing… $0″ – otherwise, Kev wants me to cough up about another $4-6000 for 2001 and 2002.

I did take back all my postdated cheques for 2004 when I was out of work, and haven’t paid a dime since May, but of course I haven’t paid a dime… I had no job! They still made sure they grabbed all my GST cheques to put on that.

And that Unemployment I paid into for 30 years? Oh no, I couldn’t qualify for any of that money. I didn’t even qualify for welfare, so WTF was all the money I’ve been giving to the government for 30 working years? Not in my pocket, cuz I owe them $12,000 (with all those late payments fees) and they want it the week after I start a job.

Fucking government.

I guess so, eh? Lazy bugger hasn’t written again in two days. What up with that?

Let me tell you, this working stuff has really wrecked my days. By the time I get home around 6:00, have some dinner or go out to get stuff I might need, it seems that it’s time to sit down and watch some TV before bedtime.

I haven’t been doing anything exciting for 2 days (yes, the usual non-excitement, shut up), but I also haven’t had much time at my computer. I’ve come in… checked my emails… gone out to get stuff ready for work the next day, had some food and watched TV.

I’ve been very good. I’ve been going to bed at 11:00 every night (since I’m getting up at 6:30). That’s almost 8 hours of sleep every night! I never get that. I’m used to going to bed at midnight or later. But I’m also not used to getting up so early any more either.

I arrive early to work every day. Supposed to start at 9:00 but I’m there by 8:30… today at 8:10. I don’t think I like that whole idea of getting there early. I don’t like the fact that I’m working an extra half hour or more for free, not to mention that some days there was no lunch half-hour.

Maybe when things get into a routine at work (as they invariably will once I know about everything), I’ll be able to gauge my time better so I’ll be there closer to 9:00. I still haven’t received my letter of offer although I’m in my second week. People are so busy.

Anyway, I’ve got to go turn over my chicken and cook it for another 10 minutes. I just thought I’d mention that I’m not really a lazy bugger for not writing. I’m a busy bugger. Everybody sing along… I’m a busy bugger, short and stout; here is my handle, here is my spout. Hey! Leave that spout alone.

I am always buying computer books. And computer books are really expensive, ranging from $15-$100, depending on the thickness.

Do I read these computer books? That’ll be a no.

For my new job they wanted someone who knows Access. Well, I used to know Access, but I haven’t used it in years. So I went out and bought two books on Access. I figured I’d take one to the office with me, in case I need it. I can tell each book apart purely by haptic clues (one is thicker than the other).

I thought that I’d practice my Access skills at home before starting the job. I did that for about half an hour. Then I was bored with it. But, if I want to read about it… I’ve got a couple of good books that go along with all the other good books I’d like to read.

While I was at Chapters I decided that I had to have one of those little day calendars that sit on your desk.

I only decided I needed one because they were 75% off (after all, it is the new year already).

So I bought this “Word of the Day” calendar, guaranteed to increase my vocabulary. You certainly don’t need a frivolous day calendar that will just give you amusement with a cartoon when you can enrich and enhance your life by learning, each and every day.

Perhaps a more maeutic approach helps my yeasty brain to learn, as long as I’m not roistering til the wee hours with the glitterati. The litmus test will be to see whether I can remember any of these words, since I’m old. Not that I’m whinging; far from it, since the issue is de minimus.

Ok, that’s enough.

… fabulous interview.

Another good interview – hard to believe. I went off to this morning’s interview and it went well. They, too, are going to have a second interview next week with the final two. So this one may be a little harder to get into than the other, who are seeing the top 4, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that I end up going to both.

Enough about that; I don’t want to jinx it.

Other than that, all I did today was go shopping for some groceries and then we made a big stirfry for dinner. Did you know that they are no longer selling bean sprouts in Canadian grocery stores? I didn’t know that.

I asked the guy at the Great Canadian Superstore where the bean sprouts were and he told me that there had been someone who got ill, and they didn’t know if the bean sprouts were the cause, and ever since, they’ve stopped selling them in the stores. He mentioned that I could probably still get them in Chinatown, but I think I’ll live without bean sprouts rather than go dragging all the way downtown for my 50¢ vegetable.

I just checked the TV because I thought American Idol started tonight. Apparently I’m wrong again, it wasn’t there, nor was any other program that I’d watch.

There’s always Blind Date or Judge Judy. I’ve set those to record on the PVR, so I can watch some stimulating television any damned time I feel like it. WTF did they change The Office to Thursdays? So far we’ve seen nothing on TV on Mondays or Tuesdays, probably goes for Wednesdays too. I don’t know why I’m paying $130/month for cable.

I said I’d post these, so I will. Stop bugging me! I’m doing it, aren’t I? Mom! They’re bugging me!

Before I get into the resolutions, let’s just start with a recap of the fact that 2005 was a really pissy year. I was working with assholes until May when the job ended, and I haven’t really been working since, except for a temp job here and there.

Money’s been very tight (especially for my snookey who’s paying everything) and yet I’m still not out of my “I make good money and this doesn’t cost too much” phase, and I have a tendency to still shop – although I have reined it in somewhat, luckily for us.

While not working for 8 months of the year, I’ve gained 17 pounds. 17 pounds!!! Count ‘em. I gave away lots of clothes that no longer fit, including 10 pairs of pants, to Value Village along with some other stuff. Luckily the 17 pounds is not really really noticeable on me *ya, right* (I’m big boned), and most everything else still fits me – and when I say “fits”, I don’t mean fits tightly, cuz I can’t stand that feel or look, and I would have thrown away those clothes too. I still wear the same sized clothing with all this weight gain, it’s just not falling off me like it used to be, and I look like I should do something.

So the good points to 2005? My daughter and son are healthy and somewhat well rounded. My honey is still the most amazing, loving man I have ever known, and, surprisingly, I really believe that he does love me as much as I love him (and thinks I’m beautiful, so who could want more than that?).

I think that about sums it all up. I don’t normally make resolutions, so I’ve got a tough time ahead. But I’ve got confidence, strength and willpower going for me. So I’ll keep you abreast of how things are succeeding. It’s not like I’ve got anything more interesting to write about.

Hey! I just realized that I won’t be getting my birthday boink today. My snookey’s got a cold and he can’t breathe through his nose.

What kinda cheap ass birthday is this?!? Oh, and we didn’t have birthday grilled cheese, we had birthday hamburgers. Mostly because I bought the Christmas turkey today and had to keep it in the freezer, so we need to get a helluva lot of stuff outta there… hamburgers taking up so much room.

So I guess my birthday boink will end up being a combo birthday/xmas one: birthmas ← sounds kind of disgusting. Oh yes, but so does the thought of a 49-year-old boinking, I know. Don’t picture it.

Oh, and here’s some crap I found about who I am, based on today being my birthday:

How You Approach Life and How You Appear To Others
Modest, unobtrusive, and often rather quiet or shy, you are a person who is content to be in the background or to serve as an assistant, in the supporting role rather than in the lead. You are quite humble in your own assessment of yourself and you have a very strong perfectionistic attitude, with a tendency to be overly self-critical. No matter how well you do something, you always see the flaws in it and how it could be improved. Often you will simply refuse to attempt something because you feel you cannot meet your own high standards.

The Inner You: Your Real Motivation
You are a gambler and an adventurer at heart, one who loves to take risks, to discover and explore new worlds, and to take the untried path rather than the safe, reliable one. You are an independent soul, freedom-loving, and often very restless. You need a lifestyle that provides opportunities for travel, movement, change, and meeting new people. A steady routine which offers much in the way of security but little in the way of space and freedom is odious to you.

None of that has anything to do with getting laid (or lack thereof). I’m sorry. You’d forgotten about that and I just stuck it back in your head. Picture a sweet little puppy that you’d love to have for Christmas.

Yes, Randall is the one who won The Apprentice last night. Although it seemed like The Donald might have picked both him and Rebecca.

However, he picked Randall. And then he gave Randall the opportunity to pick Rebecca as well.

Each of them wanted a different job that The Donald was offering. When asked, Randall could have said, “why, yes, you should also pick her, and then I’ll look after the one job and she can take care of the other”.

Instead he said something like, “this is not the Apprenti, this is the Apprentice, and there should only be one”.

I couldn’t believe the selfish bastard. Not to mention that I had liked him from previous shows, up until this one, where he sounded all whiny and full of himself: I’ve got my doctorate, I run a multi-million dollar company, I am the best thing since sliced bread.

He was making me so sick on this episode that where before I was torn between who I wanted to win, after watching his little tirade last night, I wanted Rebecca to win.

But that selfish little puke couldn’t give it up and let her win too.

I don’t know WTF is going on with the sidebar, where it starts loading, and then disappears down to the bottom of the page unless you mouseover the title, or a post title, or any link on the left.

It is driving me fucking bonkers, and it only happens in IE, not in Firefox. I’ve been playing with this all night.

If you come back tomorrow and I’ve started all over, you’ll know why. Just to get that stinking sidebar working properly.

So why is it that some people seem to think that the speed limit signs are just a suggestion? Apparently these speed limits do not apply to them.

I’m one of those people that speeders hate. Why? Because I always drive the speed limit. This may sound a little anal, however, I am one of those people who never gets a ticket. Why? Because I don’t speed.

So, of course, when I’m doing 50 in a 50 zone, there’s gotta be somebody behind me honking, or whipping around me so that they can give me the finger and pass, very closely, in front of me. They’re probably all doctors racing to the hospital to perform emergency surgery, so I don’t mind a bit.

What has been bugging me lately, though, is the fact that so many of the newer cars do not come equipped with signal lights. I don’t think this should be an option on cars, especially those big, expensive SUVs. I think that all cars should come equipped with signal lights, so that when those big mamas are making a turn, we’ll all know it cuz we’ll see a signal light.

I can’t remember being charged extra for the optional signal lights on my own car.

While I’ve mentioned my use of Blog Explosion to surf some more interesting sites, there is the downside to it… that being some pretty useless and stupid fucking blogs out there.

Tonight I happened on one that put some descriptor about “issuational occurances” on the sidebar. Being an English major, that bugged me to no end. Firstly because there’s no such word as ‘issuational’, and, secondly, because occurrences was spelled wrong.

But that’s not all. I’ve visited many sites that not only have typos everywhere included with their misspellings, but also sites that say things like, “I’ve never been good with punctuation”, “I’m a writer” (and yet they can’t write anything legible because they don’t even know how to spell).

I can understand the occasional typo. It’s not like I’m 100% typo free. Well, yes I am. I’m typo free. It’s something I’m proud of, and my “theirs” are spelled liked that and not “theres” or “they’res” because I’m not a freaking idiot.

I speak English and type English and I’m damned proud of it. And I don’t make excuses for not having a “head for punctuation” or any other lame excuses because I’m too lazy to check what I’ve written. Get yourselves a fucking dictionary, or better yet, since you’re already on the net, in your Google bar, type in “define: whatever the word is” and when you misspell it, Google will ask you, “did you mean….”.

I also hate the people who add an apostrophe to everything, so they can’t write “typos”, instead they’d write “typo’s”.

Drooling imbeciles.

I was surfing today and someone was talking about kissing – bad kissing.

That took me back to my first experiences with kissing. Let’s start off with the first time I even ‘heard’ about the tongue stuff. Whatever my classmate’s name was, she was telling a whole bunch of us about “french kissing” and how the boy sticks his tongue in your mouth.

We girls all had the same dreamy-eyed, swooning reaction of, “ewwwwwwww”, in unison. Don’t know when we all managed to get over that, but at least some of us did.

The first french kissing I ever encountered was, as I know now, really really bad. I was at a party (I was somewhere between 13-15) with my friend Jayne Greene. She of the big boobal area, a little more worldly than I, and I being the almost flat-chested, slim non-Jewish girl at the party.

I don’t know what the prerequisite for necking someone up was, only that the really bad kisser decided I was the one to be kissed. Or perhaps he’d tried others and they wouldn’t let him. Maybe they already knew how he kissed… who knows?

I wanted the experience, since I had none, so I was game for trying the necking. Anyway, his mouth covered about half my face, from below the nose on down. I don’t remember my face ever being that wet before or after. Perhaps not even when I’m washing my face.

I guess when your mouth is so wide open, possibly enough to swallow someone else’s face, there’s nowhere for all that spit to go except all over the other person.

While I didn’t like the kissing, I didn’t stop it. After all, I had to learn about it. Thankfully, at some point (perhaps it was hours, but perhaps it just seemed like hours), he stopped and I could wipe off my chin and cheeks (with both arms).

So I’ll have to say that, even though my honey is a good kisser, I don’t know what makes him a good kisser. But I do know what makes a bad kisser, and one of those things is slobbering all over somebody’s face.

And you know what? I can’t stand watching any movie or TV show where their mouths are wide open and you actually have to watch the tongues introducing themselves. Get a room.

Whenever someone’s coming over, doesn’t matter who it is, we end up cleaning.

This was the case yesterday, when the people were coming over to buy the exercise equipment. We even got the kitchen floor washed – and let me tell you, it was pretty damned filthy. I had been looking at it for weeks saying, “we’ve gotta wash that floor”.

I guess you can tell that our place is not one of those ‘eat off the floor’ types of homes, although, in general, it’s fairly contained in its mess. At least the dishes are done and things are cleared away. It’s mostly the bigger stuff we don’t get around to as often, like vacuuming, and washing floors.

While we were cleaning yesterday, my honey said he would go to Tim’s to grab us a coffee, because he had to go out and pick up some more ammonia to strip the kitchen floor. When he got back with the coffee, mine wasn’t right – it was black. Luckily we had cream in the house to put into it, or I wouldn’t have drank it.

I decided that when I next went to Tim’s, I would get a free coffee since they screwed that one up.

So I went to Tim’s the next time and when I ordered at the drive-thru, I told the guy I wanted the two coffees but I said, “I want one for free”, and he told me to drive around to the window.

I drove up and handed him $1.20 instead of the $2.40 and he looked at me. He said, “oh, did you want 2 coffees?” and I said, “yes, but I want one for free”. He looked at me again. Didn’t say anything, just looked at me.

I said, “my honey was here earlier and ordered the same thing, and my coffee was black. So I want this coffee for free since I couldn’t drink the other one”.

He said, “well, he should have just circled around and come in and we would have fixed it”. I said, “he didn’t know. He brought the coffees home and mine was black”. He said, “well I can’t give it to you for free, I would have to pay for it”. I said, “well you screwed up the coffee”.

And then he just handed me the coffees. Nothing more said. So I got the one coffee for free.

After I left, I started thinking about what the guy said. About how my honey should have brought the ‘wrong order’ back in to be fixed.

How would he know it was wrong? Was he supposed to taste the coffees to see that they were right?

What about those people who pick up half a dozen coffees for their workmates and take them off to the worksite? How would they know if any of the order was wrong? Taste them all?

What a stupid fucking thing to say, he should have brought it back in.

So I got home and told my honey what I’d done, and how my coffee was free. That was when he told me that he hadn’t gone to our usual Tim’s… he’d gone to the other one up the street.

I’ve been looking pretty Sasquatch-y lately. I’ve told you before what a big hairy bastard I am (and pretty damned feminine), but lately all I could see was a big honking moustache staring me in the face, and a cute little beard that seemed to match perfectly.

Luckily for me, my honey doesn’t seem to mind that he’s bedding down with Groucho Marx.

Anyway, I decided that, instead of tackling this myself, the way I normally do, I would go get another professional wax job. And while I’ve been getting rid of that moustache myself for quite a while now, I’ve never waxed that “chin-al” area.

So I went to the woman who’d first waxed my upper hairiosity and asked her for a wax of my upper lip and chin.

This is what she did to me. She burned my chin.

The professional waxer, burnt half my fucking chin off. There are dark marks on my chin where a scab has already formed.

So tell me, is that usual? I was in such pain, and kept looking at that yesterday, that I thought she’d ripped off some of my skin in order for scabs to form.

Then I realized how hot that wax felt, and how that little wooden stick she was using felt, and realized that it was a burn. I was slathering myself with vitamin E last night.

I’m now wondering how the “professional” part fits into this. I’ve certainly never burned my face off when I was waxing myself.

I’ll have a different look for work tomorrow.

I don’t know what’s been going on with TV for the last year or so, but it seems you can never get an accurate idea of what’s going to be on.

Sometimes the shows you watch regularly at 9:00 are, for some unknown reason, on at 8:00.

Sometimes you tune in to watch a favourite show, only to find that they’ve decided to run some other show instead.

If you look at the TV guide from the newspaper, it always seems to be different than the digital guide on the TV, and usually the paper one is wrong and the digital one is right. But that’s not always so either.

Sometimes the digital TV guide will tell you the name of the show that’s supposed to be on, even when you’re watching a completely different show.

Last night I waited with baited breath (would that be wormy?) for The Office to come on, only to find out that they had decided to play two half hour episodes of My Name is Earl.

My Name is Earl is a new show that we’ve watched this season and the first half hour was the very first episode, and the second half hour was a rerun of the show. We didn’t watch them, we just kept checking back to see if The Office was going to be on.

So The Office was NOT on. And reruns of Earl were on.

So please tell me why, when a brand new season of shows has just started, they’re playing reruns. Did they only make 3 shows? Same with The Office… was it not on because there are no more new shows?

I don’t understand what’s going on with TV any more. You can’t depend on the shows airing when expected, and you can’t count on the TV guide to tell you what’ll be on.

There’s something about cold medicines that really get me bunned. I don’t know if it’s the antihistamines or the dextramathor (something), but whenever I take them, I’m bunned for days after I’ve stopped taking them.

And that’s me today. Bunned.

I took one of those night-time pills last night, thinking it would help my stuffy nose, and wouldn’t you know I could hardly sleep.

I kept waking up about every 1-1/2 hours to go to the washroom. And what up with that? I don’t think I’ve gone to the washroom for days (thank you for sharing) and yet, as soon as I was trying to sleep, the washroom was my closest friend.

Luckily I’ve been sleeping on the couch, I don’t want to wake up my snookey (little bastard who gave me the cold).

So today I went and bought some other medicine, even though we’ve got the whole middle shelf of the cabinet full of cold medicine. Now I’m trying the Vick’s Dayquil and Nyquil liquicaps. I’ve taken 2 already and they’re supposed to keep you from being drowsy.

Let’s just hope the stinking night-time liquicaps will make me drowsy. Not only drowsy but sleepy. Not only sleepy but conked out for the whole fricking night.

On another note, this is what the view looked like from the computer room yesterday. It was kinda neat.

[cpg_imagethumb:1,cloudscomputerroom3.jpg]

Oh, this is just a quick little share that I happened upon when I went to My Yahoo.

Apparently everybody gets armed with guns lately. I won’t even talk about Toronto’s 60-or so shootings this year, but this made me think about it.

The only time the word “dear” is appropriate to me, is when you’re writing a letter. So here’s my letter.

Dear (choose one) store clerk, wait person, delivery guy, coffee server, cashier:

Why the fuck are you calling me dear? Do you think that you’re ingratiating yourself with me by using that little disrespectful term? As a matter of fact you’re alienating me. Just because you’re served me something, doesn’t mean that we’re now good buddies and that you should have terms of endearment for me.

I don’t mind being called ma’am, madam or madame, or Mrs. Idiot (if you happen to know my name). I’d even prefer being called sir over dear (and that happens on the phone a lot). So stop it. Because every time I hear it I think of a little term of endearment of my own… “idiot”.

And you know what else? If you want to say, “you’re welcome”, say you’re welcome, not “you’re more than welcome”. WTF is more than welcome? Is that akin to super welcome? really, really, really welcome?

If you have to say “you’re welcome”, instead of saying thank you back to me, then just say it. But I prefer that you say thank you when I say thank you. As in, I’m thanking you for ringing me through the cash, and you’re thanking me for my patronage… you know, the way they used to teach people to respond to customers in the ‘old’ days.

And, another thing, if you’re my waitperson and you ask me if I want change, you may not get a tip. Especially when my bill is only $10 and I give you a $20. Instead, why don’t you just say, “I’ll be back in a minute with your change”, and then, if I’m leaving the change for you, I have the option of saying, “no, that’s fine”.

For sure if you’re a pizza delivery guy and you don’t even make like you’re going to get out my change, you will not be getting any tip. At least pretend you’re getting the change so I have the option of deciding that I don’t need that $1-$3 that’s left and will give it to you.

I can’t tell you how many angry delivery guys left my place, all because they started walking away with my change, as if it was automatically theirs.

Maybe I’m a miserable old bitch, but if all people who served the public followed these simple rules, I think we’d all benefit.

Last night, when I said I was starting work, they didn’t have me scheduled. ???

You’re supposed to call every day, before you start work, to see that you’re scheduled. So I called. My name was not on the list. So isn’t that fucking perfect? My first day of work turned out not to be my first day of work.

What the hell kind of company does that? Call to see if you’re coming in? So I’m not working this week. I’ll call on Monday to see if I’m scheduled for work. I can’t get any fucking work in this city.

Since my honey has taken the week off for all the funeral arrangements, today we just hung out together and cleaned up a bit. There’s more to do, but there’s more of the day and tomorrow still before we have company on Wednesday.

I suppose I should eat my sammich that I made for my dinner yesterday. Lord knows I didn’t need it.

I picked up my dry cleaning – I had a new pair of pants hemmed, $6.90. It’s not like I’m dirtying any work clothes, mostly I’ve been wearing what I’d normally wear on a casual Friday. And when I’m not working, I tend to wear the same clothes every single day. Tim’s staff are probably sick of seeing the same clothes, but WTF, I’m not here to impress them.

Tonight I’m hoping that the final INXS show is on – I got to see it last night where they were all to write a song with one of the band members. Please don’t let JD win it; he really, really sucks the big one.

Ok, I’ll go make myself a tea and clean up some more. But first a quick game of Zuma.

Oh, I forgot to mention, The Office starts tonight at 8:30 (and I’ll be home to see it!)… the American version of course. You know where I’ll be.

I bought Macromedia Dreamweaver the other day, so I thought I’d print out all the manuals and instructions that are in PDF format.

Wouldn’t you know, the laser printer was out of toner, and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna use up all the ink in the cartridges on the inkjet.

So I went to Office Depot to buy a new toner cartridge. The HP brand was $143. $143! So they had a store brand for $69 and if you bought two, the price decreased to $62. I figured I’d buy two of those. But, of course, they were out of stock.

So I headed off to Staples where the HP brand was the same price and their own store brand was $73, and I ended up buying one of those, plus some 3-hole punched paper, and a binder to put all the stuff in. That was over $100 I spent on this stupid crap but I figured it’d be great to print everything, and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna punch holes in paper for half the day.

Well I printed out the one file (144 pages) and opened the other, only to find out it was 784 pages long. The package of paper I bought was only 500 pages. And the binder I bought was only 2 inches wide, so it fits what I put in it already.

That’s a helluva lot of my supplies to have a manual.

Now I’ve just started going through the manual cuz I’d like to learn how to use Dreamweaver. I usually do hand coding for any website stuff, but I understand that lots of places use Dreamweaver, so here I go.

In other news, I splurged today, went to McDonald’s and bought myself a Big Mac. That was my breakfast, lunch and dinner around 3:00.

Once again when I said, “Can I have a Big Mac?” the woman said to me, “a Big Mac combo?” and I said, “a Big Mac”, and she said, “a Big Mac combo?”, and I said “a Big Mac, I’d like a Big Mac”.

So she said, “a Big Mac sandwich… just the sandwich, or a Big Mac combo?” and I said, “I’d like a Big Mac, a Big Mac sandwich” (even though the stupid thing is a hamburger, not a sandwich). She said, “just a Big Mac sandwich? no fries, or drink with that?” and I looked over the top of my sunglasses and said, “just a Big Mac”.

Dear McDonald’s, and Harvey’s, and Wendy’s, and whomever else makes fast food: If I want a combo, I’ll ask for a fucking combo. I will say, “can I have a Big Mac combo?” when I want a combo, and when I don’t say that, that means that I just want a stinking hamburger, just like I said, a hamburger. Let me clarify for you that asking for a Big Mac means that I want a Big Mac.

After that she said, “for here or to go?” and I said, “for here”, and she said, “ok, to go” and I said, “NO, for here!”. Some days my patience wears very thin and today I wondered why I didn’t just go home and make myself a sandwich, an actual sandwich, not a hamburger.

Then I headed off to Rogers to rent a movie and picked up Monster-in-Law. Yes, I’m pretty sure it will be very predictable, but there wasn’t much new to choose from, and perhaps this will be slightly amusing, especially after a beer or 20.

So that’s all for today. I think I’ll get an early start on the beer (I don’t want to wait til the last minute) and open one up in about 10 minutes… that’s when my tea will be finished.

I’m just waiting for my snookey to get home to watch the movie and perhaps get laid or not. Ok, more than you wanted to know. For sure I will be watching a movie though.

I was sitting in the drive-thru line-up at Tim’s this morning when I noticed this pretty young thing walking into the gas station. A Coke delivery guy was leaving with his dolly and kinda looked back and was gaping at the woman.

And I’ve seen this before with guys, where a woman walks by and the guy has to turn around and stare at her (or her ass or something).

I find it not only funny, but unbelievable. It seems as if they’re not in control of their own heads. And I have no idea why that is.

Only once have I ever seen a grown woman act like that. I had a smoking buddy named Sandra. She and I used to go for beers now and then.

One night we went for a beer – she always wanted to go to the bar across from work where this undercover cop used to hang out with the other cops. She had the hots for the cop.

Well, as we sat there drinking our beers, along with some other people, wasn’t she staring at the cop all the time. She spent a whole fucking night turning around to stare at the cop!

Towards the end of the evening I finally had to say something about it. It was something like “why do you keep staring at the guy like you’re a teenager desperate for some boy’s attention?”.

You can guess that this didn’t go over well. She proceeded to get into one of those name-calling scenes, where I, of course, was a whore. I, who had a boyfriend and didn’t gape at other guys all night was the whore, and she the normal one.

Anyway, that kinda ended that little friendship. But she’s the only broad I’ve ever seen who was so obvious… as obvious as I see guys behave. And yes, I know, it’s not all guys. My honey’s not like that or I would never have been with him.

Which reminds me too… how come if you ever get into an argument with a guy, a perfect stranger, he always ends up calling you a whore? As if he knows anything about your sex life, not to mention that the arguments had nothing to do with sex.

I gave a guy shit at Tim Horton’s a couple of weeks ago for parking his truck in the drive-around driveway and cutting off access to Tim’s. Of course he ended up calling me a whore. Go figure.

As I’ve mentioned before, I cannot get past level 8-4 in Zuma. The balls always come up that middle part and then I’m screwed.

And I always get it so that I only end up with maybe one extra life and then I lose that one. That’s with me starting the game at level 8, hoping I can finally get past this level.

Well, last night, my honey, for the very first time, got to level 8. And as I was watching him on level 7, he had about 7 lives left. By the time he got to level 8, he had 4 lives left.

I watched in anticipation as he got through 8-1, 8-2 and 8-3. I was dying to see what was past 8-4.

I watched him lose life after life. I was still hoping he’d get through the level, even though I was feeling a bit competitive then… kinda hoping he wouldn’t at the same time just because I’ve never.

Well, he didn’t make it through. Now we’ve both gotten to 8-4 and no further. I wish there was a way to save this game exactly where you have the problem and start fresh with 3 new men and go on, instead of having to start at the beginning of each level.

So after that lost hope, I went back to my Painkiller game. I recall this was a hard level the first time I got through it (I think it took me weeks).

But I can’t remember how I got through this before; what my strategy was, because I’m sure as hell stuck on this level again.

Needless to say that I went back to my Half Life 2 game and, since I’m on the final level, it’s hard to kill all the helicopters on time without my mission being terminated.

I just can’t win. Even when I’ve won them before.

I forgot to mention the skank my honey and I saw when we went out for brunch on Sunday (sorry for the pic quality, I only had my cellphone on me).

We went to this new restaurant with a 50s decor, you know, paintings of Elvis and Marilyn and the Three Stooges on the walls and diner-style booths.

In walk these 3 women, perhaps from a trailer somewhere. But the one with the red hair…. she made her entrance and then stood there in her little tank top that refused to cover her midriff and performed a big stretch for us all.

I think the stretch was supposed to be some Marilyn Monroe type of pose as she thrust her newly purchased tits out at us and proceeded to look around with the Ally McBeal lip lock.

While the np breasts were quite astounding in their size, so were the chubby stomach rolls. And I suppose some make-up might have kept us from looking for a paper bag.

It always amazes me to see people living under the illusion of sexiness.

I’m feeling like I’ll never find a stinking job. I’m also feeling disrespected.

I talked with an online friend today who seemed to think that the whole “over qualified” shit was just crap. That there’s no way I could be overqualified for the jobs I’m applying for.

I explained to her that I’m applying for anything, most lately the admin. assistant-type jobs (because that’s what there are most of) and she didn’t seem to think that I’d be “over” qualified for those.

This is a woman who’s never seen my resume, has no idea what my background or education is, and so I found it strange that she didn’t seem to understand what is going on with these interviews.

I can understand it for Christ’s sake. They think I’ll leave the job as soon as something more suitable comes along. They think I’ll be bored. They think that because of my background, they won’t feel comfortable asking me to make them a stinking coffee (or whatever the hell they’ll ask me to do).

Anyway, I was a little perturbed after talking to her. I guess she thinks that my knowledge level is equal to hers, not realizing how much more I’ve done and would like to continue doing.

On another note, I got a call from my daughter, crying, telling me that she doesn’t like her father… that she’d spilled some stuff and had to clean it up and got in shit for it.

Then I talked to the ex, who just a week or two ago told me that I was right when I talked about how he had to change the way he dealt with her. He was going to change. He was wrong.

And yet all I heard in the background was this screaming at the 12-year-old for not being responsible. Apparently she even takes drinks from the fridge without getting a glass. I pointed out that during our marriage, when he was in his 30s, he did the same thing.

“Yes but I didn’t spill it all over the floor!” he explained to me.

Both he and my daughter seem to think that whenever something goes wrong the answer is that she will come here to live. He’s always telling her to get out and she’s always saying that she doesn’t want to live there any more.

I am not the answer. And I’m not cleaning up that mess. As far as I’m concerned, some changes need to be made and I’m not going to be the easy out.

And speaking of respect, even the stinking paper clip in my Outlook doesn’t seem to think that I have a clue about what I’m doing.

I was awakened by the phone this morning at 8:30. And because there was the possibility that it could be someone about a job, I tried my best not to sound like they woke me up.

It was about a job, and a half-decent paying job, and they wanted me to come in for an interview on Thursday morning. So good luck to me on that, and I’ve got the interview tomorrow at 10:00.

I decided to go over to the clinic to get some advice about what to do with my “tennis elbow arms” if, indeed, that’s what’s wrong with them.

I went to the clinic I used to go to up here and looked at the full waiting room and stood in line behind some other guy. I rested my purse on the counter so I could get out my health card. Some doctor? was standing by the receptionist and told me to “step back from the counter”, “one person at the counter at a time”.

Well I was using the counter to find my stuff, so I ignored him. I moved back a bit from the counter and continued to look for my health card. I found it and stepped back from the counter a bit, but I left my Tim’s sitting on the counter.

Well, that wasn’t good enough for herr doktor, he said, “step back from the counter”. “Take two steps away from the counter, this area is confidential”. I said, “do you really think that I can’t hear what’s being said, two steps away?” and moved back a couple of mini steps.

He said, “take two steps back”, I said, “I took two steps back”. He said, “take two steps back” and I finally said, “oh fuck off, this is ridiculous”, and walked out of there while he said, “have a nice day”.

I really couldn’t believe this asshole. Y’know, if he’d been at all pleasant instead of thundering at me to “take two steps back”, I might have been a little more compliant, but the power trip this guy was on was unbelievable. I figured, fuck it, there’s another clinic right across the street, and I went there.

I only waited about an hour – as opposed to the full clinic across where I would have been for hours, and I saw a woman doctor who recommended that I take anti-inflammatories 3 times a day (with food), to see if that helped.

If that doesn’t do anything the next step I can try is some cortisone shots, acupuncture or therapy, the latter two not being covered by OHIP. So we’ll see how far the anti-inflammatories take me. She gave me a box full of free samples since I told her I was unemployed.

I also got a note from her (for $15) to give to Bally since they won’t let you cancel your membership unless a doctor has said that you can’t work out or you move 40km away from a Bally. Watch them tell me that I’ll have to pay out the membership, miss unemployed has no money to pay any Bally’s fees.

So then, clever me, decided to take my car to Mario the mechanic to ask about getting the air conditioning fixed since it keeps kicking in and kicking out.

After waiting half an hour in the boiling heat, sweating like a pig and coughing like crazy (I cough more when it’s hot), he told me to come back in an hour.

I went back in an hour and didn’t he have me waiting another half hour. I was pissed off (and boiling again) when I decided I was going to leave and go to Canadian Tire when I got into my car, started it, got the air conditioning breezing on me for a minute when Mr. Mario pulled in behind me, cutting me off from escaping.

After testing, he told me the problem was that there was too much pressure in the air conditioning and that the last guy had put in some mixture with high hydrocarbons that shouldn’t have been used in the car.

He said they’d vaccum that out and put in brand new stuff – all for only $200. So I killed another couple of hours while they did that, only to go back and have him tell me that it all seemed to be working at first but then it kicked out. He thought there was a problem with a circuit, which he’ll order tomorrow.

Isn’t that fucking great? I figured I’d have this fixed in order to keep cool on my way to a job interview. Now the thing’s not working at all and I’ll look like a pig on my way to the interview.

I’m bringing the car back in tomorrow after the interview and hopefully he’ll have the part and the time to fix it right then so I don’t have to sit yet another half hour in the boiling heat.

After coughing up $211 already (which pisses me off since it didn’t fix the problem) I’ll be thrilled to learn what the hell it’s gonna cost me on top of that tomorrow.

So that was my day, boys and girls. It was a long, swelteringly hot, miserable, costly day. So imagine my mood in this un-air conditioned computer room. I need to go to the living room.

Hitch was good… amusing, cute, and, in general, I like Will Smith so I was more likely to enjoy the movie than not. Gene Hackman was not in it. Well, he probably was somewhere in the background where I didn’t notice.

We got the drawer finished – the one that goes inside the trunk for the DVDs and it was too big. Some of the cuts that the guy made when cutting it made it a little off, and then there was glue. This was a precise fit so everything had to be perfect.

So after the movie last night I spent my time cutting edges with an exacto knife and we finally got it to fit.

Then we found out it was up too high. There are two pieces of wood on the lid that stop it from closing properly if we had the DVDs going all the way across.

So now we’ve got to see if we can lower the brackets that the drawer sits on, or else notch out those pieces of wood.

It’s never fucking simple, is it?

So aside from those few little glitches, the job is almost finished. Maybe I’ll take a picture later to show you how it’s “supposed” to be.

I’ve just sent my daughter to bed. Yes, at noon. The reason for that is because she ate everything in the fucking house. She polished off a package of english muffins. She ate two packages of yogurt mousse. She finished off a large container of yogurt as well. I don’t know what else she polished off, those were the things I found so far.

What the hell is wrong with that kid? If she’d had an english muffin, a mousse, some fruit, I would have thought that was a normal breakfast. But eating enough food to feed 5? There is something seriously wrong here. She hasn’t even hit puberty yet. And, of course, every shred of evidence is hidden.

I’ve just put some turkey bacon on to start our brunch. Then I’ll wake up my honey who is sleeping in like crazy. I don’t think that my daughter needs any food.

Ok, my first day (of on-the-job training) went ok. I actually thought it was kinda fun.

Thing is… tomorrow there’s a test. So all night I’ve been reading up on the manual – actually input it myself into powerpoint to help me retain some of the information. So I’m the browner who has the colour presentation when everybody else has the ‘photocopied 80 million times’ version of the same thing.

I typed up all the questions for the test, and all the answers of course. If you don’t have 90% on this thing, apparently you’re toast.

So I’ve been studying all night and now I’m gonna have my snookey ask me the questions. When I get to work early tomorrow morning, I’ll try to answer the questions without looking (since I’ve got them all typed up anyway).

Tomorrow the job starts at 9:00 instead of 8:45. I left at 8:00 this morning and I was there by 8:06. Isn’t that fabulous? Now I’m not overly concerned about whether I hear from job #2 from yesterday cuz this place is so close.

And the company seems very into promoting from within, and has lots of perks and benefits. I like that. It’s been years since I worked for a huge company that actually gave something to the employees. We’ll see how I feel after I’m actually doing the job.

Right now my outlook is optimistic. Although half the people who were there with me today were stinking pen clickers, or pen tappers, or leg jigglers. I was asking people to stop. Not a great thing on your first day – but I wish the hell they’d just stop it – stupid fucks. It’ll make me look like some kind of psychotic, anal asshole if I keep asking these people to stop clicking their pens.

Go ahead, do this little exercise to yourself… click click, click click, click click, click click, click click click, click, click click, click click, click click, click, click click click.

Once you’ve repeated that exercise about 5 times, then ask yourself if fucking pen clicking doesn’t drive you off the edge.

When I was younger (close to 30), I went out with this guy who was a drummer in a band called The Griffen Brothers(sp?). That’s how I met him actually, the band was playing at this bar I used to frequent.

So he asked me out and I went. We went to The Hayloft (no longer there) for lunch. The only reason I’m mentioning it at all is because while we were at lunch he said, “aren’t you going to ask me if I’m married?”

Well, boys and girls, it never occurred to me that a married guy might be asking me out. The thought of him being married had never crossed my mind. This seemed like a red flag.

So I asked him, “ok, so are you married?” and he said, “no, I just thought it was funny that you didn’t ask”. How strange is that? So I told him that I hadn’t asked because I wouldn’t expect a married guy to be asking me out.

On some later date he asked me if I was ‘on the pill’ and I said no, cuz I wasn’t. At the time I was using an IUD for my safe sex. He was a little freaked (I didn’t tell him about the IUD, I just answered his question). I did finally tell him that I had alternate means.

Anyway, the whole reason I thought of Dave was because I was madly in love with him (or something like that) even though that guy was one of the worst lays I’ve ever had.

I don’t think the word ‘foreplay’ was any part of his vocabulary, however, I was madly in love with him for other reasons… it was his sense of humour. I think I would have gone along being madly in love with him forever and having really bad sex.

However, he dumped me. And he didn’t dump me straight out dumping me, he just stopped calling me. The next time I saw him he was playing at the same bar but he was all gushy over this girl who was there and I knew that he was no longer seeing me.

I cried… in the middle of the bar where I was sitting at a table with another guy I was seeing and some friends. I was seeing 2 other guys at the same time as Dave the Drummer.

But the thing is, I still wanted Dave the Drummer and he didn’t want me. When the realization sunk home I just started crying and couldn’t stop. The bar owners thought I was drunk.

So my other boyfriend (who later became husband #2) and I left, and I just continued crying, wee wee wee, all the way home.

So I don’t know why I’m even talking about this, except that for some reason ‘the drummer’ popped into my head. Man what a bad lay he was. What the hell was I thinking?

This memory brought to you by Kleenex, Anti-Viral Tissue… the only tissue with a treated middle layer that kills 99.9% of cold and flu viruses.

Ok, here’s the big news. My contract is over. I no longer have a job until I talk to the guy I had been talking to about a job. I know I made sure not to talk about work here, so this is my only work post.

This is gonna hinder my shopping days.

BTW, it’s after 8:00 at night and the sky looks like this. After all the rain we’ve had lately, this is an omen of nice weather coming.

April showers bring May flowers, and April’s almost over, so perhaps we’ll have a nice weekend.

Oh ya, I have another focus group to go to tomorrow night. There’s $60 in my pocket *yay me*. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out like the last $50 focus group that cost me $200 to repair my smashed in car backseat window.

Too bad I couldn’t get a full time job doing focus groups. I’ll give you an opinion alright.

Over the past I don’t know how long, I have been using Filzip – only. I stopped using Winzip a few years ago when I found it wouldn’t open .tar files – and Filzip would. And Winzip was always bugging you for money and Filzip didn’t.

So I was downloading some plugins from //Gamerz’ site and it seemed like every time I tried to unzip them there was a problem with them. While reading comments on his site, I didn’t find any comments that said they had a problem with the download, so I installed Winzip. The downloads now unzip fine. So I don’t know what the hell is up with that.

Anyway, it enabled me to put back some plugins that I liked. So there. I may end up buying it because it said it was good for 21 days (evaluation model doncha know). We’ll see.

I did end up donating some money yesterday for a freeware program that I’ve got – Spybot Search & Destroy. I don’t often “donate” but the program is good. Sometimes it finds some stinking spyware that the two other programs I have, don’t find – and I paid for those. So I thought, “WTF”. Let’s give this guy some money – I certainly don’t need it.

I had a not bad day today although with all this plugin work, I haven’t even washed my face yet. Yes, I washed it this morning, I don’t mean that ‘yet’.

My son stopped by yesterday because of the TTC strike. With no transit he was gonna borrow my bike to get to work. He works 2 hours away from where he lives. The lucky thing though is that the strike was called off, they reached some agreement, and so I didn’t have to drive to work, and he didn’t have to bike it.

Christ, I don’t even work 2 hours away from home and I can’t imagine biking it. He was gonna take the bike anyway and headed off home, only to come back 20 minutes later cuz one of the pedals came off. Lucky for him he wasn’t halfway home or something, stuck with a bike he couldn’t ride. My honey will have to see if he can fix that. I’m not a bike fixer upper person.

I got some cheque from the government for $141 – I don’t know what it’s for and they never want to tell me, so I just cashed it. It’s my spending money this week. If I can stick to that I will have made it through the week with money left in my bank account – no overdraft *woohoo*.

More good news… I found the receipt for that new printer I bought. I couldn’t find it and there’s the $60 rebate. So I found it today – the rebate ends tomorrow – so I spent $7 to have Canada Post deliver it next day. So I’ll still score $50, good for me. For a while I thought I’d mistakenly given the receipt to the girl at work, thinking that I had work receipts on me. Stupid me, I ended up putting it away where I put the cards away, instead of where I put the receipts away.

So now my honey’s gonna go and top up the groceries, we’re out of salad and celery and other crap that I take with me for lunch. And I’m gonna go wash my face. Perhaps I’ll peruse the television and see if I fluke into something that we watch but have forgotten that we watch. Aging = cruelty.

Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Isn’t that the way it works?

I arranged to have tomorrow off. Those replace the car window before 9:00 guys did not show up here before 9:00. Assholes. So to take care of things, I asked if there was anything urgent going on at work and there wasn’t, so I arranged tomorrow off.

Amongst one of those things I will take care of is the fact that my driver’s licence is expired. I went to check on that today since they never sent me a new one from the time I was changing to the bus driver class. When I checked on it the guy told me that I’d have to go to a testing centre and do the whole eye test renewal thing cuz it’s been over a year.

So, get this. I’ve been driving with an expired licence for over a year. Not a good thing if you were to get pulled over. So tomorrow I will go up to a testing center not far from where I live and do that crap too.

As I was checking my email when I got home, I noticed that up in the top right-hand corner of my 17″ flat screen monitor, there were a whole bunch of stripey looking lines. I figured I’d reboot but instead I shut down.

Well, my monitor had a big rectangle of light and stripey lines up in the right-hand corner. I went through my receipt file and found the receipt. I bought this thing last March – just over a year ago, I think it was the 17th.

I also bought an extended warranty for $50 bucks. As I looked at the extended warranty tonight it had a checkmark beside “repair” not “replace”. So tomorrow I will also be taking my monitor to Staples to see if they are going to replace it.

The thing is, I don’t want a 17″ replacement. I now want a 19″ flat screen. So I don’t want that repair me buckos, I want a credit for a replacement and top it up to make it a 19″. I looked at the price I paid for this 17″ monitor just over a year ago and it was $479 before tax, plus the $50 warranty. Add the little $20 screensaver I also bought at the time and my bill was $646.25 for a monitor that has lasted a year. I’m not impressed.

Let me tell you all about what happens tomorrow after tomorrow arrives. For now I saw online that American Idol voting was fucked up last night. We missed it cuz we thought it wasn’t on til 9:00, and after our night of escapades, waited til 9:00 to turn on the TV and found it listed at 8:00.

But the good thing is that, because the voting was fucked up, apparently they’re redoing the show with half clips: half redone songs and leaving the voting for tomorrow night. So we’ll get to see the show after all.

I think I’m in a state of depression and I don’t know if it’s all about the car window break-in thing, but it’s another reason I wanted to take tomorrow off work.

I felt done in today like I just wanted to go to bed and stay there. Forever. I kept thinking about giving up my life and renting a room somewhere. Just a room by myself with my computer and large TV. Being a cashier at a grocery store or something and working all day, and going home to bed.

Other than my thoughts of becoming a recluse, I also thought that if I’d had a gun, I’d just shoot myself in the fucking head right there in the smoking room at work. Yes, that’s where I was having these thoughts. I didn’t even care whether or not the smoker-friends would have some grisly sight to witness, or a mess was left to clean up. Recluse/gun… decisions, decisions.

So anyway, I think it’s good that I’ll be off tomorrow and just take care of things that need to be taken care of. Maybe when I wake up in the morning – with, hopefully, mucho sleeping in time, I’ll be in a better frame of mind.

Oh, and one of my credit cards sent me a letter today to tell me that they’ve increased my limit. I suppose I could buy that iPod now if I want it.

So I was working until 9:30 and just made it through the door. Stupid assholes waiting til the last minute, then when something’s fucked up… who gets to stay and wait for the right stuff?

Today was the best day I’ve had this week with this cold. I actually slept last night after having 7 lite beers. That stuff’s better than medicine let me tell ya. But on the way home it seemed like the cold symptoms were really starting to kick in again. Unfortunately, there are only 4 beers there. I hope that’ll be enough ‘medicine’ to keep me asleep again tonight and well into the morning.

That’s my honey’s fault that there’s no beer there. He’s supposed to be looking after me. He’s supposed to tell me if I’m running low on beer. He’d be in big trouble if I didn’t feel so bad that he lost his purse tonight.

Yes, he met me downtown again since I told him I’d be working til at least 6:00. So he got down there and came up to my office to wait for the arrivals of my packages for Sunday. We waited hours longer because once again something was screwed up and it had to go back to be redone.

So Emmet, my honey and I took the stuff over to the supplier and decided while we waited for the new product, we’d stop for dinner (Emmett was buying because of all the problems). We went to Young Thailland at Adelaide and Church. Apparently it’s the first thai restaurant in Canada. And you know what? It was good.

I got the spring roll appetizer which came with 5 little spring rolls for about $5, so we could all share in that. The sauce for that was great. It was a clear sweet sauce which was very hot. They said they made it themselves since I was looking to buy some to take home.

We all ordered #28 which was a spicy noodle dish. There was way too much food, so I brought 3/4 of it home with me for another day – along with some of that spring roll sauce.

At some point on our way back to the office my honey lost his purse. He went back to the restaurant – not there. Back to the suppliers – not there. He’s screwed. Now he has to phone all the credit card places, he’s got no bank cards to get out any money, yada yada, you know, the usual stuff when your purse is gone.

So I’ll be easy on him for not reminding me to get some beer. And hopefully, since I’m starting to feel a little worse for wear after my 13-hour day, I’ll have a nice deep sleep, regardless of the cold and lack of medicine.