crash

Computers make our lives so much easier. Usually. Until the entire system that your restaurant runs on melts down. Actually, it wasn't the system so much as the hard drive that stores the information for said system. When it melts down on a Thursday, at the end of the night, it causes a headache or two. When it is still down for all of Friday, and you lose out on the entire day's worth of sales, it creates a few more.

After staying until 1:30am while the IT guy comes and replaces the hard drive, I'm left with an entire days worth of cash, debits and credit card payments (all 100 of them laid out nicely on a spread sheet from my friends at merchantlink) to try and guess what people ate two days ago. I can deal with this, as these things happen, and we have the money so it's not such a big deal. And nothing to worry about from Friday, since we were closed all day. A couple hours, and it should be all good.

That is until the computer crashes again. At 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. Luckily, this time, our system was able to run on the backup, so it only caused a few minor hiccups, and a bit of extra work from the servers.

The frustrating part is the IT guy, the one who probably gets paid an obscene amount of money to come on a Friday night at 11pm and install a hard drive, shows up again at 4pm on Saturday, making what is sure to be another huge investment on his obscene paycheque. And then proceed to ignore the fact that the computer tells him the CPU fan is not working. He can see the fan, I can see the fan, and it's not working. The computer does him the courtesy of telling him that it isn't working. Yet for the next 5 hours, tries 42 different ways to fix the problem without making the fan work.

This has now held me up 5 hours from getting Thursday cleaned up, which should have been done and cleared now for some time. Maybe I could have even came home an hour early. Nope, the fan isn't there according to the IT guy. Finally, thank goodness, he stops to look at the nonexistent fan. And, after moving the cord and jiggling it, it worked! Imagine that.

So, reboot the computer, and it doesn't tell us that the fan is broken anymore. And it stops shutting itself down. And all is good in the land of Micros. Amazing. The crappy part, I won't get paid any extra for spending extra time at work. And IT guy, he will probably get double OT for his adventures in White Rock.

30 today

Lots of people get very emotional over turning 30. I remember a time ago, when I was but a young lad, that I was at my aunt's birthday party. She was turning 30. There was a good part of the evening that she spent sobbing, sad that she had just turned old. Being younger, I am sure that at the time I agreed with her.

Now though, as with all youth who eventually grow up, I must admit that 30 doesn't really seem that old. At least not to me. I still feel like I am young, if not at 7am at least at certain points in the day. And my brain does not feel old like I would expect it to. Sometimes I still wonder how it is that I am a dad, cause dad's are supposed to be dad-like, and I don't always feel like a dad.

Now that I have had a months experience being 30, I get to rub it in to Vanessa that as of today, she is OFFICIALLY 30. It's only playful though, because neither of us really feel old. I wonder if kids now look at us and think "I can't believe he is doing that, he's so old" or "can you believe what that old man is wearing?".

Vanessa, Happy Birthday to you. I love you, and I pray this year sees you well and joyful.

moment of silence

I am sure that nobody needs a reminder of what happened 6 years ago in New York. We do all need to take a moment to stop, and honor those who died in this senseless attack on freedom. Say a prayer for their families and friends.




I remember exactly where we were that morning. Eleanor had been in the hospital for almost 3 weeks and Vanessa and I were living out of a one room space in the Easter Seal house in Vancouver. We were spending our days in the hospital, long long days, and coming back to sleep. For some reason on this morning, I turned the TV on while Vanessa was in the shower. I don't even know how it ended up on CNN, we didn't regularly watch it at all. It was right when the first images of the first plane hitting the tower were hitting the airwaves, and I remember thinking to myself 'which movie is this'? I soon realized that it was CNN that I was watching, and it was no movie. I called Vanessa out of the bathroom, and we stood stunned for about 30 minutes or so, watching the scenes play over and over, and feeling ill deep inside. The rest of the day the hospital was abuzz with the news, every TV set tuned to CNN.


Where were you this day 6 years ago, when the world stood still?

southpointe

So has ended the first week of school, and the first week of me working in White Rock. The school week was a short one, with Eleanor excited for the first day, and grouchy for the next 3. I am not sure how she is going to handle this year in school, with 5 full days ahead of her every week. Today started well, but it's only Monday, and after a weekend in Birch Bay with Grandma & Grandpa and my brothers family...

I worry about what Thursday and Friday morning will look like. Here the four of them look a little bit like young hobbits trouncing through the forest.



I started working in the White Rock chapter of the Restaurant last Monday. I haven't talked too much about what this change in locations means for me, mostly because I am still trying to figure it out for myself.

Upon announcing my leaving to The People in Langley, The People began asking why, why must you leave? And they want to know if I am excited about it? Was it your choice? Do you want to go? To this I prepared a statement, an official press release if you will. And then I threw it out, and just laid it out for most of them.

I must leave. I cannot continue to work in a restaurant where the GM doesn't care about the people coming through the doors providing him with a paycheque. He just cares about the paycheque. I could not continue to go to work every day excited when everything that I had spent building up in the last 4 years was coming apart. Was it my choice? Not really, my choice was to take over the Langley store. This is a distant second. As far as the future of the Langley store? I am sure that it is going to suffer some hard times very soon. And then the bosses who made the decision to bring in an outsider instead...maybe they will see the mistake they made, maybe not. Either way, it's their loss now.

My welcome in White Rock has been mostly warm. I seem to be getting along pretty well with most of them. Some, not so much. In the first week I have had 2 hosts quit, and one kitchen dude. The hosts were not so much of a loss, as they were lazy, and I have 2 new ones starting tomorrow anyway. Oh, the apathy on the host team right now...it will change.

If I am around long enough to make the change.

let the school year begin

For anyone out there who has school aged children, here are some great tips for how to make things a little bit better this year.

I especially like number 9, "Concentrate on their hearts more than their behavior" and I think it is so important to remember that. Sometimes as parents we shake our heads, and ask "what were you thinking?" or "why did you do that?" or my favorite "seriously?". The circumstances often make us want to scream and shout, often with much banging of our own heads on the wall in frustration.

Take a moment to dig deeper and find out where their heart was in whatever the particular situation is. I know that when we do that, we find that they didn't really mean to color on the carpet, paint the walls or cut a hole in the couch. Kids are kids, and they don't always know the consequences of their actions, it's a trial and error thing. Don't be too harsh on the errors, as they will have more opportunity to learn from these if we react in an appropriate way.

Except she did mean to cut a hole in the couch. She said so. And now, Eleanor is banned from scissors. And our couch? Suffered yet another war wound of living with a 6 year old.

Saturday shows

So there is no sound involved in this brief clip, but I really only had about 11 seconds to blow the dust off the camera and capture it.
A quick impromptu show from Eleanor and Thomas, as Jess and Leslie from the Bridge to Teribithia movie, singing "why can't we be friends".


Notice at the end, how Thomas comes over to check out the camera as I don't think he realized it was on until after he was halfway through the show.

Since we got this movie a month ago, the kids must have watched it about 50 times. It is the current favorite, and the current favorite would be played all day long if we let them. We got Eleanor a copy of Charlottes Web (real people) for the drive to Calgary, and I was sure that this would quickly obtain status as the current favorite. It didn't.

This is also the first time that I have tried to post a video, something that wasn't from youtube, so I am hoping that all will work out.

Enjoy.