Overtime

This is my 15th working day in a row (not counting weekends) that I have worked an extra hour and a half. I take the bus home, justifying my laziness with my extra income. Besides, the sidewalks on my normal route home are so torn up by the subway construction on Granville (which may never be finished in my lifetime) making it largely unsafe for me to navigate them in rush hour traffic while panicky commuters charge towards the trains at 4:30. The bus comes right to the back door of my office building every 5 minutes or so, making public transit a tempting choice.

When I get home I am still quite alert and quickly pay bills, do dishes, shopping or other chores while I have the energy. Then, like tonight, I settle in to work on stained glass for an hour or two.

What I hate being is idle. Idleness allows me to think about things I shouldn't think about, stirring up negativity which crops up too often in my life these days. So I was thinking between calls this afternoon what I should be doing to keep negativity out of my life. I had already thought of many things I shouldn't do, such as dwelling on negative thoughts, etc. I decided that to absorb my time I should focus on a combination of stained glass, writing and reading. Granted these are all solitary but I feel like I should withdraw into my own independent world where I won't be waiting for or depending on friends.

End of April round up.....

Swine Flu has swept the news. Every few hours the body count is updated. Yesterday there were 20 cases in the US and now there are 40. It seems if the birds don't get us it will be the pigs. Is there such a thing as Cat Flu?

My life is in a bit in the doldrums after my two French couch surfers left on Friday after 26 days of living with me. My living room seems unnaturally tidy and usable. I took the opportunity to watch two rented movies.

I am still working an extra 1.5 hrs each day, and then doing some stained glass when I get home. It keeps my mind off my thoughts. I have finished the camellia circle and put it up in my front window, but I have noticed that two pieces have cracked and will need to be replaced. Now I am onto the less-original sailboat-in-the harbour with mountains for a backdrop. I hope to complete it by Saturday before my next couch surfer arrives. The client for both windows will pick them up the week of May 19. I might see some of my overtime pay and my tax refund by then. Pennies from Heaven.....

I skipped out on the AGM for my condo last week. I just couldn't stomach listening the the lying bastards that run and manipulate our council for three hours. They were voting on a massive proposal to spend a six digit figure to renovate our lobby and hallways, which it badly needs. It will cost each unit an average of $1,000. I haven't found out yet how the vote went.

I have finally put the guide book on Utah away and relinquished any hope of having a vacation there this year.

New projects

Before this week I hadn't earned a cent from my stained glass art so far this year. By this time last year I had already earned $730 clear, the best start to a year in years. But a week and a half ago I got a call from a client who wanted a window of a sailboat on English Bay with the North Shore mountains as a backdrop as a gift for her husband's birthday in June. I made her a 66-piece design 18" wide by 22" high which I priced at $230.

I had no sooner started the design when she sent an email asking me for a camellia bush window for Mother's Day of no specific size. I recklessly designed a 190-piece bush with 5 full bloom and 5 buds made of irridized pink glass and two shades of green leaves to fit inside a 2-ft diameter beveled circle. The design was much more intricate and costly to make than the less-original sailboat window. Of course I loved it, but it was I thought it would be much to expensive for a lesser-holiday gift. I decided I wanted to make it whether or not she wanted something so expensive. I set about making it without her approval, as I often do with patterns I design that inspire me. I set about making it a week ago Monday and I finished it last night, except for the cleaning and polishing and a small piece of U-channel border for the top edge. (The U-channel I had was 3 cm too short!)

The client was out of town most of the time. She came to see the designs Sunday afternoon when the camellia circle was 90% done. She fell in love with it and had no hesitation about paying the $600 for the piece, much to my surprise. She was less enamoured with the sailboat design. I had made a smaller 8" circle of a similar design for Eric Mourre, one of my French couch surfers, using 18 colours. I was proud of it but she decided she didn't like the colours. Her husband's boat, like its sails, is white and 8" circle was too colourful. She gave me the go-ahead to make that window too, using lighter, more translucent glass, "Like that one," she said, pointing my favourite Mexican village window which has almost no translucent glass at all.

She was more in love with the Mexican village window and wanted a quote on that. The $900 price did not discourage her as I had hoped for, since I wanted to keep it for myself. She wants me to hold it for her until she has paid for the other two. The total price would be $1730. She gave me a $500 cheque towards the price of the first two windows. So April hasn't been all bad.

Processing disappointment

My challenge is this: share with Michal my disappointment with losing my vacation in Utah without losing my temper and damaging our friendship, which I value highly. I told myself a week ago I would just pretend that he never made an offer to travel with me and everything was as it was before. But my feelings have been manifestering and putrefying into resentments and anger since then. I have also felt quite lonely and sad, not to mention betrayed. I am afraid of expressing these feelings to him out of fear of ruining any travels and laughs I might share with him in the future. But I cannot let it pass without communicating something to him because my trust in him has been damaged.

I mentioned my corundum to a friend at Faerie Coffee this morning. He suggested a formula he uses to deal with such situations. It involves four rules: the first is to stick to the facts when speaking to him ("I understood we had a firm agreement to vacation on the Apr 24-26 weekend. You knew I had booked vacation time for the Friday. You then offered out-of-town friends to visit you at home that weekend without speaking to me first, even though there is little likelihood of them being able to do so. On March 28th you promised to call me back within a few hours to confirm a replacement weekend and half a month has passed since then.")

The second rule is to share about the judgments I have made as a result of his actions. ("I have the impression that a vacation with me is very low on your priority list." "I doubt your sincerity when you say that you still really want to go to Utah with me." "I don't believe you will follow through when you give me your word.")

The third is to communicate my feelings about the situation. ("I have felt disappointed, hurt, lonely, sad and depressed, not to mention angry and feeling betrayed.")

The fourth is to reach for a solution by clarifying what he would need to do to restore my confidence in his friendship and right the situation. This part I am still working on. ("I need you to keep your commitments to me when you make them." "I need you to speak with me before you act if a situation arises that makes it preferable to you to change our plans." "I need you to buy the fucking airline tickets with your own money before I book my vacation time again.")

There. Said with such simple detachment and elegance......


"Go, and never darken my towels again!" - Groucho Marx

Diabetes Clinic

At one point in the novel I am working on, the protagonist tries to tell a missionary he has befriended that his lover and life partner is another man, but try as he may the missionary has no internal wiring that allows him to receive that message. This is set in Victorian times and the missionary's mind negates any such message with the dismissive ruling: "That's not possible."

I suppose it's human nature to "know" certain facts without examining them. After all, we can't walk around with open minds all the time or we might get something in them. When I visited the Diabetes Clinic in St Paul's Hospital this morning for my semi-annual check up I was reminded of this fact. I mentioned to the doctor that I had a painful allergic reaction to the new medicine I was prescribed in November, a reaction that left me curled up like an armadillo in pain half the night each time I took a pill, and no anti-diarrhea medicines could stop my other symptoms. That is, until my sister gave me a holistic allergy treatment that involved reprogramming my body with a small electric current on certain acupuncture points to reverse my body's magnetic reaction to it. Since that treatment 30 days ago I have taken a pill every day without the slightest side effect.

This should have been astonishing news to the medical professionals. If a simple treatment like that could allow a body to receive a medicine that might eventually save someone's life or at least prevent heart disease, blindness or amputations (the common effects of prolonged high blood sugar levels) they should want to know more. But when I told the nurse and doctor in turn I saw the same blank, non-comprehending expression that I imagined on my missionary's face. I think they only registered that I was not having a negative reaction to the medicine for unknown reason, and that's all they cared about.

I have no fear or disdain of hospitals and I appreciate that trained professionals are trying to help me maintain my health, but visits to the clinic have been less than enlightening or encouraging in the past. The dietitians are the worst, addicted as they are to their useless little food charts and guidelines that do as much harm as good. If I reduce my food intake moderately to help control my blood sugar levels they accuse me of not eating enough. They insist I must have snacks between each meal, which raises my blood sugar to very unacceptable levels. They tell me I am not eating enough carbs (only 40% instead of 55%). One visit they tell me I must not eat eggs or cheese more than a couple times per week to keep my cholesterol levels down (they are at very healthy levels now). The same visit they recommended I switch to soy milk on my cereal to have a balance of protein with the carbs. This visit they criticized me for using soy, which they now say has too many carbs, and tell me I should be eating eggs or cheese with breakfast each day.

The nurses and doctors are just as entertaining. Today the nurse went over my test results and criticized the high level of my triglycerides and said my new medicine was obviously not working to bring down my blood sugar levels. She was unhappy with my normal cholesterol levels, insisting the doctor would need to prescribe something to bring them to a much lower level. When I saw the doctor 15 minutes later, he was impressed with how far my average blood sugar levels had dropped, thought my triglycerides readings were good and felt that average levels of cholesterol were fine as long as my blood sugar levels were under control. Of course, both of them came from a place of "knowing", without doubt, that they were right.

Someone once said that if one isn't his own best doctor by age 40 he is in for a difficult ride in his later years. My diabetes has been my best teacher. It has taught me to manage my diet carefully, to listen to what it communicates to me and to respect its needs instead of caving into the gluttony and bad food choices promoted by modern advertising. I have come to see my body as a 'sacred temple', and I have always had a deep appreciation for historic ruins.

"Re-examine all that you have been told – dismiss what insults your soul." - Walt Whitman

a--a-aaa-AA-CHOOOoo

This winter has been a severe case of sexual repression. Our temperatures have been consistently below normal for months, often significantly so. Allergy season was a breeze (a cold breeze). I managed it up to the date it normally ends, March 25, without taking a single allergy pill. I attributed it to my sister's holistic food allergy treatment, which she said would have a side effect of lessening my other non-food allergies such as pollen.

Then Saturday the spring caught up to us with the first three days of warm, sunny weather and every plant in the city went into orgy mode. Today, the worst day so far, has been off-and-on horrible with uncontrollable sneezing fits, itchy eyes and, and and and...... runny noses. Three allergy pills have done nothing but make me dopier. Sis will come by with pollen samples to test and treat me on Thursday,if I don't blow my mind out by then.

Alice in Government Land, Part 2 - Deviousness

One of the great illusions when one joins the federal civil service is that the employer is benign, supportive and respectful of their employees, a model employer if you will. After 11 years of service, I have seen so many talented and motivated employees wither over the years from lack of acknowledgment and from exposure to politically-motivated, dysfunctional policy and procedures designed and implemented by invisible shadow creatures in Ottawa uninvolved and unfamiliar with the work we do.

At the moment our workload is crazy. With the economy tanking, there is a flood of newly unemployed. The Employment Insurance phone lines, previously understaffed, are now almost impossible to get through to and the wait times to get benefits grows longer each week. I think it takes about three months or more now. It has become a major political issue in Ottawa. The opposition is trying to make the "insensitive" Harper government look even worse in anticipation of another election in the coming year. In response, our department is hiring hundreds of new employees, but that takes time and takes staff off the phones for the job selection process, training and one-on-one coaching for a couple months after the training.

Pension call centre employees like myself are being begged and cajoled into taking "temporary" secondments to EI processing as a break from our phone work. I offered to do my part to help out, even though our own phones lines are quite busy too. At the very last moment the volunteers learned that "helping out for a couple months" translated into a minimum 1-year assignment. I smelled a rat and backed out immediately, siting my two days of pre-booked vacation in Utah which fell into the training period (which I canceled later anyway without telling them). There's no way I want to get stuck doing processing work for a year.

Since then I have learned that EI is trying, undoubtedly under pressure from Ottawa, to change the volunteers' temporary assignments to permanent ones without their consent. Rumour has it that this has already happened to the volunteers in Edmonton. Once they are permanent, the "volunteers" can likely be forced to work on the phones where the current employees are dropping like flies from the stress. As I have seen before, conscientious employees who offer to help management are sometimes rewarded this way. I really hope this doesn't happen to my wonderful co-workers who did volunteer. Personally, I feel I have just escaped from the train on its way to the concentration camps.

"If someone’s going to try to stab me in the back, I want to be there!" - Toronto Mayor Alan Lamport