North America

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Business is NOT Picking Up

I feel like a couple of recent comments need to be addressed in a post. There seems to be the mistaken impression that business for me is picking up and that I’m raking in the cash. This is most certainly not the case.

Being a freelancer, business is never steady. Sure, I’m swamped this week, but the last two weeks all I had on my plate were jobs from a client who pays me minimum wage at best. The client who’s keeping me busy this week could go dark for all of July. I don’t know.

Since last summer, I’ve been able to ride this income roller coaster and get the bills paid, no problem. But it’s still not enough to go beyond my most basic needs. I need a couple more steady clients who pay me well to serve as my ‘overtime’ pay. Until that happens, I’m going to be scrambling.

I have so many big expenses this summer, including attending the seminar, truck maintenance, and the cost of transferring residency to Saskatchewan, among others.

So these ‘I’m busy with work’ posts are not to say, ‘wow, I’m rolling in the dough’ but rather ‘there’s a reason I’m filling the blog with fluff.’ 🙂

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International Cooperation

Late Wednesday May 29th, I ordered a water filter to be shipped to my friend’s in Virginia. I have an Amazon Prime membership, so the package got there on Friday May 31st, within the two promised business days. My friend promptly checked the order to make sure everything was there, repackaged it, and sent it ‘Express Mail’, which offers delivery to most major international markets within three to five business days.

She had me pay her the $30 or so it would have cost to send the package a slower route and covered the difference for Express herself (THANK YOU, I love you!), only telling me this after the package was processed.

The package left Norfolk on Monday and got stuck in Canadian Customs. It’s always scary to see the ‘item was sent for further processing’ and then ‘item was released from customs’ notes. This was Wednesday. No update yesterday. As far as I knew, the package was languishing in Mississauga.

I checked the status this morning and discovered that it had arrived in Regina at 1AM and left there at 4AM!

I went to the post office around 10, just as the post master was getting into her car, and when she saw me, she got out and told me she had a package for me. My filter was here! AND I didn’t have to pay any taxes on it! So my out of pocket cost was only about $30. Wooho!

This isn’t the first time I’ve been impressed by the expediency of the postal system, but this really was above and beyond what I expected, especially since my friend sent me another package by a slower method and it seemed to be moving along faster.

In other news, Skynet has gained self-awareness AND is prescient. I got up this morning and had crazy fast internet with three bars of signal and an RSSI of -86. At the EXACT minute I hit send on an email to a client, the connection dropped and would not come back. I had to scramble to get out the door and up the hill for my deadline. Once up there, I got offered tons of work for the weekend, which meant enough downloads that I would have had to go up the hill even if I had been able to send an email from home. Be very afraid people.

I don’t expect to be back online till Monday as I have 30 hours of work to do by 9PM Sunday. Gary, have a virtual beer for me each evening!

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Grocery Sprint

Even though it looked like the transcription marathon was going to stop at the end of this current (very difficult) job, due tomorrow first thing, getting a few groceries today was absolutely necessary. I had originally planned to leave for Stettler on the 10th and didn’t want to leave too much food in the fridge, so I worked down my stores before realising that I’m actually leaving the 14th and that I would have to eat Neelix at some point to get protein. A gal can’t live off rice, veggies, and the odd bit of almond butter forever. 🙂

Since a) I was in a hurry, b) the truck was full of donations for the thrift store, and c) I didn’t want to do a giant amount of shopping, going to Willow Bunch made sense. To my surprise, my trip took me exactly one hour round trip!

The road to Willow Bunch was in decent shape and I actually drove about 80KPH on it even though it’s gravel.

I found the thrift store and Co-op (right across from each other) without trouble. The lady at the thrift store had me go around back through the alley to unload. It felt good to get that stuff out of my truck! She seemed pleased with the donations.

Then, I circled back around and parked at the Co-op. The food store is tiny, but the more I walked around, the better stocked I found it to be. Since the prices are the same as the Co-op in Assiniboia, I didn’t have the small market sticker shock I was expecting. In fact, once I manage to do a good pantry stocking run in a larger community, it would definitely make sense to just top up in Willow Bunch once a week instead of Assiniboia if I have no other errands to do since it’s half the mileage.

I stocked up on produce, including a 99 cent avocado, and then looked at protein. Like in Assiniboia, there was lots of choice, but everything was so pricey. Every time I have tuna (of the canned, non sushi variety) I think that I should start eating more of it. Since tuna was on sale for $1 a can if you bought two (which I think is a decent price for the Cloverleaf brand), I decided to go that route and I also found some nice looking pre-marinated pork chops for $4 that will make four meals, so that sounded like a fair deal. I am most definitely not a vegetarian anymore! 🙂

Today was the day Co-op members got their equity cheques. Of course, I didn’t have one (I’m told I will next year, though…), but that made me eligible for the BBQ. I wasn’t interested in burgers, but I was somehow talked into grabbing a doughnut and coffee “for the road.” Considering I haven’t had anything resembling junk food in a full week and the last time before that was about a week and a half, I have forgiven myself for my weakness. 🙂

The drive home seemed faster than the drive out, especially once I found the country music station out of Moose Jaw (turns out all the radio shows are on the AM frequency).

I came in and assembled a tasty tuna salad (using sour cream instead of mayo) and slathered it on some fresh cheese buns (couldn’t believe they had those; I am a sucker for them). I asked Neelix if he wanted the tuna juice and he answered by getting up on two paws and reaching for the counter. Still, he appeared dumbfounded when I poured the tuna juice into a bowl for him. He’s been wanting to go outside since we got here and so he’s been getting a lot of nos lately. He really enjoyed his treat!

It’s another beautiful, if not super warm, day and the internet has decided to work. *rolls eyes*

Oh, and before I forget, I have to give a shout out to Joni in Salem who sent me a tripod for my camera! THANK YOU! Having a post office right here in the village is such a bonus. I go once a day just for the walk and didn’t expect her package to be here yet, but the postmaster had seen me coming and had it out for me. I’ll be putting it to good use.

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Lots of Typing

My biggest transcription client is keeping me busy this week! I finally learned over the winter to take on as much as I can in such situations even if it means a week of 14+ hour days since the droughts can be quite severe. I still have another four hours to do on the current project, but it’s 9PM and the deadline is 11AM tomorrow, so I may push on for only another hour or so. I worked till 11PM Monday and 10PM yesterday, so I’m feeling a little knackered.

The thing with transcription is that you actually have to work to get paid. It’s not a job where you can stare out the window for five minutes and pad that into your invoice. You’re paid to complete so much audio regardless of how long it takes you. When you have 10 hours worth of typing to do, that’s 10 hours of sitting at your desk moving your foot and hands. You can’t do that straight, at least not for several days in a row. So the days grow quite long as the breaks increase when fatigue sets in.

I put in a good morning, then took a long break for lunch. Charles gave me the heads up yesterday that Nels is returning this weekend to haul stuff out of his yard. So I spent a half hour or so doing a final audit of all the junk and hauling a few more pallets to finish my boardwalk and to bring to Ken. If I catch sight of Nels and he appears more rational than the first time we met, I’m going to see if I can convince him to have the water and power turned on to his property, with me paying the utility bills for the rest of the summer.

Then, I packed up the dolly and tools that I borrowed from Charles and trundled over there with two empty jugs to fill with water. No one was home, so I just left the things in plain sight, filled up, and headed home to make some food.

Reading Apartment Therapy this morning, I found a recipe for onigiri, Japanese rice balls, so I had that on the brain even though I didn’t have nori (seaweed), never mind anything interesting to stuff in them. And then I remembered something my cousin gave me last summer, a sachet she’d been given by a Japanese exchange student. All the text on it is in Japanese so I had no idea what the contents were although I could read (if not comprehend) a lot of the words.

I pulled it out and realised the picture on the front was of onigiri! I was holding mix ins for them! I put some rice on to cook and opened up the sachet. WOAH! It smelled like fish food! I could identify bits of dried nori, salmon, and shrimp as well as coarse salt and sesame seeds. I figured that if it was like most Japanese food, it would be addictive despite the strange smell.
Once the rice was ready, I decided it needed a little something, so I turned it into sushi (rice seasoned with sweet rice vinegar) and then put in a little bit of the fishy stuff before making up a few balls. As I suspected, the fishy stuff was addictive! So this was a very good first introduction to onigiri and you can blame my internet connection for there not being any pictures. I am amused that lunch was made with a sachet from Tokyo given to me in Montreal, vinegar bought in Hampton Roads, and rice bought in Dallas!

I powered through a good chunk of the afternoon, then took a break to restring and clean my new clothesline and make dinner. Now, I’m getting my second wind and should be able to get a little more done tonight so I don’t have to rush in the morning.

I badly need to get some groceries, but that takes about three hours out of the day, so I’m hoping I won’t have time to get any tomorrow… I have decided to go to Willow Bunch since I need to drop some stuff off at the thrift store, so maybe that would cut the grocery run to two hours. I only realised today that prices at their Co-Op would be the same as in Assiniboia, only the selection would be even more restricted.

Back to work I go. I surely have the fittest fingers in all the land!

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Irate

Once I got online Monday, the internet worked like a charm. Yesterday, no problem getting on and I stayed connected for FIFTEEN HOURS STRAIGHT.

So when I got up this morning and couldn’t connect, I actually wasted a full hour trying to get the f’in Mifi to not go dormant. I had a strong signal and was getting pages to come up, but then the Mifi would drop the connection. I rebooted and rebooted and rebooted and finally realised that a full hour had gone by and I was not going to get online at home.

I’m having trouble up here on the hill, too, so it looks like the Mifi is the principle culprit of my internet issues now that the boosting problems have been essentially resolved. Of course, it’s now too late to return it and try something else. Especially frustrating is that I love the Mifi when it decides to work because it’s nice to be able to connect several devices at once.

It is just so ridiculous that less than 12 hours ago, I was streaming Netflix and now I can’t even get online. Absolutely nothing has changed except that I turned the service off overnight.

Anyway, I got my files for the day so I’m off to work. I hate getting such a late start. Looks like another loooong day.