Once again, I find myself working in the elder care facility. Fortunately, most of these people are older than me. Although there is a disturbing trend that all the management and IT support people are all younger than me. Guess I get the advantage of experience. Experience is not all it's cracked up to be. Just means you've made all the mistakes they are making but you still get the blame for it. Plus, they all seem to speak a foreign language. Might be I am hard of hearing but I think they leave out a bunch of words that I would think were necessary for them to communicate correctly but as they can talk to each other, they think the problem is the old guy.
But enough of my lot in life. It's not a lot, but it's a life.
Maeghan does another show tomorrow. Don't get your hopes up. By show, I mean a market where she tries to sell her wares. She has done about a half dozen now. Still far from breaking even. I think most of the problem is she treats it like a once every few months thing and instead of making things for the whole time between shows, she waits until a few days before it and works like crazy to get some things done.
She makes jewellery and stuff out of that plastic stuff that hardens in UV light. Can't seem to recall what it is at the moment. RESIN! That's it. Anyway, she makes things out of that, plus some little tiny things out of clay that she then turns into jewellery. She has also started knitting some little tiny things but I don't think those will be jewellery. She made a frog and a cat and some other stuff. I don't know if she is going to sell them this time as these are her first one's. She might keep them.
She gets a lot of praise at the shows when they find out she made them all herself. I hate to say it, but if she takes advantage of sitting in her wheelchair during the show, she sells more. I know, blatant mis-representation, but hey, the wheelchair is comfortable to sit in so can she help it if it makes them feel more like buying from her. I know she didn't sit in it the last time and she hardly sold anything. Might also be because she did not make any of her best selling items. She makes a puzzle piece earing out of resin and some little clay dragons. The dragons are really, really good and all the kids that come by want one. She sells them for $5 each but they are hard to make as she makes them all free hand, meaning she does not use a mold to do it. She hasn't made any this time either because she has been knitting things for Christmas presents instead of making things for the show. Hopefully, it won't be too hot tomorrow. It is at night but the start is around 5, so it is hot at that time. If they give her a good spot, it's not so bad but some of the places are facing the setting sun and it is not pleasant to sit there waiting for the foot traffic to pick up when it gets dark.
I am throwing this paragraph in after I published this entry. I forgot to mention one of the most important things about Maeghan. She got her Certificate III in child education. I am not totally sure what is means, but she tells me she can now get a job teaching or working in a day care or a number of other things. I think it is great. I know Juanita used to have a Certificate III in something, aged care I think, and she worked her whole life, or the life before me, with that. It puts you on the bottom rung of each job but it gets you in the door. You can either go for more education, like a Certificate IV, or you can try to get promoted from within. I think Certificate IV lets you be in management or something but I am just making that up as I do not really know what it does. Certificate III is what most workers have and she now has one. We are extremely proud of her. Now if she can find a day care or something to hire her, she will be all set and I will not have to worry so much. We always knew she would do it but now she has. Way to go Maeghan. Hopefully, this paragraph fits in with the rest of the entry. I did not really re-read it to check.
I am out of work for the next few weeks. No one does anything during the holidays so they do not need me. It's been confusing lately, anyway. My HR firm is having a lot of trouble keeping track of where all their workers are. I keep getting double booked and if I mention it, I normally lose both jobs so when I can, I say I have a half day here and a half day there. This job is always on Friday but they never seem to remember that and try to book me for other places on Friday's. It doesn't help that I work for two of them and they do not seem to talk to each other, even though it is a family business and they are all related. One of them calls for one thing and the other one calls for another and I have to sort out when I can do each. It is very confusing at times. I think I have work the week between Christmas and new years but I cannot get them to confirm that so I have no idea if it has already or will fall through and I get nothing.
I got Maeghan a new Xbox for Christmas. That means we will have four in the house. Although, I think Leslie's mother sold his as we have not seen it in a while. That is a long story that I won't go into now. Leslie is one of the grandson's and he now lives with us as his mother is homeless. Too much to explain and I am already getting tired of typing. Normally, Leslie has his for his TV in the garage. William has his in his room. I have mine in the living room and now Maeghan will have hers in the dining room where the other TV is. None of these are the new ones. You cannot get the new one. They are all Xbox One S. You can't find a One X anywhere either. I could have gotten the Series S for Maeghan but she has some games on disc that she wants to play, and has never played, so I needed the DVD player. Plus the Series S is an inferior machine. It is just not spec'ed very well. The One S is old but I figure if they are not going to have any Series X machines until 2023, or that is the date I am hearing, then getting the One S with the DVD drive was better than getting one that does not have it. It only has to last until the Series X is available and then I can upgrade mine. But, I probably will keep mine and any of the others until they fall apart. The new one is just too expensive. I cannot justify getting that when there are other things I can spend a $1000 on, like the car or a new TV, or even a new clothes dryer. Not $1000 for a gaming device, although we do use ours for everything. Watching TV, DVD's, Netflix, Disney. It all goes through the Xbox. I could change it to some other device but I am happy with how it is setup now. The only thing we do not use it for is over the air TV but who watches that anymore. Sometimes, there is something on, like the Cowboys but that is very very rare, and we have to watch it on over the air TV. I did not know how bad commercials have gotten. They are just so bad and I hate watching them in the middle of whatever it is I am trying to watch. Not sure how we ever did that.
We do watch a lot of YouTube, and the number and length of the commercials we get on there is ridiculous. Far worse than regular TV. We watch it enough that I have considered paying for the premium YouTube, whatever it is called, but so far, I have enough other things to do that it has not become a problem. It is annoying when I am watching though. I watch sports highlights on there and you get a commercial every four minutes. Plus I watch some other channels, Sailing Le Vagabond for example, but the better channels don't seem to have as many commercials. Juanita watches all the DIY shows, mostly for building cabins and stuff, and there are not as many commercials on there either it seems. I don't understand how it works but I have gotten in the habit of just turning the video off and switching to another one when they get too bad.
Speaking of advertisements, I have downloaded some new games on my phone lately. I had stopped playing the ones I had before and wanted something else to play while I was on the train. These things have more ad breaks than anything. If you just get the free version, you get an ad every time the screen changes. Twenty, thirty times during one 5 minute session. And they are always the same ads. Maybe they change once a week but you get the same ad over and over again every thirty seconds or so. When did games start doing that. I only played one or two before but these new ones are ridiculous. How do people play them. Does everyone opt for the paid version. I am not sure I want to pay for any of these games and the constant ads means I will probably never find out if I like it enough to pay for it. It's just too much.
I think I have reached my quota of complaining for one email. I do have plans for the holidays. Mostly just to get better organized. I am planning on going through all the photos I have online in all the different places and finally organizing them into something that can be searched and looked at without having to scroll through a thousand photos looking for the one you want.
I am also planning on doing something with my weight and poor health. I think everything that is wrong with me can be pointed to as a weight problem but I feel so bad most of the time, I don't want to do anything about it. Maybe I can get the kids involved in going for walks with the dog and stuff. Maeghan needs it as well. Or, we can just spend more time actually doing something instead of playing the four Xbox's we have in the house. I know I have tried to solve that problem by bringing another one into the house. I think the plan is that there are so many, they will get tired of them like all other toys and start to do something else. It's a good plan and I know it will work well.
I need to organize my computers also. Get them more adapted to what it do on them and not just a random selection of bits and pieces that I have to hunt for on each computer to see if it is installed or up to date on each one. I have tried to make them all cloud based but anytime I do something new, it only gets done on what ever computer I am working on at the time and the others do not get the update until I try to do it on them. Then it takes a while to download and synchronize them and I get frustrated waiting.
Well, I have just been asked to do something so I have to go actually work on it. Fix a printer or something they have screwed up. Here's a question, if you are trying to scan a document to email and your printer is not connected to the network, is the problem that your email address is not in the printer. That is how the problem was presented to me last week. I thought connecting it to the network would be the first choice but apparently, they do not know how to connect to it that way. They were using a direct USB connection to their computer and now they want to know why that connection doesn't work anymore. (I disconnected it last week). So now I have to go down and try to make it work like they want it to work. Doesn't help that the only port they have down there is connected to the computer but I will put the computer on WiFi and the printer on the ethernet and see what else they have to complain about. Main problem is, the people who are complaining do not work on Friday's so everything I do cannot be checked by them and I get a call on Monday to tell me it is not working, even though it was all working when I left on Friday.
Did I just go off into another rant. Must be this headache I have. I was just told that the internet was back up but I never noticed it was down so I'm not worried about that.
I'm going to be going now. It's 2:00 and that is when they all come in and ask me to do things before I go, so I am expecting a crowd of people here shortly. It's been fun and I we can do this more often. If I can avoid falling out of bed and breaking my ankle again. Oh, did I not mention that. Well, it happened. Not really broken but it has hurt for a week. Oh, to be young again, and not so frail and incapacitated.
Until next time,
Later
No comments:
Post a Comment