Anne got a call from her place of work saying Friday’s shift is canceled and same for the weekend. She wasn’t to happy. She asked about the following week if they could guarantee her work for next week. They confirmed a yes. That’s the trouble with research jobs. So, she made me some lunch of hamburger helper. She makes it too chunky.

I managed to get some H writing in as well before lunch..

My wife went down to pay our rent for February as she was heading out to pick up her cheque. So she comes back after she pays our rent and says how the caretaker had a chart showing the price differences between the various apartments. She said the 2 bedrooms are going for $865/month and she looked at me like this was the end of the world. We’re paying $815/month. I said something like, "A $50 difference, that’s not so bad.” She tore a strip out of me like I spoke blasphemy. Holy shit. That woman needs a dose of reality. People would kill to have a 2 bedroom at $865/month, and she’s complaining!? If all we get is a $50 rental increase, we’re getting off lucky. I don’t think this will be the case though. Most 2 bedroom apartments in the city are renting out at around $1,200-$1,600 month. If you can find one! Good luck, in this market? She should take a look at city apartment rents in the paper for a 2 bedroom. Boardwalk is charging $2,000, $1,500 for a 1 bedroom and $1,000 for a studio. My old place I used to live at during the 1980’s was a studio. I paid $250/month in 1985. When I left out of there it was $320 in 1995. I’d love to know how much the rent is there now. I’m pretty sure the old place is a Boardwalk site. If it is, rent for my little studio is most likely $1,000/month today.

Anyway, I took my $20 and the $60 for my February bus pass and headed out to catch my bus. A small delay and I went to the Redi Mart for my February bus pass at. The Redi Mart is a small store for pop, cigarettes, coffee and candy that sore of thing. And transit passes and lotto tickets. Yikes, the monthly bus pass went up to $66.50 from $59. They went up $7. This was not totaly unexpected. I didn't know exactly when, so the increase was a bit of s surprise. I recall back in 1978 a monthly ETS transit pass was $18! A single fare ride was a quarter. We do get a bit of a tax break on transit passes. I think the difference is one bus pass. Every bit helps.

So I go in and get settled into my dialer and there’s Rob leaving out. So I needed to talk to him about the credit card OTH screw up from when we did that last Tuesday. But after all my ranting he said he’s not in charge of it. That’s Brendan’s project. He also said “I don’t know if I want to talk to a guy that only works 20 hours/week.” Yeah well how about talking to a guy that banked 90% of his ytd gross income from credit card sales alone from last year? That’s what I should have said to shut him up. So, I’ll be talking to Brendan in the morning so we get last weeks credit card points straitened out. I like Brendan. He’s an alright guy.

JT and Garry were on the other side of the post. I sat in Pats old dialer station #11. The calls were coming in slow for everyone. I managed to get some reading in. I like slow nights like that. I ended up with $250 on the shift. I even forgot about putting on the radio for the Oiler’s game. Greg had called from home chatting with Moe and I knew Greg was watching the game. Moe gave me the score. 1-0 but it was the end of the first period or something like that.

I gave in and decided I’d still ask for credit cards. My goal is a 1-1 ratio vs. what I bank in credit cards to what Xl pays me. Last year I was 1-2, barely 1-1. If I can qualify for CPP and I get it, then I'll be going to Rob for a sallery increase. If he can't get me to $15, I'm gone.

I was glad to get out of the office at about 8:15pm with my miserable total. Anne had called earlier saying how she was going to give me $90 for my Lodge dues for next week. Thanks honey. I‘m trying to impress upon my wife that my Lodge dues are $100/year but she still thinks they're $90. They were increased as of last year. Just now as I talked about this she handed me the $90. She short changed me $7 on my bus pass and $10 on my lodge dues. So now I’ve got to save the $10 I’ve got here for the rest of my dues. This means I’ll be short for the festive board next week. I’ve got about $5 in change on me. Maybe I can give the secretary $90 and he’ll give me a receipt. I can always fudge on the receipt and give it to Roger at the emergent meeting. The other thing is I could just owe the festive board. I can hold onto this $100 until Thursday no problem.

When I got home I watched what was left over of the Oiler’s hosting Dallas game. It was 2-1 Dallas in the 3rd with 14 minutes remaining. Not to bad. But the Oiler’s had given up two power play goals and lost to an empty net goal 4-1 in those 14 minutes. Ethan Morrow was playing outstanding. To be fair they had Rolly in net. The Oiler’s aren’t going to get into the play offs with just one goal/game. The good news is that Chicago is at SJ (Saturday). Come on SJ!

That’s all for now. I’ll update this in the morning.

Well it's morning. The above was written about 8 hours ago. I had a good sleep despite having to pee almost every 40 minutes or so. But I'm up now and I have my first coffee going here. I love Saturdays.

I fired up the computer and got to my website and hey, hey, Markus changed my theme to the gamesavers theme I wanted. Some problems occure: Firstly it took out my Google ad. The "Worlds of science fiction and fantasy in your face" under my name is almost to dark to read. I'm going to see if we can replace that with some kind of gray font to match the logo above. The logo itself looks sloppy. I've got to get a better logo eventually. To be fair I did some alteration on it about a year ago and enlarged the logo. Also the menues don't work. I'll be addressing this with Markus over the weekend. Most likely there's an email in my Inbox waiting me about this. I'll get to that before I leave this morning. But overall I'm happy with the new look. I have some issues with the logo, menus and the ad.

The other thing I wanted to mention is I completed my 2nd chapter of H yesterday after the Oiler/Stars game. I got 1,170 words in and I'm happy with what I got. Overall, I'm sitting at 5,469 words. I want to try and bring it up to 8,000 words by the end of the weekend.

I'm determined to go into work for a couple of afternoons next week. Maybe 3. The problem I had with doing that last Spring is my insulin. I'm still not comfortable leaving it in the fridge at work in the business section and having to ask who evers in charge to let me get my insulin so I can take my shot. This doesn't work very well. So, I'm considering taking my insulin at noon just before I leave out of here for the afternoon shift. Most likely Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

Today however, I'm bringing my reward points with me. I figure that I can get a couple of books and the unused portion of the certificates will make up for the festive board. Two books will run me about $25 out of 3/4 certificates. I'll get the change out of that. Lunch will be less then $10 I'll get the change out of the last $10 certificate. Hopefully I'll have about $10 for the festive board. Because Lodge night is Thursday, I'm going in for Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. That will give me something like 28.5 hours. It's going to be intersting monitoring my bsl reading because I'll be taking my insulin about 2 hours earlier. It's going to be a bit of an experiment doing this. I'll know if something goes wrong by about 7-8pm. If my bsl reading doesn't change much then taking the shot earlier won't be to much of a deal.

Today (I hope) it's go into work get my Tim's breakfast sandwich put my 4 hours in and go (I hope) to City Center mall with those reward points. Do my business there and come home have a nap. Since there's no Oiler game on this weekend, I'll be following the Chicago at SJ game tonight. The big game for Oiler fans coming up is when Calgary comes to town and that's on Monday but I'll be at work for that one because it's Lodge night this week and if all goes well, I'll have my dues paid up and enough for the festive board.

Most likely this will be the last post for today but I might pop in later tonight and post an entry, we'll see.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

e. Jim