Terminators, Taxes and Testing

I knew I shouldn't have mentioned the lack of snow in last week's blog: you never know who is listening. Glad to hear from you too, Jen... nice to see you're still dropping by the blog!


March 2 - Monday Madness

Ergh.... man, today was BUSY at work, so much so that at the end of felt like I had jogged in place for the entire time. Which, considering I worked almost 10 hours, was really wearing on me... yadda yadda, I know, everyone has to work. When you're alone though, there's nobody to complain to, so you have to suck it up and do your best despite the crowds of people who of a sudden all decide to show up within ten minutes of each other... damned strange, that. I've also noticed that when it's sunny out, MANY people seem to let that decide them if they've been waffling on whether or not to go anywhere. "Sun's shining? Hooray, let's head out then!" And where do you think they stop first? MMart, for cash, of course... *grins* Keeps me in a job though, so that's good in MY books!

A lot of people seem to confuse Vancouver Island with the City of Vancouver, especially when told I live in Victoria( Langford now, close enough )which is on Van.Island. While Vancouver has a mild climate, I would not want to live there due to the size of the city and the increasing crime rate, including shootings. Still, some people really do seem to like the place, and I can't speak to it fully until I've had the chance to visit sometime soon.

And WOW, did we EVER get a windstorm tonight! Out of nowhere, 75km/hr winds whipped up from the north, blasting everything on the deck and nearly causing my carefully-constructed anti-cat bird saving structure to flip through the living room window. Thankfully, the plastic sheets were quite heavy to begin with and landed on the deck, only cracking the corner of one of them. T'was scary though, so have the wind rise to such a howl that it made the chimney moan like a tortured beast... and to die down again after less than half an hour. Weird weather, reminded me slightly of the time when Niagara was hit by a small twister back in the nineties... though today the sky didn't turn green and the rain didn't blast down as though from God's pressure cleaner.

March 3 - RAID Failure

The day off today was pretty good, all told. An order from Monoprice.com arrived today, so I was able to wire up my ancient laser printer finally, along with replacing the power cable for the Canon Pixma printer. While easy to find online, neither of these specialized cables are stocked by local PC retailers, so I was relieved I found them online, cheaply too. Now that I have printing capability again, I feel an odd sense of relief, especially since I can't print things at work and the local Staples charges an indecent amount for printing things like PDF docs... I mean, really, $0.49 per page for colour? Sheesh!

I also managed, after exhaustive testing, to fix my Blue Frankenstein of a computer. After running down the list of possible reasons for it NOT wanting to boot, it turns out my paranoia from years ago has paid off. Years ago after losing several former PC's to drive failure, I had installed a pair of redundant hard drives in THIS computer that mirrored each other's data - so if one went wacky, then the other would still work. Turns out that WAS the case, and unplugging one of the drives( the second choice )let the system boot happily. Which meant I spent the rest of the evening backing up all the recent data from the remaining drive to other external sources, just in case... you can't be too careful. I was really, really happy that the RAID setup worked so well, and will have to figure out a way to replace the drive ASAP - since it's a Seagate, it may STILL be under warranty. Though they recently went from 5 years to only 3, it's still best in the industry, despite recent concerns about some of their drives experiencing far higher failure rates than is acceptable for consumers.

March 4 - Talking Taxes

For those of you who are anxious about doing your taxes, take heart: aside from EasyTax at MMart, there are a ton of other solutions to juggling those numbers to take form in your favour. One I prefer over all others is QuickTax.ca, which has the added bonus of being linked to from most major banks for an additional 20% off... which means you can do your own taxes online for less than $20.00. That's assuming that your tax situation is not too complex and doesn't involve things like owning your own business or long-distance trucking mileage. And is it mileage if you live in a country that measures things in metric, like Canada? Wouldn't it be 'klickage' ? Nevermind... that's straying back into Made Up Wordz territory.

Not that I advocate making up words will-nilly, or mashing a few together to make a new one. Unfortunately, I seem to be in the minority in this regard, as evidenced by the newest media ads for the Apple iPhone... "The Funnest iPhone Ever!" - made me want to write stacks of angry letters using famous english grade-school teachers as pseudonyms. This person has also taken exception to the slow degradation of the language, much like my posting last week for Feb 23rd. Language has to evolve, but I would rather not see it delve into offshoots like Ebonics or the unusual cross-cultural effort of Esperanto, the most popular of the constructed languages to date. I also snuck a look at Sindarin, which is one of several fantasy languages derived from Tolkein's works which has several online translators and thousands of fluent speakers worldwide.

But you can't order a hamburger at your local Wendy's in it... heck, I've still got to get to the point where I can do that in french, Italian or Spanish. One of many things to do when I find the time.

March 5 - Thursday in Brief

Having grown up with syndicated reruns of the old Star Trek series, I was pleased to hear that a new 'reboot' of the show was happening. The most recent trailer looks amazing, though it obviously tries to break new ground and steer away from the campy elements of the original series.

Merchandising has always been a core part of Star Trek, though I wonder why they've recently decided to branch out into... colognes?

I miss my Babylon 5.... but things like the new Battlestar Galactica reboot have been amazing. Many fans have wondered though: what would the old series title sequence have looked like with the new cast?

March 6 - Movie Time

Today Watchmen was released in theatres, and though I really want to see it, I just can't bear to share the same space as the Massed Public Hordes for over 2 hours. Reviews of the film at RottenTomatoes.com are mixed, with the main complaints being that it's "too complex" and "slavish to the original material" - neither of which are bad things in my book.

Related to that, I've been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in bits and pieces over the last few months, and was disappointed to hear that tonight's ratings were rather low. Yet i09.com has posted the obvious answer: everyone was out watching Watchmen. Which is a cool way of putting it, actually...

Well, that's it for a Friday. Not much to do out here in Langford on one's ownsome, though I am working on seeing some of my Victoria friends more regularly come the spring. Perhaps I will be able to take up a few more outdoor hobbies come the summer as well, as I do miss my biking and the Galloping Goose Trail is close by.

March 7 - Da Weekend

Not so bad a Saturday, really... except it snowed four separate times today. Typical Victoria weather, changeable three times or more an hour. Snowing, then sunny skies, then snowing again; we're talking heavy clouds and masses of white drifting flakes that fortunately did little more than melt when they hit the ground.

After work today I did something different: I went out to a pub just down the street - it has a striking home page here. Christie's Carriage House Pub has been around for over a century, though the building was only turned into a pub in the late 80's. It was quite crowded when I arrived, as there was a hockey game of some kind on - I didn't bother to pay much attention, as is my wont. Instead, I dug into a turkey sandwich with fries and gravy, with two pints of Guinness to wash it down over the course of several hours as I read through Pierre Burton's The Joy Of Writing, which I've never managed( until now )to actually open and read through. It was quite enlightening, moreso as I had no idea of the sheer volume that people could produce with only ancient typewriters, pencils and steno pads. While not containing any revelations about the craft, it did emphasize to me the importance of perseverance, hard work and finding one's own style, as well as reading as much of the work of other good authors as possible.

Which also begs the question of motivation. Working as I have been for the last while has left me little energy, feeling the way I do, to put towards other things. I find myself in dire need of decompression / de-stress time, and my creative processes of late have been stretched in just trying to come to the blog each week with something new aside from purchasing new socks.

March 8 - Sunny Sunday at last!

I spent most of the afternoon attending to my Blue Frankenstein PC, backing up data to various drives before reworking the interior setup - added a video card so I can run 2 monitors at once, as well as ensuring my now-unmirrored main drive was hooked up a little differently to make room for the video card. I am surprised that now the main bottleneck in my storage setup is speed: having a sizable external drive is great, but with standard USB 2.0 speeds, it takes hours to copy massive amounts of data. One of my external drives does have an eSata connector, so I think that I will invest in some cabling to take advantage of that fairly soon - I hate waiting to copy data around.

Nice to see the sun, despite the cold outside. Sitting in the rear family room it's amazing just to bask in the evening sunshine and watch the sunset reflect on the clouds behind the hills to the northwest. The colours it creates on the lake are incredible, and I'll post some pictures soon.


Lastly: I am narrowing down possibilities in regards to my health issues, thankfully. My doctor has been very attentive, and together we've eliminated( pun intended )quite a few avenues and continue to do so with various tests. Nothing concrete yet, but allergies to gluten are a possibility, as are several other sources of indigestion, including IBS - more as I find out solid medical facts from tests.

Cookies, Subway and Sadness

This blog ran a little late in being posted... see the Aug 11th entry as to why. No pictures either, but they ARE on the way. I'll let you know. :-) 300 page-views since I started the counter back in January.. amazing!

Aug 11 - Cookies and Stress

Today was a five-cookie day. Nearly ten hours of continuous stress….yeesh! We rolled out an update of one of our major products today, Victoria being the test-market for the rest of the country. Can you say ‘fiasco’ with me? Repeat ad nauseum… it was horrible. Bugs in the program meant that my first customer, who had the patience of a saint, spent 45 minutes in the lobby while I tried desperately to get the product working. It finally did, after a band-aid solution was found to work around the issues. It was like that all day long, and I finished the ten-hour-long day with my teeth gritted in a solid mass. Doesn’t do much for headaches, that – I try not to grind them, which is foolish.

I’ve noticed that stress hits me differently these days. In years past, I would wind up a bad day by ending with incredibly tense neck and shoulder muscles, to which I quickly applied a fantastic Homedics back massager ( looks like E.T. ) – made a world of difference, and I still have it for the occasional use. Now, stress tends to add up over a few days, where I will have a day where its just a struggle to get some energy and focus on things, even relaxing. Different from the end-of-a-single-day stress, and more difficult to deal with, as I don’t get anything done at the end of one of those days – staying focused at work takes it all.

Aug 12 – Reboot Revival / Zeroes2Heroes

One of my favourite shows from the 90’s is Reboot, the first computer-animated television show. It ran for three seasons, as well as having two two-hour movies, which were actually the fourth season cut down a bit when the series was nipped short. Recently, I have discovered that a ‘ReBoot Revival’ is underway. This makes me happy, as I very much enjoyed the series for its characters and its story; the third season was a non-stop thrill ride with an ending that did not disappoint at all. No ‘kiddy show’ by then, I tell you! Too bad the DVD’s are incredibly difficult to get, which I find odd.

A movie pitch was made for a ReBoot idea, on a website called Zeroes2Heroes where anyone can put up their creative ideas… with the possibility that they will be picked up and produced, in some form or another, by a major entertainment company! What I find fascinating is that anyone at all can submit their ideas or art, and the community of registered users will vote on it… to the point where it may be developed! Sure beats the heck out of trying to find an agent and getting them to add your manuscript to the massive piles of slush that are an editors cross to bear daily. Nobody likes slush piles.

Aug 13 - Subway

Work is going to be interesting in the next month, and not in a good way. With the departure of one of my co-workers earlier in the month, and the news that my other co-worker is leaving, I will be the ONLY staff member at my branch – not good. My DM has already asked me if I was willing to cut short my vacation and start working almost as soon as I return from Niagara – since this is the sort of thing that usually happens when I take vacations, I agreed, as it’s either that or close the branch for the rest of the week… seems it IS hard to get good help in a lot of sectors these days, as it’s a buyer’s market. Too many people are staying only for a few months, then hopping to ‘better’ jobs – which is good, as it indicates a strong economy, but bad for employee retention. Yep.

While having a chai tea with my neighbour over at the Cook St. Starbuck’s, I noticed something new going in just down the road: a Subway. Amazing, as that was the only thing that my neighbourhood did not already have – kind of freaky actually, like wishing for a new toy and finding it some months later by the side of the road. Well, not exactly like that, but you get the idea. Made me wonder how careful I should be about wishing for a movie theater down this end of the city… don’t want to wipe out a block of homes! A library might be nice though, as the nearest one is downtown, where I don't usually go. Too much to ask for with all the other conveniences around here, so I'll stick with my own massive book collection.

Aug 14 - Sadness at a Distance

I found out that a friend’s father passed away today, and that he had been sick for some time… damned hard news to take, especially from this far away. Coming from a large Italian family, I can remember much of my youth was spent going to funerals( or weddings )so my feelings are still quite strong on BEING there for people...

Distance and friends are always hard to juggle. Though the internet makes it easy to communicate, it can’t help when you need to BE there for someone – phone calls just aren’t the same, it’s just a voice on the line and not a shoulder to lean on.

I wonder, in this coming age of rising fuel costs, if travel will become a barrier again. I recently wrote an article for Cyberwalker about webcams and videophones, the latter being something we STILL can’t buy down at the local FutureShop as easily as we would a regular phone. You think that someone would come up with a simple, reasonably-priced unit that uses compatible standards so ANY videophone would work with any other manufacturer’s unit… but no. To date, it’s still webcams and fond wishes, which annoys the heck out of me – I had those back in the 90’s, and they’re only marginally better for the non-techie to set up and use, despite a decade of ‘progress’. At least theyr’e cheaper, and no longer suffer ‘pixel burn’ from bright light sources like sun on snow through a window… I learned THAT one the hard way during a call to Mexico one day.

Aug 15 - Writing practice and Civ

In writing this blog, I have been getting in some good practice with my word-skills, and just recently realized than on average I am writing about ten thousand words a month just for this blog alone – surprised the heck outta me, that did. It is also rather difficult to keep this blog flowing along, in terms of never retreading the same topic as well as not just creating a boring play-by-play daily journal on washing socks. No, I try to put in something different, something amusing, every week – my thoughts on various subjects, my observations about Victoria and even the occasional profound thought as it scampers pell-mell through my mind.

I played Civ:Rev for far too long this evening, trying to win the game in specific ways yet being frustrated as usual by random chance that set my plans askew. I have also noticed that the game is not as polished technically as I would have liked for a console game. Graphical glitches, slowdowns, slow access to some features and odd sound-level variances all make me wince on occasion; I hope that Firaxis Games is hard at work on a patch to smooth things out. While the glitches do not interfere with gameplay, they are annoying.

Aug 16 - Overtime and Bad Gameplay

I worked an overtime shift today at another branch, to help out. It always amuses me to work somewhere else, as the regular customers usually ask “Oh, are you new?” to which I always reply “Why, yes!” just to see what they will do. Some of the slightly sneaky ones will try to convince me that they are ‘allowed’ to do something that tries to get around our work policies… which again amuses me, as I let them go on for a bit before snapping them back to the reality of how things really work. It never fails to amaze me how people will try something with a ‘new’ person that would never do with a ‘regular’ staff member. But I guarantee they’ll never try it again when they see me next.

Surprisingly, I had a bad experience on NWN tonight, though in hindsight the stress of work this week perhaps provided a tipping point for my frustrations. Given the unstructured nature of a NWN-run gameworld, every DM running ‘quests’ is there on their own time, volunteering to run people around and tell their own story in the overall framework of things. As an aside, this usually works, but give the ‘catch-as-can’ nature of unscheduled events, some nights there aren’t a lot of people around, and other nights you can miss out on an amazing experience by but a few hours if you are unlucky – annoying, that is.

Well, in a nutshell( before your eyes glaze over )a few friends and I were out to do what seemed to be a simple rescue… but turned out to be a Mexican Standoff. I grew very frustrated at the seeming lack of options, and when the NPC ‘hostage’ was lost, despite our frantic efforts, I grew very angry – the first time that has happened to me in an online game. I quickly cooled down, but this clarified the problem that a lot of online games have compared to well-crafted single-player games: good gameplay structure with MULTIPLE means of problem resolution, most of which are NOT too difficult to distinguish – it should be hard to MAKE the choice itself, not to just SEE it initially. In any case, I logged off after chatting with both the DM and other players, to ensure this sort of thing did not reoccur and so frustrate people who would be less better able to deal.

Aug 17 - Heard the Thunder

I felt a little better about working the weekend through( again today )as the weather was nowhere near as sunny as promised earlier in the week – go figure. Again, the rain here doesn’t last, similar in some ways to rain in Florida: it rains for a few minutes and moves on, though the sky may be cloudy for most of the day. A week of get skies and rain is unheard of here, just like thunder or lightning; some people here have never SEEN lightning before, if they grew up in Victoria.

Amazing, to think that something so common in Ontario is a rare wonder here. Good thing too, as it’s damned dangerous… and that so many fools take so little note of that. I’ll never forget a violent thunderstorm that hit Niagara some years back, while I was staying at the Prince. The winds blew the rain horizontally so hard that it penetrated into the building( since sealed )and managed to cause my bedroom ceiling to partially collapse – we ended up having to move for three months while the unit was repaired, including new carpets. No, what got me was DURING that storm, a family of crazy fools was IN the pool, with lightning strikes flickering in the sky all around. They huddled for shelter, all of them still IN THE WATER and UNDER an overhanging tree as the wind and rain whipped all around. I remember shouting out the window for them to get out of the water, but the noise of the thunder and rain was too much. Incredibly lucky they were, as lucky as they were stupid! Dumbest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time, I tell you... and I work with the public.

At least I do not have an early morning tomorrow; we’ve scaled back our hours on Mondays and Tuesdays, so( for now )it’s guaranteed that I can sleep in, even to 9am, on a Monday – how many jobs can you say that for? Mind you, there’s a lot of other things that balance that out about the job, but since I rate sleep rather highly( never getting enough of it )then anything that increases sleep time is good in my books. Reminds me of someone I worked with, a long time ago: a figure skater, who told me that due to the incredible demands that that sport puts on a person, she needed to sleep at least eight to TEN hours a night before practice or performances – incredible, since I feel logy if I get more than eight hours… or less than six, which shows there’s a balance needed too.

Another week blogged and logged, and that makes TWO weeks without comments... has Anonymous given up? Or is he plotting some fiendish comment campaign the likes of which this blog has never seen before? Tune in next week for another exciting episode...

UPDATE: we have a NEW commentator... a holy figure, no less! Welcome to Comment Christ. We'll find out if he's just cross, or if he can really nail those comments in coming weeks... and thanks Jen - glad you keep coming back for more! Surprising, but welcome!!!

The Second Week in Victoria: Lots and lots to tell...

My second week in Victoria was rather stressful, and I ended up catching a cold by the end of it from some helpful stranger, likely one at work. As always, you can comment on this blog at the bottom - I keep wondering if anyone's actually READING this thing....? ALL previous Blog enries have been updated as of today with Links - images will be next, I hope, in a week or two.

Nov 11th - Remembrance Day

We drove through Beacon Hill Park today in the rental Pontiac G6, the last day we had it. I took a lot of pictures, as the sun peeked out here and there from the overcast sky to give a few good photos. The park is very large, larger than the sizable Bourgoyne Woods back in St. Catharines, and since it sits in the middle of the south end of Victoria, the city surrounds the park but does not intrude on it. Tall trees cover about a quarter of the land, with winding roads and paths meandering through the vast spaces. A good portion of the park is undeveloped wilderness, with great rock prominences jutting through the grass like the bones of the earth itself. Some areas, like the ones where I saw 4 peacocks, are planted as beautiful flower gardens, while another area contains a large pond surrounded by willow trees. A gorgeous park, the south end of which overlooks the ocean straight and gives amazing views of the Juan de Fuca Islands.

We saw quite a few folks out for Remembrance Day today as well, despite the weather. Quite a gathering was down at the Parliament Buildings on Government Street, and we saw many military uniforms returning home from that area as we finished our tour of the park. After returning the rental car, my parents and I had lunch at the Bay Centre cafeteria, which is on the fifth floor of the Bay Centre and is quite large. The food is excellent, as are the prices, and included in the meal is a fantastic view to the west of Esquimalt, where my parents will be getting their retirement digs set up in a month or so - more on that later. The view of the harbour shows seaplanes taking off, as well as the ferry to the USA and other boating traffic.

Another nice thing about Victoria is that everyone seems to watch out for one another. The bus drivers actually SLOW DOWN when nearing each stop, even if all they see is someone walking towards the stop area - they slow, just in case that person is trying to catch the bus. And as I've already mentioned, everyone THANKS the driver when they leave the bus; it's great to hear. Even seeing people wait patiently in groups to cross almost-empty stretches of street is a treat; I keep expecting people to do the Niagara Falls dash-for-your-life-through-oncoming-traffic thing, and seeing people actually WAIT for the 'walk' signal, en masse, even with no cars in the immediate area, is still a source of fascination for me even weeks later.

Nov 12th - Stay Home Storm

A nasty pacific storm blew in today, revealing that our temporary quarters at the Landmark building are not all that well sealed against the weather. In particular, the door to the patio of the main bedroom had huge drafts of air blowing in around all four sides, so we sealed those with painter's tape temporarily. We also have noticed the tile floor in the kitchen is quite chilly, which we suspect is a lack of insulation in the walls. Another point is that the kitchen backs onto the second bedroom, and there is a complete lack of noise insulation in the wall - you can hear every drawer or cupboard close, utensils rattle or appliances running. I am very glad we haven't rented this place for more than the few months planned, for although it looks to be a lovely building and the trimmings are very nice, the guts of the place aren't very well thought out a'tall.

Needless to say, we didn't go much of anywhere today due to the storm, and a good thing too. While we didn't lose power here, the evening news revealed a lot of damage all over Vancouver Island - the heavily wooded Island meant a LOT of trees fell from the severe winds. Seeing as today was the second of FOUR days off in a row, I spent some of it sorting through things I had brought from the storage depot and just generally relaxing, as I've been very tired of late.

Nov. 13th - a Day Spent Shopping

A very quiet day again... I had received notice from Multicites Moving that the delivery would be taking place either today or tomorrow, so I was very grateful to my new co-workers for giving me these three weekdays off to get that taken care of. Unfortunately, nothing arrived today due to delays caused by that severe storm a few days ago - it played havoc with shipping schedules for the Vancouver Ferry, setting things back at least a day... of course.

So I went walking around Victoria instead, determined to get a better look at the place on foot. I wandered into the London Drugs store on Yates, and found a fantastic camera that I had been eyeing for a while. After having a better look at it, I bought it - a Fuji F50fd, a little pocket camera that packs a 12 megapixel SuperCCD, a large screen and a ton of features. While it cost a fair penny, it was nowhere near the SLR-range price insanity that seems the rage these days.

I also bought a 2-gig high-speed SD card for the thing too, to ensure I could snap pictures fast. Seeing as our last camera had started to severely malfunction a few weeks ago, I knew that I would be needing a new one, so my research pointed me to the Fuji above all others. Joy!

When I arrived home that evening, I discovered that Multicites had called; the shipment would finally arrive tomorrow. I was thrilled, as I had been stressing that the bad luck revolving around trying to ship our goods would keep true to form and result in its total loss in transit. Whew! I slept a lot better that night, let me tell you.

Nov 14th - Our Stuff Arrives

I went to the Budget Car Rentals just down the road with my mom at 8am to rent a nice SUV to use today once our things had arrived in a few hours. It was a nice Ford Freestyle, which had a ton of interior cargo room, lots of bells and whistles and drove like a brick, while looking like a squashed cousin to an SUV. At least it had heated seats, as it was quite chilly today.

We got a call from Multicites at 9am: they were en route from the morning ferry. We met them at the City Centre Storage depot on Johnson St a little after 10am; after some paperwork, they started unloading our stuff... which was no longer palletized - Strike One. I had organized our goods into seven distinct pallets, to allow easy shipping and distribution of important boxes on arrival - apparently that wasn't good enough for Multicites, which jumbled it all together... while damaging several DOZEN boxes in the process. The moving crew of three men were nice enough, but they were NOT careful with our boxes at all, even though we were right THERE watching them unload and directing certain boxes to be set aside for our SUV to take. I saw quite a few boxes CLEARLY marked 'Fragile!' in red marker all OVER the box simply tossed around and piled under other boxes marked 'VERY HEAVY' - can you say, DO NOT CRUSH?

It was rather stressful, and all this in the wet and cold too. I ended up paying a TON of money for these folks to mangle my goods, and LOSE several boxes in the process, conveniently one containing my Olympus camera, which was marked clearly on the box. I suspect that this was 'lost' intentionally along the way, but the last laugh is on the theif: the camera is defective, and while I had to eat the $200.00 cost through an eBay fiasco I won't get into, I am very slightly satisfied that the camera will NOT do whoever has it now any good. However, the flipside is that I have NO idea what ELSE was in that box, and never will likely know. My whole plan was to take pictures of the contents of EVERY box before it was sealed, as a record of the goods that we could use in case of loss in transit. Due to the failure of our old camera and severe time constraints at the tail end of October, this simply didn't happen - let that be a lesson to any of you who are going on a long move that will see your goods out of sight for weeks: TAKE PHOTOS! My shattered Visions pots, broken wine bottles and missing boxes are all proof that any idiot can move, but only a wise one will take precautions against other idiots messing it up. Given the MANY negative reviews of Multicites I have since come across on the 'net, I am not bothering to claim anything with them, as very few people have had any results without a lawyer!

We packed and moved three SUV-loads of goods to take back to the Landmark; I had had the foresight to purchase a handcart from Canadian Tire for the move, but it was defective - the tires went flat in minutes, and since I was the only one capable of heavy lifting, I had to move ALL the boxes on my own. My parents could not do more that unpack the stuff once I hauled it to our condo, which was stuffed with vital necessities by day's end. I was exhausted by the whole experience, and went to bed early with thoughts of how I could have managed the move some other way dancing a nasty tap in my head. I hadn't come up with any solutions before sleep whacked me with a soft pillow.

Nov 15th - Wow, can it RAIN here in Victoria! But what if you have nowhere to sleep...?

When it rains here in Victoria, it tends to be a gentle sprinkle in the morning, followed by some clearer skies around noon, then some more rain in the late afternoon. Today was no different, save that the rain decided to skip the clear bit around noon and dump a load of water instead.

Which made me glad to have my umbrella as I walked to work today for the closing shift; having a solid gust-proof umbrella is a must for anyone walking among downtown's odd wind patterns.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is the preponderance of street people here in Victoria. While there were homeless and street walkers in Niagara, one didn't see too much of them all that often, which wasn't to say they were not really there. However, here in Victoria they are quite visible in the downtown core, right in your face quite often. My first time walking through downtown Victoria, I counted more homeless folks in sight that one day than I had ever seen in my life up to that very day. Here, they are polite but ever-present and certainly not shy; they will approach anyone to ask for change, and there is usually someone sitting in front of any store or business that is closed for the day, or in front of the few empty shops that dot the area.

I have mixed feelings on these folks, having worked in cheque cashing for nearly eight years now and seeing the many paths that life can lead a person down. On the one hand, some of these folks were simply dealt bad hands and became stuck here in Victoria, where their life went askew and they haven't been able to turn it back around again. That, I can understand very well. On the other hand, I see people every day on the other side of the glass at work that simply don't care to try, or are so lost to themselves that they are beyond the help of all but the most dedicated social worker. Having heard stories about folks making more by begging changed that I make working for a living( and questioning those same stories ), I always wonder as I pass these folks what their real story is, and why they sit on the sidewalk day after day, asking strangers for change... and where they go at night. I have seen things in passing down alleyways that I will not repeat here, and I know there is a sordid life that exists in every larger city, everywhere in the world, that most folk do not see nor care to. Due to my job, and my own observant nature, I KNOW it is there, and it tarnishes my image of this lovely city to see each street walker working the crowds in downtown Victoria day after day. For it is where the crowds are that they set up; you will not find them outside the local malls, or on side streets or suburban shopping plazas - downtown is where the easy money is, and why they still persist day after day in asking for change. Which is sad, and ironic, for they themselves will never change until it is forced upon them, likely through circumstance and likely through violence. And while I applaud the efforts of organizations like Stop Homelessness.Ca, I wonder how many of the people I see every day walking to work actually want to change things for themselves. That, I think, is the sad part, and one I see played out day after day in the lobby of my workplace.

So that's my rant on the homeless and the street folk of Victoria. Like it or not, they're there, and nobody who lives in Victoria can deny that fact, though many choose to ignore it as they walk past them... day after day.

Nov. 16th - T.G.I.F.

I spent the morning putting together the last of my PC, so that I could communicate with the world once more without having to use my parent's laptop. Too bad I have to run a fifty-foot cable all the way down the hall to the main room here to connect to the 'net; I will have to figure out a wireless option one day soon when I have more time, as I had to work later this day.

My closing shift last night went well enough, or so I thought. Apparently I missed a few things, as I am wont to do when faced with a new way of doing things in the same company. At least they were minor, and I am dilligently taking notes as I go along, so tonight will go better. As I noted above for yesterday, there are quite a few homeless folk here in Victoria, and the system here to support them is set up somewhat differently from Niagara. Wheras I was used to seeing Social Assistance cheques once a month coming through the doors at work, people here receive a weekly allowance instead, albeit three much smaller cheques and one larger per month. I should also note that due to the wet weather here in Victoria, many of our poorer clients do not have the best odours, and I find that hard to ignore when dealing with them regularly, being a fairly clean person myself. My empathy is working overtime in this new job; seeing so many people so hard-pressed to get through each day tugs at my heart, but at the same time I have to deal with the anger, mental illness and stress that same life brings about in them. Good thing I've trained myself not to get emotional at work, or I'd be a wreck some days.

Nov 17th - A cold, of course...

I woke today with a sore throat, which I blamed on the lousy air in the Landmark; there's no fresh air save if one opens a window( and baseboard heaters only )so I resolved to unpack my air cleaner later tonight after I finished work, hoping it would fix the problem while I slept.

No such luck. By the end of my shift today, I had added a stuffy nose and a headache to my sore throat, all classic signs that I had caught a cold. Lovely. I've very careful at work to wash my hands, use sanitizer regularly and NOT to touch my face, but something got through the window and now I'm going to suffer for it.

I did talk to some of my friends tonight, thanks to my foresight of getting a local number set up in Niagara through Vonage, so that anyone can call me from there as a local call and have it ring out here in Victoria. It was great to talk to all of them while they were at Starbuck's at the Fairview Mall in St. Catharines, as they are wont to do most every Friday. Though I can no longer be there in person, I did stop at a local Steeb's here on the way home tonight, so that I could hoist a hot Tazo Chai tea to them as we talked on the phone. Lovely folks, I miss 'em all.


While it was a great way to end the week, I was feeling rather under the weather... but there you have it Next time, I will try to pack two weeks into one, as doing a week at a time, as a once a week blog entry, will mean I'll always be behind. There's lots more to come!