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I read the newspapers yesterday a bit. I read about the rule of law and the legal realists and the critical legal studies movement in a school book. I read a bit more about domestic crime victims. I have been studying the internet generally and also other technologies by both listening to business podcasts and also reading some middle 1990's books. I read the beginning of a book on network security. I stopped doing so much course picking as of yesterday. I passed around my CV to some young people who are still studying either in university or as apprentices. Neither of these two people thought they could help much but I encouraged them. I argued that youth should not be discounted. I need to sleep now I am tired.
I helped with the newspapers this morning. I was also volunteering on call but it was quiet. I am going to sleep now at 9:00 AM and will wake up at 3:00 PM. I am volunteering tonight but there is no newspaper delivery tomorrow.
My friends came over last night. We talked and read books a little. I fed C and J some salad my wife and I had made. We talked about things going on in our lives over the holidays. They all left at about 10:30 PM. I then cut my wife's toe nails after she used her new Dr. Scholls footbath for ten minutes.
I read about 60 pages of a US defence book exploring the Internet. It is interesting and I know most of this stuff already. Perhaps if I keep learning this internet stuff again and again I can teach it comfortably. It is early morning only a quarter hour past midnight but I don't really need to sleep until about 4 or 6 am at the latest. I am a bit tired but am too excited to sleep yet.
I tried out my jig saw. I need to use this tool for the right job. What I really need to make my PA shelf for the rack case is a circular saw. A sister union member offered to loan me one. Anyways I used the new safety goggles, clamped the wood I was cutting, locked up the cat so she wouldn't get hurt, and generally did a safe job. I only did it for less than a minute because it was getting late and it was noisey.
I have been updating my live journal just now a bit. I think I will link my live journal with my blogspot blogs now.
I did about two hours of job searching for government jobs. I found nothing solid but there are possibilities in the new year. Some of my union comrades are in Korea right now. Others are struggling with school work and others are in England.
I was scheduled at the last minute yesterday to get my teeth cleaned today which I did. I slept at 8:00 PM last night and woke up at 9:30 today so almost 14 hours sleep. But I feel good today. I did not help with the newspapers this morning and had said I would. Saturday may be the last day I help or I may help on Friday morning as well. I got to my dentist at 10:30 and then after a brief cleaning paid for by the government I took a bus to Canadian Tire and bought a jigsaw and extension cord for working outdoors. The extension cord is medium duty but should be fine for my uses. I have not yet read all the instructions for the saw but should also buy some new safety goggles before I use it. I have face dust masks already. In fact I may go out again today to buy the safety goggles. I may also make a trip to the Future shop for some more electronics junk. Today was a pay day so some bills got paid and some shopping was done.
In my self help group presidency I emailed the staff and other board members saying I needed to steer clear of any conflicts of interest so will not be applying to the new jobs we are creating in our peer to peer recovery program. I can now talk more about this progam here, because more of it is public information now. We have been granted some funds to partner with the local psychiatric hospital to let consumer/survivors, such as our members, coach consumer/survivors who are in hospital. They will coach them specifically on wellness plans to aid in their recovery. I have done some reading and studying of the psychology and psychiatry research done by the hospital staff. This research they have done is being used to construct this program. The wellness plans I believe may be copyrighted and I will post more of the research sources later this winter. It is a good thing for us as a self help group and our first major funding out side of the government.
Today was good too because my dad actually emailed me about my school plans and is discussing this with me openly. I also did a fair amount of computer tasks over night and listened to some Business Week stories on my iPod while doing the paper route. I also lost my cell phone yesterday and had it returned by an honest person today. I gave her a reward of a CD of local musicians. I also got some cat food and returned some company property to work.
I also read a fair amount of Monday's front section of the newspaper. There was a cute story about voting on Christmas day. We too voted on Christmas day for the novelty of it. I won't say who we voted for but if you know us well you know how we vote. I will say that my wife and I agree on many things in politics but we vote for slightly different parties every time we vote. We always vote together though and we both walked to the near by election office to vote on Christmas day in the very advance polls. The election is not until the 23rd of January.
I did almost no studies today. I did write emails to professors. I also have been searching for possible open courses. I am not sure my chances are that good in statistics for graduate school. So I will probably study more legal studies this winter. I need to take at least one course so I can work as a TA. Many people will not see the logic of this given I have already graduated. There is also a secondary reason to study undergraduate fourth year courses after graduation. I can use these fourth year courses to prepare for graduate school. I am trying at the moment to arrange to study a directed study course with one of our more famous police scholars. I will learn more about radical criminology if we can study together this winter. This could be pretty exciting study and something to look forward to starting next week.
I have managed to help deliver the newspapers for the last three days. It is important to help the older neighbour do this, this week, as this is his last week at this job. He will also pay me a little extra and we need a little extra right now. I will help him tomorrow and then again Saturday, and then perhaps never do this job again. I will have to now pay for my own newspaper. The fringe benefit of this helping my neighbour was a free newspaper everyday. This job also helped me work in the evening or early morning hours, so it turned a bad part of schizophrenia into an asset in the working world. That is schizophrenia makes me stay up late but this worked in this job and in my other job I have for five years where I was often assigned night shift work. The newspaper job got me back into working and calling someone a boss.
I also got a call from my other job but could not take the work. At least they are still calling me. I was worried they might have let me go. I just lack seniority with this job so don't get much work.
At my teaching work, the application is open for winter term. I am taking my time before I fill out the application. I am still not decided on my own winter term study schedule. I also want to research the courses I am able to teach a bit more before I offer to teach them. I have until the 4th to apply. I will fill it out tomorrow or Friday.
In my volunteer work I have succesfully completed a more senior task this past weekend. I will do some more volunteering for the next two weekends and then not volunteer for a few weeks with this one volunteer gig.
I missed my vitamins for a couple of days but am going out to buy some more now. I missed them because the holidays meant the drug store was closed. Also I did not figure out how to pay for them until today.
I need to buy our cigarettes at a store downtown that does not open until 10:30 AM so I need to stay up late into the morning. I am up from about 1:00 PM yesterday. I am frazzeled and hungry. I spent about an hour backing up and configuring my Palm w. I also tried some iPod software out. I tried out Pod2GO. It is shareware that could cost 15$ US in about two weeks if I continue to use it. I helped with the newspaper delivery, studied some legal studies concerning the Charter, equality and women. I also did apply for some decent full time jobs on line. I should really learn to rewrite my resume more for these on-line job applications. One resume for each job; the CV or resume being written specifically for each employer.
I am keen to job search in this hot economy. I have started this morning to use the school's graduating student job search web site. I have also just listened to an interview from the Wall Street Journal of an IBM diversity manager. I am keen to be employed where my disAbility is not kept secret.
My wife was asking me about traveling across the USA and Canada. I told her this would be dangerous and that we can not afford it. Instead we played some guitar together. I then did a little pen and paper journaling. I need to budget for some music equipment supplies. I then cleaned up the couch in my office and organised my shelves in the office a bit. We are ordering pizza tonight.
We ate our second holiday dinner this time with my wife's family. We exchanged presents and talked after supper.
We celebrated Christmas and opened our presents to each other. We had a quiet evening. We called distant family on the phone.
I am getting better at cooking turkey. The turkey was mostly defrosted. I washed it with soap and water. Before taking it out of the fridge I cooked two boxes of stuffing. I then stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven. My wife just cut up the potatoes. We got a new small knife which she cut her finger on. We did first aid with me preparing the bandages and alcohol swabs for her to apply. The turkey will be ready in 4 hours with a 325 C cooking temperature oven and a 6 KG bird.
I read the newspaper and also a book or two. I intend to do a lot of reading and calculating over the holidays. Finally I have a holiday period with very little work. I did a little of the web mastering I need to do. I read about the crusades in the book Power and Greed. I also read the local news about our new mental health hospital being built. I read the crime news. I will read for a few more hours but for the next hour I will do some organising my schedule.
I have mailed presents to children that should arrive today or yesterday. My wife has some presents under the tree. Oh and we have a tree now. I was hoping to get a jig saw but that my wife would give me but we can not afford it so we have some jig saw blades in anticipation of a jig saw when we have some money. I got my wife a foot bath for her feet. I also got us each about three CD's of music. I am defrosting the turkey and will cook it later today after sleeping.
My wife's father's family is having us over for christmas dinner. We have only ever spent Christmas with my wife's family. We do though only spend our visits with our daughter with my family. My mother mailed us some cakes and cookies yesterday. My father is now happily married to his third wife. Our grandparents have all passed away. For a few years these elders were great grandparents on my side of the family. Yes, family is an interesting part of life.
I managed to work the two shifts 24 hours apart without sleeping. I slept at 6 PM Wednesday and woke up at 8:30 AM today. I was a little groggy today. But I got a lot of Christmas things done on Wednesday morning. I worked today too and that was my last shift. So I have done a new job at the university for the past two weeks. The university will close tomorrow and reopen in the new year. I have no work scheduled at my various jobs. I do have some web mastering to do but have already been paid for that. So money is tight until the new year or more work.
I decided to stay up for a 31 hour day today. I am presently at 21 hours thus have ten more hours to go. The problem was two fold. One basic problem is today is a pay day and thus a bad day for me given my over spending. Two with working 11 days in a row in the afternoons except for 1 day off and two mornings working I am finding little time to do Christmas tasks to prepare for the celebrations. Also both mornings I worked I also had volunteer duties in the rest of those days. Thus today I am using these extra hours not to work but to do household duties. Thus my new focus is less on working and more on keeping myself busy on the home front. But I do have to work four hours later today before I can sleep. Thus I am worried that today's work performace will be bad. But then I have done very well with this job for 8 days now one bad day should be ok. I will be so tired and wired at work this afternoon.
I left at about 6:55 and got home at about 7:30 with a 6 KG turkey, peas, beats, and stuffing mix. I did plan on a smaller bird this time both for a better defrost, and also because we had too many left overs last time at Thanksgiving in October. I used my new bigger roller pack on my back to carry the groceries. Both bus drivers there and back to the 24 hour grocery store were friendly. So another Christmas time/event is moving along. One more task done with a few more this morning still to do. The bird will defrost for about 50 hours now when it should defrost about 76 hours. I tired to improve and plan this better than Thanksgiving but it didn't work perfectly, but then hey, I am not perfect.
I had been thinking of buying all this music equipment, school courses, etc.. but instead I will just pay bills and try to allow us to survive for the next five weeks. We have really no extra money at the moment.
When my wife wakes up we are both going to Canadian Tire to buy presents. I will wake her up at 9:30 and try to do this shopping and get it done by 11:30. The other task is mailing presents which I will do in about half an hour before the shopping.
I started to read about some globilization theories as they relate to urban development or city/local politics. I though about our local politician and his getting a big box store put in our neighbourhood. This relates to Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Dalton McGinty and Gordon Cambell, all politicians who are reinventing government as entrepenurial politicians. Our union leader Sid Ryan has called upon us to appose these trends and political buck makers. The studies continue.
R came over for coffee and brought me two small cans of coffee. One of these cans is expresso. We talked about work support and "phone a friend" needs. We also discussed computer games. We loooked at MP3 player at futureshop for him. We found a Sony model on sale that will work with Win98 which is what he is running.
There is a three course certifcate in risk management at our school's school of business. I am inquiring with the school about studying this certtifcate. I might start one course out of the three this winter.
We wrapped a few children's presents. They are ready to go in the mail. I am just heading off to an exam to work as a proctor. My wife is seeing her ACT team today and her best friend is over.
I worked again today at exams. We had our info meeting on our peer to peer recovery support program in the early afternoon. We also had our board meeting and I took minutes. I came home and then went out late night grocery shopping. Now I am going to sleep with a full belly and another productive day behind me and many more ahead.
I did get the wrapping paper now. I also got a foil baking pan for the turkey. I also got a little food for this week so we can have dinners. So if you are following me and my life stuff, (and that hopefully is not the major reason people read here), this is tonight's personal news about shopping.
We still need a turkey and if we need 80 hours defrost I should start defrosting the turkey at midnight tonight. But I don't have the turkey yet. 8 AM Friday to about 12:00 noon is our "in the oven" window of time. So Estimated Time until cooking begins about 80-84 hours.
Right now I am cooking some late night tofu hotdogs. Then I am going to sleep and working tomorrow again for four hours in the afternoon, so I can sleep in tomorrow.
I am up from 10:00 PM last night. I have to work at an exam this morning then I go to our self help group for an info session at 13:30. Then after this I have another brief meeting near by that I will walk too. Then I come back to the self help group for 17:00 PM for our monthly board meeting then I can come home. Tomorrow I am not working until 13:00 or so in the afternoon. I hope to do some mailing of presents and shopping for a Christmas tree still. We also need to still buy wrapping paper or find our stored wrapping paper. I also need to pick up some fruit cakes, and get some printing of a Christmas present done at a printshop. I also need to buy a turkey perhaps tonight and also more groceries for the Christmas weekend.
I finally cleaned up the cables around my office PC and also the living room around the two eMacs. I had not gotten to this for months in the case of the office PC. Cables are real hazards when messing things up.
I got a little lost playing Sims 2 at about 4 am. I got through a few goals and had simulated sex. I used the simulated washroom and ate simulated food powering my simulated character. My simulated car is repaired too. At this point I saved the game and was tired and a little weary.
I started to study, partly out of guilt, but also because I have so much to read. I took breaks by reading the newspaper. I read tigers will soon be extinct in India and that was probably the most important piece of news. Also our supreme court has narrowed the definition of a violent crime when the offender is a youth. I also read a little politics and other crime news and a bit of a piece about happiness and consuming to sustain happiness v. consumption for material ends.
Speaking of crime I read about the drug abuse crime connection in a study by British criminologists. I also read more about the US service economy in a book that pits the service economy i.e McWorld v. the ethnic and powerful identity economy, i.e. Jihad. This over simplifies to be a comfortable book for Americans to read and a book that demonises ethnicity by tieing being ethnic to terrorism. Like a little pigeon hole game I wonder about how to write with catagories and simple structure and suppose I could not do much better.
I also read a few chapters of a book that looks at classical sociological theories of suicide and how these feature in relation to the economy and then constructs a mathematical model for the relationships between suicide trends and various economic variables. Modern theories of suicide are also used for models. I only sent one email the whole time I was reading. I emailed some thoughts on the criminology statistics, the suicide v. economy models and a chapter on statistical literacy in a book on damn lies and statistics that I read. The person I emailed is a busy professor of statistics who I am hoping will supervise my M.Sc. studies. She and another professor taught the data mining course I took last winter and I will try to take another course this winter from her.
I did read an article from our grant proposal literature reference list. I got worried that because I have no formal psychological background education I needed to look up some terms in the article so looked up dispositional approaches to measure for making scales. In this case the scale is a hope scale. I search google and visited aboiut nine academic links and documented my search. So I learned another skill that of documenting my internet search activity. In the end I learned that dispositional means of the self. That is I hope I rate my level of hope for my "self". The scale measures hope that an individual's self has for goals. I found references to dispositional measures of satisfaction with work, avoidance/ approach ( this was out of context and a failure of the search engine to contextualise my search terms or my failure in use of search terms), and also the self and being able to think about symbols. So dispositional could be like a trait or it could be like thinking. All in all an interesting little study of psychology was done by me for tomorrow's meeting.
The newspaper carrier is moving so I won't be helping deliver the newspapers any more. There will be a new carrier and I will have to subscribe now. It is early Sunday morning and the carrier needed my help the last three days but I could not help as my exam proctoring required me to be awake in the day time so I could not stay up late at night. This morning I am up from 8:30 AM Saturday. I will stay up until about noon today, then sleep until midnight or earlier in the morning Monday and its back to proctoring duties for Monday morning.
Monday, early afternoon we have an info session for our new peer to peer program. Then we have our board meeting at 5 PM. I am just this morning going to study some research that helped support our grant application. I have just been studying the American economy and also playing a new computer game I bought last night: Sims 2, on my handheld PSP. I also was chatting off and on at yahoo and gave out this blog address to a few chatters with schizophrenia who happened to be in the chat room.
So this morning I will now study having relaxed a bit. I will then make some study blog posts and then sleep having had a very productive day.
I am mostly buying presents for children and bought some books for kids yesterday. I did also buy something for R who will also buy something for me. Since I manage our money I picked out something for my wife to buy for me and I need to buy something for her next week. I will be buying her a TV corner table for our bedroom where she watches TV and then also a cabinet to hold all her DVD's, Video's, and CD's. This furniture will be from Ikea. I may suggest that she also buy her self something and that I buy myself self something. All the smaller things like chocolates and food items we need to buy for neighbours and staff will wait till this coming Wednesday. I might buy five fruit cakes for my staff at the union and the self help group. I will also buy the Ikea furniture on Wednesday. I might buy our Christmas tree today after work. Also there is something at the post office I need to pick up today sometime. Perhaps I will go now before I have to leave for the exam this afternoon.
I worked yesterday at exams. I am working again today. So far I have worked for five days every day for the past five days. I work today then have Sunday off then work four days next week. I have a little building inspection work to complete and then by Friday this coming week my school duties will be completed for this term. My other job has not called with any shifts for a week now and I am hoping I can work there the week after Christmas.
My friends came over as usual on Friday night but only stayed a little while. R came a little early and we made him some fish and brocolli. But when C and J got here I was very tired and so were they. So they all left at 9 PM. We did manage to watch a Stargate SG-1 episode about the destroyer of worlds being set free. I had only slept about 4 or 5 hours Friday morning. I slept at about 9:30 PM and then did not wake up till 8:30 this morning thus getting a good 11 hours sleep. They are all coming over this coming Friday for our social Christmas dinner. I have to buy our turkey soon but may not afford it until Wednesday. For Christmas day we are going to my wife's fathers house for a family dinner.
I have worked for four exams now the last three in the afternoon. I have one today in the afternoon and one tomorrow then have Sunday off work then back to work for another four days. The work is easy and just requires being quiet and keeping the exam space quiet. I also must enforce the exam rules and yesterday I actually had to read things to the class. The first day I just needed to yell to the students as they came in the theatre to put their bags at the front. Another proctor read the instructions and made announcements. On Tuesday and Wednesday the exams I worked at were in large gyms so I did not speak but the Chief Proctor spoke over a PA. But yesterday was in a small classroom so I was the only proctor for that exam and needed to read the instructions myself.
R started a new job and I helped him get started. The first step was I guess encourging him to use a Clubhouse. The club house helped him find an interview. I always encourge clubhouses for consumers because we have a clubhouse in my city, (I suppose if your crafty you could find out where I live from this info.)The step at hand was to research the company he had an interview at on the internet because he only knew three initials for the company name. We found the company's web site and then I read him the career sections on the web site because of his literacy issues and helped explain what I thought the work would be like based on the company web site info. I was right. His report last night over late night coffee was similar to the work described on the web site. He passed the interview and trained on Thursday for his first real day on the job. I helped him get to sleep early Wednesday and he got to work for training an hour early so it worked out fine. That is one day done. I also late last night coached him on some arithmetic.
When I help a consumer/survivor/friend I do not take money for this service but only try to use the experience to improve my own career prospects if it is math related or otherwise only try to get health myself from the experience. Recovery breeds recovery. Peer support is a two way street of support flowing both ways.
I got the computer working with a complete reinstall of the Mac OS X. Somethings still need setting up. I got the extra memory and installed it myself. I also bought a new ethernet cable for this computer. I also bought a Patti Smith lyric book collection simply called Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Notes, and Reflections.
Of course being a mad person I phoned the computer shop after hours three times leaving messages threatening to take them to small claims court in the last message. They did not install the extra 512 MB RAM I paid for. Also after I transfered all the data from my old eMac to the new eMac as a first step, the new eMac would barely work. I could for a short while open an application but then nothing really opened. I gave up. I did test the hardware as one can do on a Mac with the install DVD but everything on the hardware side is ok. I am presently trying to reinstall Mac OS X. I did take some time off this work.
So yes I woke up at 9 AM and got to school and paid for the computer and brought it home at lunch with our business agents van and his driving. I then went back to school and worked at an exam and then came home all set to work on the new eMac and got really mad with it. I really have almost never bought a computer and been happy with the service from the store. I almost want to take the University bookstore computer shop to small claims court as a message to computer retailers.
The Apple eMac computer ordered last week has arrived at the book store. So yes, I am really getting a new computer this week. The problem is I need to pick it up during business hours and am working in the afternoon's all week. I have a lift available from our business agent at the union to help get the computer from the book store/computer shop to our apartment. But he is available tomorrow morning but not after my work in the early evening. He is available in the early evening on Friday. I really should sleep at 1:00 AM this morning and then wake up at 9:00 am and get to school about 11:00 AM pay for the computer and take up our union business agent's offer of driving the computer to our place at lunch and then driving me back to school for my work in the afternoon. Then I could stay up late tonight rather than this morning. This way I could stay up with the computer. In fact I could start the set up of the new computer at about 6 PM tonight. That is what I will try to do after all I am a bit tired now and I doubt I could stay up 26 hours and then work three hours later this afternoon.
I worked Monday morning which left most of Monday free. Yesterday I worked in the afternoon and then attended a brief union meeting. I did some shopping after that and paid some debit. I am now home reviewing the budget and checking out winter term courses. I am working again tomorrow and thinking of staying up all night. I can stay up until at least 3:00 AM and just drank some fresh coffee.
I went out to a comedy bar with a group I volunteer with. I drank coffee. I felt awkward around others still. I came home walking and busing in the cold weather. I gave my wife her pills. I then did a little email reading. I then did some journal writing and verifying my schedule for work for tomorrow. This stretched into Tuesday and I am now going to sleep at about 1:30 AM. I am working later today at 1:30 PM until 5:30 PM then I have some union duties and I am done for the day.
I went to school early for my new job of proctoring exams. I spent about four hours working there and then came home. I am doing some computer art for christmas presents this afternoon. This evening there is a snow party for our volunteer group. Tomorrow I am proctoring again but it is an afternoon exam. Then I have afternoon exams to proctor everyday for the rest of the week including Saturday then I have Sunday off and then I proctor all next week again early Monday morning and then afternoon exams until Thursday. Then on the Friday before Christmas we are having our turkey dinner at home for fellow and sister consumer/survivors. I need to buy the turkey this Sunday coming up.
By writing this exam tonight I have completed all the requirements for an honours BA. I can now study courses outside a program until next fall when I will be starting grad school I hope. The exam was fun. The topic that was the most fun was to set up a legal system for assisted suicide in which I wrote as the last sentence a disability slogan "nothing about us with us" concerning my system's limitations on consent. So there was some medical law to make it a fun criminal law exam.
I watched lecture 5 and lecture 10 and parts of lecture 11 the final lecture. I have probably now done enough review of the lecture tapes. I will now read my course notebook a little then head off for the exam almost two hours early in case there are bus delays or the light rail train is not running or something. If I am early as usual I will go to the library and buy a cofffee and relax there in the comfortable reading chairs. My exam is at 7 PM. I will stay for the full exam until 9:30 then I will come home and stay up late and read and surf the net. I will post here once more today after the exam.
I helped with the newspapers this morning but only helped prepare them( inserting and sleeving) and did not deliver them. I just don't have time given my last minute studies. I am working in the afternoon on Monday at school as a proctor for an exam. Then I am working everyday next week as a proctor until Sunday when I have the day off as there are no exams on Sunday. I have no other work scheduled in my main jobs. My teaching assistant work is comlpeted until January when I need to be hired again. My other work has not called this week and I have told them I am working at school so am not available. I slept at 7 AM and woke up at 2 PM with my wife's help waking me up.
I slept at about 4 am and then woke up at 1 PM. I watched some more of lecture #5. My wife was out with her ACT team at their Christmas party. We are both home now and our meds should be delivered shortly.
I was up at 5 AM yesterday morning. I am still up now. I am feeling generally like I can't stay up long hours anymore. Two older gentleman at work find it amazing that I can stay up these long hours. Some people are amazed at the amount of writing I can do.
I have watched the first three lectures of twelve now. I just started the fifth lecture because I did not attend that lecture. There is one other lecture I did not attend and I must also review that tape. I have also opened all the digital documents included in the course materials on my computer. Speaking of computers I have paid a down payment now for my new eMac.
I did call the pharmacist on Wednesday and the next supply of medication should be delivered today. I also did the carpentry on Wednesday that I had been planning to do but only did half of it and my wife insisted I throw out some wood. Our recycling is piling up again. Our cat litter needs changing. I also cooperated with my wife today by doing Christmas shopping. I got some packing materials for mailing stained glass angels. My wife then packed these up and I taped it up and we need to get it in the mail for Monday. I also bought a gift for my wife to give to me. These are a set of books by the author James Joyce. I began to read his novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I also did a little union business emails today and have done some in office union work this past week.
I usually at the end of each month back up three of my blogs to hard copy and soft copy word processing files. I usually copy and paste each month into a MS word document and then print it. Sometimes like for the month of November I spell check it and correct it here on the blog and then save and print it. I am doing this now for November's blog entries. I have some problems because I tend to over do the Canadian spelling until it is wrong in Canadian and American English. Often too the spell checker I use is an American spell checker and thus I have to decide for myself on the Canadian spelling. Words like honour and labour are defintely done differently but words like realize are not spelled realise but I tend to think they are.
I got the Compaq Presario1210 early model Pentium 150 working with ethernet. It took me a few operating system installs before I again installed the complete K desktop this time with the networking turned on. I haven't tested it on the net yet and it is being used without security updates over the net from security.debian.org because I do not want to install Sarge the next most version of the OS. So I have an unsecure un updated version of woody on this laptop now.
I wish I was able to just turn on the networking but Linux is a very tricky beast. I also now want to turn on the security updates without reinsatalling the OS. I may be able to get an answer from the local linux community but they are as likely to call me an idiot. It seems this Linux on-line community is very rude. I have already left one of their email lists because of excessive abuse.
I paid for most of the new eMac computer at school today. I will be getting it delivered in about a week. I can simply copy my files from my old eMac to my new eMac with a firewire cable.
I have been using our course's web based bulletin board for studying. I spent at least an hour tonight reading and posting on that system. I have watched about 5 hours of lectures now. I have about fifteen hours to still watch and am not sure I will get this done perfectly.
I will be working at about 10 exams this term as a proctor. I will start two days after my own exam and then work six days in a row although each day will only be four hours. This will test my sleep planning ability. I will also then work four days in the week before Christmas. I won't be paid for this work until the end of January. I guess I will need some clean clothes and need to look my age a middle age foggy.
With some family help I am buying a new eMac Macintosh computer. It will be able to burn DVD's for back ups. It will also have a much larger hard drive. I can transfer all my files on my present eMac to the new computer. I should have it in about 2 weeks or less. I will have it for Christmas.
I am also looking for an older IBM Thinkpad to run WinXP and Debian and they cost about 400$. But a faster desktop would be only 200$ for a pentium III.
We server turkey dinner to about 100 members of our self help group. We had a raffle. I helped police the event. I talked with a lot of people. I learned a new card game too. The former president was there and our vice president. Also a vice president of another self-help group attended. We had a good time.
I was promoted to a position of more responsibility in my victims support work. I will be busy with this later in the month after exams.
I went to the 7-11 before 11 PM. My wife just took her meds. I need to call the pharmacy some time this week to get another month's worth of meds for both of us.
I had completed turning the CD's into digital files and loading them onto my iPod by 8 PM. I forgot the Led Zepplin at my friends house. I will return the CD's tomorrow on my way home from the volunteer meeting I was supposed to have on Friday but was rescheduled to tomorrow.
I need to go to the 7-11 and buy cigarettes and coffee and some juice for my wife. I think I will post this and post a few more posts then organise my week first and get the juice and other stuff on time for my wife to take her meds with juice around 11 PM. I just added a photo to my iBlog blog at my school web space.
I borrowed about 20 CD's from some friends to copy to my iPod. I got some Deep Purple, Junkhouse, Led Zepplin, Tori Amos, Beatles, Sarah McLachlan and Monty Python. I am spending the afternoon ripping these CD's. I gave my friend a case of beer for his trouble. Free beer = free music? I got the grocery shopping done. We got the recylcing done too as our home management worker had planned with us. We just need to throw out the regular trash today and we will have all this done on Sunday because Monday the garbage and recycling trucks come by. I still want to do some carpentry today. I also have to do some legal studies and marking. I slept yesterday at 2 PM and woke up this morning at 2:30 AM.
I am getting my studies organised for next Saturday's exam. I reviewed the last lecture in the term tape a bit this morning. I will also do some readings this morning. I have a fair amount of other stuff to do too like household cleaning, groceries, and some carpentry. I also have to mark some papers today or tomorrow.
I took three 3 mg risperadol and am going to sleep now. I do too much and can't relax especially Saturday mornings.
People have been asking me questions here related to statistics. I do study and teach this subject but this blog is for my experiences with schizophrenia and my struggles to make a normal life for myself and friends. I am not going to use this blog in other ways such as for teaching statistics. It would not be good netequiette so I won't do it.
I was successful at napping. I did miss the volunteer meeting I had planned for today. I am now ready to attend a math and art seminar at our mathematics and statistics school. I will then attend a union meeting on campus. Then the union has an end of term social in a campus bar. I then will come home and have friends over. Then I will stay up and help deliver Saturday's newspaper.
I marked all the minitab problems for the student's homework. I just need to mark their textbook problems now. I stayed up all night and made ice coffee in the blender. My partner is going out today to do crafts with her assertive community treatment team. I am attending a seminar today and a union meeting and perhaps volunteer meeting. Then this evening I am having friends over. I need to nap a litle now.
I read the course readings last night. I finished reading about Louis Riel from press clippings from the trial and the execution. The next case we look at is Oka.
I ordered the 2nd season of Stargate SG-1 and the 3rd season. I also ordered Jesus Christ Super Star on DVD for my wife. This movie was made in 1973. I also ordered a gift for R. He made a list of 10 Xbox games and I ordered one of these just now. R and I are watching Stargate SG1 together these days, one episode at a time. This is structured time together.
I paid a bunch of bills. Our disAbility cheque came in again. I also bought some cargo pants. I am just surfing an electronics store for some TV series DVD's. I am thinking of buying the 2nd season of Stargate SG-1 a sci-fi TV series. I am also thinking of buying McGyver that 1980's TV series. Something I would really like is the original Mission Impossible TV series.