Tecta, TMNT and Trevor

The word of the week is foreshortened – deal with it.

July 26 - Be My Guest!

On my way to and from bear Mountain, I see at least one or more deer a day, lingering quite close to the roadside( if not on it! )and almost unafraid of cars. Really, they should have named the place Deer Mountain, as there have to be hundreds of the creatures in the woods of the area. When I called the Langford City Hall to ask why there weren't deer warning signs on the roads leading up the mountain, I was told “All the locals know there are deer, so it's not necessary” - rather rudely, at that. So I presume that all the tourists and visitors to the area have foreknowledge of the deer somehow, and that when the inevitable happens and someone gets hurt in a collision, that the city has that excuse ready and quite lawyer-proof...

I was at work earlier than I expected today, as we're now 'hosting' staff from our local head office every few days for training. Specifically, I've been singled out as the 'best able' to present how staff and stores function at the Retail level, so as to help Head Office staff understand how to better help us do our daily jobs. While some people would turn this into an hours-long complaint fest, I look at it as an opportunity to get Head Office staff focusing on how to quickly solve Retail problems. Which means in essence that instead of Retail staff seeing their requests end up in an electronic black hole when trying to get Head Office to help with something, we might actually make lines of communication easier and more productive. Which in the end would make my job easier – so I show up early today and teach, no big deal really and I think it went very well indeed.

July 27 - Meeting Surges

Morning saw me in Victoria for an early doctor's appointment, where I picked up a solid prescription for Tecta which is making a big difference my my nausea bouts. Seems that one of these tiny pills a day keeps the barfing away, which I can appreciate as it gets in the way of my job when I have to excuse myself from the counter constantly during the day. Whatever the underlying condition is, so far the Tecta is treating the symptoms, which reduces one more stress factor from my massively full plate. The rest of my day was spent in a monthly manager's meeting, which I won't detail – suffice to say that more was loaded onto our plates with firmly-fixed smiles and the subtle glitter of dire punishments if we failed to figure out how to balance things anew – nothing surprising there at all.

I surfed around a few of my fave tech shopping sites that evening while on the balcony, again using my parent's Dell laptop as mine were out of power. I was looking for a portable surge protector, specifically one designed for laptops. There were no solid ones on eBay, so I went to NCIX.com, TigerDirect.ca and a few others until I found a good APC protector on BPDirect.com – for less than thirty dollars including shipping I bought peace of mind. Silly when you think about it; I've had a UPS on my home PC's for years, but I never thought that I would need one while OUT of the house, not being one used to having a laptop. Goes to show you have to really try to think of things ahead of time, to be prepared for the Law of Unintended Consequences. Damn you Murphy!

July 28 - Make Beer, not PC's

Most of my one day off today was spent trying to get my older PC working using a variety of methods and operating systems... to no avail. Ubuntu, RedHat12( and 13 )as well as Windows Home Server simply won't install on the machine, for various reasons. In all cases, I blame Murphy: each failure drives like a sliver of bamboo under a fingernail, as I'm THAT close in each case to getting it to work, except for one minor glitch each time that prevents me from completing the install. Very, very frustrating, especially as it would give me a PC to use apart from the currently-defunct laptops. I hate to see good hardware idle and I am angered that I can't get the damn system to accept an OS. It's not TOO much to ask, really... is it?

The origins of Beersbee seem shrouded in mystery, according to a few web searches I did today. On the one hand, there is the history listed at Beersbee.org along with rules and some photos, as well as the listing at RealAlberta.com – seems to be a different game than the one I am familiar with from Ontario, which involves no poles and has only two players at a time. Seeing as I barely get out here as it is, it's highly unlikely that I'll run into a BC variation of the game around here – I'll have to think of my own variant while planning for next summer's outings.

July 29 - Trevor Visits! No BPA!

Today I left work a few hours early, in order to give Trevor and his family a tour of Victoria. We started out things right with a late lunch at John's Place downtown, which won praise for its fantastic food and unbelievably low prices. The bread especially was pronounced superb by one and all. After settling them into the Scots Hotel near the harbour, we went over the Parliament buildings and took a tour of the provincial digs, including the grand entry hall where $10,000 of gold leaf adorns the walls – our taxes at work, though 10K is really peanuts all in all. Following that, we enjoyed some great root beer floats down on Government street, watched a few street performers put on their act, and toured the downtown pedestrian areas along with a fair crowd of other folks walking hither-whither. As dusk approached, I caught a ride back to Bear Mountain from Trevor, but we idled a while on the patio at Jack's Place to shoot the breeze, enjoy the lovely summer evening weather and to speculate on the total lack of mosquitoes and other sundry airborne pests in BC. All in all, it was a grand day that I enjoyed immensely, as I believe Trevor and his family did as well.

Remember the BPA scare of last year? Well, it's back, this time in the form of cash register receipts – go figure. Seems that forty percent of US receipts tested contained levels of BPA, which has set off alarm bells all over the place – not here though, which I found surprising, as people were quick to get rid of water bottles containing BPA. Strange, as receipts are everywhere – have YOU seen anyone putting on gloves to handle receipts this week?

July 30 - Sainted Alias

A fairly long day at work, begun early and seasoned with a smattering of schmucks throughout the day – trying to help people is its own reward, because they sure don't appreciate it sometimes. I was told a few times by my staff that I have the patience of a saint, as I managed to turn several customers from venom-spewing idiots into people who listened attentively to what I had to say, as it meant that their problems would be solved simply and quickly. Why complain loud and long, if the alternative is to listen for a few seconds to someone who's been doing this sort of thing for almost ten years? Makes sense, right? Anyway, I lent a hand at both stores today and managed to get home before 8pm, making it 'only' a 12-hour day...

While worn out, I did manage to catch up on a few more episodes of Alias tonight to finish off the fourth season finally. It's been a long time since I started watching the series, but thanks to Mike I managed to keep my interest alive to make it to the final season this week – I'll hopefully start it this weekend. In the meantime, I still think Ben Afleck must have worked some kind of hypnosis on Jennifer Garner; how else could such a babe fall for such a goof?

July 31 - Demolishing Cartoons

Saturday morning cartoons stink nowadays – the heyday of the Eighties has long since passed, and I don't recognize a lot of what's out there when flipping through the channel listings before work. A lot of shows seem like commercials for Japanese toy systems, and while the TMNT are still around they seem somewhat less... fun? If that's possible? Makes you wonder if kids and TV are parting ways, to make way for video games and the online experience in general. I see more and more people texting / talking on cells when I'm out, lost in their own little worlds and removed a step or two from the reality around them.

Demolition Man was on tonight, which I always enjoy catching on TV as it has the lovely Sandra Bullock in one of her earliest roles. Bonus that she wears spandex for most of the movie too. Not a bad flick really, even factoring in Stallone and Snipes, who put on a good show of hating each other's guys without too many snarls or long-winded jibes. Definitely re-watchable, as even the parts with Denis Leary in them aren't hard to take... mostly.

Aug 1^st - Summer's Half Done? 

Not much to say about today – I worked again, giving my staff each a 3-day weekend. The branch was busy, so much so that I didn't manage to catch up on any of the 'must-do-now' projects that I had hoped a Sunday would provide me some time to work on. I averaged one customer served every nine minutes for the sever hours the doors were open today, which as you can imagine leaves little time for aught else when you factor in the daily paperwork, calls etc that each day loves to provide one with.

Creating the blog tonight using OpenOffice on my parent's laptop, as I'm still waiting for one or the other of my replacement power supplies to arrive from eBay. I'm also still waiting for the manager from The Mountain Bean to call me; I'll stop in Tuesday I think to have another go at actually talking to her. For now, I'm just relieved that neither laptop seems to be damaged – I could claim that the USB ports on my newer laptop were fried, but they stopped working months ago and I'm not that kind of person. I see enough of people trying to take advantage of my company every day; at least today there was some payback, as a fraudster was arrested at another branch late today - I had left notes in the computer directing staff to call police should he be dumb enough to show his face again at one of our stores, and today he proved my predictions right. Goes to show that greed will overpower common sense time and again. Made me smile - briefly.

That's it for now - I'm just waiting on NewtAndJohn tonight, really.