bamboo wednesday! part 6! and WEEN!

so there's been some more growth on the bamboo front. it is definitely flourishing in this harsh office environment. essentially all i do is fill it with water every day, ignore it and take a photo of it once a week. i think that's the trick for all of you office people out there killing bamboo plants on a regular basis.



on friday night last week i went to see WEEN in concert at the docks (which is now the Sound Academy). it was one of the best concerts i've seen in ages and from what i've heard, it wasn't one of their best shows. i can only imagine how awesome it would have been had they been in peak form. from what i've been told, they have a reputation for playing for several hours straight - and i thought the 2 1/2+ they did play was pretty badass. i would highly recommend everyone find a copy of their new album and listen to it on repeat. hella good. they have such a unique style and a diverse sound. putting one of their albums on is kind of like listening to a mixed cd of crazy and funny music.

today is also halloween. i had almost forgotten about it because my office has absolutely NO holiday spirit whatsoever. the closest to enthusiastic this place gets is when the secretary (one of few people here with a pleasant personality) decides to try to do something fun and everyone else just smiles and nods. today she went around desk to desk giving out candy. i was the first of about 4 or 5 people who accepted it and thanked her. she goes to such great lengths to make sure people here are happy and everyone else here goes to great lengths to make sure they stay bored.

tomorrow i get the keys to my new place. i'm pretty excited, this couldn't come soon enough. i'm so tired of having to take the elevator down 23 flights with a bunch of assholes every morning in order to get to work. this morning the elevator was full of ghetto trash with music blaring from their cell phones.

yes, more than one of them had the external speakers of their mp3 cell phones cranked with shitty pop-rap music.

and they were listening to different songs.

then one of them started singing out loud with one of the songs.

when i moved into this building it wasn't full of asswipes with their music cranked at 7am trying their hardest to annoy the hell out of other people wanting to go to work.

okay, so i don't really WANT to go to work, it's more of a need to go to work in order to make money and not get fired. but the important part is that i'm moving soon to a house which means no more elevator rides with arseholes, no more people smoking in the hallway and no more building management shutting the water off twice a month. huzzah.

holy nickels batman!

i bought a can of pop from the pop machine (soda for americans eh) and put in a $2 coin. it's bad enough that they're charging a dollar for a can of pop that i KNOW retails in the 20-30 cent range, but did the damn machine have to give me my change in nickels?

bamboo wednesday! part 5!

a little bit more growth on the bamboo front, but more crappy RAZR pictures. One of these days i'll bring a real camera to take pictures, but you'll have to look at camera phone pictures instead.

and what's the deal with Globalscape shutting down CuteHTML? and how come nobody told me? now i have to download the whole CuteFTP package to get their html editor. bugger. now i'm gonna have to use notepad.

i love lamp!

steph's gonna be pissed when she finds out the Value Village has her lamp on sale for $3.99

what to do when your conferene call gets cancelled

i originally had a conference call scheduled for this morning with one of our high-maintenance clients, but that got cancelled. i'm glad too because scheduled half-hour meetings with these people always turn into hour-and-a-half meetings that drive me nuts.

so in lieu of working on something important, i offer the public the following time-wasting items:

• a family caught a burglar in their home and force him to clean up the mess at gunpoint
• a guy created an Optimus Prime transformers Halloween costume with supplies he got from the local hardware store that actually looks like Optimus Prime and not just one of those cardbord "i'm a transformer" crap costumes.
• next year should be good for comic book movies. looks like we'll be getting Wolverine, Iron Man (let's hope they get Black Sabbath back together for the title track eh?), and possibly even Thor.
• Guitar Hero III is coming out this month.
• generally most rabbits do not approve of your actions. disapproving rabbits has the facts.
  

bamboo wednesday! part 4!

so things are still pretty busy. i managed to forget my good camera, so you get crappy RAZR photos of bamboo again this week...



i've noticed a bit of growth. it seems to be keeping up with its regular .5 to 1 cm per week growth pattern. i'm kind of in shock by office people's capability to kill bamboo. outside of a cactus, it's probably the easiest plant to take care of in the world. you can't seem to over-water it, i keep the glass full to the top every day and the thing seems to be thriving.

the deal is essentially done for the new place, i just need to drop off my rent deposit tonight and wait for the 1st to come around so i can start moving my crap in. i've had to book a ton of time off work to try to get my act in gear and get everything moved. the good news is that i'm excited to move, the bad is that ever-lingering feeling that you might not be quite ready to do it. i'm sure 1 or 2 days of hard-core packing will remedy everything.

bamboo wednesday! part 3!

week three of the bamboo project and things are looking well...



if i were to guess, i think it's grown by about another half to one centimeter or so. i think i fudged the angle a little bit in this week's photo. maybe i should bring in a better camera to take the picture too, my Motorola RAZR isn't really doing it justice.

good news on the new home front too. the place i looked at last night worked for me, so i'll be moving in next month. no more apartment hunting for me. i'll be so happy to not have to take a crowded elevator every day. and also - a fireplace for the winter time. that's gonna be so awesome. i'll be able to save a ton on heating bills too i figure.

the only downside to all of this is that i have to start packing like crazy. i want to get the hell out of my place as soon as is humanly possible. it'll be so nice to have a big place to live again.

perhaps an actual place to live?

tonight i'm going to go see a townhouse that will hopefully be the place i end up moving to. it's a big three bedroom place with a garage (or should i be calling that a car-hole?) and a back yard. it will be nice not having to take an elevator down 23 stories with a bunch of arse wipes just to take the dogs out for a pee.

and did i mention the arse wipes on the elevators? yesterday my adventure in walking the dogs resulted in one woman freaking out so much when she saw them that she wouldn't get onto the elevator. no big deal for me, but really - who's scared of a 5 lb chihuahua and a 9 lb dachshund (yes, i now also have a wiener dog).

today i need to try to be effective and productive at work, although i REALLY don't want to be. working is for suckers. the unfortunate thing is that i've still got another 15 years or so to go of being a sucker (and yes, i DO intend to retire by the age of 45).

finding a place to live is important in our society

i went to look at a new place to live this morning, thereby making myself incredibly late for work. it was all worthwhile though. it's a nice 3 bedroom townhouse with a garage and a big unfinished basement and hardwood floors.

which is good because i hate vacuuming cat hair out of the carpet.


sometimes you can find the strangest things at the Value Village. like the above gnome painted on a stone. he was $2.99, which i thought was a little high for a gnome painted on a rock. but hey, to each their own right?

bamboo wednesday! part 2!

i suppose it shows how busy i've been when i notice that the last post i put up here was bamboo wendesday and so is this one?

i've noticed that it has grown when i compare the two pictures side-by-side. looks like about a centimeter of growth. hopefully i can keep this one from joining the ranks of the withered, yellowed bamboo skeletons that are popping up around corporate canada.

great news is that i've finally gotten a new dryer. the down side is that it's slightly smaller than the old one so i have to be careful aboot how much laundry i stuff into the machine. also, the lint trap is in a really stupid place - right above the door where you'd take your clean, dry laundry out of it so you either get lint on your clean clothes, or back inside the dryer. great.

work at both jobs has been insanely busy lately. at job one we've undertaken the massive task of translating our entire application (the bread and butter for my company) from english to other languages. doesn't sound like that big a deal until you realize that there are 350+ report files with thousands of labels that need to be updated - not to mention hundreds of other web pages that need to be modified. at job number two we've taken on a new massive client and are seemingly perpetually short staffed. you know it's not good when you walk in and people are saying "oh man, it's insane tonight - i'm so glad you're here. these three people didn't show up..."

but at least i can wear clean clothes to work.