I went to my bank for the second time in a week today. Again no line up. Weird. Twice in one week I'm either first in line for a teller or a wicket is open and they are waiting for me.

Banks are going to lose their reputation as large uncaring, unfriendly institutions if they keep this up.

Okay .. so the bank machine decided not to recognize my pin.. and then when i got that reset I found they forgot to hook up my checking account to the bank card. So there is no worry they are efficient and provide top notch service.. its just they are friendly and have less line ups.

Opened a large bag of shredded cheddar from a small local dairy/cheese place. Was going to sprinkle some on my chilli until I tasted it and found it tasted more like a cross between feta and blue cheese than cheddar.

Needless to say I had the chili without any cheese...

Found the number of the company and called them. I think its a relatively small family business. They called me back and I finally got them today.

I'll get a refund most likely but they are going to send a sales rep to pick up the product as they want to find out what happened to it.

Oh fun -- told them to drop by one morning next week. Time to remove the trapeze from over the coffee table (kidding) - seriously my living and kitchen need a slight sprucing up before anyone visits... Guess what I am doing this weekend...

I went to Walmart last week. Had a number of things to pick up and decided I'd brave Walmart, even though I'd normally avoid it, as it would be one stop shopping for everything I needed. Cold weather means one sometimes organizes shopping trips by number of stops and availability of underground parking (this walmart has parking underneath as well as around it)

Other than the mother teaching her child to scream "woo hoo" cause the Mom thought it was "cute" and the toddler I found in the aisle with no parent it sight (yes I stuck around til a parent showed up).. the visit wasn't too bad .. found some good deals; the best being some clearance undies (2 pairs of underwear for 25c) and some nice tops for $4 each. I love good deals like this.

Of course I didn't get the thing for my bathtub I wanted. I looked in bathroom stuff and in the organizing areas and didn't find the expandable "fit to size" pole thingy that sits in the corner of the tub and has shelves for stuff that would otherwise clutter up the rim of the bathtub. A friend told me that I should have looked the hardware and plumbing area for this. Oh well next time I go there or a similar store... but how it rates up there with a toilets, gasket seals, and fixtures is beyond me. To me it should be in the organizing stuff or bathroom stuff but no one asked me...

Got to the cash register. A nice cashier. No issues at all. Not even a price check needed. Woo hoo .. bonus.......Go home put bags down and ignore them for two days. Okay so I needed the stuff but not right that evening. And once put off.. well you know how it goes....Don't tell me I'm the only one that's done this...

Go to open one of the bags and find this treasure trove of stuff I wasn't charged for. Obviously once opening it was bought by someone very concerned with dental hygiene. 2 small bottles of Listerine, Aquafresh toothpaste, Colgate Max, and two kids toothpastes. None of this stuff is on my bill (and my bill was actually in this bag I think so I'm not sure what happened).

I'll likely use the Listerine and give away or send to the food bank (they'll take toiletries as this will save people money that they can use on food) the other items as I don't use any of those brands.

The odds are this is karma balancing out the stuff I swear I bought that never made it home...

First dealing I had with them was when my mom died. She had some insurance with them. I guess there are two parts to sending a beneficiary cheque.

Step 1: Add beneficiary to mailing list to sell insurance to

Step 2: Send cheque and advertising crap to beneficiary.

They called tonight to sell me something. A breakthrough in insurance (yeah yeah.. something with low payout high profit I'm sure)....

I interupted to rant about how they used sending me a beneficiary cheque as an excuse to put me on their maililng list.

The best? They hung up on me!

Walk in. As I pass the cash area I hear two girls say hello to me (or should I say to my back. as I had passed them).. Okay whatever.

Go look at that camera I'm interested in.

Two clerks at the counter.. one girl looking at a camera at another part of the counter.

Stand there for 5 minutes trying to get camera to work. Clerk looks my way. I ask him why it isn't turning on.

He gives me this look and in the voice you'd use to talk to a retarded 3 year old he says "oh that camera uses batteries, we don't have it plugged in".

I looked at him and left.

The girl this time facing me said goodbye. I looked at her and kept walking.

Wow a digital camera that uses batteries. How surprising. Amazing how all the other more expensive cameras can be plugged in so we can try them.

It will be a while til I shop there (or best buy - they are the same company) again.

The good news is that a friend is picking up the camera for me for around $100. The price at future shop for this model was $200.

Got my car back from Crappy tire. I dropped it off Sunday. The very bright mechanic said "oh I paged you in the store today when it was finished.

I just looked at him and said "I dropped it off Sunday and while I like roving around in the store its now thursday; I don't like your store that much. After a second he got it. If he worked on my car I'm a bit scared.

Cost just under $700. But I got a freebie - A pair of travel mugs and 1.50 in Crappy Tire money.

Got a new modem but can't get through to technical support. A 20 minute hold is what they WARN you of - which to my mind means more likely it will be an hour or more. Seems their registration server is down.

I think I'm asking for another credit.

*sigh*.

I'd really prefer to have the services I want with them.

In my paper purging today I have found a number of cheques (totalling about $12 .. a number of free product coupons (at least 3 all still good) and some uncancelled and some unused stamps..

Oh and a $10 bill

Who says purging is a bad thing? I'm finding it nicely lucerative!

Got my home phone service back and i think they got the physical line fixed. The phone now works nicely - and am getting better lines than i did before.

Spent endless hours on hold (if I'm so freaking important to you hire more customer service and tech support staff) they decided it was my modem that went. Why? Cause its old. Strange it worked before. So using dial up til i get that.

I owned that modem. They are sending me a new one if I send them back the old one. I don't get it. (Is the new one mine to keep?)
but i'll wait to question until I get the new one and then ask! I'm not too fussed about sending them the old one.. I think I got it in 1999 or 2000 - so not likes it hasn't served me well!

In the process of switching to a new home phone provider it seems I've lost both my phone and internet services. As I'm one of the last in the civilized world without a cell phone this leaves me with way to contact my 75 year old father or to get in touch with emergency services should I need them.

Lots of fruitless calls to the "customer care" centre. They should call it the "holds and plattitudes centre" as they do more of that than helping.

A supervisor is looking into it today for me.

I've told her I'm not impressed by the "seamless transition" their promotional material promised.

Damn Primus who i have my interent with now. I have had great service so i'm moving my home phone to them. To promptly get my dsl cut off while they make the transfer

"sorry lady it takes a week"

&Y#$# @#$#

Yeah right...

Its gonna be a long week

The sales guy assured me they'd be no issues and my service would not be down. The tech and customer support jail that does not allow you out of it to real people assure me I should have been told this and it is 100% necessary and unavoidable.

I so feel like a loved and cherished customer

On friday night I dropped my laptop computer. Visions of replacement and using it as a door stop danced in my head. Yes it was on when it was dropped.

I brought it to a friend to look at on Saturday morning but alas that didn't work out as he didn't get a chance to look at it.

Saturday night I looked online for information on how to get a recovery disk (I couldn't find one in my computer stuff). But I found this exciting thing.

Turned my computer on, hit F10 and voila a brand new computer that worked. Yup. It completely reformatted my drive and put it back to factory specs within a 1/2 hour.

Annoying cause I lost a lot of programs but I'm not a big downloader so it wasn't a huge issue that way.

The relief in not having to buy a new computer or spend $$$ getting it fixed - huge. I had visions of really having some large expenses.

I got told on June 18th that I was getting a letter regarding my attitude and how I had to shape it up during the next 90 days or start thinking about a new job.

My boss was told by his boss who was told by his boss tht my attitude sucks. I have mega attitude and I did tell someone my opinion and they didn't want to hear it. Lesson learned yummy - shut up.

Anyways. It is now approximately 9 weeks later. No letter. My boss said that he thinks it might never show up. Last he knew he had brought the draft letter to HR. HR had issues about the letter being not specific enough and not giving the type of feedback one needs to address the issue. His boss had a meeting with HR to discuss it that never as far as I know happened.

Boss asked me if I wanted this followed up on. My answer was no. Why remind anyone its not done. I'm going to wait until Sept 18th and figure by then its pretty much dead - that being three month's after I was told about it.

Until then I am careful on adding to the Gross National Product by buying things.

Oh and the Sr Director was in today. I had two meetings with him where I got lots of new exciting projects.

My advice... if you are gonna do stupid stuff don't do it to people who have political connections and bitch to the very senior uppper management folks.

Went to the no frills grocery store (Price Chopper). A step up from Aldi but not much up.. has a small deli.

Had some rolls a friend gave me for free so I thought I'd get some luncheon meat to make sandwiches. The roast beef was a good price so I asked her for some. They only had a few hundred grams left so I got that and got about 300 grams of corned beef too.

Got home. Realised that the difference between a good grocery store and a no frills one is that you get a package of roast beef and package of corned beef when you order those at the deli. What she said was roast beef was actually corned beef.. *sigh*. I wanted roast beef.

At least it was the same price! Thank goodness I like corned beef! Made about 7 (not 87 omg I can't type) sandwiches. A couple are in the fridge for tomorrow and the rest are in the freezer.

I guess in the know frills stores knowing the difference between the different types of beef is just asking too much...

My name is yummy and I'm an internet addict.

Please don't make me take a 12 step program.. I'm not quite ready to go that far...

Yeah you guessed it .. my DSL connection went down last night and didn't come up until just now.

I think I'm going to have to admit that highspeed has moved to the same place as my landline phone .. to a need rather than a want.

I realised yesterday that I've had to do some things to move on in my life - mostly concerned with "email clutter".

I unsubscribed from the flylady mentor group. 790 unread emails in that email box indicated to me that it was email clutter and not a list that was useful to me. I still do some of the flylady stuff just not using her list. Also unsubscribed from a couple of lists that were based in the city where my x lives. Though friends are on the list it was time to move on. Sad but good that I did.

Two trains have been stalled at my station. Coupon trains that is. One is ready to go out and so is a trade where I already got the other part of the trade. I'm such a scatterhead lately.

Unfortunately it was the vomit comet from a balcony one over and a couple of floors up.

Was on the balcony enjoying the morning yesterday. Heard someone cough and then that unmistakable noise. Looked over and saw the comet aiming to the ground. Thank god none splattered into my balcony.

Then the words "oh $#%@ I drank too much"

NO? Really?

Just realised I haven't paid my rent for July and that I still need to deposit cheques today. I am really not paying attention to things right now.

That has got to stop and I have to get on top of things ASAP so stuff like this doesn't keep happening.

Luckily if I pay the rent today I shouldn't get into too much trouble.. but still...

Started the day at work for 2 hours studying for my french test. Did the french test (i take french at work for work so studying at work seems reasonable to me, and my boss didn't protest).

Then a dental appointment for a cleaning. A tooth is chipped so I'm back next week for an unchipping.. err.. filling

Home and realise the chicken I was going to make was bad despite being three days before the best before date. Realised that this was the third time this happened. So it might be something to do with the fridge. So i defrosted the fridge/freezer compartment, to see if that might help and frankly I want to ask for a new fridge but it was so bad I figured I better do that first. $16 of chicken thighs tossed in the garbage.

Did laundry

Got all the ice out of the freezer area finally. Dumped much of it on the balcony to melt there.

Mopped floor in kitchen (defrosting the fridge's freezer makes a mess)

Got laundry.

Realised some a$$ stole my big purple bathsheet from out of the dryer. Damn I'm annoyed - that was the only bathsheet that was large enough to cover all of my fat A$$.

Made bed. Am in bed.

Tomorrow has to be better right?

After a great couple of weeks off, recharging and enjoying myself I go back to work today to find out I'm in lots of trouble. Seems one of the sales people is upset at my lack of enthusiasm and the Snr VP suddenly had this memory of me being negative at a presentation he gave. My boss and I don't remember me talking at that presentation but we do remember that I was upset after. Some of his comments were quite hurtful and I guess it showed on my face and he remembered that. So my boss is writing me up a warning and I have three months to shape up my attitude as he was clearly given the direction to do so by Senior Managment.

This was told to me an hour after my vacation ended today. So much for being relaxed and happy. With all the changes in my life ,work has been the one stabilizing thing in my life. I'll do my best to be miss cheery about everything and see what is up. Amazing while I'm not the cheeriest of the lot in the department it is the large groups I've quoted on that are the ones that have sold. Peter thinks it is bad luck and will pass so long as I'm seen as positive.

I had just come to the decision to buy my sewing machine. I will be putting that off until things settle down.

More holiday posts sure to come. We got home tonight after lots of delays. The airport at Toronto was closed for a while (hours?) due to a huge thunderstorm. This meant the plane picking us up that was starting in Toronto and returning with our flight was late

The most fun we had though was in checking in our lotions and potions. I have a pic of that but haven't uploaded it yet. Lets just say we had to ditch items over 100ml and we were able to creatively pack the rest.

I got home after midnight and am still tring to unwind.

Oh they charge those in steerage (I think they call it economy) $1 for a chocolate bar and $2 for a small thing of pringles on the plane. Yes highway robbery is alive and well and the coach robbers are now employed by Air Canada

Ever notice the correlation between the speed and efficency of service at a fast food place and the number of people milling about behind the counter.

Its definitely an inverse relationship. The more people the slower the service.

This insight brought to you by a person who needs to stop eating out so much.

Actually I should say no planning.

No planning and very little time is giving me not enough time to cook ahead and bring food to work for lunch. Working til very late this evening meant a trip to McD's drive through.

I'm calling the supermarket with the crappy meat an am on hold hearing about how important my call is to them.

You not only have crappy meat but right now you aren't making me feel very loved at all.

2 thumbs down for Superstore (ontario)

(Got them on the phone. They are going to look into it. Nice of them. Not like I'll trust their meat anymore though)

Mom always insisted that meat from the grocery store here called "Dominion" was the best meat around.

I have twice bought meat at one of the stores under the Weston's umbrella (not affiliated with Dominion) and have twice opened the package (despite my properly refridgerating it) to find it rotten. The meat wasn't in a small packages (this time it was a large tray of chicken thighs - about $18 worth). I likely should have kept them to return to the grocery store to get a refund but I don't want sticky rotten meat in my fridge.

Mom knew best. I'm thinking that I've never had trouble at Dominions and I should go back to buying my meat there.

Went in for some frozen french fries, as I didn't feel like doing oven fries starting with real potatoes.

Bought McCain superfries. Not sure if they are in mass distribution. Better than most frozen fries. That isn't saying much. Whatever they do to them to ensure they are super crispy is weird. I don't know if it is a weird chemical or a texturizing process. (I guess I should write and ask)

They aren't bad, but I won't rave about them. Best kept for teens, children and folks who are unable to cut a potato.

Much better is cutting a potato or 3 preferably yukon gold or russet (or other yellow fleshed potato of choice), cutting it into french fry sized pieces, tossing in bowl with some olive oil (1-2TBSP), seasalt, peppper and other spices or herbs. and then putting on parchment paper on a cookie sheet in the bottom shelf of the oven at 425. YOu may want to flip after about 10 minute. I cook until they are as crispy as I like 20 minutes or so (dang I don't time it).But might be longer too.. I'm not exact on this.

If you are trying to cut down on carbs use parsnip instead and keep a closer eye on time. Also excellent with sweet potato yams etc.

Convenince foods are convenient and easy but my palate is enjoying them less

One way to save money is to not remember what you planned to buy. I went into the drug store with the knowledge that I needed to buy some emery boards. I wandered around and left without the emery boards. It wasn't until I got most of the way back to the office that I remembered why I had gone in there in the first place.

At the grocery store the woman behind me was in a motorized cart - I offered to take her groceries out and put them on the counter. I thought she said thank you so I started to take an item out. She said "I said no thank you". I immediately apologized and said I was sorry and I misheard her and put the item back in her cart. Her next words to me floored me as she said "Yes, you did mishear me". The look I got was quite icy and irate.

Pffffffffft. Glad I never did offer you a coupon as I had I (I like to do this whenever possible) she likely would have gotten even more offended.

I honestly misheard her. And didn't mean to offend her. It is so hard to know the protocol about helping people. You offer and try and you offend and you don't try and you are seen as rude and uncaring.

I feel like its a "heads you win, tails I lose" proposition whatever you do.

Oh my this is just too silly. You know us Canucks with our "monopoly money". Well we get into having fun on our quarters.

A few years ago our 25 cent piece here had a red poppy in the centre. On rememberance day (veterans day) we all wear a poppy to remember those who have fought for our country.So why not remember them when we spend money too! http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm

Anyways, some US army folks came up here to the Great White north and got all spazzed out by our unusual quarters - thinking it was spying on them.



Hey guys, relax it is a quarter and not a bug.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070507....

After work last night I went crazy "shopping", but only spent about $5

I went to Home Depot and looked at flooring to see if they had any mats/runners/floor covering that would work for my balcony. I had seen something at a hotel that might work but didn't see it there. So spent nothing.

Headed to the local shopping centre and went into Marks Work Wearhouse - they had some nice priced t-shirts but nothing inspiring enough to bring it home. Then to check out their shoes. Lets just say their selection seemed pretty crappy to me (sorry Marks, but this is my blog I get to say what I think here). I have to say though that both staff members I talked to were genuniely friendly and helpful.

Checked out a woman's clothing store but nothing inspiring there. Reitmans is one of those "catch as catch can" stores for me. Caught nothing this time. Tempted for one shirt on sale but it had this weird keyhole thing in the back that showed off my bra (and if I turned it around it one would might start using the words wardrobe malfunction)

Then to the Superstore (a grocery store modelling itself on SuperWalmarts). You know the store is bad when the kid at customer service trashes the staff as lazy assed (it took three loudspeaker requests to get someone to call him back about the item I was asking for). I ended up just getting a raincheck for toilet paper from there.

Then to two dollar stores where I splurged and spent $4 at one and $1 at another on some headbands.