A bit of this and that

 

I have to admit that I missed blogging for 2 days.    This is my 60^th post in  66 days - my first post being January 11^th.     So I have missed 6 days in all.  Not perfect – but then who is perfect?  Good enough that I have gotten past the point of wondering if I will acquire the habit of blogging, wondering if I will run out of topics or even enthusiasm. 

But I do run out of time and find it challenging to devote the time I would like to my blogs.  They will necessarily will need to become a bit shorter as a rule, particularly now that the weather is starting to become nicer.  I will want to be outside more – walking and enjoying the city around me and on weekends up at Collingwood enjoying the walking and hiking trails which are in abundance up there. 

Laura popped in to visit last night.  She had a new cast installed on Monday and it is a nice fibreglass one – much smaller than the plaster one and she now is able to go back to work which is a cause for great celebration. 

The good news is that her bones are knitting well and she should have the cast off in 3 weeks and with the new cast she is much more comfortable and able to sleep.  I am glad for her.

Yesterday was St. Patrick's day.

 I am forever amazed at how busy the bars are on this day - they should call it national drinking night!   As I walked home there were line ups at all the Irish Pubs along my route.  I went out for dinner - my companion and I would have preferred to go see Greg Wyard, but chose not to since there would invariably be a line up at the Irish Pub he was playing that night.   Instead we chose the Liberty Cafe who was featuring Rude Jake, both of which I have blogged about in an earlier blog.   

We both had a wonderful evening - but it was not as expected.  Jake happened to be sitting beside us with friends (who planned to accompany him during the evening).  The bar was packed and there was a large crowd at the bar.    There being no stage in the restaurant they normally just move some tables aside to make a small spot the musicians can occupy.  The spot Jake normally occupies to play piano and guitar was blocked entirely by patrons and those tables did not look to be clearing any time soon.  After a time, they gave up thinking that the bar would clear out enough for Jake to play and they sent him on his way.   We were left disappointed  - my companion had wanted to hear Rude Jake.  However the evening was delightful in all other respects (except as always too short!) , so I have no complaints!  Maybe in the coming weeks we will get to go see Rude Jake and his friends. 

This morning I notice that trucks have arrived at the Brazen Head Pub and they are packing up the tents and bits and pieces they needed to kit out their establishment for the event.  Both on route to the Liberty and coming home we noticed that the line ups were very long .  With the main floor dining room and upstairs bar filled and all 3 patios plus a parking lot tent filled to overflowing we can be sure this Toronto Bar Night contributed greatly to a bit of an economic recovery.
 

I am at home working today – half a day studying for my PMP and half a day working on some documents I need to get finished for work.  Having said that I must get at it - time is marching.

The Beat Goes On

There are a few topics I want to cover with the limited time I am allowing myself to attend to my blog.  Firstly, I want to provide an update on my daughter Laura.  Next, as promised yesterday, I want to tell you about “The Onion”.  Lastly, I want to update you on how I am making out with my PMP exam preparation. 

Oh, Broken Bones - Oh My!

Laura just left my place.   She had booked to come over so I could wash her hair.  I guess I am going to be doing that 2 or 3 times a week for the next month or so.  I got an update on her visit to the fracture clinic and it is a bit worse than the Emergency Doctor had said.  

She actually broke two bones and fractured another bone in her hand on her thumb near her wrist.  Her arm was still quite swollen and so she needs to go back in a week and have this cast replaced.  The Doctor told her that the Emergency Room Nurse had not fitted the temporary cast properly and that had caused more problems.  She is definitely off work for a week.  She is also still in a lot of pain and so this Doctor prescribed Percocets to replace the Tylenol #3s the Emergency doctor prescribed for her.  As a mother, I am quite worried about the meds – they are very strong pain killers and have an addictive quality quite a bit more so than Tylenol.     

The other item I needed to understand better was how desperate her financial situation was.  I knew that before the broken arm the credit card company had been calling her about overdue payments and she had said her phone bill was behind also.  So it was “family counsel time” and her father came over as well and we spent several hours discussing her financial situation, developing a budget for her expenses, given her week without pay and yes, lending her a large sum of money to get the bill collectors off her back.   Over the next several months Laura and I will be meeting weekly to discuss how she is doing with her budget and I am policing that she is keeping up her end of the bargain and living within the budget she agreed to and making the agreed payments back to her father and I.  I hope this puts her back on track! 

On to a much more interesting topic:

 

The Onion.   

I found The Onion through my twitter account and I am following The Onion’s micro blogs on twitter.   


They are so much fun!   What is The Onion you might wonder? 

It is an American “fake news” organization featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news both real and imaginary.  The humour often presents everyday facts as news using puns, quips and clinches, such as today’s headliner “

Daylight Saving Time Yields Massive Daylight Surplus”.    They also take actual news events and make fun of them by making up stuff surrounding the real news.  A few of the ones I noticed this week:

• Aging Seeing-eye Dog Purchases Seeing-eye Squirrel
• Obama Outfitted With 238 Motion Capture Sensors for 3-D Record of Presidency
• CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years
• 
  
  Hurricane Bound For Texas Slowed By Large Land Mass To The South 
• Obese Billionaire Opens World's Largest Gravy Park
• Area Man Thinks He Was Fired Because Of Recession
• Congress Establishes New Department Of Finding Change On The Ground

The Onion is the perfect thing to have as a regular smile generator on Twitter.  Every day there is one or two of these silly or even not so far fetched news items which arrive to make my day.    Some of these remind me of the old Saturday Night Live TV program “Weekend Update” which featured Bill Murray and Jane Curtin.

 
Yesterday I decided I needed to see the web site behind these silly twitterings.  They have what appears to be a full featured web site as large as any City Newspaper – but every single story is untrue and some are very funny.   The interesting thing is that a good number could well be true – but are not.  They also have a Video News section with a long list of PodCasts which will split your side.  I have included one for you to have a quick peek. 

If you want to check out the site:

http://www.theonion.com/content/index?utm_source=nav 

FDA Approves Depressant Drug For The Annoyingly Cheerful

Brain Tired, On Track but not ready to Leap...

As promised, the last part of this blog is an update on me.  It had looked like I was ahead a bit as the afternoon arrived and I had finished reviewing the two planned chapters on Project Time Management and Project Cost Management and I had only the 2 extra hours for memory work yet to do – so I thought I would be able to go out to my Documentary Film group tonight to see Leap.  

Leap is a documentary in which the case is made for the idea that everything around us is an illusion and so what naturally follows this is that we make our own reality.  It looked like an intriguing idea and I wanted to see it to generate some ideas for the fiction novel I am planning for November.   If you are interested in learning more:

http://www.leapmovie.com/ 

Laura’s visit and the “family counsel” ran into early evening, so I was unable to go to my movie Meet-Up.  I guess now I will need to buy the movie if I want to see it.  I am just now finishing my blog and I still need to put in the 2 hours of further study time. 

I am taking tomorrow off work to continue studying and I have 2 chapters for 3 hours and an extra 2 hours planned for memory work. 

 Lets see how I do!

Rain, Rain, go away…

I know I should not complain about the rain. It is warm outside and the snow has almost all disappeared. I am not able to go out and enjoy the weather anyway and so perhaps I should say Hurrah for the rain! Except that it has been a dreary and grey day. I much prefer sunshine, even if I can only look at it through my condo windows.

I have been working pretty steadily all day studying for my exam. Except I had a relatively low productivity morning. I was having a hard time focusing and kept finding other things which needed attention -- like twittering and reading some stuff from The Onion (more on that tomorrow). However the opposite was true this afternoon and I pretty much worked steadily going through the stuff and I did finish today the sections I had earmarked on my study plan – the Chapter on Project Scope Management and Project Time Management.

Ok, so that is the good news. The bad news is that when I did the review of the material studied last week I was not happy with how much I had retained and decided I have to put more time into the boring task of memorization. So I am going to work just a little longer tonight and work 8 instead of 6 hours on this stuff tomorrow.

Not fun – but what can I say. I am finding that it takes me longer to learn stuff than it did --I hate to say how many -- years ago when I was a full time student. Maybe it is the fact that I have been having brain draining work weeks or maybe it is just harder to apply myself, not sure. I could complain that it is because I am not having enough fun -- I always agreed with the principal of "Work Hard - Play Hard" and maybe I have not played hard enough this week. LOL

A bit of a news update on Laura, she did not get her cast on this morning due to a misunderstanding on her part regarding the time she should arrive, so she has to get there at 7:30 a.m. tomorrow. She had arrived at 10 ish thinking she could go at any time after 7:30 – which was not the case. She is still in pain and taking Tylenol #3s. The real heart break of it is that it seems she will certainly need a week off and maybe more – can she waitress with a cast on? Will her employer want to pay a gimpy waitress? I don’t know. She was very unhappy when I talked to her this evening. Even before this happened she was having a great deal of difficulty paying bills. I am suspecting my 2nd bedroom will not be vacant for long.

I must confess at this point that I have no brain cells left to blog further. I have planned to spend another 45 minutes memorizing some of the key points from todays review and must get back at it. After that – I am going to treat myself with a listen to a few new TED talks – I have a bunch bookmarked for listening and look forward to sitting back with a glass of wine and listening to some interesting ideas. There are a few funny ones – I also intend on getting a few chuckles in!

Have a great Saturday night all!

It is 10:30 and I haven’t yet started my blog.  Just got back from the hospital.  I got a call just as I was finishing up at work and it was my daughter Laura (or Lilly as she is more often called).  She was at work (she is a bar maid these days at the Dogs Bullocks Bar) and she said she had broken her hand and needed to go to the hospital.   Of course, I rushed home and grabbed the car and went to pick her up. 

It was nearly 6:00 by the time we were on our way to the hospital.  She had earlier that afternoon fallen down the stairs of her apartment and hurt both her arm and her knee.  Arm in sling she set off for work, but once there she realized she was in far too much pain to work.  Thus the call to Mom.  I have included a picture of Lilly taken last year to the right.

Laura and I passed the next several hours in various waiting areas of the St. Joseph Health Centre’s Emergency Department.  We were joined by a number of “stinky” people who seemed to want to engage in conversation and as Lilly put it “smelled of pee”.  Once was plainly drunk.   

Once we had waited a more than adequate amount of time, Laura was medicated and th Percocets made her forget her pain.   We joked that they should drug everyone who comes to emerg (even the family and friends) and just wake us up when it is our turn.  We were starving by that point and made plans to stop for burgers as soon as we left the hospital.  In due course, she was given a sling, x-rayed and the diagnosis made that she has fractured her arm in 2 places.   The knee is just strained.  She has a temporary cast and will need to go to the fracture clinic first thing in the morning for her permanent cast. 

The bright note?  They have Sponge Bob fibreglass cast plasters she can have.   Sadly, she is going to have a tough time working for the next while and I am not sure how she will manage to pay her bills this month.

So I am exhausted from my hours of waiting and need to pack it in for the night and mentally prepare for my study day tomorrow.  Will blog tomorrow night and let you know how both Lilly and I are making out.

Going quietly mad with these cold temperatures :(

When I walked home from work today it was damn cold. Frigid. When there is a constant blast of cold wind in the face one tends to walk hunched over, head down, body clenched and thoughts focused on survival. Your whole body feels stressed. Eyes stream wet drops that run down cheeks too cold to notice. In the morning the “weather eye” on my iPhone said it was -27 degrees Celsius with the wind chill. When I checked after work it said -21. GAWD!!!!!!!!!!!!

I do dress for the weather. Winter hiking boots suitable for my half hour walk through ice and snow, a layer of tights under my trousers (no skirts for me in winter!), a sturdy winter coat over a couple of sweaters, the hood from my coat pulled up over my thick faux fur lined hat (with draw strings pulled tight), scarf wound around my neck and pulled up over my chin and mouth and of course, gloves shielding my hands. The only exposed skin is about 5 inches surrounding my eyes. Still it is nasty and I am cold!

Unpleasant is an insufficient word. Just as tolerance for a substance builds up, intolerance to adverse weather also builds up. I am at my breaking point.

Ok, I exaggerate, but God, am I getting grumpy about our nasty Canadian winters. It is March – why can’t spring come in March rather than in April or as it did last year, in May?

OK, rant over now I get onto other pressing thoughts… Like my daughter Laura (aka Lilly) telling me tonight that next year when she goes back to University she will move in back home with me, so I shouldn’t refurnish her bedroom as my office and she should not buy furniture for her new place, because, where will she put it when she moves back home? I have only one word: HA!

Hmmm, I will bite my tongue now.
Laura is taking the year off school to recover her energy and motivation so she can finish her BA, which she has worked on for the last 3 years and only half completed. The other reason she is taking the year off is that she worked all of the previous summer and didn’t save any money toward tuition (the deal was she would pay 1/3rd). Not that she didn't work - she did - however taxis and bar tabs and fun kind of ate into her bank account. Gee, what is a gal to do?

I am sharing with you a picture of Laura (right) and her best friend Betina (left), who is coming back from a 3-4 month visit to Calgary this week. Laura has missed her "partner in crime" and so looks forward to her return.

Back to the Laura story. She moved out in January to share a place with a girlfriend, since living with her Mom was a bit restrictive - she really would like to have friends back occassionally at 3:00 a.m when she gets off work at the bar. I had offered that if she paid me rent that I would return it to her at the end of the year as her tuition saved, however that offer passed up for the lure of "her own place". Well, she is old enough now to make her own decisions.

I am suspecting that she is will not be able to save any money toward tuition in this next year, so I have no fear of her really going back to school and moving back in. But I am looking at the “wanted ads” for jobs in Dubai, just in case!

By the way, I did finish studying Chapter 4 yesterday and created about 30 “flash cards”. As I review the material I am creating these home made study aids. I am carrying them around with me and can spend time reviewing them during idle moments during the day.

I plan to put in an hour studying tonight and will go through the flash cards once or twice to help fix into my memory the stuff I went over on the weekend.

Before I "sign off", I have to tell you about the calendar I have in my bathroom. It contains a wonderful series of Zenga Paintings from the Gitter-Yellen Collection and Quotes on Zen Practice by Shunryu Suzuki. I put it in my bathroom because where else is it important to meditate? (OK, I am being silly, but you get my point, eh?). Each morning and evening I do my daily absolutions in that space and I just thought that it an appropriate spot for Zen thoughts and images.

I was absolutely delighted with the March Zen thought. Each day this month as I do my duty in that room I will gaze on the words "Just sit and see what happens".

Chat tomorrow, my friends!