Happy Easter!

Yesterday, my family and I went to a family reunion / Easter Get-together just north of Weatherford Texas.

The weather was perfect, some sun and clouds and 80 degrees, light winds. It was a good day. We had a lot of food there and there was an egg hunt for the kids afterwards. Many people I don't even know were there as well. This is all my mother-in-law's side of the family and this event happens once a year on the same weekend.

Scott, my wife's grandson, and mine too, benefits the most from this. He is 7 years old and Easter is a fun time for him, with all the candies and treats. I remember what it was like when I was young, with the egg hunt in the house and chocolate bunnies.

To me now, just like Christmas, these are holidays that are meant for spending time with family. Enjoying what you have in life, because there is nothing more important to have than family. You could be the richest person in the world, but if you don't have family at your side, it all means nothing. I am just very thankful that my schedule improved at work, because now I can enjoy these times more in the way they were meant to be enjoyed.

The next step for my wife and I, is to have our own working schedule, and center work around our life, instead of our life around work. This time is not far away.

Event at Work

Today at work we got to celebrate a good year last year. In our Customer Focus program, we finished 8th place in the district in 2009. This meant we got to have a car give-away and a bit of a lunch party.

The car is a brand new Chevy car or truck. I think it's a 2010 model, loaded. The way it works is they draw 10 names of workers in the store, they all go up on a stage. Then, those 10 people have their names drawn again, and whoever is left up there at the end, wins the vehicle. It's not bad odds, with basically a 10/100 chance of your name being called, and about a 1/100 chance of winning. My name was not called unfortunately, but the girl who won this year, deserved it in my opinion. She has had a tough time the last couple of years with her life, so it made me feel good that someone won who deserved it.

The downside to this is the whole lead-up to the event. The entire district management staff comes to the store and does a "walk" before the fun. This means, for the last few days, they have been driving everyone crazy with cleaning up the store to perfection. Our store looks better than most other stores in our area, but it's never good enough. I am just glad I don't have to close anymore. Last night, they were there until about 1am, when the store closes at 10pm. I have done that before, and I am very glad that I don't have to again.

All-in-all, it was a good day and everyone had fun.

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.