First day of Spring and we got a blast of winter

out there, typical. I wasn't out in it but Anne tells me we got about 3 inches of snow on the ground. Nothing like they had back East or anything like that. According to the long range forecast, were supposed to get 3 more days of snow after the weekend. Weather related, yesterday was a solar eclipse. There were only a few places in the world that got to see it live. 

Anne received a coupon for a free pizza/wing meal from work last night as a reward for training new staff. After a bit of hassle spending about 40 minutes on the phone trying to get the pizza, she finally closed the order. Its on its way so hopefully it'll be here in 10-20 minutes. Since our finances are so low right now, the free pizza meal was a blessing.

When the pizza meal arrived we sat on the couch watching George Lazenby's James Bond enjoying our pizza meal and a bottle of diet cola. This was one of my favorite Bond films because of the location Switzerland and guest staring Tele Savalas. I used to like him in Kojack. Speaking about movies, we have got 2334 scene movie points. Just in time for the Summer releases. 

*Update: This morning Anne rescued a semi stray cat she was looking after since last Autumn. The "owners" left the cat out in the freezing cold over the winter as Anne discovered the cat under a tool shed for shelter across from us taking cover from the winter elements. Anne brought the cat fresh blankets and cat food every night as part of her take out the trash routine in the early hours. No matter how cold it was, Anne went out there. About a week ago she noticed the cat pregnant. The "owners" still kept this poor thing left out in the cold, abandoned and left to die. After months of looking after the cat Anne couldn't bare it any more and gathered a cat cage and brought kitty in here and made arrangements with a 24 hour vet service downtown and called a taxi. Anne said she was waiting outside at 5:30 this morning and noticed the taxi speeding by her going the other direction. She came back into the apartment to call the cab company and the taxi driver called her back asking where she was. So she went back out got the cab and had a dispute with the driver along the way. She didn't know about Uber. I said "If you knew, you should have said something like, 'next time I'll call Uber' " That would have shut him up. The cab ride cost us $22. Anne wandered in at 6:45 this morning. The sad part of all this is this pregnant semi stray cat was Skippie's mother. At least now the cat can have her litter in comfort. I said, leave those cats alone. I think she got the message. Anyway, that's all for now.

At the moment I'm setting up a

work from home job (wfh). They just need to test my internet speeds. I'm getting 20 download milo-bits per second. Its not bytes its bits and 5 mbps upload speeds. I hope its enough to do the job.

If I would have known about this work from home job last year when Malatest cut my hours I would have done wfh when projects slowed down and balanced out the two. It would have saved me all kinds of grief last year and this year. I always for some reason, equated wfh jobs to be like where my wife works, based on 1-2% commission. This still might be like that but I'd be calling a tap source and I still don't know if its a guaranteed wage. My contact said it's minimum wage and performance bonus. I'm sure that's how it goes or if I meet my line hour then its wage etc. I'm sure that's the format. If its a straight minimum wage if I meet my line hour, I'd still do ok. I'll know more about this Tuesday.

Earlier I learn that ETS this weekend is shutting down the lrt (again). The city is getting ready for the Metro line handover from Thales Monday. Then its 4-6 weeks of training for the  operators. I'm thinking the Metro line could be up and running by the May long weekend. In theory.

Just as I was checking out a YouTube video about 10:40pm my computer went dead. Wtf? Other lights dimmed out. We were running on 50% power. Anne buzzes to get in and explained what happened: All power South (our side) of 137th went dark, and within the last 3 hours we got dumped with about 2 inches of snow! Our usual Spring snow storm. 
So lets recap: Lrt shut down this weekend, power outage, water shut off for today. Situation normal.

Still no word about my ei claim but its only been 3 weeks  now, My roe says a shortage of work, then vilified me in my notice of termination. The only thing that might save my ei claim is the shortage of work and the my roe start date claims April 2011 when I started and the fact that I haven't been on ei since the year 2000. I was at Xentel 2011 and I mentioned this to ei. If I get this work from home job, I might just abandon ei and keep the home job until pension kicks in and do both. Anyway, that's about all for now.

I lost another job but

it was a job that I never got paid for. They tried me on for 3 days. The first (Monday) day I got no sales and I wasn't expecting any. Then the last hour of my first day they put me on leads. My job was to call businesses and ask if they would be interested in receiving a short email proposal. My 2nd day at Medlaw was to continue on with asking to send out email proposal's. They said to send them out regardless of weather the decision maker approves or not. Then after about 2/3rds of that day (Tuesday) I asked the boss if this was "legal," to get the email proposal's out as unsolicited email. He said no, I should be pitching only the decision maker. I probably could have got 20 out a day in that case. Sending out these emails unsolicited sounds like spam to me. So at the end of the day yesterday, the supervisor said my flow rate for leads was too low to keep me. Tha's ok. I couldn't see myself up at 6am every morning taking the 7am bus and then the train and the #5 and then transferring to the #3 up there by 107th and 124th street every morning. 

Out of working at Medlaw I got 3 job leads. I'm going to contact one of my other employers to see if I can start working from home. Its $11 hour. I'll be doing that today. The thing with Medlaw and Crime watch is at least Crime watch paid me. I'm glad I'm out of Medlaw or whatever its called. Anyway, that's all for now. 

I didn't get lucky

this St. Patrick's day I'm on a trial basis it seems. I might last another day or 2 more years, hard to say. But I do have options. I'll know how to proceed once I know what's going  on with ei.

I've got another full day ahead of me. Its been 3 days now and I can't take another day without getting paid for it. I can only be patient for so long, then I've got to move on. Anyway that's all for now.

It was easy heading into work this morning as I made all of

connections but I realized waiting for the #5 across the street from Corona, I was going about this the wrong way. All I need do is to catch the #3 from City Centre mall leaving out the middle man. So I'm getting out at Central station and boarding the #3 from there to work. Same thing getting back. 

I can't believe this has been the first job I ever had where I where I didn't get paid. They gave me another script which had nothing to do with selling but more to do with emailing proposals but I only did that the last half hour.

I got home at 6:30pm but of course this was my own fault more then anything. I took the #201 Saint Albert bus to Glenrose and then the rest of the way downtown and I got off at the courthouse across the street missing my #16 Northgate. I got home an hour and a half, yeesh. I'll give it a couple of days. Anyway that's all for now.

I haven't been out of the house since last Wednesdau so

imagine my surprise when I stepped out to see 90% of our snow gone! That was the big surprise of the day. I thought weather wise it was going to be cold but it wasn't that bad. Actually quite pleasant out there. I could have got away with a sweater and a windbreaker.

We got our #11 bus across the street heading West and off at 72nd street and 144th Ave, and walked a block to the strip mall. We popped into Giant Tiger and then to Capital Pizza. After we got seated I checked to see if they had wifi and the server gave the access code. We waited for our pizza. I like their bathrooms at this place because they are so clean. Anne and I had a chat about my week ahead, what with being up at 6:15 this morning. I'm going to give this place a try. One of the other options we talked about was a call centre I worked for 2 days last October because Malatest was starting up again. This place has been closed from January until the end of this month. This place has a work from home wage/commission structure, which sounds promising. So if this place doesn't pan out this week I can always try the other place, and there's the ei possibility as well. The pizza was as good as ever and we took what we couldn't eat home. After pizza over to Dairy Queen. I had my strawberry Sunday. I'm going to have the peanut butter Sunday next time. Back to Giant Tiger and then we walked back to 72nd/144th Ave and had a wait for the bus and home. It was a nice outing.

Now that the snow is mostly gone and the sidewalks are mostly clear I can wear my running shoes I'm up at 6:15 this morning out the door by 7am to be there by 8:30am. Hopefully they'll have the coffee on. I hope I do well at this place. Its going to be a long day up by 6:15 home by 6:15. If I can get on the payroll and do the job, I'll keep it until they kick me out. Anyway, that's all for now.

Anne called me from a

Telus pay phone on her way home at Rexall saying that there were about 70,000 spectators taking in the Red bull crash ice event downtown. The trains were being back logged. The Red bull event is where ice skaters skate down a luge type ice course made for skaters. It was a free event and with the warm weather it brought out tens of thousands of spectators. The lrt system had trouble handling that many people for the finale day of the event. From what Anne was telling me there hadn't been that many people on the trains since the first Heritage Classic that November 22nd 2003 over 10 years.

I was following a bit of the Flames/Ave's game working on a beat last night having a great evening. I had a nice couple of days off and when I'm on full pension, I'm looking forward to 3 days on 4 off. Thanks to Anne.

On my breaks at work since I'm on commission over the next few days next week, I'll be making phone calls sending out resumes. If I not on commission, no way I'd do anything like that. There's only about 6 people that work the phones in the office anyway. Anyway, that's all for now.