Room to Breathe

We went to Swiss Chalet for dinner tonight. The waiter 1st brought us our drinks. He laid down a small square napkin, and reached for the salt shaker. He sprinkled salt on the napkin, placed our drinks down, and walked away. I had never seen anything like this done before. Was this a gesture of good luck? I was determined to know why this was done.

After our meal, I approached the waiter to pay. As he was ringing through my credit card, I asked, “Why did you sprinkle the salt?”

He chuckled and said, “it took you this long to ask? I do it to strike up some conversation before the meal, or in this case at the end. But I do it basically because it makes it so the napkin doesn’t stick to the bottom of the glass.”

Hmm…different.

I just had to go to the office. A guess a server was down, and no one else could get there to reboot it. Luckily I live only a few blocks away and can walk to do this.

On my way, my cell phone makes this funny noise. Omg! A text message! I don’t do this, simply because I cannot be bothered. It’s a huge pain in the ass, but I guess sometimes it is very convenient. This time for example.

Boss: “Hey… Are you heading into the office to reboot (input server name)??“

Me: “Y e s” - and that for me was a pain in the ass

Boss: “Thanks. I am in a seminar in Toronto and not done until 5:00.“

Me: “M y 1 s t t e x t. G u e s s i t w o r k e d!“

Boss: “Thank you!!!“

Me: “Back up. No problem. Leaving now.” - by the 3rd message, I had gotten the whole thing down. Still a pain in the ass.

The difference: I am using my cell phone, and he has the Blackberry RIM phone. As much as I would like one, I just can’t justify getting it. I’ll stick to what I have for now.

12:12PM - 2003 taxes completed! Just need to wait for 1 final RSP receipt for Jan/Feb 2004 to add - and then do a final copy. But the hard part is done. I am so proud of myself. For years I feared my personal taxes thinking it would be to difficult. Absolutely wrong. It’s actually surprisingly very simple, and it only took an hour!

I made a measly $382.00 more than last year, put an extra $250 into RSP’s, and found myself with a refund of $68.89 more than last year. I quickly went over my taxes again, and figured if I contributed $100.00 more in RSPs, I would get back $23.59 more. Not worth the effort at this point. i thought that I would try and figure out if I had no contributions at all. The outcome: $120.07 back still….hmm…not sure what to think now!

A beautiful day and I decide to stay indoors to do my taxes. Go figure. The temperature is only a couple degrees above 0�, and people are wearing shorts and T-shirts walking the streets. Come on people. We do still have 1 more month until Spring, so I better not hear you complain about the heat and humidity mid-July.

I played Super7 tonight. I won’t get into why I have a ticket, and why i bought one because this isn’t a usal thing. But since I have the tickets, I might as well see if there is a chance I can take a holiday.

And the answer is….no. 18 lines, and I only get 2 numbers on 2 lines. Doh! Shoulda just given my money to the homeless guy on the street outside the store.

I just got my T4 today, and I have all my other forms and receipts ready. But I need to do it before Monday March 1st, since that is the RRSP deadline. I know I am not rich, but if $100 brings me down the next level….I wanna know!

I mean come on! This is so horribly boring! I really gotta do what I said 6 months ago and redesign

Ok. So that is something that I did 4 months ago, and never completed since I couldn’t get the style sheets to work properly. So I gave up quickly in frustration.

But today I get an email from Ross Wm. Rader, a guy that works for TuCows. So, being out of the loop in the whole blogging world, and since it filtered into my hotmail junk, I naturally assumed that it was SPAM. But I viewed the source, and thought that it was legitimate. It seems that blogrolling was bought by TuCows. Ok, so I read on, fully expecting the punch line to be: “Please go to this: “http://205.111.111.11.1/credit_card_scam.html” and submit your credit card/personal info to avoid loosing your blogrolling account.” Working in the internet industry, you become a little leery of everything, always questioning the source. However this was definitely not the case. This was also confirmed by actually going to his personal blog site: http://www.byte.org/blog/.

The email was my hint to complete tasks #1 & #2.

It’s getting tougher. Perhaps I should not admit such things, but I am having trouble dealing with them.

I am having trouble concentrating, my attention span has decreased drastically, as well as being easily distracted. But what is bothering me the most is my judgement, and perhaps even my hand/eye co-ordination.

Tonight at volleyball was just horrible. I couldn’t do anything right! This used to come to me naturally so it’s very frustrating. I seem to be off all the time by a foot! Sets are too far out, not far enough, to tight, too far back. My bumps go to someone else…I mean I get them up…but it’s just not good enough….I have to make people work for it a little. What good is that? I just can’t win and I don’t know how I can change things.

I uploaded my Wasaga pics though. You like my fake “Not So Pro” tattoo?

MSNBC - A new way to view London: from a toilet

Interesting. More like freaky. I still don’t think that I could use it though. I would be sitting on the toilet thinking that the sun was shining a certain way, just for me so that the world would see me “doing my thing”. I wouldn’t feel “safe”.

Nope. Definately not for me. I like my walls solid. I don’t even like the fact that you can see my feet in the stall of a public washroom! I realize that everyone does it and needs to do it, I am also a fairly open person. But this is one area I like to keep private.

No wonder I have trouble getting up in the morning! I work @ 9AM, and it’s 1:31AM now! But this is different tonight. I am staying up to watch Conan O-Brian. A guy from work went to the taping in Toronto. So I had to stay up and watch! What if he, like the many others hoped, happened to get on tv? I couldn’t miss that!

But it was worth staying up to see Stompin’ Tom perform “The Hockey Song”. True Canadian tune.

I have been playing volleyball for years now. Throughout highschool, and then a little hiatus, but I have been playing in a league for 2 years now, and rec-ball for 3. Never have I been able to get an over-hand serve over the net. It sort of gets to it, and then drops. And if I ever did, it wasn’t happening in again for awhile!

However tonight, we found a school to practice in. Something I never get to do. 5 in a row baby! Woohoo!

I am so proud of myself. I have always felt like a lesser of a player since I can’t get an over-hand serve over, and have to resort to a measly under-hand. I can hit the ball, not a spike straight down mind you, but I can hit.

Hey, I never professed to being an all-star .

Has anyone seen the movie Seabuiscuit? My friend rented it, but then thought to himself that, “This is surprisingly good! I could finish watching it, and return it late to Blockbuster, or I could just buy the DVD!”

So that was the plan. We went to Blockbuster to pick up the movie. They have a deal that you can buy 1 previously viewed DVD, get the second for half price. We got Seabuiscuit, and took it home to watch.

Chapter 12 skipped, and then wouldn’t go past it. We missed a whole chapter. So my friend took it back to exchange on the way home. That was last Sunday. Finally tonight (Friday) we were going to finish the movie. Got to chapter 17 and did the same thing.

So instead of possibly burning out the lens, or whatever in my DVD player, I guess the best thing to do would be to just give in and buy a new copy. After all, from what I have seen so far, the movie is really good! But I really don’t like to only see half a movie.