Tree Vent

Okay, I can't stand it any more. I have to vent to get it out of my system.

My next door neighbour had two enormous, beautiful, birch trees in her back yard. These trees were the resting place for countless birds, the playground for numerous squirrels, and shaded not only her back yard, but ours as well.

Last weekend, while I was at the pot luck, my neighbour (whom I'd always thought of as a sweet, little old lady) had them cut down. Granted, one of them was dead, but the other one there is no excuse for.

My back yard feels naked now. I sit on my deck and there's no sense of privacy, I feel exposed.

The patio feels bright and hot, not cool and shaded. How old must those trees have been to have grown to that size? They were so tall it even shaded our bedroom window.

I'm going to miss those trees.

Red Tape

Well folks, this is my second official day of unemployment.

I never did finish reading Moby Dick and to be honest I have no great urge to finish it. Ishmael tends to run on a bit. Pages of descriptions of whales. Pages of descriptions of pictures of whales. Pages of description of how to remove the blubber from a whale. Do you get my drift? And they haven't even run into Moby Dick yet!

Yesterday I went down to the government run employment agency to see what my options were. Going back to school on the government's dollar is not as easy as it used to be. I have to keep a job hunt diary to prove I don't have the skills needed to get a proper office job. Then I spend the month of July in the Job Finders Club and after that I can explore the options for going back to school.

When I got home I applied for unemployment on-line. The most depressing part of that came at the end of the process where the program finds jobs for you. Apparently I qualify for 9 jobs in my area. All in call centres.

I'm trying not to think about it.

Now I'm bored.

Yeah, there's all kinds of things I could be doing, but I decided to give myself until the weekend to wallow in self-pity and doing something constructive is not wallowing. But wallowing gets kinda boring after a while so I just might have to break down and clean something.

Pot Luck

You know, the reason I haven't been posting more than twice a week is not because I don't have anything to say, it's just that it's not as convenient to say it when I'm in the living room and my lap top is in the office. Don't forget I get distracted easily too. So the perfect post I think up on Monday, say, doesn't quite fit on the Tuesday or Wednesday when I get around to sitting down to post it. Maybe I should start carrying a note book to start jotting post ideas down when I get them.

Take last night, for instance. I was at a pot luck and I'd intended to post all about it when I got home. Unfortunately, I got home about 10:30, sat down, and was asleep in my recliner before Dr. Who came on (11 p.m.) Too much fresh air I guess.

A few of us girls from work (the terminatees plus a few non-terminatees) decided a good way to keep in touch (besides Facebook, e-mail and the good, old fashioned telephone) would be to have a monthly pot luck. It's an excellent idea.

The first pot luck was held in a house on Rice Lake (they call it a cottage but it's large and they live there year round). Half the fun was getting there. Armed with a map and two passengers who also didn't know where we were going, we drove to Roseneath, took a left and wound our way through a maze worthy of Daedalus. We ate, drank and were very merry (liquor tends to do that).

I can understand why this terminatee wants to work from home. If I lived in this beautiful spot, I'd even have my groceries delivered so I'd never have to leave.

My "dream house" used to be a log and stone house (with a wood burning fireplace of course) surrounded by the woods . . . It's now been expanded to include "beside a quiet lake".

Good Idea Gone Bad

Well, you can forget about the yogurt. While it's great soothing the burning in my stomach and slowing my metabolism down, I have found if my metabolism is slowed down too much I get cramps. Not the bring-me-to-my-knees kind I experienced in my youth, more like the grab-a-butcher-knife-and-gouge-out-my-stomach kind.

So, it's back to being uber vigilant about what goes into my mouth. For now at least. Once I'm off next week I'm going to park myself in my doctor's office until they fix me. I really can't see going back to school or starting a new job while I've still got my mystery gastric problem.

It's getting harder and harder to drag my sorry butt into work. I've been feeling so crappy lately that the temptation to call in sick is hard to resist, but I've missed two days off the last two paycheques and Mastercard and Visa are not all that understanding when you miss a payment . . . or two.

They cut back the number of sales queues we have access to so it's really slow. Not that those of us who have been terminated feel any great need to give it our all. Let's just say we've been taking a lot of breaks.

Two of the Terminatees have been job searching on-line and got their paperwork for unemployment filled out. Myself, I'm taking the opportunity to read. Right now I'm reading Moby Dick on-line. I'm at page 132, just at the part that Captain Jean-Luc Picard quoted in the Star Trek movie First Contact:

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

It sounded much better coming from Jean-Luc.

Clusterz

You know (and I've probably said it before) sometimes I'm really my own worst enemy. I've been getting into the habit of coming down to my office to work on the lap top after work, but I haven't yet got myself into the habit of writing, unless you count e-mails and blogging.

It started out innocently enough. I sometimes like to play word games on-line to get the old synapses firing, only when my friend "fixed" my computer he did something to my security settings and now I can't get into Text Twist. So, I was looking around for a word game I could load and ended up on the Shockwave site.

First there was Mystic Rollers, which I beat twice, and then came Clusterz. It starts out innocently enough. You fire coloured balls at groups of three or more to break the cluster and once you've cleared all the clusters you move on to the next level. However, before you know it you've spent three days trying to get past level 19 and you're totally addicted to the game. So I did what any sane person would do - I addicted a couple of my friends as well.

Yes, I'm that evil.

This weekend promises to be rain-filled, so I should be able to get some writing done (I've broken through level 19 on Clusterz so I can rest on my laurels for a while).

First, of course, I have to clean the spare bedroom. Why? you ask Because there's a kitty litter pan in there and I have to create some space around it so I can rig up some kind of cover for it. When the cats have been keeping me company in the office, they're usually too lazy to use the litter pan downstairs, so they use the one across the hall. And an odoriferous bunch they are!

Yogurt Etiquette

Let's talk about yogurt for a minute, shall we?

I have never been a fan of yogurt. Let's face it, the name alone is off-putting. Who wants to eat something with a name that sounds like you're throwing it back up?

However, one day when I was having a problem with my stomach, I tried a yogurt from MacDonalds. Lo and behold, it eased the fire in my belly.

So then I bought a tub of vanilla yogurt, intending to make smoothies with it, and it sat in my fridge until well after the expiry date had past and I ended up throwing it out.

Maybe I should start smaller. I ended up buying an 8 pack of the only yogurt brand that had any appeal to me, and I'm happy to announce that I didn't waste any of them. Any time my stomach was burning, I had a yogurt to soothe it.

Unfortunately, in the process I have learned that one must savour their yogurt. It is not to be eaten quickly. Taking too big a spoonful brings on the gag reflex. Listen, I'm lucky I can choke it down at all.

This week my regular grocery store only had peach and prune yogurt available. Peach I like, but prune? Eating yogurt is bad enough, but prune yogurt? You've got to be kidding!

I bought elsewhere, where they had more civilized flavours. Just as two wrongs don't make a right, two Ewws! don't make a yummy.

Cheese Anyone?

In case you haven't realized it by now, when there's cheese in the title of the post, it means the whine's not far behind.

I've been thinking a lot about my job options, and it all boils down to having to decide what I want to be when I grow up. Let's face it, I'm not getting any younger. If I go back to school at this point, it better be for something I really like 'cause this is pretty much my last chance (financially speaking).

That being said, I need to find out what jobs are available in this area (moving is out of the question and gas prices being what they are I'm not commuting more than 50 km) and then see what courses the government is willing to pay for me to take.

The ironic part is, when I ask myself the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" the answer is always: A writer. However, that being said, I've just spent the last couple of hours with my Word document in the background while I play games, check e-mails, and update blogs. I think I've written all of three sentences.

I've been putting a lot of pressure on myself to finish one of my novels, which in some ways is a good thing because I've picked one novel and I'm sticking with it. Unfortunately it narrows my focus until all I can see is that one novel, making me forget all the other writing I'm able to do - short stories, poetry . . .

Maybe it's time to broaden my horizons, so to speak, and spend some time outside with a pad of lined paper and a pencil. God knows we finally have the weather for it.

Updates

Looks like I have once again fallen behind in updating my happenings in progress. So here goes.

The Daughter's Jeep:
The daughter got a jeep. Two weeks later it was stolen. A week later it was found abandoned in a park. The damage was minimal - the lock on the driver's side was broken, as was the ignition; the interior was filled with mud and chicken wings. The good news was that her prescription sunglasses were still in it. The better news was the rental car she got to drive while her jeep was being fixed.

The Afghans:
The daughter's knitted blanket is done. It's kind of long and skinny, but it's so loosely knitted that it's easy to stretch in any shape you want. The heart afghan I was working on at work is 3/4 of the way done. I've been sewing it as I go along, and I have a few more white squares to do. I will post a picture when I'm done.

The Writing:
Ha! I bet you thought I was going to skip this one, didn't you? I'm just about finished the 1st person version of D.I.F. It was actually more fun to write than I expected, but it's a totally different story. My main character comes across as a much more likable person, more three dimensional. I can't wait to start the next version which will be the 1st and 3rd person.

The Cat Garden:
I planted sweet peas in an egg carton and 3 of the seeds sprouted. The leftover seeds I planted in the cats' garden and they're taking over. Which is good because pretty much the only other thing that's doing well is the Persian Cat Mint (which the cats don't seem to care for). As promised, here's the picture:




That's Dante checking out things from behind, and Julius attacking from the side. The purple thing in behind is the cat tree and off to the left, just out of the shot, is an indoor fountain. Like I said before, my cats aren't spoiled!

Welcome, to Fantasy Island

"Must be nice, you get the whole summer off." "I wish I was lucky enough to get out of this place!" "When God closes a door He opens a window."

You know what folks? Any way you want to put it, losing your job sucks.

All I ever wanted was a small, quiet niche to fill so I earn enough to pay my bills and then go home and write. Yes, I was again getting stressed out to the point where I was not getting any writing done, but the answer to de-stressing is not taking away my pay cheque.

One of the girls at work suggested I put an ad in the paper offering craft lessons. The husband thinks I should start a dot com business. And my mother-in-law thinks I should go into business with her - she wants to find a space to sell art supplies and her artwork (don’t make me have to post a picture of some of her “art work” to prove how bad an idea this is!).

Too bad there really wasn’t a Fantasy Island out there. Then I could go back in time and get a better education. That’s the catch, you see. I have all kinds of experience, but not the education to back it up. So I guess I play the waiting game until the 23rd, and then I see what kind of options are available to me for further education.

In the meantime, maybe it's time to dust off one of my novels and finish them. Now that would really be a fantasy!