I took that travel pill about 2am this morning and Anne and I didn’t get to bed until 3am. Coast was pretty good talking about (for a bit there) the assassination of Pakistan’s opposition leader Benazir Bhutto

few days ago. I didn’t know anything about her until the assassination, to be honest. But the fall out of this is apparently causing quite a disturbance in the middle east. Surprisingly though it’s not causing huge jumps in the price of Oil. Still holding at $96 and change, for December? Wow.

We shut it down after that and passed out. Just so J knows, here’s a shot I took of the empty box J. We only take them once a week.

I got up about 7am feeling really groggy thanks to the travel pill. I was back in bed by 7:15am and I slept steady until 1:40pm. A good 6 hours and 40 minutes. I’ve been up for an hour now. I had a good 9 hours sleep.

Last night I was learning the chords to the opening part of Star Wars. You know how it goes. I know the Imperial March. Star Wars (1977) arguably is still the best science fiction movie of all time. Even the ones after that are still pretty good but nothing can match the first 3. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of good science fiction movies out there. See my list under the science fiction menu running at the top. But I learned the first three chords or parts to the song. It’s not easy. The two G’s are causing me some problems because my hands are to tight with cracking my knuckles for over 35 years but I’ve got the finger placement right and to do it. I need a lot more practice.

Because I have 3 days off I’m going to use them wisely. After brunch I’m going to work on my short story. After that probably some more practice, then work some more on the story/and or HT. I haven’t developed the characters enough for HT and this is what I’d like to do for the rest of the day.

Have to admit it. The Oilers are sucking lately. This makes it now there 5th game they’ve lost in a row. They had a 4-1 lead and they let the Wild come back from behind to win the game 5-4 in OT. Rollison was playing (from the highlights) unbelievable. Pitkanen got injured. Ethan Morrow is back on the ice and assisted in Cogliano’s 7th. I doubt the Oilers are going to have any 30+ goal scorers this year and there’s a good chance they might not make the playoffs. Or if they do, barely might make the playoffs. Only if they get a winning streak and they could be flirting in early April with one or 2 points from a playoff spot. As usually I think the Oilers might if they are lucky squeak into a playoff spot. Sad part about it is I like this team.

It’s a cold December day here in Edmonton. -14C. Well it’s not that cold and the there’s no wind chill. But if you have to be outside waiting for a bus for half an hour, it’s going to get cold fast and you’ll feel it. I’m not really out in it for any length of time anyway. I feel sorry for the homeless out there and I’m not looking forward to the possibility of a huge rental increase Anne and I are going to be faced with next week. The good news is any land lord can not raise the rent more then once/year. Bad news is they can raise it to what ever they want. First thing I’m going to do on Wednesday when I get back to work is bring the employment part of the form into Rob and have him sign it. I could have done it yesterday but I didn’t know if he would be in the office. So once the form is signed great. As soon as the dreaded note is under the door and Anne’s panicking is settled down, we go through the rest of the form and get things in motion. I think what’s going on here is apartment owners that can’t for some reason convert apartments into condo’s are going to raise the rent to match the cost of a mortgage. In 20 years I’ll be in a senior’s home anyway so it won’t really matter. What matters though is right now. A lot of senior’s have just their pension money to live on. In 20 years from now (unless I get a book sold or a major contract, yeah right.) That’s all I’ll have. Hindsight is great and all but the first thing I should have done when mom and some of the kids went to Edmonton in 1973 is I should have went with them. I wanted a job with Canada Post at the time but I couldn’t pass their math test. (For a glorified carrier job? Yeesh.) Today with the Internet and all and if I had access to the Internet back in 1995, I could have passed most of those courses. Well partnering up with a buddy in the class helps out as well. I’m okay with some math like fractions polynomials and that sort of thing. The stuff that always bugged me was the “If Bob has two apples and he travels forty miles to give Jane one eighth of an Apple how,“ well you get the idea.

Anyway, that’s all for now

e. Jim