Up coming Saturday Shenanigans and Extreme Sport Shopping

Just an ordinary, typical Friday today. With maybe a hint of silliness thrown in since it is Friday. And for some of use, it's a long weekend too. I'm excited about the prospect of sleeping in tomorrow but I've even more excited about getting to have an afternoon/evening of Shenanigans with Steph. It's been far too long. I'm suffering from a serious case of cabin fever and friend-type interaction and venting.

Mother Nature might attempt to add some excitement to our outing in the form of freezing rain but I'm sure we can find a mall with covered parking to hide at for a few hours. Or Ikea :) I have a $25 dollar off coupon for one of my favourite stores and they have tops on sale for $25 tomorrow. A free top is very welcome in my world!

Someone new is moving into an apartment down the hall from me. They started moving in a little after 7pm and I do believe they're still at it. Which is highly annoying as my apartment building is less sound proof them my university residence was. Earlier, they brought some heavy piece of furniture up. It took them almost 10 minutes to go up the 2 flights of stairs and then about 5 to get it down the hall. After quite a bit of thumping, banging and grunting, I heard them talking to one of my other neighbours. Apparently whatever it was wouldn't fit through the door of the apartment. Oops. That can't be good. That's also why you should measure things before dragging them up 2 flights of stairs and down a hallway.

Back to shopping for a minute. Steph is going to think I'm crazy, but I think I might try to convince her to take me to Costco tomorrow. I know. It's a Saturday and it's a long weekend and it's only 7 weeks until Christmas...but that's why I want to go. I need Christmas cards. And baking supplies. Hmmm, I kind of hope Steph doesn't read this blog. She might get frightened away. LOL. Going to Costco most of the time is kind of like an adventure sport. On a Saturday, it becomes an Extreme adventure sport where you're not entirely sure if you'll come out alive or in one piece.

I need to get to bed so that I'm fully rested for tomorrow's adventure.

Good Night!

Sarah

Random photo of a squirrel in our back lot. He's a stumpy!

Music = Life

In his play, Twelfth Night, Shakespeare wrote "If music be the food of love, play on" (Act 1, Scene 1).  I can see where he was coming from.

Music is love for me. Nothing in my life seems to strike more emotional responses than music. While out at lunch with one of my co-workers today, we heard "Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is a Season)" by The Byrds. I instantly was reminded of my grandmother's funeral. That song was played during her funeral. But rather than make me sad, it made me smile as there was a rather amusing event that went along with it at the funeral. There was some confusion as to when the song was to be played, which lead to the minister getting confused and then there was this whole couple minutes of silence thing. More amusing was the fact that I don't think my grandma every actually heard that song.When I hear "We're not gonna take it" by Twisted Sister, I laugh because it reminds me of dancing around the living room as a kid (when mom wasn't watching of course). That was the first song that I learnt all the words to. "Dayo" by Harry Belafonte will always remind me of Saturday afternoons with my Gram and Chooch.  My gram would put that record on (yes, record) and my brother and I would dance around the den with her and my grandpa and sing along. And it also remind me of the movie Beetlejuice. LOL.

Music provides a sound track to our lives. When I hear certain songs, they remind me of specific points in my life. Sometimes that's an awesome thing and sometimes it isn't. There are songs that I can't listen to anymore without getting angry or really sad. Thankfully, they are far and few between.

"Secret Smile" by Semisonic will always remind me of my first boyfriend. "Barbie Girl" by Aqua will always remind me of my first year of University and my friend Heather (she HATES that song LOL). "Mr. Vain" by Culture Beat will always remind me of high school dances (and Heather and Rose). Pretty much anything by Guns 'N Roses reminds me of my brother because he's the one who introduced them to me. "Everything to Everyone" by Everclear will always remind me of my first rock concert. I will always associate Bruce Sprinstein and Def Leopard with my mom and ZZ Top and Frank Zappa with my dad. Mom gets the Beatles too. She went to one of their concerts when she was younger. Has a bit of an amusing story to go along with it too. Something about not being able to hear the band over the screams of all the girls... LOL.

"Gone" by The Tea Party almost always makes me cry. I cried when I saw them play it live the first time, because it so connected with everything that was happening in my life at that point. "If I had a Million Dollars" by the Barenaked Ladies will always remind me of grade 9 and the charity auction they held where they auctioned off most of the items from that song.

I probably could gone on all night, reliving the soundtrack of my life but you get the point. Music is amazing. It moves us. It heals us. It motivates us. It's universal. All cultures have music as a part of them. I think we all have music in our souls. It connects us and helps us find the right words and emotions when we can't think of them ourselves. Music is almost as old as time itself. Just sit outside on a still night and or sunny afternoon and you'll discover that nature even has its own brand of music and its own soundtrack.

From Lullabies to Operas, Heavy Metal to Teen Pop, Country to Classical, Rock to Rap, music is simply amazing. And my life certainly wouldn't be the same without it.

Good Night!

Sarah

Rock On!

Holy Math Hell Batman!

I like to consider myself a pretty smart cookie. In high school, I got good grades without trying too hard. When I applied myself, I got great grades. Except in two classes: Math and French.

Since I was in an advanced stream, I was told to take advanced math. I managed to pass grade 9 advanced math with 73%. Things went south in grade 10 and I got out alive with 62%. You don't have to be a math whiz to see where this is going. Grade 11 math rolls around and I ask my councillor if I can drop down to general or business math. He said no. Since I was in an advanced program, I needed to stay in advanced math. Within the first month of school, the teacher asked to speak to me and he suggested that I drop down to a lower level of math. I laughed and explained that I'd tried that already. Thank god, he decided to strike a deal with me. If I put in the effort, he'd find a way to pass me. I managed to fail both major exams that year but still managed to squeak by with a 51%. For the record, that is the lowest grade I ever received in my scholastic career.

Learning from that lesson, in grade 12 I was taking OAC 1 French (they didn't have grade 12 french, just OAC 1 and OAC 2 and for those who don't know, OAC was like grade 13. It's long gone now). After the first 6 weeks of the class, I knew I was in uber trouble so I dropped it. In hind sight, that probably wasn't the best idea but meh. I liked having that spare period.

Fast forward to today. I'm in French class this morning and what does the teacher tell us that we're doing: Math. In French.

Are you fucking kidding me? My worst 2 subjects rolled together into one. This is my idea of hell. The stuff my nightmares are made of. It was brutal. One of the worst parts being that I have to use my fingers to count by 10s to remember the number in french above 30. LOL. And we were using numbers in the millions today. Speaking of which, whoever developed the french language was a real jackass. The works in french for Thousand, Million and Billion are all almost the same fucking word! They're: Mille, Million and Milliard. COME ON!!!!!

Class wasn't entirely horrible though. My co-worker, who was equally in hell as me, managed to provide me with some awesome comic relief.  The teacher asked us to come up with 6 math questions, including the answer. We took turns reading them and another person in the class had to answer the question. My co-worker read one of hers and the other class mate gave an answer and the teacher said "correct". My co-worker looked puzzled. I looked over. The answer she had written down didn't match the verbal answer given. Hmmm. She did the math again, same answer that she had written down. That's when I noticed the problem. She had written:

80 + 5 = 90

LMAO. Oops. Blond moment apparently. But we laughed and laughed. The teacher actually had to stop and ask us if we're ok, which didn't help our laughter. Epic fail. So awesome. For the record, this is also the same co-worker who texted me tonight and said "Thank you for ur Knicks".Apparently I own a basketball team and lent them to her. Her auto correct rocks. She was trying to say "Knowledge". Priceless. Cheer up, it's almost Friday.

Good Night!

Sarah

The Great Run-A-Round

I'm feeling a bit better tonight. I still am tired and don't feel like eating but I had a nice hot bath with some lavender scented epsom salts and I used a warming mud mask on my face and now I feel a little more relaxed. Last night I woke up just before 1:30am, just after 4am (might have been the little earth quake that happened in Quebec), again at 4:40am and then at 5:55am. Friggin' annoying.

Today was a little better of a day. The morning sucked and seemed to drag on but I got some stuff done that needed to be done so that was good. Worked on getting yesterday's discovered mistake fixed and then got into a nice pissing contest with our ITHelpDesk, which I won.

We have 2 Help Desks: one for the special program we use and one for everything else. We had a problem with a user account. So the designated coordinator contacted the program helpdesk (like he's supposed to). They got back to him and said that it wasn't at their end, but provided instructions on who to contact to get help, as the issue lay with the group who looks after the accounts.

Here's the fun part. You can not communicate directly with the account group. You have to contact them via the main helpdesk.

So, the coordinator asked me to contact the main help desk since I'm the account contact person. No problems. The instructions from the program helpdesk said to contact the main helpdesk and ask that the issue be forwarded to the account people. So that's what I did. I provided all the necessary info on the user etc.., included a note saying that the program helpdesk told me to contact the main help desk and sent off the request. I get a canned response email back from the main helpdesk telling me to contact the program help desk. Sigh.

I email the helpdesk back and pointed out that in my request, I said that we'd already spoken to the program helpdesk and that they told us to contact the main helpdesk. A few minutes later, I get an email back from the main help desk saying to read the instructions and contact the program help desk.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. So...I hunt down the email train between the program coordinator and the program helpdesk, find the one that instructed us to contact the main help desk, and I copied and pasted it into my email back to the main help desk.

And I didn't hear from them again. But what a waste of time. It took the coordinator half a day to get a response telling us that we need to contact someone else. Then I wasted an hour emailing with the idiot at the help desk. And guess what? The user's problem still isn't resolved.

Which reminds me, I never got my help ticket # for that request. Guess I get to harass them again in the morning.

I'm not an idiot. I know how to read and follow instructions. Unless they're in french. Then I'm fucked.

Speaking of which, I have French in the morning. Dammit. At least I remembered to bring my books home tonight. I probably should get to bed. I need to be able to pay attention in class tomorrow morning.

Good Night.

Sarah

Winter blahs have arrived early

I feel like a hurricane stuck inside of a vacuum. I'm listless, bored and antsy, but I'm tired and lethargic. I kept waking up last night. I couldn't seem to sleep for more than 2 hours at a time. I had to pee, I was too hot, I was too cold, I was uncomfortable. That seemed to set the pace for the day. Every time I tried to get something done, I got interrupted. And when it was quiet, I had to force myself to focus and get stuff done because I really, really, REALLY didn't want to work. Toss in a meeting this afternoon that sounded a little like Sesame street on crack (they like to use a lot of abbreviations in this meeting) and it rounded out my day. And just when I didn't think things could get worse, they did. A lovely mistake was discovered. Crap. Can't say for sure who made the mistake in the first place, but I should have picked up on it so I'll take responsibility for it. At least it was caught faster than the last time something like this happened. Fuck. I'm so pissed off about that. I can't believe it happened again. Crap.

And adding to the delight of the day is the fact that the air at home and in the office is so dry that my poor nose keeps bleeding almost every time I blow it. And because it's dry, I'm sneezing more (dust allergy). Fun times. My apartment is a disaster yet I have no energy what so ever to do anything about it. For dinner I resorted to opening a can of Alpha-getti because I simply had no desire what so ever to attempt to cook, despite the fact that I've got some good stuff in the fridge to make.

I HATE FEELING LIKE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yeah, and it fucking snowed today. So much for the forecast of sun all day. Stupid weather. No snow until December! And even then I'm not a fan.

I know the feeling is temporary. I know it won't last. But right now it's just so hard to get out of bed and face the day. If my doctor wasn't such tool I might attempt to talk to him but the 2 failed attempts at having a physical back in Aug/Sept hasn't really instilled any faith in him into me.

I'm just overwhelmed and over tired and probably spending way too much time by myself.

So sleep is probably a really good plan right now. I have to be able to focus at work tomorrow. I have far too much to do that requires my un-divided attention. Yeah. We're screwed.

Good Night.

Sarah

My balcony from last winter

Polar Bears

Not much to report for today. It was a dull day. I worked this morning and into the early afternoon, made a quick trip to the market for veggies and turkey sausages this afternoon. I had a late lunch and then had a 1.5 hour nap. Tonight I did some groceries. Apparently Metro isn't very busy at 8pm on a Saturday.

Oh, and I killed some strange, big ass bug that was on my closet door. It's guts were green and smelt like cut grass. WTF? I have no idea where the hell it came from and I hope it was the only one. I'm really trying not to think about it.

I came across something cool this afternoon. It's a web cam that's located at a lodge in Churchill, Manitoba. What cool is that it's live from about 8am to 8pm central time and it quite often features polar bears. When I was watching it this afternoon, I saw 4 bears. They were pretty cool. Here's the link: http://explore.org/#!/live-cams/player/polar-bear-lodge-cam

Despite my nap, I'm on the tired side now. I'm happy that we get an extra hour of sleep tonight. Hopefully I'll have a productive day tomorrow. I really should get some laundry done. Maybe.

Good Night!

Sarah

I didn't have a photo of a polar bear, but this is a grizzly bear instead :)

Pink Cow.

So I totally planned on going to bed early tonight since I get to sleep in until 7am tomorrow but I got sucked into the world of Twitter and it's now a lot later than I wanted it to be. Oops.

On the bright side, daylight savings time ends on Sunday so that means an extra hour of sleep. How lovely!

Work was nothing worth writing about. With the exception of the cow. This actually happened a few days ago but I forgot about it until now.

My co-worker Mandy keeps taking the key for the 4th floor storage room home at night. By accident. Which makes it difficult to for those working late or on the night shift to get files from said storage room, should they run out. In order to prevent Mandy from taking said key home, Mandy's supervisory bought a fuzzy pink cow key chain for the key. It's about the size of a softball. And the best part? When you squeeze it, the cow moos quite loudly.

It seems to be working. No one has lost, misplaced or accidentally taken the key home since the cow key chain was introduced. I wonder if they named the cow yet?

Off to bed because I'm back to the office again tomorrow more some more OT. I really need to get a life. And less debt.

Good Night!

Sarah

I didn't have a photo of a toy cow, so I'm using a duck instead.