we went to bed about 3am and I forgot to post a blog entry overnight. I took that sleeping pill again about 2am and mostly after lunch I just worked on scene #15 of F. I enjoyed that and I’ll be working on more scenes after brunch. Well it’s a late brunch for us and a late supper around 10pm. So from 3pm-10pm I have 7 hours of uninterrupted writing goodness.

I woke up about 7:15am to do the cbi thing and with that pill still in my system and back to bed about 7:30am. I slept good from 7:30am-about noon and dozed off for a bit but woke up around 1:45pm. So, I had a good 3.5 hours before the cbi thing and good 5.5 maybe 6 hours after that. I needed the sleep. About 2-4 times week I don’t sleep very well. The days I don’t sleep very well, are days I’d like to go in for the mornings. Maybe 2-3 mornings/week. If I don’t do well and Rob pulls me away from my dialer, I’ll do the afternoon shift instead to make up for it. But the mornings I do, well, then great, I’ll have the afternoon/evening off. We’ll see. I long for those good old days at Cobogo warehouse from1982-1988. Those 6 years were great. This is from yesterday afternoon:

I went into work this morning and I had a nice trip in. Weather conditions just beautiful. I had my Clash tunes going on and I felt good going in. At Tim’s I picked up my breakfast sandwich headed into the office sat at my dialer and enjoyed that. Gary (one of the new guys) came along to take the dialer beside me. I should have had Edgar sit beside me. Anyhow they were giving away bonus money for a credit card draw. I should have wrote up a hard copy from yesterday (I’ve always meant to do this) on hard copy because Will might have pulled something like this. I should have known better. Anyway, with the hard copy when I get a not in service number, I can edit a new screen add the credit card number into the screen change the name on the screen and everything else with it. Input the credit card but that would mean deleting the original name and start him up on a new one. I’d only do this if within the last say half hour that I don’t have a credit card I can use one from last night. They would never know the difference anyway. It’s a little sneaky but it gives me a chance for a draw for a bonus. Some of the tricks of the trade. Anyway, the first half went by really fast. I can’t believe that Gary, who’s never done this kind of call center work before claims he’s getting $11/hour and that Rob’s starting some people in business off at $13/hr. Or so he claims. I doubt that. The first half went along just great. Second half I was feeling drained and tired. Gary beside me and Lev on the other side were laughing and giggling throwing me off balance affecting my calls. I won’t let him sit there next Saturday or evening the evening beside me. Anyway, I tried like blazes to get a credit card but it wasn’t my day it seems. We got out of there at about 2:45pm. It was really nice out there on my way to Corona station. I got the train home, to tired to read, even waiting for the bus to leave. I got home about 2 hours ago feeling no worse for wear. Still from yesterday afternoon:

I went to my email and I got a email from Markus. I responded to that and I decided I may as well do the website stuff now. I edited the “Hobbies” page and he’s got the URL’s for 3 pages that will be linked to Miscellaneous. Everything works well right up until Archives. I’ve also got a friends page(for now) for “Friends menu.” I’m considering another menu called Meta and this will have things like Reading/Writing and my links will go under reading and writing I might want to put the WIP bars in there. Under Miscellaneous I’m going to have the following: Hobbies, My music, Politics.

The rest of Sunday: My best years were 1974-1975, 1978-88, 1990-94, 2000-present. In 1974-75, I was working at the A&N in New Westminster. I was sad to see that job go. It was a bit hectic for me during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s but I had Theresa there for awhile from 1981-82 then I began work at Cobogo after she left me until I got moved to the store and in March got fired from my job. I struggled from 1989-1990 and even as I was working through ACT from 1990-1994 I still struggled and was on and off welfare just to get groceries and to pay the rent. Dan my Sun paper carrier screwed the job up for me by putting a note under my door the same day a welfare case worker was supposed to come by and interview me. Because I owed Dan money or he thought I did as our records conflicted with each other he was paying me $30/week under the table. Because there was no paper trail of this I didn’t think it counted as income so I didn’t report it to welfare at the time until they saw the note under my door that day. Bad timing on Dan’s part.

Of course now The Edmonton Sun and Journal don’t have their own carriers now. They outsourced this to a third party. I’ve been tinkering with the idea of getting a paper route and doing that for the exercise and extra cash but it’s up every morning at around 4:30am. If we had a car we could make an extra $500/month. I’m usually up every morning at 6am to do the cbi thing. If this route could generate me $100 week, then it would be worthwhile. There are no more collections with this third party. They put the money directly into your bank account. When I had that route in 1997 hard to believe it was 10 years ago. I could have been working with Xl back then and the route. Danny had somebody do the collections for me. I wouldn’t mind doing a route right now since I’m up at that hour most everyday anyway but I’m not in the same kind of shape as I once was. But if I could get someone to drop the papers off here for me and give me a buss, then I could go do the apartments here and some houses.

For all I know, there may be 50 people here that take the Sun and the Journal. It might be worth looking into. If it’s just the apartments here, it’d be easy to do. Take the elevator to the top floor and work down. I think there is somebody doing it here but in these days of worker shortage and all you never know. I’m going to look into it. If there is a vacancy and it won’t conflict with our plans to get housing assistance, and if Anne won’t mind. Then great. Besides, it will give me free papers throughout the week. But if it’s all mostly inside work, the it might be something to think about. I once said, I wouldn’t do any more carrier jobs ever again but I need a 2nd source of income. There are a lot of scams out there as well. Most of these work from home jobs are scams or they apply mostly from in the states.

Anne and I were talking about doing telemarketing from home as she said she had a chat with somebody from a major Pizza franchise here in Canada that they were using their own home computer as a call center. The company provides the software interface and all they do is wait for the calls to come in and submit the order to the company. There are lots of work from home options but to weed them all out is the hard part.

e. Jim