Our Winnipeg Adventure, 2019 - Part 1 -- Driving

Hello everybody, welcome back!

So it has definitely been a little bit since I've last made a personal post about my life, but here we go with our Winnipeg Adventure. Now this adventure, while it was definitely important and a fun time, I did not feel like it was of so much importance that I need to go on for 10 or 15 posts about it like I am still working on doing with our 2018 Honeymoon Adventure. I still want to tell you all about what we did and what it's like out there compared to living here in Saskatchewan, but the occasion connected to the trip was of less importance than us getting married; we really just wanted to go on a family trip.

Some people may think the drive to a location is the most boring part, but I feel like the drive to and from places is part of the fun. I mean, it's about a five-hour drive to get there or back in one direction. So you definitely either need to find a way to make the drive itself into a fun activity or to enjoy the scenery along the way. Whenever we go on a long drive such as this Carley likes to have herself a nap, or watch movies downloaded onto her tablet, or listen to music or some combination of the above. I on the other hand... I'm usually the one who gets to drive most if not all of the way. Now before you complain about me getting the short end of the stick, having to drive so much while she has so much fun... at no point do I actually ask her to take over driving if I'm doing well and feeling good. Surprisingly, I actually enjoy doing most of the driving. Besides, while Carley is a fantastic driver, she doesn't like to drive in unfamiliar places... especially when those unfamiliar places generally tend to be busier than our lovely hometown of Moose Jaw.

I don't know what the traffic is like for all of you readers out there where you live, but where we live in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan the traffic is just not that busy. Really, the worst part about driving in our hometown is the parked cars on the street that make it difficult to see through. Other than that, you can get anywhere in the city you want by car in about 5 minutes... maybe 10 minutes on a slow day if you hit every single red light. I mean heck, you can pretty much walk / run from one end of Moose Jaw to the other in half an hour if you're determined. So let me tell you, driving around a larger place such as Winnipeg, Manitoba is quite a bit more stressful than driving at home. I find it absolutely crazy that driving from one place to another can take you up to an hour depending on where you're going and what the traffic is like; and all of that driving is done within the city. Thankfully we live in a world of GPS rather than paper maps so it is a lot easier to find our way around places than it would have been even just 10 years ago... With all the twists and turns and u-turns included in the GPS directions just to get from our pretty central apartment location to say... The Forks Market... I can't imagine trying to figure that out by paper.

Being around Winnipeg was strangely familiar in design and layout to other places we've been and other places we have lived such as Moose Jaw and Regina. A big difference between the small town living that we are used to compared to the larger places that we go to visit is that the parking everywhere there is paid parking for like a 2 hour time limit on it. Of course it could just be because we were basically situated downtown, or maybe it's just a thing that larger places have more paid street parking. Either way, we did learn the hard way that the street we decided to park on when we first arrived did not actually have unlimited parking after I think it was about 9 p.m.? As it turns out there was a little period of time between 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. if I remember correctly where there was no street parking allowed at all in that area because of rush hour traffic. Of course, we would have known that... if the location that we had parked had actually shown that on the sign; unfortunately the sign that we parked in front of was the only sign that did not show the time period where you could not park there. Luckily we had taken Isabelle's car seat into the apartment with us that night for the purpose of washing it out as best as we could because she spent the whole 5-hour drive there puking almost constantly because it was her first time having her car seat facing forward; it did not occur to us at all that she might get carsick on the way there. Turns out this was quite lucky because as we walked towards the location where the car should have been that morning... It wasn't there. So lucky us, on our first day there in the unfamiliar place of Winnipeg Manitoba we lost our car to a towing company because we parked in the wrong spot between 7 and 9 am; hooray for unexpected towing expenses!

Thankfully after a couple days we managed to find some nearby residential parking that did not have a time limit or needed to be paid for; it only required a short walk to and from the apartment we were staying at.

So there you go, and that is all there is to know about the fun we had when it came to driving around the city of Winnipeg. Join me next time for some information on the fun that we had with the events we were able to take part in while we were there.

~ Kyle Welykholowa


Back to Winnipeg Adventure

Being Sick SUCKS

Holy man, let me tell you guys, being sick SUCKS. It's hard to get a good night's sleep, difficult to get up in the morning with your perfectly wide-awake child, and the worst part is keeping yourself up and motivated to do things you know need to be done. Even washing the dishes feels nearly impossible when sick.

And it's all thanks to this little thing here:

I have never been sick so much in my life since Isabelle started going to daycare and now she happily brings home every bit of germs and sickness that she can and spews it everywhere either by coughing all over things, or in my face, or by putting her mouth all over the stuff that we touch all the time. On the bright side... I SHOULD (in theory) become a healthier person with her strengthening my immune system. On the other hand, I still have this cough that I haven't been able to get rid of since... I don't really remember anymore, it's been more months than I can think of. I just can't seem to stop coughing ALL THE TIME. Now there's probably something to do with "Kyle needs to drink more healthy liquid water with no sugar in it..." Or.... Uhh..... No, that's probably something to do with it. IT'S A WORK IN PROGRESS!

If that wasn't bad enough, in all the kerfuffle my wife got sick as well. Now, Carley getting sick is something that happens from time to time and I'm quite used to taking care of her including the additional requests when she's not feeling well, but something about this sickness was a little bit different than usual. I just couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew something wasn't quite right... is it true that she's really just that cranky and annoyed with everyone only because she's sick?

As it turns out we were hit with the unexpected inconvenience of Carley's doctor being away during the time when she needed to go in to renew her prescription for Concerta. If you don't know what Concerta is, it's a slow-release medication for ADHD which really helps her focus and not hate everybody. So because the doctor was away, we couldn't get her prescription renewed which meant she had to do without her medication for a week. Something we didn't expect which never occurred to use as a possibility is that she went through some withdrawal. As it turns out, taking Concerta daily doesn't make you think much about it other than notice how much it helps with day-to-day life, but quitting it cold-turkey actually causes a withdrawal period which would be similar (though likely not as bad) as quitting something like heroin so suddenly. Insane, right?

So needless to say, dear little Isabelle was happy as a clam the past week or so, Carley got sick and went through withdrawal which made her tired and want to stay in bed but also get out of the house because she couldn't stand anybody (while also needing to go out for a walk due to excessive energy levels), and I just held on to sanity while being sick and having to cater to the demands of two ladies who were so very in need... oh, and of course the dogs still needed to go out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in all day long again. No rest for the weary as they say.

Anywhos, now that I'm pretty sure I'm over the majority of being so very sick, and now that I've finished watching the Netflix show "Strong," I'm feeling much like I should start getting back into producing blog posts and new content to keep you all entertained. I have so much in my brain brain BRAIN, that I want to get out there and share with you all!

Keep an eye out for more stuff coming up very soon! ^_^

~ Kyle Welykholowa

I Lost My Job With HGS

So for those of you who aren't aware, I lost my job. Crazy, right? I know!

I've had a lot of time to reflect on things with all of this unexpected spare time I now have which as led me to come to some realizations about working from home: Though it is convenient to be able to work from home and not require a second car, the scheduling is quite difficult to deal with. When I first started working for HGS (or Rogers as per my position), the scheduling was fine. I was able to schedule myself for 12-hour days earning myself much overtime and giving myself more time to spend with Carley and Isabelle because I'd have three whole days off! Every once in a while things would change a bit with how much hours were offered, but for the most part it was pretty consistent; then things changed.

It was around December when things went sour for a bit with myself and Carley. Between December, January, and February I used up all of my sick days by being depressed and not wanting to go to work. You'd be surprised how much an event like that could make a person not want to work even when working is as easy as walking downstairs and sitting at a computer where you never meet a person face-to-face. Luckily I was able to get through that and there was still plenty of hours to work at the right times that I pulled through. Being able to schedule yourself for 12-hour days at that point is quite nice for dealing with a situation like that where you need as many days off as possible.

After that event everything was good again and continued on quite well up until Carley got her job. Now I was (and still am) quite proud that she managed to find a job working at a care home and found what it is that she wants to do with herself moving forward into the future career-wise. The hard part with that is transitioning into having two full-time working parties in a relationship; this wouldn't be so bad if there were no child involved, but we do have a lovely little girl to take care of as well. So our little Isabelle needed to be enrolled in full-time daycare and we had to coordinate ourselves to having Carley working evenings (right up until 11:00 PM) and getting Isabelle to daycare as early as possible the next day (6:45 AM) so that I could then work during the time she'd be at daycare and then be done in time to pick her up. Now that would be perfect if not for two problems...

1) I'd have to schedule myself to start at 6:30 AM to be "done" by 3:00 PM. Now when I say DONE, what I mean is, I'd be done *IF* I didn't get a phone call that would last beyond that time. Of course if you get a phone call, you can't just hang up on a person and that call could potentially go overtime by an hour or more if it was a customer with a lot of questions or possibly an angry customer who wanted escalate to a manager. Hence, I had to be "done" by 3:00 PM to ensure I would have enough time to go get Isabelle before daycare is closed.

2) The part where I had to schedule myself for 6:30 AM. Carley is sleeping because of how late she was working and then able to get to bed after finally getting home late at night, and daycare doesn't open until 6:45 AM. Now we did manage to transition into being able to deal with this with Carley able to get up to take Isabelle then come back and go back to sleep (naturally there would be a bit of an adjustment period when not being used to working shifts like this).

There was a bit of another problem as well which sort of started to come up, but we didn't quite get around to that before I was let go. Carley was hired to work evenings at her care home, but wasn't being given consistent days to work, her schedule came out late, and she was starting to get a couple random day shifts; not too much of a problem... except where I'm working 7 days a week early in the morning to fit in all my required hours and there's no daycare on weekends. See the problem with that? Not able to just leave Isabelle locked in her room for a few hours while she's awake, huh?

So they let me go because I missed enough days and was late enough times that they felt it necessary to do... followed by immediately posting jobs to hire more employees. Now... I understand what happened and that it's obviously not great to be late so often and miss so much work, but the combination of knowing that I put out good scores in my work each month (amazing scores even), but then they're fire me due to absence and then immediately want to hire more people... hurts a little. I'm alright with it, and I've certainly learned my lesson from it; we need to work together to make sure everything is covered between us and care for our child.

So... now we're here. I have no job right now. Little update on Carley is that she's now working a new job as a housekeeper at a hotel which is a bit less pay and a bit less hours, but it's CONSISTENT hours. You really don't realize how important it is to have such consistent hours as a parent until you start having two working persons, requiring daycare, and having to coordinate with each other to get everything to work properly.

Wish me luck everybody as I figure out what to do with myself and how to get there. There's much job-hunting going on and I'm looking to keep myself busy while keeping the house in order during the time that I have.

~ Kyle Welykholowa