Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Figuring out plans for the long weekend

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In a couple of hours my husbands niece and her new husband will be arriving from Chicago. They’re coming to Toronto for a visit for the long weekend.

While they’re here we’re going to drive them out of the city to my husbands parents (nieces grandparents) for a family get together party. I guess the party is partially a mini family reunion as well as a belated wedding reception for those of us that weren’t able to make it to the couples wedding in Mexico this past June.

The only problem is that all the planning for this visit has taken place between my mother in law and our niece and our niece only got in touch with us by email this past Wednesday to ask us for a ride to “nana’s” house. I wrote back (she only has a cellphone and doesn’t answer international calls I’m told) and haven’t received a reply … so we haven’t been able to make any direct plans with her ourselves. Sigh.

I hate “Third Party” arrangements!

So we’re expected to drive our niece and her husband to the in-laws and presumable back to Toronto – maybe the next day (Monday) … but we have no idea if that’s what they want or if their plans even work with our plans .. and my husbands mother is totally freaking out because she expected her grand-daughter to show up at her house on Saturday instead of Sunday!

As I said if our niece would have either answered the email or if we could call her on a land line (cheaper than cellphone!) we could have probably ironed out some plans that would work for all of us .. but no …

Anyway … I’m sure it will all work out. My husbands niece is very nice. I can’t remember exactly what she does now … It’s something medical … I think she’s either looking for pharmaceutical or Dentist Jobs but I can’t remember which field she went into. I think that’s partly because she started one field of study and then started another. LOL I think her new husband is either an accountant or does some kind of business finance work.

Once this weekend is over it’s time to celebrate my birthday. I’m certain my birthday won’t be celebrated this weekend as no one ever seems to remember it … but that’s ok, I do my own celebrating.





My husband is losing more hours at work??

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Well it looks like my husband is going to lose more hours at work soon. Yes, on top of the four weeks of temporary lay offs that he has scattered throughout the year (the next one coming up in a week!) he’s going to lose a day each week.

He’s losing hours because his boss believed one of his co-workers when he said that he’d work weekends because he was going to go back to school so she hired another part time recovery room attendant, but the guy who said that he was going to go back to school suddenly decided at the last minute that he wasn’t prepared to go back to school so now the manager has too many employees. So who looses in this … my husband and this other older gentleman who really needs the shifts!

So my husband volunteered to work the weekend shifts in the O.R. as well as his new “three” shift work week in the recovery room. In the end he’ll probably end up working at least five days a week or more, plus get paid some “On Call” time.

When he’s “On Call” he could get called in in the middle of the night to come in to the O.R. to transfer a patient from a stretcher to a bed and or move them to a floor after surgery. If he’s really lucky he might end up going in to work for as little as 20 minutes and getting paid for 4 hours as he has to get paid for a minimum of four hours if he’s called in. Oh and the best part is we live five minutes from the hospital – that’s walking distance – so if he gets called in in the middle of the night he could be there in just a few minutes and home again fairly quickly – perhaps back in bed within half an hour of receiving the call.

So on Monday he starts getting trained as an O.R. attendant. I’m not sure exactly what the job entails but I guess he’ll need to make sure the supplies are stocked up, and that the point of care carts are in place – just like he does in the recovery room. He’ll also be helping during surgeries at times – holding patients and moving them before and after surgeries from bed to stretcher and so on. I’m sure his years of working in the Recovery Room will come in handy and the job will be similar – not totally the same, but similar, plus he already knows most of the staff that he’ll be working with as they are the same that he works with in the Recovery Room.

So .. until we’re sure that he’s actually getting the same or more hours we’re tightening up on our budget and hoping for the best. It certainly didn’t sound very good when Chris came home with the news a week ago, but if the O.R. shifts work out things might really be looking up! We’ll see – cautiously optimistic for now.

Celebrating ten years in our home

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My husband and I recently celebrated our tenth anniversary in our house. I was surprised a few months ago when papers arrived in the mail notifying us that it was time to renew our mortgage because it certainly didn’t seem like five years had gone by since the last time we’d renewed our mortgage.

Ten years in our home – our first house, has gone by quickly! Midnight – our Lab, just loves the house, the backyard, the grass (rolling in it), and the neighborhood. Just look at those eyes!

Lucky for us, we’re quite happy with our bank and didn’t feel the need to go searching for a new bank to carry our mortgage. When we bought our house in 2001 interest rates were very low so we were advised by our mortgage broker at our bank that a mortgage at a variable rate would probably be very good for us. It certainly was! I can’t tell you how happy we were at the time, seeing as we were quite nervous new home owners who didn’t know if they were going to manage to pay all the bills or not! I think for the first 6 months of our mortgage we our rate was at half a percent below prime and prime at that time was 1% so we were only paying 0.05% interest!

Thanks to the banks initial advice, and I suppose the way the economy has been over the last decade, we’ve been able to stay on a variable mortgage at a very low interest rate. We’ve saved a lot of money because of their recommendations.

This time when we were renewing our mortgage all we had to do was make a phone call to the bank. Don’t you love that? I mean, they had sent us the paperwork so we could see all of the various terms and we could decide between taking a 2, 5, or 10 year mortgage at varying rates. We simply called up our contact at the bank and asked a few questions and within a few minutes he’d set our minds at ease, lowered the rate on the mortgage term that we were interested in, and all we had to do was sign the paperwork and fax it back to him. Easy!

We’re all set for another five years and if by chance the interest rates start to sky rocket upwards we can always lock in. We made sure of that! Oh and the next time we have to renew our mortgage we’ll only have two years or less left to go on it and then we’ll own our house! Of course, between now and the next seven years we might want to move and start all over again in a new house. I guess we’ll wait and see what happens.

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Husbands back to work and things are back to normal for a while

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It’s been a busy few weeks! It sort of feels like I just got back from holidays, but in fact, it was my husband that was on holidays and disrupting my routine and my work for the last couple of weeks. Now that he’s back to work my life can get back to normal.

While my husband was on vacation we mostly stayed in town and got several things around our house. Most of the work that we did was outside, in the backyard. We painted the back stairs, and two storage units that are under our enclosed back porch. It looks fantastic. We also got a lot of garden work done. I don’t know how many calories I burned with all that outdoor work, but I doubt that I’ll need to do any searches for the best diet pills in the next while because I got a good workout. I must have been outside working in the yard anywhere from four to ten hours a day for at least one week.

We did manage to do some fun things while my husband was on holiday too. We took the dog to the beach a few times and we also attended a local Ribfest where we saw a fantastic classic rock tribute band and ate very good but very high cholesterol food. Chris also drove to his home town a couple of times to visit his parents and he did a few odd jobs around their house. I guess my husband got an even better workout than I did in the last few weeks since he did even more work than I did.

Have you used your holiday time to get work done around the house? You know, maintenance work that needs to be done anyway?

My husband will be off work again next week – he’s on temporary lay off next week. My schedule will be all messed up again I’m sure.

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