Tricia's Musings

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



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Shame that I should even have to ask …

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Question for you …

Some of you have been reading this site and many of my others pretty much since day one. I’ve developed friendships with several of you, and have exchanged email and comments with many many more. I’ve worked on some of your websites, developed business relationships with a few of you and have even gotten to know some of the people that advertise on this and my other sites.

Have I ever come across to you – either on this site or any of my others, via email or comments as:

1. Rude?
2. Crazy?
3. Hard to deal with or unprofessional?

The reason why I’m asking this is because I was called all of these things in an email that I received earlier in the week. Obviously I’ve calmed down about this by now, but curious me still wants to know your opinion. Needless to say, since I don’t recall ever being called any of these things before, I found the email very upsetting.

I will not say who said these things to me. All I’d like is your opinion. Some of you know me quite well, and others only know me by what I write on my sites – either way, if you’ve been reading for a short time I think you should be able to come up with an opinion.





Getting back into cooking

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I’ve really been on a real cooking kick this week. Yes, normally I do cook our meals but we’d fallen into a bit of a rut and it was the same ol thing time and time again. I mean, with my tummy troubles I do have to be careful what I eat, but still … unless I’m feeling really bad who says food has to be boring?

I once thought that I might become a professional chief. I enjoy cooking that much. Actually up until a month before my wedding I was going to cook the meal for oh … 150 guests! Right. I’m glad someone talked me out of that! Still I did manage to make the wedding cake and many of the pastries, deserts and finger foods.

Of course in those days we often had people over to our house each week for full dinners. Perhaps five nights a week we had guest and I’d make up seafood meals, Roast beef, marinated grape chicken and so on. I was right into the whole cooking thing. I thought of taking courses at the kitchen academy or another cooking school who’s name I’ve forgotten at this moment.

I grew tired of having guests over almost every night. It was my own fault of course because I was feeding them delicious meals. If you were the recipient of free and tasty meals would you stop dropping in? No I think not. I think we got out of that cycle by suddenly having other plans almost every day for several months in a row. It took a while to get out of that habit and train our friends out of dining at Cafe Tricia but it worked.

We still do have dinner parties, and our friends drop over several times a week, but not always for meals this time round. Most of our dinner parties begin about this time of year and slow down by mid-fall. We have the winter to ourselves for the most part before the entertaining season begins anew each year.

Do any of you enjoy cooking an entertaining as much as I have at times?

Dinner and a meeting

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Saturday night Chris and I got together with an advertiser that I’d done a post for earlier in the month. It turned out that he lived in the Toronto area, enjoyed my writing, and that he offered me a free lance job writing on his company blog a few times each week.

So Chris and I went to meet with him Saturday night and we had a great time. Paul’s a really nice guy and a very good cook. I must get some of the marinade that he used on the steaks that he served us. The steaks were nice and tender and had a mildly sweet honey taste to them. Mmmmm.

Paul has an electric and acoustic guitar so Chris entertained us here and there by playing some tunes on the guitar.

All in all it was a nice little get together and very nice for me since I don’t seem to get out much lately. I’ll let you know more about the blog that I’ll be writing on soon so that you can come and visit me there too if you’d like.

What did you do last weekend?

BTW very few of you guys clicked on the post that I did for Paul. Don’t some of you do some work in your homes? Redesign a room? Remodeling? Put in a new kitchen or bathroom? Don’t you want to win and earn $5000 that you could put towards your reno projects?

Since I might end up working for this company I can’t enter. I really want to enter though, because as you probably know we’ve got several ongoing reno projects and we’ve documented them from start to finish as we went.

Something for nothing

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Why do so many people expect something for nothing?

I had a very bad experience a couple of weekends ago. I’m not going to go into all the details. I’ll just say that I provide a free service to people and over the last few weeks I’ve gone around and asked for a little more feedback and participation and it just seems to have all backfired on me.

I actually got quite mean spirited comments and emails that basically wonder how I “dare” ask them to participate. Well … duh .. it’s one of the rules of the service that I’m providing.

It’s upsetting. I felt like shutting down the service that I’ve been offering for approximately 10 months, and when the comments started to get a bit nasty I even started to think, to hell with it. I felt like shutting down that website too.

The service that I’m providing is absolutely free yet it actually costs me a little bit of money to provide. Don’t I have a right to require that people follow the very lax rules?

I’m in a very people are assholes kind of mood as I write this. Hopefully that changes.

Then yesterday, one of the mailing lists I run broke out into flames over a non-list topic. It took me into today to settle the list down and get it back on track again. This again is yet another free service that I provide as I run four mailing lists.

On another forum that I was visiting between naps and bleary eyed wakefulness I theorized over something that might affect the sites terms of service and had my words twisted around by two people, one of them an employee of the company I was discussing. It made me feel like leaving that forum all together. I don’t want to do that though as I learn of interesting things on that site, get some help with my sites when I need it, and I also offer some help and advice to others from time to time there too.

I actually got up and checked my calender yesterday to find out if there was going to be a full moon. Honest. I mean when I work in the ER you wouldn’t believe the crazy stuff that happens on Full Moon nights. I figured that perhaps that phenomena had invaded the net too.

I get really frustrated when things like this happen. I put a lot of myself into the things that I do, and many of the things that I do I’ve created with the benefit of others in mind. I often don’t get all that much out of these things for myself (the mailing lists in particular). So when people start turning things around, blaming me for things, or begin to take advantage of the situation it just makes me so angry.

How about you? Do you ever do things for people and end up feeling like you’ve been taken advantage of? or perhaps like my experience yesterday, have a bunch of things that go wrong all at once?

WomanSavers – rate a guy and a whole lot more

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Ladies listen up! Have you visited WomanSavers.com yet? If you haven’t you should take a moment to visit this site that touts itself as the worlds largest database rating good and bad guys. Some of the articles are amazing!

If you aren’t into reading some of the very interesting listings about good and bad guys or adding your own worst boyfriend to the list, you can chat with other site members, take relationship quizzes, join in on relationship polls and play women’s cartoon relationship games, shop, or read and join in the conversations on the the sites forums.

Speaking of the message boards. There is a large forum section devoted to abused women, called “Abuse Help” where women being abused can talk to others who can help, or who can offer support. A number of resources for abused women are also listed.

Other topics in the message board are general issues and general discussions, Infidelity and catching a cheater. There’s also a section for men too, and I’ll bet the men reading this were feeling left out. Men can use the message board to talk with others and get relationship advice, ideas for the perfect gift for that special woman, or perhaps even get some advice as to what women consider the perfect date.

One thing that I really like about WomanSavers is that all proceeds generated through donations or sale of WomanSaver items are donated to abused women and children’s charities.

Check it out. I think many of you will enjoy this site.

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