New blog!

I finally got the new site up and mostly running. You’ll find it right over here.

Update your links!

For Dave

Happy birthday, sweetie!

May your beets grow well and may you find many large rocks in your hat.

Smitty’s

We made a short venture to the city today to look for an ice cream maker for Dave’s birthday. We didn’t find one, but one helpful employee from the Bay told us to check back around Christmas time. Because what better time to make ice cream, right? Why are these things unavailable when people actually want to eat ice cream? We’ll find one online somewhere.

But the lowlight (I refuse to suggest it might have been anything close to a highlight) was breakfast at Smitty’s. Dave was starving when we got in. I was hungry. All we could see on the one road I was willing to venture down were giant chains that didn’t have much to do with breakfast. I shudder to think what East Side Mario’s breakfast menu looks like, or what the Beer Hunter was offering before noon (or any time of the day, for that matter. Their website screams class). There I am, watching out for giant vehicles who are obviously doing things much more important than watching where they’re going.

Rules of Order and Things You Shouldn’t Name Children

• I’m going into my third week of the new job. I’ve gotten over the initial anxiety (which appears to have been compounded by drinking multiple large mugs of tea throughout the day) and I seem to be settling in just fine. It’s the sort of general office work I’ve been trying to find for years. No customers, no telephones, my own desk that I could put a plant on, if we had access to natural light.
• Whenever someone sits down and starts talking to me, I’m overwhelmed with the urge to take minutes. I’m one step away from naming my firstborn Henry Martyn Robert.
• Dave learned a valuable lesson about kosher salt and cookie dough.
• He also learned a valuable lesson about how much tea should go in the teapot.
• We’ve come to a decision about the car. Last night, I was asked where we were going to take it. Out behind the barn, was all I could think to say. But since we don’t have a barn, we’re going to have it towed off to the auto wrecker’s and see what can be done with it. More specifically, see if they’ll give us anything for it. Then we’ll get something a little better. I’m thinking about a small truck – because no one ever asks us if we can help them move.
• Looking forward to my first pay next Tuesday. Yes, Tuesday is a weird day to get paid, but it actually works out pretty well.
• In other news, I’d like to declare this the Summer of the Evil Landlord. Cam and her family just got some miserable news and Chris and Kristy aren’t having any luck either.

Curses

The curse of blogging seems to be that there’s all kinds of time to write when there’s nothing interesting happening. Then the moment something interesting starts, you’re too busy to write about it.

Fortunately, this is a long weekend.

Unfortunately, I’m a ‘casual’ employee, so I doubt I’ll see any money for it.

From the Archives: Double-Double

(We had some trouble with the Tim Horton’s back home last summer!)

There’s a woman who works at the drive-through of the closest Tim Hortons, where we stop for coffee, tea, headaches, and doughnuts. I don’t want to use her real name, so let’s call her, say, July. She’s an older woman with greying red hair and six metric tonnes of rouge used like a putty to fill the cracks, who looks like she’d be a doddering old grandmother, but since she works at Tim Horton’s, she’s a doddering old Tim Hortons employee who is taking far too long to figure out how to toast a bagel – something she does every morning at 7:00am when we pull through. If her IQ ever hits 50, she should sell. She is the only person I’ve ever met that speaks the Queen’s English but still manages to sound like she’s not the sharpest knife in the chandalier. She has screwed up countless orders. Part of this is our fault for going there over and over again (fool me once, shame on you; fool me eight or more times, shame on me), but the other part is definitely hers.

Mechanical Options

There are three options we have for fixing our car.

1. Attempt to drive it out to Jim the Mechanic, who lives a fair distance from town. He knows his stuff. He knows cars like ours. We could probably make it. Maybe.
2. Take it to Canadian Tire, which is about four blocks from here. They’re likely more expensive and I kind of doubt they’ll know their stuff like Jim the Mechanic does. But it’s close and we can definitely make it there.
3. Give the car a proper Viking Funeral.

S-M-R-T

I talked to my mom this morning and she told me about a conversation she had with a government agency, which, of course, I have to tell you all about.

Having just moved, she was calling to change their address, just in case said agency needed to send them anything.

“I’m sorry,” the agent on the other end of the phone said. “But our computers are down. I can’t change your address. Would you like me to mail you the forms?”

“Wouldn’t you need the new address for that?” Mom asked curiously.

“Oh no. We’ll just mail them to the old address.”

***

So I’m sitting at my desk this afternoon, fresh from a second meeting. I’m putting the info into a lovely template that requires multi-level bullets. No problem. I’ve done this repeatedly. So what I’ve got all the way down the page is a line of text, each point beginning with a number. Then below it and indented are a series of other notes relating to the first note, and all of these being with a lower case letter. Then, indented again, are notes for those notes, which all start with Roman numerals.

Everything is going along just fine until I hit the letter N. I get those notes in and try to move on to the next point. Only the auto-formatting in Word has decided it doesn’t want to do what it’s done with all of the points before it. It’s not correcting the indents or the spacing or lining anything up. I’m getting irritated. I stare at it, but it refuses to fix itself. So I threaten it. Then I stare at it as I threaten it. I ask a co-worker if they know what’s going on. They’re as confused as I am.

It takes a few minutes, but I find a way to get the next point to show up as a bullet the way I want it to. But then I notice the letter. There’s an O. And it occurs to me that O does indeed come after N. No wonder I couldn’t get it to accept M as a proper bullet.

It would appear there’s a gap in my education.

Forecasts

If your forecast shows fire, maybe it’s time to leave.

(Actually, it means local smoke from the Kelowna fire, but it’s never inspiring to look at the weather report and instead of sun or clouds, there’s fire.)

Casual-Casual

I’m used to jobs where employees are watched with the same suspicion that a 17 year-old boy in an oversize hoodie picking through CD is treated to. One job so closely monitored our breaks and lunches that if we were two minutes late leaving, we had to fill out a form and get it signed by a manager. When my review came up, the manager nailed me for being 15 minutes late one morning. She knew I arrived early – we had an extended conversation about Tupperware in the lunch room – but was locked out of the computer and had to wait for someone to come down – but I forgot to fill out the form. Another job required employees to enter codes whenever they did anything, so middle management could make all sorts of charts, showing how no one works very hard.