Silly contest at work

At work this week, we were informed of a new contest between departments. The department who gets the most calls to corporate about how good they did, gets a free steak dinner. The department who gets the least, has to cover the other department while they go to dinner.

What they want us to do, is hand out a card to every customer and ask them to call head office and tell them how great we did today. Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? I am not going to hand a card to a customer and beg them to call and tell some people how good I was. If they want to do that on their own, that's fine. I will not solicit a customer to try and make myself look good. If I was in a store shopping, and someone came up to me asking the same thing, I would feel very awkward. I would likely not call at all, and I may not go back to that store again for a while because that employee put me on the spot.

This is really one step further than being expected to leave a tip when you go to dinner. It is supposed to be a courtesy thing based on how well you did. We get so many customers that some of them may call anyway, or tell their friends to come shop here since we were so good. This is the real goal, not telling our "parents" how good we are behaving at work. That won't get us more business.

With any luck however, I will be gone from this retail working environment within the next year and my wife and I will be free of this kind of thing.

I Love Spring!

Today, it was a very warm day here in Texas. It was about 76 degrees F (or 24 degrees C). Back home where I am from in Canada, it was 54F (or 12 degrees C). Not a bad day for Toronto, but I love the warmth here.

Back up north, spring wasn't officially well underway until late March or Early April. Sometimes it was not even feeling like spring until May. Here it is already in full swing. The grass is turning green again, flowers are showing up in gardens, some trees have begun to bud. Life is returning to the plants and it puts a great smell in the air that is not present during the winter.

People were coming in all day at work commenting on how great it felt outside. Contractors can finally start to get some work done and it is putting them in better moods. This is good because I have to deal with them all day.

I am hoping the spring has some good storms hiding in it this year as last year, the spring was lacking in interesting weather. It cam for a few days at the end of the spring, including a big hailstorm, but that was all, and the summer was HOT.

This weekend, the clocks go ahead an hour, which means I lose an hour of my weekend. Sucks, but at least the sun will be setting after 7:30pm once again. The only thing I am not looking forward to right now is I am going to have to cut the grass this weekend. Ah well.

Spring has finally arrived?

Finally, after an unusually harsh winter for North Texas, it looks like the cold and snow has finally ended for this season. With spring officially only a couple of weeks away, we have started with much warmer temperatures and the long range keeps us in the warmer trend.

I have a feeling the grass and trees will spring back to life fairly quickly since I think they have been waiting for this weather.

Business is picking up at work also, very suddenly, with more and more people wanting to get out and do some spring work. The beginning of March is what our store terms the "100 days of hell". This means that spring is the busiest time of the year for us, and for the next 100 days, we will go through a LOT more selling, restocking, cleaning, moving things around, than we do at any other time of the year. Working in a hardware store, spring is big business.

I am glad spring is really starting to come in now, as I was getting tired of the cold. Now I am really looking forward to the beginning of the storm season here in the southern plains of the USA. I love a good thunderstorm. hopefully with my new work schedule, with only working till 2pm, I will get off work before most of the "fun" weather starts up in the day. Time will tell, but if we get anything interesting, or drastic, I will be sure to report on it here.

Network Marketing and Making Money Online

When I was younger, somewhere in my teens, I was interested in trying to make money in some other way than going to work every day.

I found that some websites that let you get a free domain also had a way to sign up for putting ads on your website and getting paid if people clicked and bought something from them. I was a newbie at this, so I decided to sign up and try it out. I put ads everywhere I could find to check out my "shopping website". I put banner ads all down the page and hoped for the best, but my traffic never did any good. People don't want to visit a website that has nothing but banner ads on it, unless you have some kind of hook, so I gave up on this project.

A few years later, my best friend told me he had found a program called Quixtar and said it was a way to get yourself a better income. After learning all about it, I decided to give it a try. The problem was my parents were able to buy many of the things Quixtar sold at much cheaper prices in the store. Another problem was they only shipped the products once a week and not even to your house unless you made a certain amount of money per month with them. I never renewed my membership because it was starting to cost me more money than I could afford.

Many years went by without me getting into any more programs. Going to school full-time and working part-time to pay for it didn't leave me much time for this kind of thing.

After I met the love of my life and moved to Texas to be with her, things started to change a bit. within a couple of years of being here, the economy started getting worse and worse. Her job was affected and we started to realize that normal work was no longer a secure way of providing for your family. For years, people would tell you network marketing was a waste of time because it was not secure work. It depended on how many other people you could get to join you. "Working a 9-5 job full-time is the only way to live your life and be secure" is the mindset of many people in the world. This economic problem proved that was no longer true. People with established careers were being laid off by the millions. We needed another way to do this.

Last year, we started looking into ways of making money online. My wife came across many programs and some were not good for us. Some of them had sneaky ways of being sure you got charged more money before you could react to it. We kept on digging around though for the perfect program.

We tried iJango, but because the founder had such a bad history, the company was failing miserably. It was a good idea, but the leadership just was not there.

In August last year, we shifted to Peoplestring. This has so far has been the best program we signed up for. We have been disappointed in the lack of communication from the head office in what is going on with the business, but they do pay when they are supposed to. Promises of the program kept going unfulfilled, but at least we were able to make some money. We still have high hopes for Peoplestring but we realize it may take longer than we need it to get going full swing.

Through Peoplestring, we met some amazing leaders. These guys know the ins and outs of network marketing and opened our eyes to many ways of making it work. They have become good friends of ours and have helped us at every turn on how to make this work. My wife is working this stuff full-time, when she is able to, and I am working full-time at my job and taking care of things so she can get this working for us. We are hoping within a year, we will be done with the J.O.B. lifestyle and we will be our own bosses, financially free.

The team we are with is called Team IMG, which stands for "Insomnia Marketing Group". Right now we are pushing 2 programs, TrafficWave and LGN Prosperity. These 2 companies have a long track record of being true to their word and our team is growing very rapidly, so we think this could finally be the answer we have been searching for.

If you want a way to get out of your J.O.B. and be your own person, check us out, we are there all the time to help anyone who needs it, new or experienced in network marketing.

This link is the way into our team. Check out what we offer, and enjoy life for once, the way we were meant to enjoy it.

Click here: TrafficWave

Winter 2010 continues for Texas

Yesterday, we got yet another winter storm for our area. This makes 4 snowstorms for an area that is usually lucky to get 1 per year. Must be that global warming *rolls eyes*.

We got another 2-3 inches of snow yesterday here. It was hard to tell exactly how much we received because much of it melted before the storm was actually over. Schools remained open but that was because it never really accumulated on the roads, just the grass.

Here is some quick video I took of the white landscape outside our house here in Granbury Texas.

So far this season we have gotten about 12-13 inches of snow, which is basically unheard of here in North Texas. I am glad the children got to experience this because they may never see this kind of thing again in their lifetimes.

We are hoping this was the last time it will snow here this year, because many of us are ready for it to start warming up again now. I have a feeling though that this year may be a bit cooler than usual, which is not unwelcome news since we had many days above 100 degrees last year during the summer. Time will tell, but I'll be sure to update here as we get further into the year.

I just hope we get a good storm season this spring. Last year was slow to start.

Taste of Spring, then Winter continues...

This has been a very unusual winter for us here in North Central Texas. It has been colder, and more snow than any winter in recent memory for this region. I have been here for almost 4 years so far and I can already tell this is not a normal pattern.

This evening, we have a bit of a taste of spring coming in the form of thunderstorms. This is the kind of weather I love to experience. It's entertaining and fun to watch the progression of the storms here in Texas. This is my passion for weather. Normal rain is boring to me, unless it is very heavy, or you add some lightning and thunder.

After this event this evening, it will be cooler again and by Tuesday, we have yet another risk of accumulating snows. It is a very good chance this time from a few days ahead, which is not normal since it is very tricky to predict snow in this area. A difference of a few miles could mean a couple of inches or not one flake of snow. We are border lined with the precipitation.

It will probably be a much lighter dusting of snow this time around compared to the several inches we got a week ago, but in this area of Texas, we normally get 1 snowfall per winter, and this one will make it 4 times, all spread out from Christmas Eve, to late February. We are all hoping this will be it, because spring is so close, but maybe this is indicating a cooler spring ahead, who knows?

The weather service has already issued a special statement to prepare people for what is coming. 2 inches of snow here in Texas, is like 10 inches in the northern states. It can shut things down very easily. We will have to wait and see what happens in the next couple of days. I will report back here with the way it all unfolds. Stay tuned!

Sometimes I get so tired

My life right now has its ups and downs. Right now, I probably have one of the best schedules at work, but many times i just wish I could sleep in. My shift is 5am-2pm Monday through Friday. Weekends and evenings off. This may not seem like something so special, but this is in a "big-box" retail store. Most people have rotating schedules, but mine is consistent. It lets me enjoy my family since now I am home when they are home.

My one good day to sleep in is now Saturday. Sunday I try to get up earlier, so I can be more ready to sleep Sunday night. Getting up at 4am for work means going to bed by 9:30 pm. My whole life so far I haven't had to go to sleep so early every day. I guess I am getting ready for retirement, when it's early to bed and early to rise hehe. It is very hard for me to go to sleep by 9:30pm. This leaves me a bit more tired each day and by Friday, by around 8pm I am ready to crash. It's a price to pay, but the evenings and weekends off deal is way too good to change things around. This is the kind of schedule I have been wanting for a long time now, so I can be home when family is home. I can live with being a little more sleepy each evening if it means being with my wife.

Family is all we truly have in life, enjoy it!