www.whereswilly.com: the blog

Rea News first.

Jon has a new job he's been at for over a week and is already making more per month than I am.
We thought it might be fun to go look at houses with the family realtor and ended up BUYING one.
We take possession June 30th and are thrilled at the prospect!
My job is officially secure for another year or two. My manager seems to be grooming me for upward mobility so it's always fun to go to work. I love my job!
This job that Jon has is his last semester of school and a job all rolled into one DFS/Co-op. After minimum 450 hours there he'll be officially done!
Yay!

WW News now!
I've added Peter and James as administrators to this site. This means that they can email invitations to join the blog. This means we can lock out unfriendly characters - AND - once one of us admins gets a commenting system on the site that too can block IPs from posting comments need be.
The Beta site for WW looks awesome. I didn't get to help out much on the testing but I was glad that Hank would allow me in to at least tinker a bit... heh heh.

Sooo... here's to a new and improved activity level at the WW blog! Cheers!

New Pics!

Any day now I'll have sorted out my online photo collection, deleted a few and added some new ones.

How is it, you ask, that I can add new pictures without a camera?

Well, I got a new one.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'll be a photo blog YET! :-)

Hi everyone, Rea here!

OK with the renewed interest in the wwblog I've changed the template and invited a whack of WW players. If I've missed you and you'd like "in", email me!
If anyone would like to be the interior decorator and take a stab at the HTML for the template, let me know :-)

Um, ya. I'm going to work now - yay work! Yay payday!

Cheers,

Happy howlidays
So Jon was walking through Eau Claire with his Mom (who is visiting from Florida for Christmas) and the guy who runs the Egyptian place says to him "Merry Christmas!" and Jon says "Have a great day!" - so the guy cirps back at him... "When a Brown guy tells you Merry Christmas, you say Merry Christmas back!" So Jon giggled and said Merry Christmas. As he should. I do think all the PC folk worrying to extremes that calling it Christmas offends people is a little tedious. Sometimes PC goes a bit too far, sometimes not far enough - but I do think that saying Merry Christmas is 'kosher'. :-)

News: Last day of job was today. Mom-in-law got into town last night, so we got to pick her up AND see Sarah who was working in her bright "Don't run me down" yellow fleece. I had the time and tact to diss (diss?) the colour right in front of the boss's best friend - tho yellow is a great colour it was just a little too much what with the rest of their logo stuff being bright caution-yellow too... I'm so bad.
Very cool to see Sarah at last, hopefully we can find each other over the holidays to xchange prezzies.
-Dad has been healing well, the wrist is puffy and looks like a work of Dr. Frankenstein, but isn't going to be that bad we think.
-All I want right now is to sleep in. I suppose that means I have to go to bed and that it has to be night? Damn.
-The malls are crazy busy and I don't know if I want to brave them just to show Jon's mom Dee a good time. I have this aversion to being around stressed out people, so who knows if I'll have my way and get to snuggle with a nice glass of wine instead. I wonder if I have enough presents??? I suppose I should check my list twice. That being said, I think I need a list. Damn again.
-It's getting to look a lot like nap time - so here I go. Bye!

Michael Franti and Spearhead are inspiring folk.

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday. I had a comedy-of-errors dinner at Smugglers with Jon (which was good once we finally got the right food/table/bill), and got to open some presents at home. My sister Carm got me the newest Michael Franti CD (see above link)! He's a reggae-style human rights activist with some cool stuff to say, and for sure groovin' music. Mom and Dad bought me new funky specs, Jon's parents gave me my radioio.com subscription (and a US $ cheque! Whoo hoo!), and Jon gave me some cool ornaments and a Cranberry Body Shop sampler set which smells yummy. I also got some nice birthday emails from Dad, Cheryl, Roxanne, and Sarah... I love you all!

Needless to say, the dinner had some mystery gluten in it and my morning wasn't so hot. Damn gluten.

All in all it was a nice birthday. I'll have to have a real party/get-together because Sarah was stuck at work. Damn work. ;-)

I slept in again today, gee it was tough.

-Jon is putting together our Christmas present wardrobe my parents got us early (because we need it badly), so there are big white tall pieces of wood that are slowly becoming the REKKE model.
-I'm playing lazertag with Karen and Vik from Where's Willy today :-) Yay! If that's a blast then I might hang out with them, but I do have the option of stopping by the TM Christmas party if I want.It would have to be, like Sarah, going after 8:30 because we didn't buy a ticket for the dinner and we didn't work enough hours to qualify for the prizes. Holy stingy... and I hate to not sound grateful but there isn't even transportation provided so I know there will be DUI's in the party, like last year, and that's just too stupid for me to associate with. Yeah yeah, now I'm a snob, but I warned three senior staff members about the DUI's from last year and nothing was done to prevent that this year. How arrogant, liable, and thoughtless that was. Please comment and tell me good reasons why I might be overracting, since I somtimes get focused beyond the obvious. And I've lost touch with the gang that worked there with me, except for Sarah and Cheryl, and Sarah is going with DB&D who don't have anything in common with me but her, so I'd be a bit out of place. No matter, I'll amuse me self.

Hmm... I couldn't really tell ya what resolution it was, except that if you save it and view the file directly in a browser (just start by typing c: in the URL/Address bar in your browser and you'll ideally see what I mean) then you can see how it will hopefully look once online. Toast made a wicked image of his own, probably easier to read than mine even. Any suggestions Josh?

Yesterday Jon and Sarah and I took in Spooky's Haunted house in the parking lot of Maroborough Mall in NE Calgary. It was damn scary! I would say its mostly what you make of it, since we were really in the mood to be freaked out, but it was a LOT of fun. A bit cold - I'd hate to be one of the people who worked there - and also expensive at $10 a pop for 10 minutes time, but we had a great time. The point of this story in relation to WW, is that I of course paid in marked cash. I discovered that Scotch Tape glows in blacklight! The line-up was lit in a strong blacklight, so I was a little apprehensive to pay with cash since it would be obvious that these three bills were marked up (what with the highlighting to boot). Luckily, the cashier had a red lightbuld to light her counter, so I thrust my bills at her into the red light so she never noticed the blacklight glow. Success. Then I pondered getting the $15 shirt that said "I'm a Screamer!", but decided it was a bit too much for a fairly plain white T-shirt.

Go check out one of the haunted houses this month, they are a blast!

Why thank you Toast for all the kind words! I'm blushing!

I was pretty impressed with that particular bill, and even put a link to it in my profile (which I usually don't bother to do). As for the new insert, that was a brainchild I had one morning when I wanted to put way too much info in that tiny 255 character space. Then I remembered that you can save Power Point slides as jpg's, and so I set out to create one. It was a bit tricky, because the default size of the slide when saved is too long/tall in my opinion so I had to resize it manually in the program, and increase the font size (hoping to prevent pixilization (sp?)) a bit. I suggest that you save it to your computer, and load that specific file in your browser to see what it might look like once online. I also found that you have to save at max quality, and that gif's and bmp's don't show up as well.



If you need any help making one, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

:-)

Why hello again!

I just marked up about 30 bills this morning, with my simplified marking w/a red arrow stamp pointing to issue and serial. Not as colourful in the highlighting department, but I'm thinking the red arrow will make up for the lack of other colours. And, its a LOT less work.

So glad to see people posting here. I can only invite people I have email addresses of, and that's if I think of it, so please email me if you want me to send you an 'invite' to the Blog. Blog , FYI Toast, means something like Web Log only shortened... but you're right to imply that its a weird word that reminds me of how the Smurfs use the word Smurf to describe anything or any action. Smurf that, that's smurfin'.

Link away DougyB, its all the more fun and then maybe this Blog will show up on Google?

Update on Nelson rant: It seems that everyone has calmed down a bit and will be acting most responsibly next time someones' posts annoy them... :-)
I've done a better-than-deserved job of forgiving the lad of his past comments to me and others, and he's done a good job of changing his ways once everyone got communicating effectivly. No wonder I've got this reputation of being WW's Mom... that's kind of funny!


This whole thing about Nelson these days is getting really annoying. I'm not even so much worried about Nelson, because he does appear to be trying to fit in, even if his posts over-anxious and pushes the etiquette envelope. He reminds me more of the kid who tagged along with the crowd where that kid tried so hard to be accepted that he made an oddball of himself. Now, the crowd he was tagging along with could be mature and ignore the questionable comments and praise the rational. Or the crowd could show how narrow they can be by only seeing the bad, trying to get a rise, not using email for comments that they wouldn't want the world to hear if they were spoken to them instead. Treat others as you would want to be treated, even if they are having difficulty treating you that way in return. Perhaps you can't remember your own off days, your own days of not knowing etiquette, your (yes, perhaps in this case seemingly endless) days of annoying other people. Perhaps it wasn't here online, perhaps it wasn't even within the last 10 years or more, but let me tell you; none of us was always as perfect as we'd like to think we are. I think we can all get off our high horses here because negativity is contagious and now I'm getting mad at everyone, not just Nelson. And I'm obviously not the only one. Nelson may have a different sense of how the world works, and a different sense of what's deemed appropriate in 'social' settings, but no one has to be sensitive about everything and make trouble by posting mean-spirited responses on forums not intended for such purposes. Be sensible people. Think before you submit. Re-read your own emails... would you want people bringing up such topics on the forums instead of via email? I'm absolutly amazed to see some of the posts by some people who have been here long enough and seemed mature enough that they wouldn't say such things in such a public and insensitive manner. Sure, Nelson sometimes appears to be lacking in manners and maturity himself, but come on! Let's be examples, not aggrivators.

Welcome to Where's Willy's new User-Run Blog Spot.

When all the details are sorted out, there will probably be a few moderators selected by myself Rea In Calgary and other carefully selected members. For now, keep posted for daily rantings and celebrations from me about some of my bills.

Thanks for playing the game!