Ok, this is the strangest movie that you’ll ever see.

Our hero (Christian Slater) is a recently famous self-help book writer, who’s fallen in love with a gorgeous blonde he doesn’t really know too well – although he doesn’t know that. After announcing his engagement at a public event, the pair are mugged outside and the girlfriend is kidnapped/killed, we don’t know what’s going on.

Christian is told by her lawyer that after a year has passed, he will inherit the dead girlfriend’s stuff, so we then see him after a year. After the year, he finally takes his friend’s advice and starts dating again.

This movie is way too obvious. We know that the new girlfriend is a bad guy who is probably just after the diamond’s the dead girlfriend has stolen from Cuba Gooding Jr. – we found that out in the lawyer’s office once our hero left and the bad guys came in to cut off the lawyer’s finger in a paper shredder.

It’s also not totally unexpected that SPOILER ALERT: the girlfriend is not really dead and comes back to save Christian from the bad guys and collect and share the diamonds with him.

The ending was really dippy. I wouldn’t bother even renting this if I were you. You hope that it’s going to turn into something and it doesn’t.

I think my cold has completely gone away, I don’t feel sick in any way, however, I still do have this cough and I’m thinking that it’s as a result of quitting smoking – not the cold. So I think that my lungs are trying to break up WvTF is in there and get rid of it, so I’ll say that’s the reason I’ve still got a cough now.

I’m just waiting – hanging around until it’s time to go to Aquafit. I don’t normally do it on Mondays cuz the woman sucks – she gets down into the water with you where you can’t see an effing thing she’s doing. How are you supposed to figure it out that way? Anyway, I’m just going to that cuz I figured I’ve got to work out when I’m doing the weights and machines so that I’ll have a day off in between doing those to rest the muscles, and since there are no good classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays, I’m going to use those days as the weight days, which meant I had to do a class tonight.

In the 8-9 weeks I’ve been working out again, I haven’t seen any results in my body. I still feel like a big fat pig (and look like one) and I’m a little disappointed in that. I’ve got to get using the weights and machines in order to make a difference and I obviously haven’t been doing that enough.

And I’m also going to be tracking my eating since I know we started snacking at night since we quit smoking (anything for that constant hand to mouth habit). I think I’m going to have to chew more gum and forget about having some popcorn when we’re watching TV, especially since we don’t even pay attention to how much we put into the bowl.

Of course I could have given up beer and that might make all the difference in the world. But on my way home from work tonight, I decided that we should have some beer in the house – what’s a house without beer (my beer… my honey’s got some). If I can get it through my thick skull that I’m going to lay off beer for a while, then maybe I could knock some serious calories out of my weekly diet and actually see some results from all the working out.

Anyway, enough ranting. I should try to do something productive before I go to the club. Like maybe playing farmville or something.

Well the cold is not quite all gone – I have a cough now, just like when I smoked, but at least it’s a helluva lot better. I even went to work out again last night for the first time in a week. I took it a bit easy and just did a little warm up and then the machines – gotta build those muscles if I ever want my body to turn into a fat burning machine. I hope the cough hurries up and goes away – its kinda disappointing to have a cough again. I’d gotten used to it being gone.

Anyway, I’ve got a meeting tonight at 7:00. The good thing is that I don’t have to go all the way downtown for it, they booked a spot up here close to me. According to google, the fastest route for me to get to the meeting will take 8 minutes, and the longest route will take me 12 minutes. So I’m taking my sweet time, having a tea and dinner (I had a turkey breast sandwich on whole wheat) and then I’ll probably head out around 6:30. These are those meetings with the yappy people. But I think they’ve given the boot to one (or at least that’s what we all agreed to at last meeting) and one is away on vacation, so perhaps things will go quickly.

The problem when I get home around 9 or 10:00 at night is that I start my 8 or 9:00 routine of sitting and relaxing in front of the TV. So all of a sudden it’s 11:00 and I haven’t had enough time to relax in order to go to sleep, so I have to stay up til at least 12:00. It screws my timing right up.

Oh, and BTW, I’ve never liked whole wheat bread. I’ve never liked the taste of it although I’ve eaten it before they came out with multigrain, just because it was supposed to be ‘good for you’.

The last couple of days for lunch I’ve had a tuna sandwich on whole wheat bread and, you know what? It was delicious. I’ve been liking this whole wheat bread. It’s Wonder bread! Wonder Plus, 100% Whole Wheat Bread! And it’s got 190 calories for 2 slices with 4 grams of fibre there and only 4 grams of sugar. That’s not bad. There’s another kind of bread that I’ve been eating mostly – I think it’s called Body Wise – which has fewer calories and more fibre, but as far as a whole wheat taste goes, I think I’d stick with this one for a change every now and then.

Ok, I guess somebody better start paying me sponsor money or something for those kind of plugs

Don’t ask me why, but the other night when my daughter stayed over here, my snookey and I were sucking back beer like it was going out of style.

I guess since I drink lite beer, it didn’t have as much an effect on me as it had on him – or perhaps because he switched to vodka after he was out of beer, it had a more profound effect on him.

Needless to say, that he was quite the sight in the morning. I think he was still quite drunk.

He was going out to the store (to buy my daughter cigarettes since she was all out) but he was getting dressed the wrong way. He had his sweatshirt on backwards and he was trying to pull on another sweatshirt as a pair of pants. I watched him for a while and then I told him that the sweatshirt wasn’t pants.

He was out and he called us to ask how she takes her coffee, to which I told him that he wasn’t getting coffee, he was supposed to be getting cigarettes, but he couldn’t find any place to get them.

He got back home and I decided that I would go to the store instead – helluva lot safer and faster. As a matter of fact I probably shouldn’t have let him near the car (especially since it was my car first), but at the time I just thought he was still half asleep and would wake out of it, I wasn’t thinking that he was drunk. Now I think I know the difference.

Anyway, he went to couch and stayed there until 11:30. I started cooking up a weekend brunch and he got up to eat that. Then he laid out on the couch and slept til about 3:30, whereupon I asked him if he planned to spend any of the day awake. He told me he hadn’t been sleeping, but I also told him that I heard him snoring from the computer room, so that foiled that little white lie.

All this just says that I guess old people can’t drink. I know he used to be able to pack ‘em away, but not now.

As you know, not feeling good over here, but I guess I’m better today than I have been. I’ve stopped taking all the medication, just because I’d like the stone out of my system before I show up for work on Monday.

Anyway, last night, while I was sitting here minding my own business, there was a knock on the door. It was my daughter and she was in tears, and there was my ex-husband behind, chasing her up the stairs.

There was screaming and yelling – I told them to come in, I’m sure the neighbours didn’t need to be part of this. As I gleaned what the story was through all the yelling, it turns out that the drunken ex-husband (who not only drove here drunk with my daughter in the car, but also had an accident earlier on in the evening), was accusing my daughter of stealing all his roaches. Supposedly he had about 10 roaches in his car and they were gone, so he was accusing her of taking them.

She told him he could search her, she didn’t take them, but he was having none of any normal conversation. As a matter of fact he once grabbed her and made like he was going to punch her – while half falling over my furniture, and I pulled him off. I also asked him if he wanted me to call the police.

There was another altercation when he came back screaming for her to give him his house keys, he wanted her out of there, she could go live on the streets. I told him that she wouldn’t be giving the keys back, that all her stuff was there and that she’d need to go get it.

So, needless to say, my daughter stayed here overnight, we got calmed down, watched some TV and all went to bed.

As I think back on it, it’s not that I was surprised by this outburst, nor even him showing up here – I seem to be the go-to person in bad situations.

I was just thinking though, what a big fucking nerve he has to show up at my house, drunk, putting me in the middle of his problems – not even thinking about me being sick, although he knew I was sick. It’s all about him. What a pathetic loser he is. While he wasn’t this bad when we were married, the potential was there and is there in full force now that he doesn’t have a wife to tell him what’s right and wrong. And how sad is that for a 47-year-old man?

I got a phone call from him this morning, which I didn’t answer. I was trying to sleep in some more for my cold. Then another call later which I answered and he proceeded to tell me that “I guess I overreacted a bit last night”. Over reacted? A bit? WTF is wrong with you is what I wanted to say. WTF is wrong with you?! However, he probably doesn’t even remember half of it, but he wanted me to tell my daughter to give him a call later on because he’d left some money for her at home since he was going away for the weekend.

It’s very hard for me to believe I was ever married to that guy. I tried for 8 years, and I’m very thankful that I got out.

I’ve been off work now for two days with this stinking cold. Now my throat doesn’t hurt any more, something deeper in my throat hurts, so when I cough, it’s not a surface pain, it’s a pain deep into my chest – only not quite at my chest (yet).

I tried to stay in bed all morning and succeeded, however, it’s not like I was sleeping. I was just laying there. I think these drugs I’m taking are keeping me awake. I don’t have a good reaction to dextramethorphan – gets me stoned – and apparently keeps me awake. Just what you want when you’re sick, to stay awake and revel in your illness.

Anyway, I’m drinking my neo citran – is that more lemony than it used to be? I tell ya, that tastes just like a lemon to me now, I thought it used to be a sickeningly sweet kinda lemony taste – not now, it’s puckering me up.

Needless to say I haven’t worked out since Tuesday. I haven’t had a shower since Tuesday (ewww). Wow, I didn’t realize that. However, that explains why my hair looks so good.

Ok, maybe I’ll have a shower in a little while. I’ll wait til these chills stop happening and then go run a really hot shower, come out and put my nightgown, and robe, and slippers, and maybe a blanket on me. Now that you bring it up, the computer room seems a little chilly.

I think I mentioned that I’ve had the sore scratchy throat ever since I quit smoking. Well the other night I got about an hour’s sleep because somebody kept snoring the whole fucking night through, and I kept yelling, “somebody, stop snoring!” but that would only work for a couple of minutes and then he’d be right back at it.

So I went out into the living room, thinking that I’d sleep there. However, my body was not in the mood for more sleeping after I’d already had an hour’s sleep. On top of that, I kept feeling itchy. So I’d relax, trying to talk myself into sleep (or hypnotize myself) and then I’d be itchy – this stupid dry winter weather has done that.

After realizing I wouldn’t sleep, I got on the computer and played some of those facebook games. After exhausting that option I went back to the living room and turned the TV on. So at around 5:00 in the morning, I did get back to sleep – so I could wake up at 5:45 to get ready for work.

Anyway, it was downhill from there. I felt like crap at work. My scratchy throat was really, really sore and I had given my throat spray to my daughter who showed up with a cold one day looking for medicine. I was drifting off to sleep at times during the day and I felt like going home.

So I went off to the doctor last night to see if he could give me something for the throat. He said there was no infection (I was expecting him to say I had tonsilitis since I used to get that so often in my life). He didn’t even prescribe anything…. ummm, hello, my throat is really, really sore, that’s why I’m here. He did tell me to go and get an ultrasound done and gave me a paper to take with me. I called them but that’s not scheduled now for another week.

So I stopped to get some chloraseptic spray – numbs your throat – and picked up some chloraseptic lozenges which also seem to work somewhat that way. I put the humidifier on in the bedroom last night and forced my snookey to sleep on the couch instead of me to see if I could get some sleep.

The good thing was that I went to bed at 11:00, slept the whole night through and was up and at em at 6:00 this morning. The bad thing was that the humidifier didn’t do anything for my throat, and now it seems like I have a cold with a stuffy nose and a cough to go along with that sore throat, and I felt like crap again.

So I emailed work and told them I wouldn’t be in. I went back to bed and slept til about 9-ish. I intend to go back to bed at some point after I go to the store and buy some more kinds of cold medicine (the kinds that will put you out). It’s really boring to stay home from work when you’re sick, unless, of course, you can spend your time in bed all day. Hopefully I can do that.

I had to go get some of that pad thai at Thai Express after my workout this morning. Let’s say it was lunch time cuz it was just after 12:00. Since I had to stop at Costco cuz there’s a screw missing on the side of my Serengeti’s, I figured I’d head over to Yorkdale (even though I hate Yorkdale).

Well we each bought a separate box of vegetable pad thai, usually we just split one cuz there’s so much, but this time we had our own and we just brought the rest home with us for dinner tomorrow night. While we were there we also stopped to see a movie for no apparent reason except that it was there and it was close to 2:00 and there was a matinee playing.

Even though it was a ‘puppet-like’ movie, since this movie was supposed to be so good and won awards and had everybody loving it, we decided to see it.

We donned our 3D glasses and watched. It was a good movie. Graphics were well done. The storyline seemed a little predictable but we’re used to predictability. We had an enjoyable experience and this was our first time seeing a movie without smoking – usually at some point I sneak out for one, so it was unusual not to even have a craving for one.

I did have to sneak out to get another Tim’s and I also had to sneak out to go pee. This movie is about 3 hours long! After a couple of Tim’s, you can’t just sit there for 3 hours.

Anyway, I’d recommend it. Go see it now at the theatres, you’ll be much more impressed than on your home TV.

I have no idea what I was dreaming about the night before last. The dream could have been about anything but there is one part I remember about the dream. I wouldn’t smoke.

Whatever the hell was going on there, at some point the situation came up where I could have smoked. I could have cheated in my dream and smoked to my heart’s content, or lungs’ discontent, whatever, but I didn’t.

In my dreams, boys and girls, I can’t even cheat! Do you know what a piss off that is? I can’t even cheat in my dreams! All the times I’ve felt like I wanted a smoke, said to myself, ‘fuck this non-smoking crap, I should go buy a pack’ – and didn’t, you’d think that at least I’d let myself enjoy a cigarette while sleeping, while in ‘unreality’, but no. Not me. I’m devoted. I’m dedicated. I’m committed.

It just pissed me off to wake up and realize that I couldn’t fulfill my dream in my dreams, since that’s all I’ve got right now. That’s the only place I could have a smoke. I make me puke.

Surrogates

These surrogates will look the way we want them to look (maybe even like younger versions of ourselves) and their identities will be connected with ours.

Thus the plot of this movie. Bruce Willis is a cop who, of course, has had a son who has died and a wife who has never quite gotten over it and therefore the relationship has become torn apart. That’s the personal aspect.

On a professional aspect, some one has created a special type of gun that will kill the surrogates and while doing so, also kills the person who controls the robots. Bruce had better find out who so he can save the surrogates from those fanatical groups who think robots are bad and should be gotten rid of.

Predictabzzzzzzzzle. Depressing. Lighting was yellowy.

See it if you want. There are worse.

Yes, it feels like all I do these days is try to fit in things I need to do in between when I’m supposed to go and work out. So tonight I’m taking a break. I’m going to sit at home, listen to some music, drink copious amounts of beer (probably 6-8 and then I’ll start to fall asleep), and perhaps order some fattening chicken wings cuz it’s too damned cold to go out and get anything.

I think I may just play some Wolfenstein soon. I want to go download a non-CD version cuz I can’t stand playing games where you always have to put the CD in. WTF are they thinking with that crap?

And I’ve got lots of work to get done on the computer – let’s not even think about how much I still haven’t installed.

I did put on the Adobe Design Premium CS4 package but I get some crashing using Photoshop, then I get a message that it’s my video card and I should check that I have 128 mgs on the card, yada yada. The stupid card has 512 mgs so I don’t understand what the issue is here, and I don’t want to buy a new video card since that one was just replaced for free after my last one conked out. Who knows about that. I may contact Adobe and see if they’ve got anything else to say about this issue.

Anyway, for now I’m going to finish my tea, and if I’m lucky, by then it’ll be beer time. No it probably won’t be, it’s really early still. I may just make it beer time. WTF do I care? It’s Friday night. I can have a beer at 3:00 in the afternoon if I damned well feel like it – I don’t have to report to anybody. Ok, 6:00 pm it is then. Official beer time tonight (if I don’t feel like having one more tea). There we go.

Tonight I decided not to work out. I had a craving for a meal. And when I say meal, I mean some meat and potatoes and vegetables. Since my dinners are usually so ridiculous, consisting of peanuts or a spoon of peanut butter, or some salad or other stupid thing, I had the craving for the real meal.

So my snookey and I went out to Wimpy’s (not exactly elegance but we knew we could get something similar to a home-cooked dinner there) and I ordered a hot hamburger open-faced sandwich, with gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans (I hate green beans).

I ate about half of that which was probably more than I should have eaten because I could barely breathe, and took the other half home with me. I don’t know about that fullness thing though, I think I need to see a doctor because by the end of the day – meal or no meal – my stomach is bloated out like I’m 9 months pregnant. Doesn’t quite seem normal to me. Plus it feels hard, like some pressure is pushing it out like that. I gotta go get a referral one of these days when I have some time.

Anyway, after that, we came home for a nice relaxing evening, even though I have a shitload of things to do that I haven’t gotten around to doing. So I decided that tonight I would finally replace that hard drive in my laptop. I got all prepared to do that, took a look at the back of my laptop and where the Dell guy had told me the hard drive was, and proceeded to pull out my battery. Hmmm, not it.

So I called them to ask which of the parts of the laptop held my hard drive. They told me to take out the screws at the bottom right and my hard drive was right inside there. No problem. Wait. Problem. I couldn’t get the fucking screws unscrewed – they’re in there so tight they must have been screwed hydraulically.

I tried with my little precision screwdrivers… no good, I’d end up stripping the screws. I tried with a little mini phillips screwdriver and still couldn’t get the screws out.

Once again I had to call Dell to tell them I can’t get the screws out. I was passed around to three different departments until the final hardware department let me know that I shouldn’t be talking to them cuz I’m in Canada. They confirmed a number for me to call. I called the number and it was voicemail. Great technical support there… leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you some day.

So, I’ll be waiting to hear from them about how to get my new hard drive installed. So much for my relaxing, and yet trying to be productive too, night.

I can’t believe we’ve headed into the fourth week of not smoking, but we have. In some ways it seems like we stopped just yesterday, and in other ways (like wanting a cigarette every stinking day) it seems like its been a long time without.

We’re doing well, neither of us has cheated (no matter how much we wanted to sometimes) and it’s looking to me like we can do it. I’m proud of us – especially my snookey with no patch. Today I started on the step 2 patches and I’m gonna keep that up for 3 weeks til I go to step 1. I figure the more I ween myself from the nicotine, the better chances I stand of just being in the habit of not having a smoke, while still not craving it as much cuz I’ve got the patch on – get out of the psychological wanting because the patch leaves the physical wanting out.

Anyway, other than focusing on that, I haven’t been doing much of anything else except working out. And I wasn’t even doing that last week for 3 days because I went to a class and pulled a leg muscle, then something in my groin, then something around my elbow area. So I gave my body a rest for 3 days and then headed back into it.

I was gonna go do an aquafit class tonight but the Monday woman sucks. She does the class from within the water. How does she think that a class full of people also in the water area going to be able to see what she’s doing? *duh* So instead I’m gonna do some bodyattack thing – let’s hope that it doesn’t attack my muscles in a bad way like last week’s bodypump class.

I’m hoping after the class to get onto the machines since I still haven’t figured out when to work those in with all these classes. Tonight my daughter’s coming with my snookey and me. She got a one-week free pass to try out the club. If she liked it I’d be willing to pay for her membership, but only if she was gonna show up 3 to 4 times a week. Otherwise, I’d be stuck paying for her membership for a year and be pretty pissed off that she wasn’t going. So I don’t know how that is gonna work out.

Other than that I’ve just been playing Mafia Wars, Yoville and I bought the new Wolfenstein game. I used to play that years ago, and then Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I didn’t even know they’d come out with a new version til I happened into a game store (why oh why do I go in there?) and saw it. Anyway, so far that seems ok except that I’ve got to play it with the disc in – whose brilliant idea is that? Now I’ve got to reinstall and download a non-cd version of the game. Idiots.

I’ve yet to reinstall the hard drive onto my laptop. And you can believe that Dell is getting anxious. I get a phone call from them once or twice a week to say… “what about that hard drive you’re supposed to return?”. I’d better get around to that soon or they’re going to charge me for the new one.

So I’m off. I have time to finish my tea before I pick up my daughter for the big work out. Be easy on me, workout, while giving me a fantastic body at the same time, thank you

Well this is a chick flick for sure, I don’t think anyone would doubt that from the commercials.

What can I say? I like Alec Baldwin (especially in 30 Rock) and I like Meryl Streep (my snookey doesn’t like her).

Divorced couple (he’s remarried to young stuff and she’s still single) get together at an occasion and happen to get a little too drunk. Things get looser than usual and they end up in the sack. Then things turn into an affair with the ex’s.

It probably doesn’t have the ending that you’d expect from the typical chick flicks but the ending wasn’t too far out of speculation either.

I liked it – probably because I like those actors, but the movie wasn’t bad – it had me smiling at quite a few parts.

See it if you’d like some fluff – or if you’ve been divorced before (as I have a few times). Those affairs with the ex’s are not too unusual.

I’m texting from my Cell phone so there may be a bunch of typos

We’re sitting here in the middle of a power outage

so I can’t do a fucking thing but wait for the power to come back on

we’ve got a little battery radio – waiting for updates

what a pain in the ass – I think I’m dependent on technology

might as well go to bed (at 9:15 at night for christ’s sake

Ricky Gervais plays a big loser in a city/town where everyone always tells the unabashed truth. Ricky ends up being the first person ever to tell a lie since he wanted to ease his dying mother’s fear about death by telling her how great things were going to be. Because everyone always tells the truth, everyone assumes that he is also telling the truth and, he, therefore, becomes a famous, sought-after person for his knowledge of what happens after death.

The film was mildly amusing at the start, I guess because you’re not too used to hearing people going on a date talking about how the guy won’t be getting any because he’s fat with a snub nose, and yet the guy is not the least bit insulted and goes on the date anyway.

I think they could have done a helluva lot more with this – I was hoping for more just because I know Ricky Gervais is quite the talented man. I wanted funny but there weren’t too many ‘laughing’ moments.

Go ahead and rent it; it’s not bad, it’s just not real good.

Just a quick note to say happy birthday, Minna. I can’t seem to comment at all on your site – tried using IE and Firefox – just not working. So here’s a birthday wish from my site – where I can write WvTF I want

No I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, I’ve just been really, really, really (really?) busy.

I didn’t mention that my snookey and I quit smoking again (again!?!) for our New Year’s resolution. We started stopping on January 4th and have held tight ever since. Although I should mention that the very first night after I got home from work, as we were both yapping about how we’d like a cigarette, my snookey was the first to cave and tell me that he’d run to the store… did I want a large pack or a small? That’s our usual modus operandi – that’s why every time we’ve quit, we end up just quitting for a day and then smoking at night.

But I was strong, boys and girls, I said, “I don’t want either… I don’t smoke”. Well that wiped the hopeful look off his face, but the good thing is that from that one little decision, it’s now been a week without smoking. It’s at this point that my sense of smell is really coming back strong.

As a matter of fact, yesterday, when I went to heat up my lunch in the microwave at work, one of the smokers who I used to see outside, started talking to me about something. At first I was affronted by this big smell. And I couldn’t place it. It was almost like a hit in the face. Then I figured out what the smell was and it was the smoking smell. Never have I smelled that so strongly, even when I’ve quit smoking before. Anyway, after smelling that I started to realize that I was never fooling anybody with my hiding my smoking – with smells that strong, every non-smoker probably smelled me from 5 yards away.

So, aside from not smoking, we also joined a gym. We spent numerous nights going and checking out different places and finally decided on one. So every stinking night (or day as on the weekend), we’ve been off to the gym doing various things. Tonight is supposed to be some training orientation on how to properly use the machines, but that doesn’t start til 7:00, so I had some time to myself and figured I’d better write something before you thought I was dead.

After that we’ll race home and watch our new season of recorded American Idol. Gotta watch this year for sure since it’s Simon’s last season and Ellen DeGeneres has joined the show. I know it’ll be more same old, same old, but, WTF, it’s not like anything else is worth watching either.

So that’s it ladies and gentlemen. I imagine in a few months I will not look like the pig I am, and I’ll be a healthier little ham that’s not smoked (oh, I’m good). I look forward to seeing and feeling some benefits. Cuz otherwise…. I coulda had a V8 smoke.

A couple with two kids of their own decide to adopt an older child after losing another child of their own in childbirth.

The new adopted Russian child, of course seems very nice at the start, but, whaddayaknow? She’s a psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est.

Now the husband doesn’t really believe the child is guilty of doing the things that the wife is accusing her of. That causes a little rift between them… especially when we find out in the past, the wife had a little problem with drinking after the death of their baby.

Anyway, this was a good little nailbiter, albeit predictable until close to the end. I was almost sickened by some of the stuff the kid was doing.

Rent this if you have a strong constitution and no kids with behavioural problems where you might start examining everything they’re doing.

Liam Neeson finds out that his dead wife was having an affair with Antonio Banderas. He found out by going through her computer after she’d died and seeing somewhat explicit emails from this mystery man and finding a folder full of pictures in which they weren’t fully clothed.

He tracks Antonio (talking about killing him although you’re not sure whether this is just what he wants to do or whether he will do it) and gets to know him.

We rented the movie because it said ’suspense’ and that there was a surprise ending. However, the ending was no surprise to me. I won’t tell you the ending in case you want to rent it.

I think I fixed a javascript file – and I don’t even know javascript!

If I visited my site, down on the bottom left I was seeing this error message – you know the one, done but with errors on the page. The errors were with the hover.js file and if I opened up the details it told me ‘line something, character something, expecting a ;’. This is a file that comes with my theme, Deep Blue.

So I played around with that and then it would give me another error message, line something, yada yada.

I tried a bunch of different configurations and finally got one that didn’t give me an error message. So I’m assuming I fixed it, but who knows whether or not something will stop working properly now.

Here’s what the new code is:
sfHover = function() { var sfEls = document.getElementById("menu").getElementsByTagName("li");
for (var i=0; i {
sfEls[i].onmouseover=function()
{
this.className+=" hover" };
sfEls[i].onmouseout=function()
{
this.className=this.className.replace(new RegExp(" hover\\b"), ""); }
}
}; if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent("onload", sfHover);

And here's what the old code had:
sfHover = function()
{
var sfEls = document.getElementById("menu").getElementsByTagName("LI"); for (var i=0; i {
sfEls[i].onmouseover=function()
{ this.className+=" hover"; }
sfEls[i].onmouseout=function()
{
this.className=this.className.replace(new RegExp(" hover\\b"), ""); }
}}if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent("onload", sfHover);

If anybody out there knows javascript and can see any errors that might impact me, please feel free to let me know and we can put a real fix in there. Oh, and if something doesn't work properly... let me know that too - not that I know how to fix it, but it would just be interesting to find out what could get screwed up by my little changes.

I got two calls yesterday from the guy who’s backing me up at work while I’m on vacation. The first call was directed to my cell phone while I was out working on things with a bunch of people. Whether it seemed rude or not, I had to take the call since I told the guy he could call me if he had any problems. It was a simple fix, although not a simple phone call since the guy tends to yammer on and on so that it’s hard to understand what the question really is.

The second call was a little more difficult but the answer could have come more swiftly if I had been able to connect to my work computer and just send him a file. I could not. I tried to connect remotely, and all I could see was a black screen. Although if I used the Alt-Tab keys, I could see the screen I wanted right there, I just couldn’t click on it at all because going to that screen gave me the big black screen.

So I tried a bunch of different things to fix it. Changed my resolution – didn’t work. Accessed the remote connection settings and changed the configuration there – nothing.

I’ve now got a call in to the help desk at work to see if they can come up with anything. I will be devastated if I can no longer work from home – to me, that’s one of the perks of this job, having that ability, especially considering that I hate my job, at least working from home now and then seems exciting.

I’ll find out if they can get something going. And I told them to call me back right away since I’m supposed to go out somewhere. Come on… get to it.

Remember my video card conked out? I’ve been waiting for that replacement, and I got it yesterday, so now I have both my monitors working again. I can’t tell you how weird it was to work with just one monitor again since I have the two at home and two at work. Now I’m back to normal *woohoo* [yes, yes, what I call normal, shut up].

Anyway, when he called me to say my card was in and to bring over my computer, he asked if I wanted Windows 7 put on at the same time. Since I had asked for this before but it was too expensive, when I asked this time and he said the price would be ‘installation fee’ only, how could I say no?

So, boys and girls, I now have Windows 7 on my computer. And I recently had my computer reformatted, so I had just started reinstalling things. Now I’ve gotta start reinstalling things all over again.

However, I will say that my computer is just zipping along – for programs and for the internet. I don’t know if it’s gonna get real slow once I’ve got everything reinstalled here, but I’ll find out and let you know.

And this version is a big change – even from Vista. I had hardly gotten to know the Vista, and it was a change from XP. But this one is a really big change that I’m going to have to study. I can’t even find out how to put a screensaver on my desktop right now, so you’ll understand when I say ‘big’ changes.

Anyway, I’ve got another 4 days to play with it (not today, I have a job to go help with). So far I’m liking it. So far I’d recommend it. Stay tuned for more.

Hmmm, I've been watching you

I felt like I was being watched *uh oh*.

Have a great Christmas, everyone. I got up at 6:00 this morning so that I could sit all by myself for a few hours and play games on the computer (isn’t that what Christmas is all about?)

I’ve already finished a pot of tea and it’s only 8:40. I should wake up my snookey soon so he can run to Tim’s and get us our day’s supply of coffee (and perhaps a breakfast sammich). He’ll appreciate getting up nice and early on Christmas morn.

I hope that you all get whatever it is you wanted for Christmas, or at least something that makes you happy. I’m hoping for anything since I don’t usually get too much except from my snookey. Maybe one of these decades my kids will finally buy me a nice present – or any present even.

As usual, my Christmas poem is below. Click on MORE if you feel like reading it again this year.

T’was the day before Christmas, and all through the house
Empty beer bottles clattered, from Jafer – the souse

She sat drinking good cheer, toasting holiday season
Not like other times drinking, when she didn’t have reason

When all of a sudden she heard a big clatter
and staggered out of her chair to see what was the matter

She walked into the wall on her way to observe
what the fuss was about, someone sure had their nerve!

When right down the chimney, a big crash as he landed
was Rudolph the reindeer, dejected and stranded

He said, “I’m afraid that I’m lost, and I can’t find St. Nick
I don’t know this neighbourhood but I have to learn quick

’cause this is just dress rehearsal, what will I do tonight
if I can’t find my way even when outside’s light?”

“I have to guide Santa – my bright nose gave direction
but this flu screwed me up in my direction selection”

So, Jafer, to alleviate Rudolph’s deep fear
handed Rudolph a glass and served beer after beer

When time came for departure, Rudolph left in a hurry
Self-assured, calm and confident, not left with a worry

He left with a flaming, and veined, bright red nose
He’d guide all the reindeer – thanks to Jafer, I suppose

And isn’t that just what Christmas season’s about?
Loving and helping your fellow reindeer out

And though she couldn’t remember anything the next day
Down her chimney a present had found its own way

There sat 5 – 24’s, Jafer’d surely get tight
And yell “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good [hiccup]“

You’ll remember I talked about my dealings with Dell here. Since then, I’ve had the hard drive sitting on my desk, and I’ve been waiting for the supposed ‘technician appointment’ for the guy to show up – to no avail. Not even a phone call where they told me someone would come and install it.

In the meantime I’ve received a phone call that the warranty was going to expire on the laptop I bought for my daughter (and would I like to renew it). I never got that phone call for my laptop, so expiry date came and went.

Anyway, for three days now I’ve been talking to Dell every night. They told me I could renew my warranty. They listed off a bunch of different warranties with a bunch of different prices. And depending on whom I was talking to and which night it was, I got different prices, different warranties, and different explanations of which warranty it is that I still have existing on my laptop til 2012.

I kept phoning back, being put on hold for who knows how long, but last night was the real kicker. After saying to the guy, “yes, I will take this warranty for $113, in order to have the technician also install all the software for me”, I was on hold while he processed it, and all of a sudden, the phone went dead.

I phoned back and what did I find? Office hours were now ended. The guy hung up on me cuz his shift was over… forget about that sale, time to go.

I called back again tonight and was told that there is no $113 warranty renewal – that was for the different laptop – the one I bought for my daughter. For my laptop the renewal would cost $900 for the highly trained technician to come and install software on my computer.

I asked “why would there be an $800 difference to install software on one laptop over another” and the answer was because the technicians who worked on my type of laptop were more highly trained. While I pointed out that installing software on any computer didn’t take any highly trained technician, he told me that I could install the hard drive myself and that phone support was included in my existing warranty… did I want him to transfer me so they could walk me through it.

Ok, reality is, boys and girls, that I can install a hard drive myself. I can certainly install software myself. I can do everything I wanted these guys to do…. myself. However, that was not my understanding of my warranty, and I was even willing to pay another $113 to have someone do it because I can’t be bothered with installing all this shit myself. But that’s not going to happen.

Obviously, I was totally wrong about my understanding of what those warranties were. Somehow I cannot understand english and so when they told me what they were at purchase time, I had english as a second language and thought they were completely different than they actually are.

I pointed out to my 6th or 7th Dell customer service rep that I would not be buying anything more from Dell. I could have bought these things from Yow up the street, but somehow thought that any potential troubles would be taken care of with these Dell warranties.

In future I will stick with my own computer people in my own neighbourhood. Fuck Dell. Not only have I had it with their different versions every time you call, but frankly, I’ve wasted a helluva lot of time on hold and being transferred from one department to another.

Unfuckingbelievable. If word had gotten out about this service level before people bought Dell, they certainly wouldn’t have been able to get as big as they’ve gotten now.

Yes boys and girls, just one more day of work, and *woohoo!*, off for 10 days (if I count the weekends). I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this break… 10 days in a row, I’ve been counting the minutes.

My only plans, other than a commitment on the 30th and a guest on the 26th, are to try to sleep in, perhaps finish a necklace I’ve been working on for weeks and will take at least days more (one of those really involved, piddly little stitching things), and drink copious amounts of beer, and Panama Jack, and wine with dinners.

I’m sure we’ll rent many movies and stay up until 3:00 in the morning. I may even get laid a time or two in there *ha ha in advance*… which reminds me, I never got my birthday boink – we pencilled that in for Saturday because we were so busy.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll write something else within this time, even though I’ve been fairly lackadaisical about writing lately. So we’ll talk soon.

Download audio file (HappyBirthdayJafer.mp3)

Ok, you were expecting something new maybe? I’m getting old, I can’t be putting up new and fresh stuff here all the time.

So go ahead and listen to my fabulous birthday song (year after year after year).

It has amazed me how so many people can unite for what they believe in. People in different parts of the world have united for one cause – perfect strangers have stepped up to the plate. What is the cause, you ask? Why that would be growing your mafia in Mafia Wars.

I can’t believe how many people, virtual strangers, are now my ‘friends’ on facebook (and myspace) all in order for me to grow my mafia and for them to grow theirs. (I’ve got over 500 ‘friends’ now on facebook and my new myspace account is growing too.)

All I could think about as this goes on and on was, ‘imagine if there was some worthwhile cause that people would join in to as easily as this’… a political issue; world peace.

It’s amazed me.

I don’t remember having seen the original of this movie (or reading the book), so this one was new to me.

It’s about a bad guy (John Travolta) who is holding a subway train and passengers hostage for $10,000,000. That’s not really it though, he’s not interested in the ten million, he’s really interested in affecting the stock market because he’s invested put two million into something (can’t remember if it showed) that rises up to $307 million by the end of the movie.

Denzel Washington plays a demoted transit big guy who ends up taking the hostage call and going above and beyond the duty in order to see that Travolta doesn’t get away with it.

The movie was ok. I don’t know if I really like John Travolta as a bad guy, even though I liked him as a hitman in Pulp Fiction. I think I find it too same old, same old.

Denzel plays his most usual part – the good guy, caring, concerned, and the only one that Travolta wants to speak to.

I guess it wasn’t a bad time waster. I’ve seen worse.

You’ll remember back in June 2008, I bought my laptop from Dell.ca.
Links here and
here.

Since cleaning up my place, buying more furniture and getting everything in order with the studio, I now keep my laptop on my desk, beside my desktop. Since I only ever use it if I’m going somewhere (which means it’s probably been used under 20 times), I turn it on every now and then to update the anti-virus and any microsoft updates.

So the other day I turned it on, did my usual stuff and all of a sudden got a pop-up message to do some diagnostics. I followed the instructions, ran the diagnostics and it gave me this error message which was a hard drive error message. The message also told me to write down the error number to tell the Dell technician.

I called Dell, talked to them a bit after being on hold and being transferred, and being on hold, and being transferred. Turns out they were going to send me a new hard drive – even though I have yet to see any trouble with the laptop. Ok, I’ll live with a new hard drive, maybe it works preventatively… they send you a new hard drive ‘before’ your whole computer crashes.

Anyway, while I’m talking to the guy he’s explaining how I’ll have to install the hard drive and send back the old hard drive. Whoa! He wanted me to install the hard drive in a laptop?

He said he was going to send out a technician but it’s only a hard drive replacement and his supervisor told him to cancel that. I asked about my service plan that I’d paid extra money for when I bought the laptop and he told me that I was no longer covered. The only coverage I had was for the extra, “if I spill a coffee on my computer they’ll fix it” type. And I wondered how come I got no notification of my warranty expiring. How come they, like so many other companies, didn’t email me to say, “HEY, wanna renew this for x amount of dollars?”

I told the guy I was no computer technician and wanted someone to come out and do it. He said he would do that even though it would only take a minute to install it, but the hard drive arrived and there was no promised phone call from the technician to arrange the date of installation. He also told me that after installing it I could call phone support for them to ‘walk me through’ installing the programs.

I know how to install programs. What I don’t know is which of their CDs go in first, where I start and where I finish. For that I guess I’m supposed to sit on hold for half an hour while they then transfer me to another department where I sit on hold and then talk to someone.

All of this is a pain in the ass to me, even though he told me that all I have to do is pull out the hard drive at the back and plug in the other one. That sounds really simple but I can’t help feeling WTF is going to go wrong.

All this says is that I’m not too impressed with Dell. While their service package sounded good when I bought (and I bought a shitload of things from them), I’m no longer impressed. I was feeling like a true believer and a probable future purchaser, but no longer.

I may attempt this tomorrow; I may not. I have to be in a mood for doing stuff like this and in the meantime I lost all the records for the society I sit on due to a computer crash and reformat of my desktop, so I’ve spent all day reinputting that information and I’m not done.

I’m beginning to feel that computers are no longer my friends. Maybe if the weather’s as nice as it was today, I’ll just go out wandering and take some pictures instead. Fuck I wish the holidays would hurry up and get here.

I went for a dye job tonight. I’ve been letting my hair go ‘undyed’ for quite some time now and you could see spots of grey in it.

So tonight I had my hair dyed Walnut (it’s a good, natural looking colour on me) and I had him add some streaks to the front.

The streaks are… *drum roll*, *applause*, *raucous audience noise*; I know, the suspense is killing you, wait for it…. they’re grey.

Yes, boys and girls, I had some grey highlights put into the front of my hair only. All dark walnut with a few strands of grey hair on my face.

I’m loving it. There’s something very appealing about grey hair on purpose. I didn’t mind the grey at the sides either, but then I’m weird that way.

My snookey’s hair is all grey/silver. He said once that maybe he should dye it when he was thinking about applying for jobs and all the agism around. I told him he’d have to find another place to live if he dyed his hair – only because he suits that white hair so well.

I’m not looking to match him – after all he’s way older than young me. But I am loving these few grey strands.

For my upcoming birthday I told my snookey that I wanted my winter tires put on. And for Christmas I said I’d like my regular tires put back on after winter.

That sounded like a pretty cheap present to me, so I thought it was good that he’d give me something I needed and yet it wouldn’t cost him too much.

So yesterday he took my car in to put on my winter tires since we’re expecting a big snowfall tomorrow.

What they found while he was there was that my rear brakes were totally shot – no pad left even, and that the front stabilizer bar had rusted apart and could possibly have hit into my tire – wouldn’t that make for a nice little car accident as I’m driving along Hwy #7 on my way to work.

I heard no squealing from those brakes, although I did know that my car wasn’t driving too smoothly (I guess that stabilizer bar thing).

So instead of $60 for my tires, my snookey ended up coughing up over $400 to have my car fixed. He told me about it when I got home.

He also said, “Merry Christmas”. Poor guy. Literally.

Tom Hanks returns in his role from The Da Vinci Code in this, I guess sequel. I never read this book, although I read the first. The good thing about that is that I couldn’t compare the movie to the book. The movie’s about the Catholic Church and the Illuminati plotting against it.

Anyway, I thought the action started happening a little too fast for me. Maybe we should have watched The Da Vinci Code first since it had been so long. It didn’t seem to me that there was enough prelude into things that were going on and then, all of a sudden, you hear the evil choir music.

Overall it wasn’t too bad but with the usual predictability – we knew who the bad guy was. I’d probably watch it again if it was on TV and nothing I like was on.

I took my computer in to Yow today. For some reason the CD player wasn’t working (which is actually a BluRay DVD player). Wouldn’t read or autostart any disks I put in there; I figured somehow the connection had come loose. Upon inspection, he told me he thought that the driver was missing… don’t know how that would happen.

Anyway, he did not have it ready for me to pick up tonight, so I’ve gotta use my laptop for my usual computer addiction. WoTF can sit at home without a computer all night?!?

Yesterday I had to take my little Fuji point and click back. For some reason it wasn’t turning on at all. I thought that the battery was dead, so I charged it but still nothing – that is until I got to the store to return it, there it turned on just fine. However, I wasn’t trusting the camera after that, so I traded it for another one.

I got the Canon SD100 IS (in pink to match my laptop and laptop mouse). Nothing looks better on your desk than a laptop and mouse that match, while your matching little camera is charging there.

This is the camera that has Avril Lavigne doing the commercials. I only got it cuz it was on sale for about $179 (instead of $220). It’s only 10mpx, but I figure I won’t see too much difference between a 10 and a 12 since I’m not printing out any gigantic posters. My DSLR is 14.2 megapixels. I’ll have to compare the quality now, won’t I?

So far I’m liking the little camera. It has a viewfinder, which I like for sunny days when you can’t really see the LCD screen on them too well. Also has live view, and not only live view for focusing, but the thing starts focusing itself when you point it towards something. Makes for a noisy camera, but so far I’m liking it.

If the weather would stay nice, I just might go out on the weekend and take some shots. God knows I’m sick of taking pictures around the house.

Still testing out my new wide angle lens… thought I’d show you the difference between the two exact same shots.

Taken with a regular lens

Taken with a wide-angle lens

Isn’t it amazing how much more you see? I keep taking pictures around the house (cuz I’ve got nothing else to take pictures of) just to see the difference.

Jack Black and Michael Cera play what looks like cavemen at the beginning of the movie but somehow becomes Roman times later in the movie. Maybe that’s the way it worked – caveman over here, but roman gladiators in a different part of the world.

Regardless, that’s pointless, because it’s just a comedy movie and I don’t think it has to be historically correct.

I found it amusing. I especially like the deadpan lines that Michael Cera brought to the film. I think a lot could be missed if not listening carefully, although predictable and sometimes stupid but not stupid enough to be considered ‘Naked Gun’ stupid.

My favourite part had to do with Cain and Abel, seen in the clip below, but that was a very short part of the movie. I’d recommend it as a grin inducing litte time-waster.

I can’t believe it’s 6 days since I last wrote, but it is. That’s what happens when you’ve had a website for years and years, you forget about it sometimes.

I was doing stuff every night – mostly working on jewellery, cuz my jewellery website is also suffering from my lack of work there.

I can’t be everything to every one. I’ve only got so many arms, legs, eyes, noses.

This weekend I’m having my jewellery open house, so there’s some cleaning to be done. I’m hoping my snookey will take care of that tomorrow while I’m off at work. He’d better. I don’t have time to do it.

Anyway, right now I’m just working on another necklace cuz I’ve got a really difficult one in the works and I’m sick of working on it. Tonight is TV night, but I betcha the shows won’t be on because it’s American thanksgiving and they’ll probably have football all over the place or reruns of my shows. With that I guess I should say Happy Thanksgiving Americans! Did I even remember to say that for our own thanksgiving? I don’t think so.

Ok, so I’ve got things to do, places to go, people to see. Or else it’s just my usual hibernating in the computer room with my Mafia Wars or jewellery. Same thing.

Here’s some pictures of the new carpet. I’m just so thrilled with it, compared to the old carpet. The room feels new.

See the beige and taupe?

This picture’s more like an overview of the colour.

I’m happy – especially since I told the landlord that I’d rather have the floorboards than the carpet that was there. Maybe she was just worried I’d rip out the old and go with the floorboards – that’s why she agreed to this.

Last night I was in a mood. I’ve been bothered by the carpeting in our living/dining room because we’ve steam-cleaned it so many times that it started getting all loose and wrinkly, so I asked my snookey to phone the landlord and tell them we wanted something done about it.

He phoned, they had the ‘carpet expert’ who had installed it come in and say that they could stretch it and pull it tight again. However, that was not good enough for me when I was out there looking at it and thinking that it looked moldy around the edges – which may well be since we’ve steam-cleaned it so many times in 12 years of living here… maybe the edges never got dry.

Anyway, I called the landlord last night and had a little hissy fit. She, of course, was going on about how cheap our rent is (implying I guess that for rent this cheap, we don’t get new carpeting), and I, of course, going on about the improvements we’ve made, how well we’ve kept up the place and done repairs and been good tenants.

She finally seemed to be the calmer of us both and said something to the effect of us being the tenants if we were to get new carpeting we should at least be paying half. To which I said, “sure”.

So tonight the owners, my snookey and I hiked off to the carpet place to choose a carpet. And – big AND – the carpet is going to be installed tomorrow. I guess that carpet place is not too busy, but I don’t care about that – it’ll be done tomorrow! It’ll be done in time for the two dinners we’re having this weekend – one Saturday, one Sunday, and for the show I’m having in-house next weekend. And the carpet will only cost me $735 for my half (fuck, carpet is expensive).

So I’m a happy camper. Maybe sometimes a hissy fit is a good thing in helping get what you want. My snookey and I had talked about buying new carpet before but I said that I wanted the landlord to at least pay half. That’s exactly what we’re getting – only it’s now ‘her idea’.

The carpet is a nice beige and taupe texture that the guy says is very stain resistant (except not that good with coffee). So I’ll try to spill only my beer on it – not coffee.

I can hardly wait to get home from work tomorrow night. Oh, that’s right, I’ve got a meeting tomorrow night. That’s a good thing too, I guess. Maybe by the time I get home, my snookey will have all the furniture put back. The scariest thing will be him trying to rehook up the TV, Blu-Ray, PVR and Receiver. We may not be watching any TV tomorrow night.

My site may be down for a few days while I’m transferring providers.

Be patient, I hope I can get everything working properly at the new spot (including importing the database, otherwise it will be a brand new and shiny site).

See you soon – hopefully.

UPDATE: The site wasn’t really down at all – everything’s at the new spot and I’ve yet to find stuff that’s not working – tell me if you find anything. Also, let me know if it seems faster… it’s faster at my end.

Instead of putting up more pictures, I figured I’d tape a little video since I haven’t done one in a long time. Ooooo, you’re in for a treat *yawn*. So click on it already.

Ok, I told you about how hard it was to find a rug that I liked to fit the studio, so I figured I’d show you what we finally chose and how the room ended up. What you can’t really see in these pictures are the ‘real’ colours on the walls. You can see the yellow ceiling, but then it’s not as deep a yellow either as it looks in these pictures, so everything’s not quite ‘actual’, but it shows you how much time, money and work I spent doing this. Pretend you like it. Here goes:

Walking into the room, this is what you see.

Turn to your left.

Close up of the rug that looks like it doesn’t match, but it does – there’s a tie in with those blue-ish curtains and blue in the rug.

Over in the corner, let’s not forget that there has to be a computer in there too.

I got this fat, old, ugly broad to come in and take a picture of the mirrored doors where those who want to see how the jewellery looks on them, can look.

So that’s it. Over $1000 in the hole now just so I don’t have to go out and do shows. Then I got an email today that I’m accepted for a show November 21st. I was hoping that I had been missed on that one, but no. So now I’ve got a whole bunch of plans to change cuz I can’t cancel it (they’ve already cashed the cheque).

I don’t know about you, but I’m not one of those ‘before we go to bed’ kind of having sex people. As a matter of fact, it’s more likely to be in the early evening that I have sex. That’s before any beer can be consumed, before I’m trying to get myself tired for conking right out.

I don’t want to revive myself before I go to sleep. When I go to bed at night, that’s all I want – sleep. And I feel damned lucky if I go to bed and get right to sleep.

While I realize that having sex can make you more relaxed, and it seems to work for guys – puts them right out. I’m still not into it. Then I’d have to go to bed at 10:00 or something just so we’d be able to get to sleep at our normal bedtime.

I don’t see the benefits. When’s your favourite time to have sex? You can tell me… I won’t tell anyone.

These days – when I’m not playing my Mafia Wars addiction on Facebook – I’m finding all sorts of things to clean or replace in my home.

Today we replaced those little separator things that separate the carpet in one room from another. I happened to notice that one room had a gold one while there were two silver ones on the others, and one room had none, so I needed to have them all there, and all silver.

I’ve spent so much time washing walls, washing furniture – yes furniture. Oh, let me tell you. I had a chair that I’ve had the carpet cleaners clean for me before, but the other day I noticed it had zippers on it. So I figured, ‘hey, I can take those off and wash them in the washing machine’. So I did.

That worked out fine, they were washable, and I didn’t put them into the dryer because I didn’t want them to shrink.

But guess what? I had four cushions on that chair, so four coverings, they all came out clean, but the zipper broke on two of them.

So while I have clean coverings, I can’t use two of them because the zippers broke. Of course that meant that I had to take them to the dry cleaner to replace the zippers. It’s only $24 to replace those zippers. So my big home clean up is now costing an additional $48 to replace zippers.

Maybe a home is better when it’s not so clean. What do you think?

I didn’t want a new camera (other than the good one I had that my daughter stole). I didn’t want a new little point and click camera. However, for some reason, lately my little camera wasn’t holding a charge, so whenever I’d turn it on to take a picture, it would tell me that the battery was almost empty.

So I headed off to Staples where I bought it, expecting to buy a new battery. The guy there told me that they didn’t carry those batteries, and he didn’t know who did, maybe I could try Future Shop.

That seemed like a pain in the ass, so I told him I’d buy the new camera that was on sale. He asked me if I had an extended warranty on the old camera but I said no, and figured I’d have to cough up the money I don’t really have, just to have a working camera again.

He told me that even the battery would have been covered if I’d had the extended warranty. I told him that sometimes I do buy the extended warranty, but I couldn’t remember if I’d bought it on this, I’d have to look through my papers when I got home.

He told me they could check online to see if I had the warranty, so I said go for it. He called somebody, they were asking questions about the make, the model, etc. It occurred to me that it would be just my luck that I’d bought one on one of the camera models I’ve owned, but watch it wouldn’t be this one.

Well, you know what? I did buy the extended warranty on that camera and they told me that. That meant that my new camera was free! Free, free, free! I like that in a camera.

He asked me if I’d like to purchase the extended warranty. I guess you know what I said. I said yes. Worked for me once, it might work for me again in the future.

So I bought the extended warranty and they told me I owed them one cent. I can live with that.

One penny. Ha, ha. One penny. New camera (with wide angle, unlike my last one), in a nice plum colour. I figured not too many people would buy the plum colour, and I’d never had a plum coloured one, so I went for it.

I’m just happy. Good things have been happening lately. Maybe it’s karma. Gotta go take pictures of inane things right now to test it.

You’ll remember I wrote about Sears and how screwed up their website was. How could you not remember… it was only two days ago. Have you got Alzheimer’s or something? That post is here for those who missed it: http://www.idiotonastick.com/talk/2009/10/what-up-sears/

Anyway, you may have seen the comment from the woman who worked for Sears telling me to contact her directly, so I did.

I gave her the link to the product I was having trouble buying so that she could see the problem for herself and, hopefully, let her IT people know so they could get it fixed. Since I work in IT myself, I know what a big deal it is to find the problem, make sure the fix works with everything else that’s already working, and get things the way they’re supposed to be.

Well they did get it fixed and first thing this morning, I ordered my rug. I actually ordered two rugs because I couldn’t quite make up my mind and I figured if I didn’t like the first one, by the time I’d order the other one and wait for it to arrive, it might be too late for my little soiree. So I know I’ll be returning one of them, at the moment, I’m just hoping that the cheaper one is the best looking for that room.

Anyway, Paige (the Sears woman) emailed me today to let me know that the website was working properly and offer me a promotional $10 off my purchase. Unfortunately, I had already ordered, so I couldn’t use that. But, in following up with me, because I’d missed the offer, she offered to send me a gift card instead as a thank you for my feedback.

Who could resist that? I’m all for gift cards. And I’m assuming she’s not sending me a gift card for The Bay, but for Sears – where I seem to spend most of my time lately – I saw a little back room there where I may just set up a mattress with a little hot plate so I don’t have to travel quite so far to shop.

To finish, I’m happy. I’m happy they were listening to their customers and did everything in their power to get things working to satisfy their customers.

I guess that they’re walking the walk and providing a point of difference that you can’t find at some of the places you’ll shop… that is, listening to their customers.

You know me and how I can never sleep in… although I thought I might have slept a little longer since we went to bed around 2:00 last night.

Perhaps I would have slept a bit longer if The Brick hadn’t called me at 7:45 this morning to tell me that my delivery was going to arrive between 12:00 and 3:00.

“Oh, thank you. I’m glad to know that. Is there some reason you had to call me before 8:00 to tell me?” is what I said. What he said was, “that’s the time I’m supposed to make all my calls”.

Perhaps if I was one of the people whose furniture was arriving first, like at 9:00, I wouldn’t mind that call so much. But seeing as I’m the ‘between 12:00 and 3:00′ person, I think I would have preferred a little more sleep.

• It's almost time to watch a movie… I forget what we got #
• Sears updated their website so you couldn't access it last night. Now you can't shop from it – good work! #
• Maybe when you've been blogging for 12 years, it becomes a bit ho-hum #
• I've hardly been tweeting lately either – never mind the blogging #
• I think I'm the optimist http://rep.ly/1l3lU #
• finally got my iPod working again after 3 days of restoring #

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After my accolades the other day about the great service I got from Sears, let me tell you what’s going on now with them.

I’ll start with the fact that I’ve ordered two rugs from them recently. They arrived in good enough time, but when I put them down, the colours weren’t good with the room, no fault of Sears other than I guess having better pictures, but I’ve returned them both.

As of last night, the Sears website was down for their “brand new and improved” website which would be open this morning.

Ok, so I had to wait. I couldn’t order yet another rug last night, so I went to the site this morning. I found a rug that I thought might be the last one, I figured the colours ’should’ be perfect for what I want and tried to order it. That’s after I got a little used to the changes and tried to figure out how to find what I was looking for.

What it looks like they’ve done is tried to implement some Ajax for ordering – I guess so that customers are not taken from page to page in ordering and that the little ajax pop up will do the work on the same page.

Guess what? Their Ajax was not working… just kept doing the spinny loading circle and when you’d finally try to click on a link to order the damned rug, it took you to a page where you input the catalogue number. How the fuck would I know a catalogue number?

Since this wasn’t working (and I want it ordered fast so it will get here in time), I called them. Well, waddayaknow… their staff also use the website to fulfill the orders when it’s not a catalogue order. So their staff could not help me either; but they did tell me that they were aware of the problem and to try back in half an hour.

I tried back in half an hour, and an hour, and a few hours later. It’s now after 6:00 pm and their website is still screwed, still takes you to a catalogue ordering page.

But, you know what? I stopped at the Sears store today as well. The rug I wanted was not available in any of the catalogues. The only way to order this one is online. Maybe. Who knows if it’s even in stock – I’ll only find that out when their website is working.

Which brings me to another thing. I had ordered blinds from Sears. A new set for the living room, and a new set for our bedroom. Wouldn’t you know that the living room ones were out of stock. But I didn’t find out til yesterday when I went to pick up the bad rug #2 and got the blinds for the bedroom only.

So I called up Sears and said that since these blinds were on back order, if I switched colours, were the other ones in stock? They were, so I told them to send me those ones instead, whereupon the woman taking the order and cancelling the other order, told me the price. These new coloured blinds were going to cost me $40 more.

Oh no they were not. I told her that I had used this ‘Sears coupon thing’ when I’d ordered and I wanted the same discount applied. She asked me to hold, then came back to tell me that the discount was finished and I’d have to pay this full price.

I then told her to cancel both orders. I said I wasn’t paying more for the blinds when it was their fault I had to order a different colour just to get my blinds in time. I was no longer interested and would take my business elsewhere. She asked me to hold and then came back with a discount where I’d be paying the same price as I was supposed to for the other colour.

So, this has been the long tale of my recent interaction with Sears. Not only that, but when I was at the store today, I noticed they had a sign up that said they will no longer call you when your order has arrived. All I could think of was that, in this day and age of stores not having a price differential, they’re usually trying to flog their great customer service that will keep you coming back. Sears newest approach is to tell you that you’re now going to get less customer service.

Big mistakes going on here Sears. I can’t even imagine how much money they’ve lost today with the website down and their customer service reps not being able to ring through a sale either unless someone’s got a catalogue number.

UPDATE: It’s 7:25 on Sunday and the site is still fucked up.

I finally dropped off all those necklaces I created for that wedding party and got the final payment on those.

I was feeling a little rich for about half an hour, that is until I decided that I needed a new chair. I had been searching for a new chair because we rearranged the living room and that made the one chair that we had, too big for the only place it would fit.

So after seeing lots of furniture online (for $699 and up), I decided to go over to The Brick.

The good thing was that they had a nice brown leather chair on sale, and it was a small enough size to fit in the area where the old chair is. I’m just a little concerned that replacing the beige chair with a brown chair is going to make the living room look really dark, especially considering that most of the furniture in there is black leather (except for the pull-out couch that’s a browny colour too).

Anyway, while I was there I found this beautiful leather coffee table. Brown with brown cushions on top of it where you can put your feet up if you want, but the cushions turn over into trays for when you’re serving something to your guests (ya, guests, we have a lot of guests).

But best of all, there’s a whole bunch of storage space in there. So I’m replacing the antique trunk off the Aquatania, that we had built up to store our DVDs, with this new storage leather coffee table. I’m still going to keep the trunk, but over by the wall in the dining room.

I also bought a smaller end table for one the chairs, but the end table there used to house all the picture albums, so I’m now going to keep them in the trunk.

I guess the bottom line here is that I’m not too rich any more. I just spent $1000 on a coffee table, end table and a small chair.

Oh, and today I decided that I needed a stainless steel slow cooker, so I bought that too. The good news is that my son will score the old slow cooker and chair. Bad news is I have no money left again, as usual. I’ll put up pictures when they arrive and we finally get stuff put away once more.

However, my big job is done. Now I’ll just wait for wedding pictures from the bride to put up on the jewellery site. I need another wedding to do.

I spent the last three days trying to get my iPod working again.

The other day when I put my iTunes on, it said there was an update for the iPod and of course I said “ok”.

Well didn’t I get stupid error messages through the update and then my iPod wouldn’t work at all. So then I had to restore it back to factory default settings but after that, nothing would work, I kept getting error messages trying to load my songs on.

I followed the support steps, one of which was to create a new log in on your computer and try to do it that way.

That worked except my apps and videos weren’t in that log in. So after that, I logged in as me again and tried to download all my stuff. But, hey, there were those stupid error messages again and all of a sudden my iPod wouldn’t work again. So I restored it to factory default settings and once again couldn’t get my stuff on there.

I followed the other instructions which were to log it in on another computer, so I did that and everything worked, got all my songs on there again, but hey, I didn’t have my apps or videos there.

So after two days of restoring, reloading songs, getting error messages and restoring back to factory defaults, tonight I got in touch with Apple and did a walk through with technical support.

I ended up having to delete that last update file, restoring back to factory defaults yet again, unplugging anything and everything that was a USB connection, and plugging the iPod into a back USB port instead of the top one I use.

Then when it was factory defaulted and I had it all restored, it started downloading everything – apps first, which was a good sign since we’d not gotten to the apps on the other days.

After a couple of hours of restoring music, videos and apps, I’m happy to report that I once again have a working iPod. Not that I use it that much, but when I want to use it, I want to use it. And Christ knows I paid enough for this one with my name all engraved on it and everything.

Next thing I’ll be looking at is the iPhone. Only because Telus has sent a survey to see if there’s interest in it. I’m still on pay and talk because I don’t really need a plan and I have per-second billing cuz I’m such an old long-standing customer, but I recently switched things there too. I signed up for 5 favourites so that it cost nothing for calls to those five numbers. WTF, I only ever call about 3 people anyway.

Phew – just happy things are working now.

• Working at home – I needed more sleep at 6:00 am #
• It's almost noon and I haven't done a damned thing all morning. I should wake my snookey and get a little holiday action happening here. #

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I ordered a little rug for the Studio and was told it would arrive today between 7:00 am and 1:00 pm.

Who called me at 6:45 to say they’d be here in a couple of minutes? That would be Sears. My one day for sleeping in – and believe me, I was sound asleep, I don’t know what time I would have woken up, but thanks to Sears for being so prompt – even early – with their deliveries.

I put the rug down in there and it looks like shit. The colours don’t go with the colours we just painted. I thought it might look eclectic but it looks like eclectshit ← oh, I’m good.

So now I’ll have to return that and pick another one. Who knows how long this could take not being able to see the rug in person. It’s a nice thick rug, sits well, it’s very nice… but not with those colours.

What a pain in the ass.

I didn’t even know I had to pee… until I started washing the dishes. How can you not notice something like that?

And I also think it’s not a good idea for me to have sex just after a shower. Y’see, after I have my shower, my hair just seems to do whatever it wants. And since it’s really straight, it just dries really straight, and looks like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber.

Think of how enticing that was to be putting the moves on. You think he might have told me and I would have run into the bathroom and waxed up my hair or something.

• I've been cleaning a lot – and it's nowhere near finished #
• Who knew that curtain tiebacks and the little leaf hardware would come to $50? #
• Time to shop #
• I may have to give up Mafia Wars – I can't stop #
• Working from home – painting when nothing's going on #
• #mommyknows – giving away some cool measuring cups – gotta win me some of those – maybe those recipes will turn out right then #

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That’s all I ever do. Almost, I’ve also got a meeting tonight so it’s like working and painting and going to meetings is all I ever do.

However, I have been doing something else. I’ve become addicted to Mafia Wars on Facebook. I almost want to put my name up with a link for everyone to join me but that would give away my real name and not this name, so I can’t.

I don’t know what it is about this game, but I have to keep going back to it. I was watching some TV last night and had to run in at every TV commercial to do something else – ice someone, pull a bank heist, etc.

It may be something I have to give up (in a while) before I spend every waking moment playing this stupid thing.

There’s gotta be something seriously wrong with me.

What a complete waste of my time. And when I said that out loud, my snookey said, “your time!”, which meant a complete waste of both our time.

Jamie Foxx was supposedly some music prodigy who went to Juliard when he was younger but ended up getting out of there when he started to hear the voices in his head.

Robert Downey Jr. is the journalist who needs a story and finds him and proceeds to try to get him into some symphony somewhere.

I rented this movie because they had absolutely no other Blu-Ray movies in the store at Rogers. And although I didn’t want to see it, the Rogers guy told me it was a good movie and that there was “good character development”. I think this guy must have taken a class in the characteristics of good movies because good character development is not usually something I think of. I think of good or bad, or amusing or totally not funny. I’m a little more simplistic than Mr. Rogers Video guy.

Anyway, I didn’t see any good character development. I would have turned it off if I hadn’t been waiting for the good character development to happen.

Don’t bother renting it, or do if you have insomnia.

• Chocolate chip cookies are comfort food #
• thank you Friday, I love you for who you are #
• gotta go to facebook and play mafia wars #
• @mommyknows -you'd be grumpy too if you drove a bus around all day – or I would in reply to mommyknows #
• @Risk – very cute in reply to Risk #
• @Risk have an account – don't really remember to use it mostly in reply to Risk #
• found this really fun game on facebook, that's all I've been doing for a couple of days now – mafia wars #
• Why did I think that the ceiling should be painted yellow? And just how many coats of paint will that be now? #
• Why did I decide that room needed painting? #

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I got up around 7:00, and the furthest thing from my mind was painting. My snookey painted the second coat on two of the walls yesterday, but without the edging, which means I’d need to do the edging. And I tell ya, I’m not in the mood for edging. I’m not even in the mood for rolling.

Now that I’ve wasted an hour doing pretty much nothing, I suppose I’d better go do something productive… like maybe go to my facebook and play that Mafia Wars game. I’m having fun with that.

If I go now, my energy should be built back up and I can kill off some more people and get more points.

Yes. Then I’ll use up all my energy, and maybe by this evening I’ll have some more and play again.

That’s the kinda stuff to do on a Saturday. Not this painting crap.

I’ve just gotten up before my snookey on a weekday. Usually he’s up before me getting breakfast ready, making my lunch, turning off my alarm clock that I somehow didn’t turn off properly.

In his head I think he thinks that this is like one of those days where I work at home and he sleeps til God knows when. He’s going to get a big surprise after my shower is finished and I run in there and turn on those bright lights.

I’m just so happy that it’s Friday. We’ve been painting all week and I gotta say that I’m sick of it, even though we’ve still got to put another coat on all the walls and I think I’m going to switch colours on the bulkhead (I painted it the same colour as the ceiling – yellow). I think it dominates the room though, and I don’t want yellow to be the most noticeable colour.

Anyway, I’ve gotta run and have my shower, get to work so I can get home in just 9-1/2 short hours.

I got a call from the home where my daughter’s living. Apparently she stole my expired back pills – muscle relaxants – and took them with some Advil and ended up being rushed to the hospital by ambulance where they pumped her stomach.

Apparently she’s still in the hospital (that’ll explain why she wasn’t at school today; I was talking with them), in the psychiatric ward. I don’t know for how long, but I’m unable to visit today or even tomorrow since I’ll be working at home all day and then I have a meeting in the evening. If she’s still in there on Thursday, I’ll go visit.

This happened earlier this summer where she was in the hospital for the same thing and we went to see her. She seemed then to be pretty normal, so I don’t know what’s going on.

As far as I know, nothing earth shattering has happened to cause her to want to kill herself, and I don’t even know if she’s doing this for some kind of attention, albeit negative attention.

If something’s going on with her, she certainly hasn’t told me about it. I do know that she’s living a very self-destructive life… skipping classes, doing drugs, drinking, hanging out with some losers who live like that.

I had hopes when she wanted to change back to her old school and we got her in a little late. I was hoping that she was getting her act together. She talked about taking night classes to make up for classes she’d missed. She talked about summer school. She talked about also getting a part-time job.

All of that seemed a little too much to me, especially since this school has homework, unlike her last. I’d be happy if she just went to school every day, did her work, got good marks since she’s a bright girl, and lived a normal life. That’s all I want for my daughter… a happy, normal life. I hope she figures out what is normal and pretty damned soon. And I hope the psychiatrists will talk with her and maybe help her to see what she needs to do.

The bottom line is that she’s responsible for her own life, and only she can prevent any misery. Let’s hope she can grasp that.

Jim Carrey plays a guy who’s withdrawn into himself after his wife left him (3 short years before), and his friends keep trying to get him out and about, but he’s not answering their calls.

He runs into an old friend who tells him about a program where he can become a “yes man”, someone who says yes to everything in life, thereby really living and experiencing life.

Jim becomes the yes man and good things start happening to him. Whenever he says no, bad things happen.

The show was amusing, had some funny lines and scenes. I was expecting a sequel to Liar, Liar, but this was not that (for which I’m glad).

Not a bad little time waster.

• Is the bar open yet? How much tea can I drnik? #
• It's only on the weekdays that it seems I could go back to sleep. #

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I know, I know, I keep writing about the jewellery and the shows and yada, yada.

But I can’t remember if I told you that someone had asked me about making necklaces for her daughter’s wedding.

Tonight we had the third and final meeting, and, yes, I’m a go. I shall be making 9 of these necklaces for the daughter’s wedding – the bridesmaids, the bride, the mother, and the mother-in-law.

The good thing is that these are fairly expensive necklaces, so it will be nice to get some money in my pocket. And the only bad thing is that I guess I’d better get busy. Although I do have some time. It’s not like they asked me to have them finished tomorrow.

Tonight I’m gonna relax a bit cuz I guess I’ll start getting busy again on the weekend. I might be able to do two or three of those necklaces, as long as I have all the right beads. Right. I’ve got to check that, I may need to buy some more.

But tonight I’m going to spend my evening vegged out in front of the TV, watching The Office *woohoo*, and 30 Rock, and WvTF else is on.

Tomorrow’s Friday and I’m damned happy about it.

Ok, just about all the work is over with for now, except for a meeting tonight, dentist and another meeting next week.

I just thought I’d give you an update since I haven’t posted much recently. Maybe tonight I’ll be around and can actually write about something.

Over at Mommyknows.com, she’s got a huge Kraft Foods giveaway basket for some lucky reader to win. The post is here: http://mommyknows.com/huge-kraft-foods-gift-basket-giveaway/.

I, of course, have to enter that giveaway because Kraft peanut butter is the only kind I eat. Yes, boys and girls, I am a peanut butter snob. I’ve tried other peanut butters, and they just don’t compare. And when your dinner, most of the time, consists of a spoon of peanut butter, you become a very discerning peanut butter eater.

So I’m blogging about the giveaway cuz that will give me two entries to the contest. You can enter too – find out how at her post. There’s more than just peanut butter in there. But I don’t think you should even try… fewer chances for me to win that way.

• That was a long day at the festival. Remind me again why I do this? #
• I was pretty sure I tweeted yesterday. I guess I was wrong #

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Tomorrow come to the Thornhill Festival and meet me. You don’t have to buy anything, just come and say hi.

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to buy something, I’ll let you but otherwise come to Yonge and Colborne Street and look for the first jewellery booth.

Come on. You know you want to say hi.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a priest whose actions come under scrutiny by the head nun/principal (Meryl Streep) of a Catholic school.

This was a well done movie, probably Hoffman’s best role and Meryl Streep is absolutely believable as the self-righteous, manipulative, head nun.

The story enfolds with a new kid to school, a black boy whom the priest befriends to save him from bullying and taunting since he’s the first black boy in the school. The boy is interested in becoming a priest, but he also has a dysfunctional home situation with a father who beats him.

Hoffman is a priest who wants to spread love and bring progress, get the younger generation to come to the church and enjoy themselves, thereby gaining new parishioners.

Meryl Streep is hung up on the old, strictly enforced rules of the school and church, and, that, as far as we can see, is the only reason she has a problem with the new progressive priest (who doesn’t cut his nails short enough, and who’s given sermons on doubt, which she sees as a possible statement about his own beliefs).

In the end, while the priest tries to get through to the principal and doesn’t succeed, he succumbs to her attempts to get him out, and takes another job (a promotion as it turns out) as a pastor at another church.

The crux of the storyline is the persecution of the priest, by an immobile woman, all under the name of God.

• Is it time to pass out yet? Stick a fork in me. #
• It's almost time to go buy some new uniforms. What was wrong with the school without uniforms? #
• I'm on vacation but not for me, my daughter needs me to go to the school with her #
• Up til 2:00… slept til 10:00, that's the first time I've had eight hours sleep in a long time #
• Had to buy a new subwoofer – couldn't get the other one to work since it goes through the DVD and we're using the receiver #

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I can’t believe it’s been 5 days since I actually blogged about anything. That’s busy for ya. However, after next Saturday (the 18th), the madness will stop.

In case I didn’t tell you, I’ll be doing a show at the Thornhill Festival, so those of you in and around the Toronto area, come and buy some jewellery (or at least come and say hi and look at the jewellery pretending you’re gonna buy). I’m gonna be close to Yonge Street (probably the very first jewellery vendor) and you’ll recognize me cuz of my short hair and the way that I look just like my photo at the top – only a little less purpley.

Ok, enough propaganda. I spent my entire day today taking my daughter to go buy her school uniform and various other sundry shopping so that she’d be prepared. I took off Friday so I could go to her old (uniform) school in case it was any help in her getting back in there. Something worked – she got in. But, of course, I’d forgotten all about the uniform stuff – and this at a point where I don’t get paid til next week.

Anyway, roughly $500 later, everything’s all set and, boy, am I tired. I feel like I’ve been doing the breast cancer walk all day – and, as a matter of fact, that was going on today, which screwed us up royally heading out to that uniform place and having the streets closed off and trying to find a reroute.

I do not know that area of the city – Etobicoke – thank God for my little Australian boyfriend in my car, giving me alternate routes as I headed back the wrong way.

Oh, and I stopped at this garage sale along the way… they had a big sign that said “jewellery”. So I thought, “hey, maybe I can find some retro beads”, you know, old jewellery that I can take apart and remake into something current, even if just for me.

So we stop at this ‘garage sale’ and look at the jewellery. It’s some woman selling her own hand-made jewellery. And not cheaply either. I’m looking at stuff and she’s got it for $35. I think, “hmmm, this doesn’t seem like a garage sale”, and I was right. It was a venue for her to sell her jewellery. I felt ripped.

She started telling me all about the special beads in the pieces. “Oh, this is my bestseller, these beads from Brazil, yada, yada”, so to shut her up as I inspected her jewellery, I said, “ya, I make jewellery”. Ok, that killed the sell job, she obviously figured I wasn’t about to buy the jewellery. But then she wasn’t too forthcoming with information when I asked what something was – don’t want to give away secrets to the competition.

Anyway, enough yapping. This is not a catch-up for five days of saying nothing. I’m done, but I’ve got a movie to watch – that priest one where they think he’s a pedophile, I forget the name of it. I’ll let you know if it was any good. It didn’t really appeal to me, but there was nothing else cuz I didn’t get over to the movie place til after 5:00 and my zip movie wasn’t here in time for this weekend.

My daughter and I went to see this movie this afternoon. You know I love Quentin Tarantino’s movies, so I had to see this.

It’s about Nazi occupation and the people working in the background to kill the Nazis.

Brad Pitt plays the head of the Inglourious Basterd team, and, while I like Brad Pitt, I can’t say that I like him with a Southern accent. In general, I don’t think I like Southern accents – love British, Australian, Scottish, Irish; don’t like Southern, not fond of French, don’t like Newfie. I’m an accent snob.

The movie was l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-g. Holy crap, he could have made that movie in half the time. It started at 2:30 and we didn’t get out til after 5:00. Take half an hour off for previews and that makes it two hours.

I didn’t find it to be what I would class as a “usual” Quentin Tarantino movie, which I guess means that it was ‘ok’ and would have been better if shorter, but I’m not going to be adding it to my QT collection.

Go see it if you want, it’s not out on Blu-Ray yet. I don’t consider it worth it considering that I paid $23 for the movie and about $20 for a combo that came with a large popcorn (to share) and two drinks (mine was water) and a bag of candy.

• I could have slept in today – but, no, company's coming #
• Ha, ha. Wow, that was more than once in a month. #
• *woohoo* I took tomorrow off!! I'm in a really good mood. Did I say really good mood? #
• Nothing on Mondays, right? #
• I'm bored. And I don't feel like making jewellery. #

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I read this book by Elmore Leonard years ago. This was one of my favourite books of all time. Because of this book, I went to the library and took out all Elmore Leonard’s books and read them. Another one you’ll probably remember being made into a movie is “Get Shorty”.

Anyway, I did not picture Mickey Rourke as the Indian in the book, yet here he is in large living colour, playing the Indian, “Blackbird”.

I waited a long time for this movie. I was ecstatic years ago when I first heard they were making it into a movie, then the release on DVD was held up for some reason, so I finally just got it from my ziplist.

Keep in mind that by this point, I barely remember the book, the plot, the characters, only that it was a favourite. What I do remember liking about the story was that there was a lot of what Blackbird was thinking. Half the fun of the book was reading about what he was thinking, but not saying.

Well you can’t show what someone’s thinking in a movie. And so a lot of the best is left out of the movie. All I get from the movie is that there are these two criminals out to kill anyone who’s been a witness to their criminal activities. End of story.

As far as I’m concerned, the movie was really lame. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I would recommend the book (I think… now I’ve got to go get it and read it again to see if I still like it).

Ok, I’m just on vacation today, I decided to make it an extra long, long weekend.

I had big plans. One of which was to get all the jewellery priced and in order since there’s only two weeks til the show and I don’t think that everything’s priced.

I was also going to do a mock display to see how I’d have everything placed since I’m going to have one table with the expensive stuff and one table with the cheaper stuff.

So far all I’ve done is make some more necklaces. I got it into my head that I wanted some long necklaces and, of course, I can’t make just one to sell, I also have to make one for myself – so that’s taking me twice as long.

Unfortunately, one of the ones I made, I don’t have enough of some of the beads to make the same one for myself, so I’m gonna have to do some substitution. The other one I’ve made, I’m in the middle of making mine now.

Luckily it’s a long, long weekend. I’ve got pretty much the whole weekend to do what I had planned to do today. And I’d better get to it, too, since I’m pretty bogged down with meetings next week.

Work, work, work, it’s all I ever do. How do I keep picking hobbies that are so much work?

This is the wired pink necklace that I made not too long ago. I was asked whether I would donate some jewellery for the breast cancer auction and I donated this necklace, and the earrings, and another pair of day earrings (I forgot to take a picture of all of them together).

This is some of my more expensive jewellery, the necklace being $100, the long earrings $25 and the day earrings, $15. A lot of that cost to do with the sterling silver in the pieces, never mind over 160 beads and pearls, yada yada.

I finished it off with the little pink breast cancer ribbon – you can’t see that here because I put it on after I took the picture. Even though I’m a ‘leadership’ giver to the United Way, I hope that they are able to raise some money for breast cancer with this. I’ve never been asked to donate stuff (other than money) before. Look at me… I’m caring.

Yesterday I went and got my hair cut (really short) for the first time in two or three months. I didn’t get it cut because the last haircut I got was so bad, I figured I’d better let it grow out for a while.

I went back to Ray Daniels salon, where I’ve been before, and where I once had a really good hair cut, but by the time I went back, that guy had gone somewhere else.

So I tried a variety of different haircutters at Ray Daniels – not liking any of them too much, but they weren’t absolutely putrid – just basic, I figured I could get the same thing at First Choice, and so I went to a bunch of different spots.

Yesterday, I had Sayed do my hair. And I think Sayed thinks that he’s Edward Scissorhands, because he kept doing this thing with the scissors and a comb that was like, ‘comb, snip snip snip, comb, snip snip snip’, really fast – maybe he likes the sound that the scissors make, I dunno.

I was about to ask him if there was a contest or something going on where he needed to be the world’s fastest hair cutter. I let it go and let him cut.

As he came around the side where I could see him cutting the front, I could see that the scissors were nowhere near the hair. So he was doing this ‘comb, snip snip snip, comb, snip snip snip’ in the air. I almost burst out laughing (except that I was going to be paying for a haircut).

At that point I almost said to him, “ya know, the scissors are in the air – they’re not even near the hair”, but, instead, I let it go again. You know me… I’m such a people person.

At the end of it all, he’d managed to cut my hair – and pretty much the way it was in the picture I showed him, so I didn’t say anything about his ridiculous hair cutting technique.

I told him that it was the best haircut I’d had in about six months – which is true, but that doesn’t say much. The haircut is ok, nothing special, and certainly nothing like I used to get before my ‘great’ hair stylist disappeared or retired, or WrTF he went. Oh, Paul, where are you?

If I go back to this guy, I’m going to ask him whether or not he can just cut my hair normally, without all the theatrics (once again, my people skills eeking through here), because I don’t want another Scissorhands performance. As a matter of fact, he would have been done in half the time had the scissors actually made it near the hair.

Anyway, I’m groomed at the moment.

• Ha, ha #
• @momontherun when is girl's night out? in reply to momontherun #
• RT @mommyknows : Did I mention, all she is wearing is panties?! lmao in reply to mommyknows #
• Working from home… I never take any lunch hour here. #
• It's almost time for Gordon Ramsay *woohoo*! #
• I better go see what I'm going to wear to work tomorrow. I hate having to rush around in the mornings. #
• Finished my work. Now I'm already for nothing on TV on a Monday #
• Getting ready to go to Costco with my daughter. I guess I'll have the big hot dog there. #

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I have found that,

1. When you’re making a tea, it’s better to have a teabag in your cup, rather than just pouring boiling water in there
2. When you’re wearing a white shirt, no matter how careful you are, something will always hit it… even just a little splash off your salad dressing
3. If you’re running late for work, you will always hit every red light on the way in
4. The day after your boss tells you what a good job you’re doing, is the day that you’ll screw something up royally, and your boss may even be the one to point it out to you
5. When you have something that needs to be printed in a hurry, you will run out of toner. That toner will not need replacing for another year.
6. When you try to use your coolest, newest gadgets in front of others, you will forget how to use it, or where the key is to show them how cool it is
7. On the day that you write your longest blog post, when you go to post it, instead you’ll be asked to log in, and you will not have copied the post (for safety’s sake)

These are just a few of life’s lessons. Feel free to add your own.

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.

Yes, tonight is the monthly meeting with the yappy people again. I wish to hell that some of them would learn the meaning of “concise”.

So I’ll probably be home around 10:30. I’m thinking that maybe things will go faster because a few of the people can’t make the meeting. Although I know at least one of those people is not one of the big talkers.

I think I’ll make a point of saying something at the beginning, like, “well, this meeting should go pretty quickly since there’s only a few of us”. And maybe, just maybe, those really VERBOSE people will shut the fuck up for a change.

Wish me luck.

On Friday, when I was working at home, I got all the emails from work, and one of them was an announcement about some changes that were taking place.

One of those changes was that the girl who backs me up (and not too well, I might add, it takes me a day to straighten everything out when I get back) is moving into a new job.

My first thought was, “WHAT!?!??” I’ve been bugging people for at least two years for something new, something challenging, just something and have been rewarded with even more work, never mind anything the least bit challenging, and this girl, who I don’t think is the sharpest tool in the shed, got put into a new job.

I was so pissed off I even sent an email off to TFB saying that I was pissed and why was it that I was still stuck in this nowhere job after begging for more things and the person who can’t even handle doing what I’m doing, gets something new (not a lot more money, but some).

I never heard back from him and now he’s off on vacation. Today, however, I did go to my director and told him that with all the changes going on (and people being moved around with some vacancies left open), I would like more responsibility. I said that I’d been doing the same (fucking ← not out loud) thing for years and I’d like some expansion.

He said he thought that was a possibility. That I might be able to take over some of those responsibilities that were being left by some of the vacancies (not my back-up’s vacancy).

So, boys and girls, I guess I’m waiting to see what they offer me. Because the first thing I started doing on Friday was looking for another job. If I had to do this one the rest of my working life, they’d probably be putting me into an asylum (and maybe they should be already).

It probably wasn’t the soundest judgment on my part to email my boss, but WTF, it’s done now, I guess we’ll see if there are any repercussions, and I certainly needed to express myself.

This was a strange movie with Danny Glover playing a train conductor. Synopsis: A man boards Danny’s train. The man is carrying what looks like a gift, and throughout the ride keeps popping pills. When Danny goes to collect the fare from this man, he and a couple of other passengers find out that he’s died.

The two nosy passengers open the dead man’s gift only to find a box that looks like it’s filled with diamonds. The rest of the movie is about how they’ll get rid of the body so they can split the diamonds with no one being the wiser.

Spoiler: We find that while one person saw diamonds, the other saw emeralds and the other saw rubies. None of these are in the box, it’s one of those ’see what you’d like to see’ kind of boxes.

Of course it turns out that others on the train are rivals seeking the box and in the end, pretty much everyone ends up dead.

In some way, the movie reminded me of the ring in Lord of the Rings. I was a little disappointed that there weren’t actually any diamonds, I wanted to see how it would turn out with the split.

• Working from home tomorrow – the big sleep-in until 7:30 *woohoo*! #
• I need more time in the day. What I've got is not enough. #

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I guess I’ve never told you how much I look forward to receiving my Sears bill. I’m not even being my usual sarcastic self; I’m serious.

What I like about it is that they put all these little flyers in the envelope. All these flyers for more stuff to buy. Product! Not like the phone bill or the hydro bill, the only flyers in there are to do with price hikes or some meaningful new government initiative.

Sears flyers are just like looking through the catalogue, and I love looking through catalogues, imagining everything I’d buy if I had any money.

With my Sears membership, I can choose:

1. having ‘my child’s name on one of those beautiful placemats’.
2. 500 labels with my name and address on them for only $9.95.
3. the ever popular Egg Genie (as seen on TV), which will cook a perfect egg in minutes! It’s easy as 1…2…3 and takes the guesswork out of making perfect eggs.
4. the Timeless Collectible cars, perhaps a 1937 Cord 812 Supercharged, or a 1963 Studebaker Avanti – only $29.99 each for these.
5. the Diamond Tennis Bracelet with a total 1/2 carat weight, although I don’t think I’d go for that since I already own a 2-carat tennis bracelet and I can hardly see the diamonds.
6. the Barcelona Leather handbag really interests me. It comes in black, fern green, cognac or wine and says it’s roomy enough for all my purse needs – ideal size to keep me organized and give me maximum space. They’re $59.99 unless you buy more than one, then the others are only $49.99. Not a bad price for a leather purse. Problem is, I’d like three of those – black, cognac and wine (forget fern green – although maybe it would go well with khaki, I’ve got a lot of khaki and neutral stuff).

Those are just a few of the product flyers that those Sears people think I would be interested in. And I am interested. Problem is… I don’t want to be interested. I have no money Sears – unless I put it on my Sears card, but I’m trying to get out of debt cuz I’m just out of control on spending.

I’ve gotta put that stuff away. I won’t throw out the Barcelona handbag one, just in case.

Ok, I’ve been a little bit slack in posting – and I’m still gonna be a little bit slack. I’m really busy. When I have a minute to myself, I’ll write about some lame thing as usual.

• Time for filet mignon with mushrooms and onion, and a nice healthy salad on the side. #
• Is this thing on? #
• Where's my tweet from 6:00 tonight? #
• I keep tweeting, and it keeps not showing them. #
• Just watched Hell's Kitchen. For some reason, it was on at 7:00 tonight. #
• Home from the hospital – life is back to normal #
• Ha ha #
• I'm drinking water and black coffee, preparing for that colonoscopy *woohoo* #

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Well, I just took the bandage off my foot to see how it was doing. You can actually see the bandage mark on my foot. My, but don’t I have sensitive, delicate skin.

Looks like that bandage kept my wound clean and moist. Just what I want in a big, honking scrape… moistness.

I’ve decided to leave the bandage off it now so that it can turn into a really attractive big SCAB. That scrape looks like the sphinx, doesn’t it?

And tomorrow I happen to be wearing long pants to work instead of capris, so nobody’s even gonna see this thing. How am I supposed to get some much needed attention for my ailments? I know, I’ll just have to show everyone. I’ll wait til we’re all sitting at lunch in the cafeteria before I delight everyone with my scarring.

Yes, yes, I’m pathetic. But I enjoy being me. Does that scar make my foot look fat?

Last year, for the jewellery shows I was doing, I decided I needed an Interac machine, you know, something that customers could use debit or credit cards with in order to buy my jewellery.

This little extravagance was costing me $86 a month, even though I only do these shows in the summer months.

I asked Moneris if they had a seasonal rate and they told me that for $5 a month I could keep my account going, but then when I wanted to get the machine back, I’d have to pay another $250 to get it (just like I’d paid up front to get the machine).

That seemed like a bigger pain than just keeping it all year, and having it if I ever needed it at other times, so I told them I’d keep it.

Last week I found out Moneris had cancelled my account. How did I find out? A courier showed up at my door to pick up the machine. My snookey was home but he didn’t hand it over, not knowing what was going on.

When I called Moneris, someone told me that my account had been cancelled because there weren’t enough transactions. Huh? Wasn’t I paying $86/month to rent this thing that I wasn’t going to use? Didn’t I spend a year of paying for this, and now, in September when I’m doing a show, I find out I don’t have a machine to use.

They gave me the name of Natasha? to call and find out how this could be remedied. Well, I called Natasha. Her phone always went directly to voicemail. And so I left message after message for a period of two weeks and Natasha never called me back.

In the meantime, I also called TD Merchant Services and arranged to have an Interac machine with them. They said it would be two weeks until I got it, which was fine as long as I had something for the upcoming show.

I also checked my bank account to make sure Moneris wasn’t taking out monthly fees again when they had cancelled my account.

Today I called Moneris to come pick up the machine again. I explained to 3 different people what had happened and was finally put through to a supervisor who informed me that Natasha always returns phone calls right away. Uh, no, she does not even return calls within two weeks, Ms. Supervisor.

They thought I wanted to reinstate and I told them to cancel it. Not too long after that, I got a call from Natasha. I asked her why, after all the messages I left, she had not returned my calls and she informed me that, “we do not return calls if they haven’t left their merchant number”. Oh ho, once again, I did not know the rules. I was supposed to leave my merchant number in order to get a phone call back.

I said, “well why didn’t you return my call and I would have given you my merchant number?” (you fucking twit – didn’t say that out loud). Then she talked to me about reinstatement and I told her to cancel the account and get the machine picked up.

Anyway, she told me they had cancelled my account because my bank account had been frozen. I told her that was crap because I had my account opened online in front of me and I could see that all $86 payments had gone through there every month. What horseshit. It still sounds to me like they weren’t making enough money off me with that measly $86 rental fee.

So that is cancelled, I will never be dealing with these incompetent boobs again. I hope TD Merchant Services comes through alright and that they’ve got a little bit more on the ball than Moneris – otherwise this year’s only show that I chose to do, will be cash only.

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?

Ok, it’s over and done with. And it wasn’t so bad. Actually, the worst part about it was the day before, wanting to eat something (because I couldn’t) and having to drink all that crap every 10 minutes. Ok, I guess the going to the bathroom every 10 minutes wasn’t the best either, but, today? Not too bad.

I got up at 5:15 and had my shower, then I started drinking the stuff again and going to the bathroom again. By the time we left at 7:30, I certainly didn’t have to go to the bathroom (ever again), for sure there was nothing inside me.

We got there within half an hour and we’d left an hour early. So of course we couldn’t do anything, like go to breakfast, to kill time. There was a Tim’s right there in the hospital – they are cruel. I had to stop drinking any liquids at 6:30.

After waiting, a nurse called me… “Jafer?”. I looked over at her where she proceeded to go out the door, yelling, “Jafer?” I said, “hello” and she looked at me and said, “I’m looking for Jafer”. I said, “yes, that would be me”. “Oh, that’s you?” she asked, to which I responded, “that’s why I looked over when you called my name”. She told me that I should have said something. Pardon me for not knowing the rules.

She took me to a change room where I was told I had to take everything off but my bra. Why? If I have to take off everything else, what the hell does it matter if I’ve got my bra on?

Anyway, after that she tried to hook me up to the intravenous but of course she couldn’t get it into the vein in my hand. She told me that she’d stuck it into a valve, and that was no good, so she’d try another vein. She finally got it into the vein but my hand is going to be really purple tomorrow based on the way it looks right now.

I sat around at the pajama party with a bunch of other people. One old guy also in pajamas joined our little party and I could tell he was a yapper so I was trying not to have any body language at all in his direction but he started yapping anyway.

After I politely answered back I turned and started talking to my snookey so the yapper wouldn’t keep making inane conversation with me. That didn’t stop him, oh, no, there were other people in attendance at this party, he decided to monopolize the group.

Then I got called in, just me an my little pole of intravenous liquidy stuff. They told me to lay down on my back and they’d get the drugs started.

The doctor told me that she might have to give me more drugs than the usual person since I drink so much alcohol (that’s beer to you and me) that I was probably fairly resistant to drugs. But I told her that I hadn’t had any beer last night, just water and the stuff, so maybe I wouldn’t be so ‘resistant’ at all.

She told me to lay on my left side and then I was out. Ha! Resistant that!

I woke up in a room with a nurse taking my blood pressure which was low but that was ok cuz it was low when I got in there. It’s always low, that’s why I’m going to live forever doncha know.

I slept a bit more, in and out because those noisy damned nurses kept doing stuff to me and other people in a noisy fashion. Hey! Don’t you know people are trying to sleep here?

Then I got the final wake up call. I got dressed, got wheeled over to Tim’s in the hospital for my fix and an oatmeal raisin cookie, and then my snookey wheeled me out and got the car. We then headed off to Wimpy’s for a meal.

I ordered Eggs Benedict but I couldn’t eat much more than a few bites of it after getting stuffed from a cookie, so I took it home and we split it for dinner.

That was my experience. Colonoscopy not so bad. They removed a couple of polyps. Who knows… maybe I’ll go to the bathroom now (thank you for sharing). She told me I had to come back again in three years. I’ll give that some thought.

Yes, boys and girls, you’ll remember that tomorrow is “C” day. The big colonoscopy day.

So my preparations started this morning with no food all day. I can’t even have milk, so I can’t have tea cuz I drink my tea with milk.

I did have about 4 Tim’s and one coffee made at home since I drink those black, they’re allowed. And I was allowed to have jell-o, so I’ve gone through about 3 snack packs of sugar-free jell-o so far.

It’s funny how starved and empty and hungry I felt. And the reason it’s funny is because half the time on the weekends, I don’t eat anything all day. I’ll sit here having tea after tea, at some point hearing my stomach growling and think, “oh, I should get something to eat”, and then forget about eating unless I get up right away and get something.

But when you’re told you can’t eat? All of a sudden, all you think about with those growls is how you’d like some food.

I started my Peg-Lyte at 6:00 pm. One 8-oz. glass of it every ten minutes until you drink 3 litres of it (litre roughly like 3 quarts).

And what you find after about half an hour, is that you have to go to the bathroom about as often as you have to drink one of those glasses (if not more).

I have even mastered the bathroom while drinking at the same time feat. What can I say… it was time for another glass. My stomach is all distended like I’m 8 months pregnant, and I have to tell you that toilet paper is not so ‘cottony soft’ when you start using it every 10 minutes.

I only have about an hour and 10 minutes more left of drinking this stuff. Then I get to save another litre for tomorrow morning when I’m supposed to wake at 5:30 am, start drinking, arrive for my 9:30 appointment at 8:30.

It’ll be interesting to try to fit a shower in there somewhere. Perhaps I’d better have one right after my first glass. Or no, it usually takes me about 15 minutes in the shower. Perhaps before the first glass – which would mean that I have to get up at 5:15 and jump right in.

This is literally a pain in the ass. Couldn’t they do the same thing with an enema? Not that I’m fond of enemas mind you.

Ope, better go. Nature is calling me.

• Gotta shower and get ready to go to a movie with my daughter #
• How come none of my tweets have shown up for days/ #
• Hell's Kitchen is on tonight *woohoo*. Something to look forward to. #
• Went to bed at 3:00, got up at 9:30 – more sleep than usual #

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Lyndon was testing this plugin on his site, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I had it all installed and I like the look and everything, adds some buttons to the comment area, buttons for twitter, or OpenID, Flickr, and others, which I thought was really neat, people could kind of ‘cross-comment’.

However, even though there’s an option for importing all your comments, none of my commenters’ previous comments were showing up.

It was almost like starting with a blank slate – you couldn’t see any comments at all on any posts.

So I took it off. I like to see all that stuff, never mind just showing new comments.

If they come up with something that will show all the comments, I might go back and try it again. For now…. no.

And, BTW, WTF is up with Twitter? Or is it the WP plugin for Twitter? I’ve tweeted a bit over the last couple of days but none of them are showing up here in my little twitter sidebar thingie and sometimes it shows me an fsocks error message on the bottom of this site.

Anybody know about that?

I’ve never been on Jeopardy ‘in person’, but for the past little while we have been watching it every night (probably due to nothing else worthwhile being on TV).

Anyway, I used to be really good at it back when I was younger and then used to watch it every night. Now, not too good. The categories have gotta be just right.

Although I did surprise myself one night with some geographical question and I answered ‘Crete” and that was the right answer. Surprised the hell out of me cuz, as far as I know, I don’t know anything at all about Crete and can’t remember having heard anything either.

Anyway, we were watching last night when it’s now a teen tournament – hoping like hell that we can get easier, more geared-to-teens questions right and not succeeding too much.

But I did have this run. I got all the answers right in one category. And what was that category? It was video games.

Leave it to me, a 52-year-old woman with more knowledge about video games than the teens who supposedly play them.Ooooh, what a genius, ahhhh, the old broad knows all about that.

Don’t ask me geography. Or history. Leave out science too. Don’t go near math or current events. Art and literature… not so much. Video games! I’m rocking.

Yes, boys and girls, it’s official. I have a pickle up my ass. Little sexual experimentation, you ask? Nah. New fangled bidet, you muse? Nuh, uh.

After all that suspense (huh?), I’ll tell you. I have my appointment next Monday for a colonoscopy. I’m taking Friday off (to run errands because when I ran them yesterday on the civic holiday, every effing place was closed), and then on Sunday, I’m not allowed to eat anything, just have to keep drinking a bunch of fluids.

I’ll have to read up on exactly what I’m supposed to be doing on Sunday and at what time so I guess I can gorf down a bunch of food on Saturday to poop out all day Sunday while I’m taking the stuff, Peglyte.

What kind of name is that… Peglyte? That doesn’t make me think of having a big poo; why didn’t they name it Poolyte (oh, that wouldn’t be very poolite now would it?). From my understanding, they should have named it Pooalot – which is why I booked the appointment for a Monday. Drink the crap ← oh, I’m amusing, not eat, and rush in there to get a camera up my ass first thing in the morning.

That poor doctor, she’s gonna have to look at my big hairy bum. Hairy? ewww. Hey! It’s a dainty, feminine, peach fuzzy kind of hair that everyone has (don’t they?), some are just blonder than others. And some of us look like Fu Manchu bum – but that’s not me, I digress.

Anyway, the whole reason for this colonoscopy is (1) because I’m over 50, and, (2) the real reason… I never poo (thank you for sharing). Ok, maybe I do poo, but it’s not too damned often.

So I thought, maybe some doctor who likes to stick cameras up your bum should have a darned hard look up mine. Perhaps she’ll be able to remove that pickle. Maybe replace it with something a little smaller that lets the poo out.

By the way, does it sound less offensive if I call it a big poo instead of a big shit. It does to me. I almost find it a term of endearment, my poor poo, stuck inside me. Just like my babies – didn’t want to come out. Oh, is that even grosser? Comparing my children with poo? Ok, I take it back then.

That was my big news. I’m sure I’ll share the fun and excitement of it all after Monday. Stay tuned for Everything You Ever Wanted to Read About Poo, and More, Part II, The Pickle Killer.

• Ok, I'm sick of waiting. I'm going to watch Fast & Furious by myself #
• WTF is my snookey… it's 8:30 already and I want to watch a movie #
• It's beer time already. Ok, I made it beer time already. #
• Drinking my prescribed lax-a-day in a lackadaisical manner #
• Clearing all in Firefox will let me see my new favicon – but not in Chrome, not in I.E. Could things just be simple for crying out loud? #
• Doctor's appointment over with, now there's cleaning up to do. Why don't I have a maid? #
• I'm clean so what are we waiting for? #
• Gotta jump into the shower – I've got a barbecue to go to and my kids are gonna be here any time (the place is a pigsty) #
• Holy crap, the day's half gone and I haven't done anything except play with another theme #

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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 am not using the Thesis theme. I bought it quite a while ago, and I bought the developer version that you could use for all your sites, but I can’t figure that stupid thing out.

You’ll notice I’ve changed my theme. Hopefully this one is faster loading, that’s the only reason I changed it. I was sick of how long it seemed for the site to load.

You’ll see I also changed the colouring somewhat… less purple, more orange and green. That just enabled me to go with a lot of what was inherent in this theme by Daily Blog Tips.

The Thesis theme had all these ‘hooks’. And that’s fine, reading through the guide I got the idea of how the hooks work. However, I’d be adding hooks to customize things and only one of them would show up.

I dicked around with that theme for a long time (only because I paid for it) and finally had enough.

If it’s gotta be rocket science to make changes, I don’t want to be bothered with it. I just want to edit some html, or some css, maybe move some php code here and there and be done with it.

So, I hope things are faster for you. They’re faster for me.