Burritoes

Hi everyone. Sorry it's been a bit. On review, my post frequency has been trending down year-by-year (although the posts have become longer and my views keep going up), so I made it a bit of a New Year's Resolution to post more often. First half of January, this was coming along just fine, but come February and I lapsed. I just need to fit in three more posts before the end of February and I'm back up to speed (I average one post per week)

I've been posting mainly on major-ish events as well, instead of more slice-of-life observation stuff. Another blogger that I'm a fan of, Ali Brosh from Hyperbole and a Half, as she began posting less and less, justified it by saying when she writes about the little things, it's like a burrito, which is nice, but when she'd write about big important things, it's like a jet plane, which is amazing. And after she's made so many jet plane posts, she doesn't want to disappoint her fans by giving a burrito.

But personally, sometimes I don't want a jet plane. Sometimes I want a burrito. Sure a jet plane is awesome to watch and more difficult to produce, but a burrito is nourishing and relatable. Some of her best stuff were burrito posts, and I actually make an effort to alternate between jet planes and burritoes on this blog. The reason Seinfeld was the most popular show on TV during its run is because there is an appeal in the smaller things in life.

Remember that post I made about going for a walk in the woods after finishing my last ever college class with two of my fellow graduates? We got scared by some snakes and we stalked a guy into the woods because we thought he might try to kill himself. That was one of my favourite posts, and I'd call it a burrito, since nothing in it happened which had a lasting effect on my living situation.

So the excuse for not updating is because my days are divided between work and travel. And because of the nature of my work, confidentiality has to be considered in everything I do. And since traveling by bus takes such a ridiculous amount of time, I have those large lengths of time where not much happens (usually. Remember when that young guy and older woman got in an argument about priority seating, he attacked her and I jumped between the two and took the hit?)

But even if there's nothing life-changing, I should be able to come up with something to talk about.

I finally got a coffee maker. Remember how I was missing the coffee filter basket, and the only way to get a new one was to order it in? The price was reasonable but hsipping and handling would cost more than the piece itself, which struck a wrong chord with me on a moral level. And then, it would be easy enough to buy a $15 coffee maker from the secondhand store across the way, but I didn't want to buy a whole new maker when I only needed a piece of plastic. But eventually I just sucked it up and got a whole new maker.

The other day, I was going through my backpack for paysheets and found a Christmas envelope addressed to me that was still sealed. It was from someone who'd given me a present, and I guess I put the envelope in the front pocket of my backpack and forgot about it, even though I put the present under the Christmas tree. I open the envelope and there was a $100 Fairview Mall gift card! Suddenly my expression of gratitude toward him seems a little lukewarm on reflection.

I recently found out that I can get reimbursed for a loud of things during my work that I've been paying out of pocket for. A year and a half in and I just found out about something called an "expense sheet". Yeesh.

I saw some turkeys last Friday. I wasn't sure if they were domestic or not, as they were on somebody's property, but they were just out and about, not restricted by anything. House by a highway. I approached slightly to snap a few pictures, but when they noticed me I backed right out.

I don't think it's a breach of confidentiality to mention that sometimes in the work I do, I go bowling. I used to be a terrible bowler, but I'm actually pretty decent now just through my experience at work. But last time I went, I saw the best bowler I've ever seen in my life. He was in the lane next to us, and he'd come alone.

Before he started, he slid all over the floor in front of the lane, I guess judging it's smoothness, and for any knicks that might throw his concentration or shift his gate as he approached in whatever minuscule way. He'd brought his own balls of course, and every time before he'd throw, he'd wipe them with a cloth. His actual throw was interesting.

I always throw the ball to travel straight. I try to have it travel just off-centre so it hits the head pin at an angle. Almost all semi-professionals, however, do this weird crescent moon shot, where it curves out, skirts along the gutter, then comes back to hit the head pin at an angle. I don't know how they do this, it looks magic.

This guy had an even stranger throw, though. He'd throw it so it traveled straight, until it was almost at the end of the lane, and then it would jet out, hit the gutter's edge, then jet back and smash the headpin at an angle. It was seriously like he had telekinetic powers.

In his entire first game, he only got strikes. That's a perfect game. Like, why would you even continue to play after you'd perfected your technique? There would be no variety anymore.

Even though he was playing alone, he wouldn't play rapidly. After every turn, he would sit down and gaze at the alley meditatively.

His second game wasn't perfect, and it was funny because he couldn't do precision hits. He was so used to getting strikes that if he had to hit at a different angle, he could never do it.

There was a full moon yesterday, a minor eclipse, and we had a comet come closer to the earth than one has in the previous 30 years. I forgot to check for the eclipse and the comet.

Life has been pretty dynamic over here. Actually, I'll have a lot of stuff to talk about once the dust clears, but I can't really talk while things are still up in the air. You'll understand when I'm more free to talk about it on here.

Direct Support Work

Hey everyone what's up?!

So you know how I've had to branch away from my field recently in favour of industrial work?

Well, when I contacted the coordinator who linked me with the two contracts that I would have to cancel, she responded with "What can I say to change your mind?"

I told her that there were lots of things she could say to change my mind. I said that I was refusing evening and weekend work so that I could maintain my original three contracts with the agency, and I said I wasn't accepting ongoing work because I had to slot away the "Train the Trainer" training in late February. I said that I would rather survive within my field than flourish outside of it, that my loyalty was 100% with the company, but that to continue working with them, I needed to survive, and that I wasn't surviving.

So they offered me an additional 20 hours and an increase in pay.

I didn't know I was valuable enough to play hard ball.

So I'm giving it another go as a full-time Direct Support Worker.

Court

So we got our gas heater working again. I got the gas heater guy to drop by again, and a nightmare scenario occurred. After several days of the gas heater not working, this guy stops by and we step into the living room. On entry, I just think "Whoo, this room is toasty".

The guy walks up to the heater and it is radiating heat for the first time since he left. He's like "It's working". I'm like "Seriously man, it was working after you fixed it, but the next morning it wasn't, and it hasn't until you just showed up just now". He takes me seriously and takes it apart. He says the controller is bad, which was a knob on the top of the heater. He installs a thermostat which shows the temperature of the heat omitted and has buttons to increase or decrease heat output. Much better than the knob that you would have to crank to change the heat to a mysterious universal temperature, which would turn off randomly.

So our main heat source is better than it ever was before. Gas heater guy also said he would propose changing the electric heaters to gas, since it's more cost efficient.

Unfortunately, a hand rail popped out of place recently and the lights in the kitchen stopped working and it's not the bulbs.

Guess where I was today? If you guessed "In court", congratulations!

My landlord invited me to court awhile back. He claimed I had some money due and I disagreed. Since then we came to an agreement and he said it would be a waste of both our our time and that he'd cancel the meeting, but I checked a few days ago and the hearing was active. I messaged him and he was like "Oops, see you on Thursday".

So I felt I had to show up to the hearing, even though I knew I was on the up-and-up, because if I didn't show, I was worried he could be like "Yo, this guy's a jerk" and get me kicked out because I wasn't around to give a sound counter-argument.

So he has a lawyer in in and represent for him. I've done a lot or preparation. I've got bank statements for the entire duration of my living in the unit with printout images of every paid rent cheque. I've got copies of confirmation of details on my gas and hydro ownership. I've got my notice of rent increase and everything to do with the trial.

I'm confident, but I choose to take free legal advice when they offer, and when they ask, I choose to take up their offer of having a mediator, doing things in front of a judge and crowd.

During the cool-off period, I approach the lawyer representing my landlord. He does some math and says I owe $81.

I'm like, "That's not much" and he's like "I know".

Who goes to court and tries to evict someone on $81?

So he reads me the details and I'm like "That's incorrect. I moved in two months after that and my rent was a different amount. It changed just last month".

So the charges against me went from $81, to $44, to $25, to nothing.

The lawyer is flipping. "F*** my life. He is trying to evict on pennies. I've got better things to do than charge on $50 F***ing dollars. I don't give a sh**, I really don't give a sh**"

So in the end I didn't owe anything. Sucks because I had a full work day I had to cancel, which would have earned more than $81, so it's like he prevented me from having that money regardless.

Heaters

So three of the six heaters in my unit aren't working. I mentioned in my previous post that the heater in my room wasn't working, but it turns out the heater in my roommates room isn't working, and the main heater in the living room is also not working. The currently operational heaters are the bathroom heater, the front hallway heater, and a secondary heater in the living room.

We had someone drop in, but when he saw my roommate's heater, he said it was electric, and he only does gas heaters. I showed him the main living room heater, which apparently is gas, and he went to work. He managed to make it start up, and after he left, I noticed that the switch on our control panel had one turned off. So I flipped the switch, and me and my roommates heaters started working again.

All six heaters were working. What a wonderful world.

But then I noticed that the control panel switch for me and my roommate's heaters switched off. Tried again and it did so again. The problem wasn't the heaters, it was the control switch. So I put a nail in the wall next to the control panel, and I wrapped a rubber band around it and the switch to force the switch in place (you may remember I used a similar technique to make my cell phone charge when it was having charge port troubles).

Unfortunately, even though the switch remained in place, the heaters would stop working after about fifteen minutes. To get them started again, you had to flip the switch off, then on again. Now obviously, it's pretty well impossible to do that when you're asleep.

Overnight, the gas heater stopped working again. So we were back to our original dilemma.

I decided to buy an electric heater for my room. I don't know anything about the heater scene, I see that prices range from about $30 to $100 and are indicated as to what size room they are most suited for. I got the $70 Mainstay Infrared Tower for medium-large rooms. Turned it on and it created this abysmal groaning sound. I can handle humming, buzzing, clicking, gurgling, and whirring, but this is a terrible grinding noise. So awful, I wonder which is worse, the cold or the noise. When applying for temp work, I was asked to indicate which environments were preferable compared to others. I answered that a cold environment was preferable to a noisy one.

I don't know if this is standard, but I know none of my other heaters groaned up this racket. So I get another one, same day. The Sunbeam 17 Inch Ceramic Tower. This baby purrs like a kitten, it has six settings instead of two, and it has an option to use a built-in thermometer to turn on and off to maintain your desired temperature. It's also more compact, and claims to be 10% more efficient with electricity usage than regular electric heaters. So if any of my readers are looking into getting a heater, Sunbeam smashes Mainstay in this respect.

Let me tell you about the work I've done over the past week.

I've acted as a warehouse worker, helping load stuff onto trucks because the warehouse we were in was going to be rented to someone else in a few days. After we got everything out of there, I was tasked by the same company to organize things and disassemble stuff so that they may be more easily transported out of a new warehouse, which now belonged to them but was full of the previous owners things.

I'm loving the Kitchener industrial scene so far. I think I already mentioned that my previous gig at the lubricant packaging factory was manned by like, two guys and went at an extremely relaxed pace. This gig was also two people, and we were only moving things when the truck appeared, and there was only one truck, so when he was delivering, we were left to our own devices.

I mean, this job has me lugging heavy objects on the regular, but realtalk, I would rather have a job that required me to be strong than required me to be fast.

Some of the guys from the warehouse I just unpacked were telling stories of what their work was like before relocating. They were talking about how they had no work, so they hooked up a TV, built a bed, and watched nine seasons of Supernatural over time.

They said they would send emails to their superiors saying "We're watching TV and taking naps" and the response was that they needed them to be available in case they needed something.

They are next to a high-end grocery and were talking about how they would go to their stirfry station every lunch. They pay very competitively. They pay me more than any other temp job has offered.

It sucks because this warehouse was in my neighbourhood. If I had stepped onto the scene a bit earlier, it could be me watching TV on my work bed, with my steel-toed shoes, eating stir-fry and making bank all the same.

Christmas Flood

So I managed to go home for Christmas. Since I work with individuals, it's not easy to take a vacation, as I have to cancel on seven people instead of one. However, all my Direct Support Contracts canceled on me, and the assignment from my temp agency started a week later, so I wound up with extra time.

I show up in Guelph Thursday evening. Wake up Friday morning, get up to go to the bathroom and step into standing water, which is covering the kitchen floor. It doesn't take long before me, my mother and brother are filling buckets of water and tossing them out. But the water is flowing in almost as fast as we're getting rid of it.

We contact our Landlord, and he calls a plumber and another guy. The three of them show up, there's a theory that it's a burst pipe because of all the freezing and thawing that's been happening due to fluctuating temperatures, but the plumber rules it out, as his evaluation concludes the plumbing in the house is fine.

Next theory is that it's a crack in the foundation of the house, and the water coming in is melt, although this would require a pretty large and pretty recent crack. They shovel away all the snow and ice from around the house and put up the metal plates against the roof to funnel away falling water. Doesn't slow the river any.

We find where the water's getting in. It's coming in through a wall on one side of the kitchen. It looks like the interior of the house is sweating. The landlord leaves his wet vac for us and his push broom and says he'll be back the next day. Gotta give him credit, the next day is Christmas Eve.

Since there is a drain in the laundry room, so long as the water was kept somewhat shallow, we were able to use the broom to sweep water into the drain as it pooled into the centre of the kitchen. We put up wads of towel to stop it from being swept into my brother's room during this process. Regardless, water is beginning to seep through the foundation inside both my mother and my brother's rooms. The only fully dry room is the living room.

Landlord gives us a $100 prepaid Visa and an Italian Christmas cake. He's really apologetic and I get why, but he's hustling and nobody gets what's happening so I really can't cast blame.

We cut the water in the house and nothing happens. We get a representative of the city to cut off the city water and that also doesn't help.

So me, my mother, and my brother exchanged stations, making sure the river was manned consistently, bailing water out of the apartment for a solid five days.

Know what it was? There's an abandoned house next door and uphill from us. A pipe burst, no one was there to report it, and before anyone thought to check, it was waist-high in water. Water from that house flowed underground and seeped into our apartment. Explains how our plumbing and foundation were unchanged, and why cutting the water in our house didn't work.

So we finally get that under control. Day that I'm about to return to Kitchener, I get a call from my roommate. He's says "Our unit is flooded."

I don't think my good luck charm is working.

So I get back, and yeah, flowing water, and standing water about as bad as the Guelph situation. It doesn't persist as long, though. It's coming from beneath the sink, so I turn the knob beneath the sink and that cuts the water. Our landlord gets a plumber night-of, he does some work and all is good. But it is the story of how I came from one flood to another, and how I was up until 3 AM the night I got back, vacuuming up water and mopping when I had work the following morning.

Before this Christmas, I'd never used a wet vac. Now I feel like an old hand at it.

Just had New Years. This isn't just the beginning of a new year for me, it's also my first year anniversary living in this unit. I remember last New Year, me and my roommates didn't realize that our heat was working (It was, we just didn't turn it on) so we spent a night without heat. This year, I found out the heater in my room is broken. So I guess like, not having heat in the New Year is like a tradition now.

Last year's New Year Resolutions were to get my G2, progress my romantic life in some way, and to find full-time employment in my field. I didn't get my G2. I did some Driver's Training, but I did half of the sessions on one end of the Summer Program, then found I had no time during the summer because I had two jobs and was working seven days a week, and then I did the other half of the sessions on the other side of Summer Program, which was mostly refresher. Wound up not touching some stuff and didn't wind up taking the test.

Closest I came to progressing my romantic life, I landed a date but she wound up standing me up. Wouldn't respond to any of my messages after that.

And as for employment, I had a few good job leads but nothing came of them. I managed to grow my Direct Support Contracts from three to seven, but ultimately found I couldn't survive on Direct Support alone and went back to being a factory temp, eliminating all my new contracts except the three I started with.

I did score that Safe Management Instructor gig, which I'll be training for late February. Unfortunately, I can't take on ongoing industrial contracts until I finish this training.

So 2016 was a big ol' washup and I'm restating my resolutions this year.

Today I was supposed to have a week-long assignment starting 7 AM, but when I showed up, they were like "The guy you're supposed to report to isn't here until 7:30, please wait in the lunchroom" So I waited until 7:30 and they were like "He won't be here until 8:00, please wait in the lunchroom." At 8:00 the guy I reported to showed up, and he was like "Turns out the guys in the warehouse you were supposed to be in are on vacation, please come back tomorrow".

Bah.

Back to Work

Hey everyone, want to give a shot at where I've been this past Monday, Friday, and Thursday?

If you guessed "at a warehouse that distributes large containers of lubricant" congratulations! That is where I have been.

I've recently reconciled myself to the reality that I cannot sustain my way of living based purely on Direct Support Work. Therefor, I have hit up the temp agencies for the first time in two years.

Even if it's a different direction from what I've been doing, I don't want to give this recent gig a bad review.

When I came in, the office lady gave me a tour, told me the history of the company, which impressed me because she put forth a bit of extra effort to familiarize me with the place even though it wasn't task related. Tiny crew. I swear I worked with only two other people. There's one guy I saw around who was doing his own thing. Then there's a supervisor and two people in the office.

 Got to learn how to use a blowtorch. That's something that seemed really intimidating, but turns out, it's about as scary as lighting a candle. I also learned how to grind characters into metal plates. Again, seemed intimidating, but it's about as scary as writing with a pen that vibrates.

Job I had, I was vacuuming out containers (cubets), wiping them down, labeling them, putting them in cages, putting plugs into holes on the cages, and wrapping them in plastic wrap.

When describing my job to my neighbour, she noted that all I was talking about was lube, plugging holes, and vibrating pens.

But even though this was one of the best manufacturing positions I've ever been a part of, I still wanted to whine and moan.

Before resorting to temp work, I decided to try applying for any position on charityvillage.com, which is basically the Job Bank for social workers. Unfortunately, every single position required a full driver's license. After this, I tried applying at every group home, which is known to be the basic entry-level position to the developmental services, even though my old crowd refers to them as belonging to the "Old Story". I got three callbacks, but each of them rejected me based on the driver's license thing.

So now the tenuous plan is to get ongoing industrial work, hold onto at least three of my current Direct Support contracts, apply for University, and if successful, take another three year vacation doing post secondary education, pretending like I won't have to go back to factories.

Not going to lie, where I'm going right now is exactly everything I've fought to avoid. I have to give up all my daytime contracts in favour of industrial work. And I don't even know if I'm going to get ongoing work yet. So I'm gambling on my nightmare coming true, so I can continue my existence in this fashion.

And it also sucks because it's Christmas, and everyone's on vacation and wants you to be celebrating when you want to be focusing on survival and employment. And all my contracts are canceling during my time of need, because it's the holidays. So no income.

I'd say this was the worst Christmas ever, but my friend Tyler died by suicide near Christmas back in highschool, so I think that still takes it.

I got a good luck amulet recently, though. I was supporting someone last Sunday, we were waiting for the bus, some lady asks if I've got an extra bus ticket. I tell her I have a bus pass and don't use tickets, but I give her change for the bus. She tells me I really saved her and the only way she can think to repay me is by giving me the heart-shaped luck amulet that has always done her well. Found it a little odd that she would give something with an implied personal value to some random at a bus station that gave her change, so I ask her if she's got a lot of crystals. She assures me she does, then she says she wants to buy me a coffee if she sees me around.

Yo, give me odds on whether or not that chick was hitting on me. Regardless, I need the luck, so I'm putting the amulet to use, keeping it on my person.

Christmas Season

Ugggggh... I'm not too into the Christmas season this year. Having spent three months without a roommate, and therefore paying double rent in the meanwhile, I'm in a financial situation where I have to be careful how I step forward. For the past few years, I've told people to not expect anything from me, and even though I meant it when I said it, I wound up spending heavily anyway. This would kind of even out, since honestly, most Christmases I wind up receiving more than I give. This year feels a bit harder than the previous ones, though.

I've joked about how I was going to go back to my roots... Like when you're a kid, and all the adults give you whatever expensive toys you want, and you give some kind of craft in return, because it's the thought that counts. Everyone's getting paper mache from me this year!

I've joked about this enough that two of my impoverished friends actually took up this line of thinking. They're giving away drawings and paintings in lieu of nothing. So I think I might actually take up this tact, would be better than showing up empty-handed. Just need some creative avenue that might be a bit interesting. Not actually paper mache.

When I joked about this at home, my mother told me she wished I'd learned how to whittle, just because it would "suit me". I thought about how I came home with those wood carvings from Mali, how they were seen as acceptable gifts, and how the Malian craftsmen boasted at how fast they could make their sculptures. If I'd learned wood carving, that would be unlimited cheap custom-made gifts! Not going to learn that skill before Christmas, though.

We've got winter in Kitchener! Usually when I'm down in the dumps, I'll say something about how the weather represents my state of mind. So here, I might say the weather reflects the "frozen aspect of my heart" but I gotta tell you, this weather is lifting my spirits! Last year, we didn't even really seem to get a winter. It just feels right, as a Canadian, to get some snow. It might be burdensome, but it's right.

The world looks beautiful covered in billowy white snow dunes. My winter fashion is on point, too. Today I cracked out my winter coat, which was a gift from my brother two birthdays back. When I paid a complement to someone's jacket, he noted that I never pay attention to clothes, and so he found it in him to get a replica. With my coat and it's fake fur lined hood, beard, flannel, toque, and blue jeans, I looked like a creature in my element today.

Choked on a snowflake! Really enjoyed the weather today, let's hope it stays around for a bit!

Last Thursday, I got to run the WALES Group. I've done this once before. Staff were required to go to a meeting, and so they needed someone to cover. I thought I might be doing this all on my own, but they pulled in the current placement student as well as a good friend of mine, someone who did her second year placement when I was doing my first, and who shared last year of Summer Program with me. When I said I thought I would be alone running the organization, she was like "Can you imagine?" I was like, "Yeah, I was".

Day went fine. We set the place up with Christmas decorations.

My neighbour's daughter had a bake sale, and me and my roommate took a few orders. We got ours in today. I'd ordered some cronuts (croissant doughnut hybrid) and some bacon-wrapped jalapeno banditoes (jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese, wrapped in bacon) while my roommate got the Portuguese custard tarts and loaded potato soup. I think my roommate won out on wise choice selection. The cronuts were good, but they were in all honesty not much more than glazed croissants, and the Banditoes were delicious but it would have been easy enough to get some peppers, cream cheese and bacon and make my own for cheaper. The tarts he got were good (we shared everything out, so it's not like I missed out on food, just salty I didn't score the best deals). The real prize was the soup. I didn't get soup because I thought it would "Spill". But he got the dry ingredients wrapped in a layered format with instructions. Very cool. If this sale comes though again, I'll be getting some soup.

Did you know they rent video games at the library? I ran into someone at the library recently and when I asked him what he was doing, he was like "You know me Gryphon, loaded up on movies and video games". I knew that the age of book-only libraries was finished, and they were now used primarily for their resources. My local library has an Internet service, printing, photocopying, scanning, 3D Printing, virtual reality simulator, cafe, audio book, and movie selection but video games seemed to branch a bit further from the spirit of everything than I was prepared for. But yeah. they have a video game selection. And it's not like, educational video games either. It's just a random assortment of slightly older in-demand video games.