It's Hallowe'en! Many kids and parents come tricker treating through our halls.

It's funny how international my job is. Many of the trick-or-treaters-- the kids, don't speak English. So far I've heard French, Chinese and Spanish.

In a weird quirk, two of my old university friends, JM & GS, were in town. JM was here visiting family, GS is here for a conference.

Saturday night we had dinner together. JM's wife, JM's brother and I all work for the same company. GS's is here for a conference hosted by that company. The end result was a lot of shop talk that RO couldn't participate in.

I enjoyed the shop talk. RO's friends are far more artsie than my old friends. Sometimes I miss that.

Sunday GS and I tourned around Seattle. We went to the Pike Street marked. I really enjoy that area and would love to live there. Too bad the commute makes it prohibitive.

This past weekend I flew to Toronto for my youngest brother's wedding.


It was a Medieval Wedding. My brother wore a suit of armour. The bride was a princess. The whole wedding party dressed up in period costume. It ended up being lots of fun. I'm trying to find a great picture of the wedding, but none of turned up yet. I'll post one as soon as I can.

The night before the wedding, we groom's men took my youngest brother out to the Zanzibar, a strip club on Younge Street.

One of the women in the wedding party also came a long. At first we thought nothing of it. It turned out she was bi.

One of the guys bought her a lap dance. She gladly accepted it. She and the stripper were all over each other! Kissing! Licking! Pinching! Pulling! Our jaws dropped and we couldn't stop staring.

My middle brother was at the wedding as well. That one is still an idiot. At one point he needed to borrow a car. My dad loaned him his car. It was low on gas so dad gave my middle brother his credit card and told him to fill it up. Well, not only did my middle brother fill the car up, but he used dad's credit card to buy himself a new tattoo.

He's thirty five years old and he's steeling from his father to get new tattoos. Then he told dad, point blank, "Oh by the way, I also used your card to get a new tattoo." as if nothing was wrong!

My blog and what it's for....

At no point did I ever set set out to be a famous blogger, or create a popular blog. I started it for three prosaic reasons: to move my journal on line, to have a place to vent and rant and to keep me writing something fun and non-technical.

I've always kept a journal. They are very useful for jogging your memory. It's amazing the number of things that I've wanted to remember, but didn't-- my brain is only so big. Do you remember what movies you saw five years ago? Or great restaurants you ate at? Or fun places that you discovered?

Seven years ago I kept my journal on a computer. The computer died. It was the height of the dot com bubble and I ran into this little website called "Blogger." This was before Google bought them out. In a fit of whimsy I moved my journal online and made it public.

And now you know.

Last night RO and I watched Air Force One. We were very disappointed. For all the big names attached to it, it's never anything more than a luke warm action flick.

There is so much over acting and it was very predictable After the bad guys were introduced, I guessed the number and types of fights that the movie would need to dispatch each baddie. At the end of the movie, my guess was right. No suprizes. No twists. How boring is that?

My blog is 7 years old. Happy birthday blog!

Reading over it is somewhat humbling. Much of my life revolves around entertaining myself. Little of it involves doing anything important.

Our store manager has quit. I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me is glad she has quit. At times she was difficult to work with. She didn't like working with our best sales woman. She also didn't like hiring sales people. She prefered to hire teenage girls who helped, but mostly had to refer to her.

She didn't give us any notice. So, we are a bit short handed right now. Things will work out fine though. We can easily spread the load around. Some of our employees want to work more.

RO and I have moved our bedroom. I am suprized what a great idea this was.

We live in a log cabin with a daylight basement. The basement has a very modern look-- white walls with an orange peel texture. The upstairs, of course, is a rust log cabin.

For the past four years I put the master bedroom in the large room in the basement. And I enjoyed it very much. it was quiet and cool, a perfect place to sleep.

When our last roommate moved out, RO said he wanted a change, he wanted to live upstairs. I was a bit wary-- the rooms are a bit smaller and it wouldn't be as quiet. We moved up anywas. And it's turning out great.

First off, it's like we've moved into a whole new house. The log cabin bedrooms have a very different feel than the down stairs.

The upstairs is also better designed. A stretch of the downstairs hall is too short for me so I always had to walked hunched over. Upstairs has proper halls. Also, the bathroom is right next door so I don't even have to use a hall.

We are also using the opportunity to clean up and throw out all the clothes and crap that we never use. We move things up from the old bedroom as we need. What's left should be garbage such as old shirts that are still wareable, even though I haven't worn them in years. I want to throw all that out.

Between the flea treatments and our moving, our cat is getting angry at us. It has shown us its disappoval the only way it knows how-- it shits on the carpet.

But, I like the changes, so the cat will just have to get used to it.

The flea problem may be bigger than we thought. Our cat was flea free for about a day, then he started scratching him self again.

Tonight while RO and I were watching TV, RO saw a flea on his arm. Tomorrow we are going to spray everything again.

Our cat had fleas. For weeks now he's been scratching him self like crazy and developing lots of little welts. We tought it came from being outside and fighting with other cats. Two nights ago, RO looked at the cat's belly and saw fleas.

We gave him a flea bath and put a flea coller on him. The cat stopped scratching him self.

The cat usually sleep on our bed. Now, RO and I are looking over each other for fleas. The very sight of the cat causes us scratch.

Even though I changed the bedding last night, I'm going to change it again tonight. I've also got out cat a proper cat bed, and put it at the foot of the bed, so he can sleep near us, but not with us.

HR Violation #2.

Last night, after hours, RO went to our warehouse to pick up some tools. RO stumbled upon our warehouse guy have sex with someone. The warehouse guy was very, very embarrased.

We are unsure how to handle this. We could fire the warehouse guy. But, he works hard. He is one of the mature employees-- someone we can trust to do his job without supervision.

We are probably not going to fire the guy. But we need to be more strick with him. RO and I understand the impulse to have sex in different places. Hell, RO is kind of jealouse that someone else had sex at the warehouse before we have. But, at the same time, we can't permit that behavior. It could get us into too much trouble.

It's been an odd week for the store. We had two HR issues.

HR Issues #1...

At the martini party last week we all wore stick on "Hello my name is ..." badges. A female part time sales clerks put her badge on her breast-- unintentionally. A male designer seeing the badge, and without asking permission, pulled the badge of her breast and stuck it higher on her shoulder. The female was very uncomfortable about being touched without her permission on her breast by a man.

This particular male designer can come on strong and the clerk is on the shy and private side, so I can how this could escalate to innocent-but-handled-all-wrong.

We got the designer to apologize to the clerk. We are trying to schedule things to keep the designer and the clerk apart. We also told the clerk that we are open to any suggestions from her on how to make the store a better place.