Author: Jeff Milner

My new roommate moved in today; the one I mentioned in an earlier post. He is from Tokyo. He bought himself a USB Wireless network adaptor and without me even being here to change any of my router settings was able to get onto my Internet connection. Maybe I should evaluate my network security. Maybe some other time – it’s late… Anyway I did tell him that the wireless connection would be the best idea and its great because this way he can just use the Internet connection from his own computer in his own room. I love technology.

I like lifeguarding a lot better than surveying. The pay isn’t as good (just slightly), but the environment is way better. I especially liked my shift today because I didn’t have to do any of the cleaning responsibilities and there were enough staff there to answer any of my questions.

The pool that I’ll be working at for the majority of my shifts this month is attached to a senior citizens recreational facility. That means that there are a lot of elderly people that like to swim there. It’s great because in a days work there is more chance that you’ll have to save someone from a heart attack then yell at kids to stop being “stoopid” and end up having to call an ambulance for their spinal injury. Actually I wonder what the ratio of elderly to kid injuries is really like? Either way, being a lifeguard rocks.

I already worked this morning at the Y and now I’m off to my second job at Environics. I’d like to post more but I’m just so busy. Hopefully I’ll have enough time to stop at the bank on my way to work. In the meantime, enjoy this picture of me pretending to be Aron Ralston. (Yeah it’s in bad taste, but what parody isn’t?)

If I recall correctly, actually if Anna recalls correctly, she remembers the critics giving rave reviews to 8 Mile. Frankly, if that’s true, all I can ask is what were they thinking?

I got into the movie a few minutes after it started but I don’t think I would have missed much had I come into the movie with only a few minutes left. Nothing really happens, there is the romance that doesn’t go anywhere, the family crisis of being out of money that is only temporarily resolved when the mother wins bingo and the case of the unresolved record contract.

Nothing happens in this movie.

The climax was a “rap battle” in which contestants insult each other while rapping. What a stupid idea for a movie. The best part was in the special features (Anna loves special feature DVD’s). In the special features they go behind the scenes to the filming of the movie and Eminem does some rap battling against some of the extras. He was actually quite good – but honestly a real documentary of his life would have been tremendously more interesting.

My house is doing pretty good. Slowly but surely I’m getting everything fixed up. I still don’t have my own lawnmower, and yes the grass is getting pretty long, oh and I still have a roommate that eats a lot of my food despite my protests. He is, however, moving out at the end of the month, and so far my plan is to take in these two new roommates that I talked about earlier. One of them wants to get Tenant Insurance, but I think he’s a little over-zealous because there isn’t much point in us both paying insurance but maybe there is, I don’t know. For sure they don’t need to know about the condition of the shingles, but he did ask so that he could tell his insurance company. Anyway I need to find out exactly what I need to do about insurance because it looks like he wants something more than what I have (he doesn’t even know what I have – I’m not sure I really do either except that it’s a rip-off job).

I went to find out about refinancing my mortgage. I guess with the super low rates today re-mortgaging will pay for itself in about 8 months. Really, I suppose I should go for it. I just need to find out the exact details of how much they will charge me to buy out the mortgage and if they will even allow me to buy it out without selling the house. I talked to one lady at TD and she said I could payout a lump payment up to 15% without penalties and then paying out the rest would cost approximately 3 month’s interest – which as far as I can figure is about $1600. That’s amazing eh? Anyway paying the same amount on the mortgage with the lower rate will mean it will be paid off in 13 years.

When I went to buy my house, just as I was making one of my final offers, out of the blue some mysterious “other prospective buyers” also made an offer. Apparently from what I had heard there had been no serious offers on the house for the last 4 months that it had been listed. All of a sudden now that I was making an offer these other people were offering and what was more, they were offering more than me.

However, the owner’s real estate agent assured me that since I had offered first that they would let me have a chance to raise my offer up a couple of thousand and still get the house. The really strange thing about all this is that even with my higher offer, the other offer was still higher but they wanted to sell the house to me. My theory is that because I was acting independent of a real estate agent – I was just buying it without an agent, the owner’s didn’t have to give part of the sale price as a commission to my agent and so even though I was offering less he would get more money out of the deal.

It was a real stroke of luck that I didn’t have a real estate agent. I’m not saying that it always works out that well, but it sure did for me. Oh I almost forgot, the other people that made an offer on the house showed up wanted to look at the place one last time, I guess in case I changed my mind. They pulled up in a little red truck just as I was up on the roof with the house inspector. They told me they were the other people that had made an offer on the house. I wish I would have talked to them, but I was busy up on the roof and just never bothered to go down and chat with them. They just drove off never to be seen or heard from again. Who knows, maybe I could have resold the house to them for more… I don’t know. I guess I’m glad I didn’t though, I kind of like this place.

Anna-Maria will have to keep a close watch on me now because now I have two jobs! I just got hired on at the Y to be lifeguard there, which while not the most glamorous place to work it does give me some lifeguarding experience. I’ll be starting on the 30th of June, and the way my schedule is set-up it looks like I might just spend the rest of my summer working. I’ll try to pencil in some time to post on the blog and sleep and the essential things needed for survival, because it looks like I may have more hours than I can handle. TWO JOBS!

Do you ever wonder how the people who came up with Godzilla came up with Mothra? Do you think they were sitting around when suddenly a huge shadow of a giant moth fluttered overhead only to realize that in fact it was the shadow of a regular sized moth that just looked huge because the moth was so close to the light and then thought well hey we could still have this really huge moth to fight Godzilla, that would still be a good idea… Did Godzilla and Mothra fight or were they just friends?

I had another 3 to 10.5 shift today. Yes 10.5 not 10:30, at least not according to the work schedule. On an unrelated note to “how much working for someone else blows”, I will share the following story as it has unfolded so far. Interesting conclusion pending actual events.

It was one of my first days on the job. Anna-Maria and I were both working and one of the other workers – I’ll call him Chris – asks what is my relation to Anna. He was wondering if we were dating. Thinking that it would be inappropriate to be dating a co-worker I said we were “friends”. Well, from that point on I created a monster. Not for me personally, but poor poor Anna. This boy asks her out almost every shift. The other night it was for coffee and well, coffee again tonight. But anyway Anna has been begging me to please set the story straight so that he will stop hitting on her. Frankly I must admit <evil whisper> I do find it hilarious </evil whisper>. Maybe I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow. Maybe.

Oh and P.S. about how to properly explain you are not interested in a phone survey. All you have to do is wait for the person giving the survey to stop talking and say, “I’m sorry I’m not interested.” If you are not sorry, then “Not interested” also works nicely. Rudely slamming the phone down, giving the phone to your sister as a prank and having her hangup in disgust or saying “can you hold on” and then after leaving the person on hold for 2 to 3 minutes and then hanging up are all improper methods. Thanks.

After being such a snob in my last post about being late for work, I’m not sure I really want to tell you what I realized when I got to work. First of all I will say that they didn’t seem to care too much that I was late, especially when I explained that I wasn’t even scheduled to work but I was just coming in for the extra hours. She stuck to her guns that in fact I was scheduled for today and that I should be in at 3:00 all this week. Nothing else was said about it. Well I checked the schedule again just to make sure even though I knew I couldn’t possibly be wrong and it looks like I was scheduled to come in at 3:00 on Monday just like they said. Well where did I go wrong? It turns out that for some strange reason the first day on the working week schedule is Monday. Yes – for some odd reason the first day of the week where I work is not Sunday like in the rest of the world, no everyday when I walk in the doors of the phone survey world, Monday becomes the first day of the week and as silly as this seems, it’s really easy to confuse Sunday for Monday when Monday is my day to come in to work at 3:00. Oops.