Zombie Thumb

Image from Pixabay

Turning the sign board at work the other day didn't go so well for me. A screw had fallen out of the frame and I wasn't being careful enough. Pinched my thumb in there but good. Going to loose the thumbnail. Hurt a great deal at the time and cost me a little bit of blood. Very minor but ugly injury.

In New Brunswick it is wise to always fill out an on the job accident report, because the government medical system won't pay for the costs if it goes bad and it wasn't reported properly. We taped it up, put a finger cot on it and went back to work. If I thought it was ugly when I did it, it looked a whole lot worse when Francine and I unwrapped it that evening to clean and redress it. The thumbnail and the surrounding skin turned several shades of purple. The rest of my protected thumb was sealed up in its own juices and the skin absorbed a lot of moisture. It looked very dead.

I of course showed it to my youngest son Wesley who doesn't have a sympathetic bone in his body for his old dad. I told him I had a zombie thumb and asked him if he thought it would heal or it would slowly take over my whole body turning me into a zombie. He just laughed and laughed.

I decided against posting a picture of it. I don't write horror.

Epic Water Shot

I was waiting for inspiration this morning and Jassi my co-worker gave it to me. I asked her what kind of sauce was in one of the squeeze bottles. She took it from my hand, accidentally gave it a squeeze and shot herself right in the face with a blob. I laughed so hard.

That reminds me of a few great moments like that on the job. My all time favourite has to the sprinkler system test accident. Co-worker Matt was my unfortunate victim.

As a lead hand working on the college landscaping department, one of my responsibilities was to make sure the automatic sprinkler systems were functioning correctly. I'd briefly turn on each system from the control box and checked them out.

This particular day my job was complicated by some recent construction work. They dug a hole next to the controller and accidentally cut all wires. They were nice and spliced them all back together – in a scrambled sort of way. It took us awhile to figure out which system was associated with which dial position. I turned on my test and walked over for a look and the system wasn't on. Then I had a horrible thought. Matt was cutting the front lawn at the time. I ran to have a look and sure enough I got him. Oddly though he was making effort to stay dry. I ran back the controller to shut the water off and then back to Matt to try and apologize without laughing too much.

Turns out the pop up sprinkler head came up right under the push mower Matt was operating. The mower sheared it off. When Matt pushed past the broken water line it squirted him right in the crotch. I could not have planned that. To hide the embarrassing wet spot he walked around until he was all wet, not just that spot on his pants.

Article Writing Success

First tablet article was a complete success. I'm very pleased with the  situation and myself. Figured out everything necessary to accomplish this with equipment that I have.

Challenge number one was to satisfy my cheapskate self. There is Microsoft Office is available on my tablet but it is only a ninety day trial. I use Open Office for free on my laptop. I did a search on Google for an android version of that software. It doesn't work perfectly but it gets the job done.

Figuring the basic features out was a bigger challenge. I wrote my first tablet blog post without knowing how to get it posted. Even with help from the younger generation transfering the text over to blogger was a puzzle. I stumbled on how to highlight the text and from there I was able to copy and paste it over. Along the way found out how to move the cursor around. Editing text has as a result become a great deal easier.

One thing I'd really like would be able to somehow use predictive text within this wordprocessing software. I will search online for that when it crosses my mind and I have Internet access.

Until I càn afford an external keyboard, I get practice writing with my thumbs. I've a shown significant improvement but I'm not very efficient. I am pleased though that writing with this is possible to the point of being practical.

I'm sure my learning how to take a selfie with this thing is a horrifying development for my readers in itself.

Writing Practice On the Road

Learning to make better use of the technology in my hands. Making an awful lot of mistakes along the way. Typing with my thumbs on a tablet is a new skill for me.

The objective is to be able to write articles and other things on here while travelling. A kind of mini writing office I could even use on a bicycle trip. It may take a few days for me produce something worth posting to one of my blogs.

One of my discoveries is that the bold/italic/underline part of this program doesn't work right. Better to just stay away from it for now. The only other issues I've had are my lack of skill. The space bar is really c!ose to the button to minimize the screen. I've already lost count on how many times I've made that mistake.

I started this in the crew room at work, accidentally erased my work once and now I'm in a waiting room giving Francine the silent writer treatment. I'll probably finish at work again.

The biggest question now is can I post this along with a selfie from work on the free wifi there. For my not so technically savvy self, that is the challenge.

Weird Day

Yesterday and overnight we were buried by yet another blizzard. That is why I'm not at work and neither are any of the boys. The Internet is working more miss than hit. I've been trying to upload the above picture for a new customer service story collection on Hubpages. I'm giving it another shot as I write this. I'm surprised it loaded up here. Francine and I staged this one. She is supposed to be looking shocked at where a customer service representative just transferred her.

My great accomplishment of the day is repairing, at least temporarily, my broken snowshoe. I spliced in some tin from a tuna style chicken can. I'm sure it will fatigue and break after awhile but for now it's usable. Important right now because we have so much snow that our hydro poles look significantly shorter.

More writing to do before the day is out whether I can use the Internet or not. Hopefully we can saw the magic words that will inspire our provider to solve the problem.

Hooray the picture is on Hubpages now. Four more pictures to go before it is ready to be published. Not sure that will happen today but fear not progress is being made.

Advertising Going Forward

Since yesterday I've had a chance to clear my head concerning my advertiser disappointment. It is a setback but not really a disaster. To date that was nothing more than potential because I hadn't gotten any sales through them yet anyway. I'm still learning and the lessons learned will make my efforts better in the future.

I will likely sign up to be an Amazon affiliate again in the future. I learned how to work with their ads and their system. Future efforts will take a lot less effort than the first time around. There are some prerequisites on my end though. First we have to get our Internet provider to give us a stable connection. This winter has been horrible and right now there is obviously something wrong with it again. I can barely do anything online. I am hoping that I won't have too much difficulty posting this and posting links on social media. I'm not sure how long it will take for them to make repairs. I'm not optimistic from past history. Once that's fixed I still have to have a block of time where I can reset everything up within a couple of days. I want my full 180 day second shot.

One thing that disappoints me with Amazon is that I can only serve Canadian readers. That is slightly less than twenty percent of my readership. More than half my readers are in the USA. I get a significant amount of traffic from the UK as well. It'd be nice to have something that is useful to those readers. Besides that I get traffic from all over the world and sometimes they do respond to ads. I've earned a few pennies from readers as far away as Japan and Argentina. I wish Amazon would set things up so that I could earn from everyone's legitimate interest.

If my traffic remains stable I should continue to make five bucks per month through another advertiser. I will do a little optimizing to see if those will perform better. Apparently I haven't got them in ideal spots. Not too worried about it at this point. That's five bucks per month I wasn't earning last month. Continued growth would mean an increase there as well.

My big hope is to find an affiliate program for bike parts that would enhance Pico's Cycling first and foremost. I struck out with Bike Nashbar in the USA which really disappointed me. They would be almost ideal. I also struck out with Black Dog Bikes in the UK. Well maybe I struck out or maybe they just ignored me. They didn't respond to my effort to sign up. At any rate the quest continues.

The picture above reminds me of warmer weather. Moncton announced in the paper recently that the snow accumulation this winter is a record 147 cm. The old record was 109 cm in 2011. More than 400 cm have fallen which is double the normal winter snowfall.

Frustrating Setback

Chose the picture because of the evil grimace. Had an advertiser pull out on me and it hasn't left me very happy. Not all is lost but it hasn't put me in much of a writing mood. I can re-sign up with them later but I have to remove and or redo all the existing ads already on all my sites - as if I haven't got enough to do. What probably got my goat the most was the condescending email they sent me, inviting me to re-sign up when I start getting consistent site traffic. Well, I am getting consistent traffic and consistent growth in that traffic.

I first took out some of my frustration on wood with my splitting axe. After that I cranked up an old offline medieval warfare game, we have on our computers. I beat up on the toughest computer character I've had to deal with to date. The game is called Stronghold Crusader. I honestly thought Richard the Lion Hearted was supposed to be the toughest but I took care of him some time ago. His castle isn't that tough to breach. The Wolf on the other hand knows how to build a defensive castle. He's the only character that has been able to hold off my initial assault. He really didn't have anything left though, when I stripped my castle of defenders and brought in a second wave. It was a blood bath, but I do feel better. Maybe next time I'll try to defeat him with a little more finesse. The only enemy I haven't fought yet is Saladin and Wesley's beaten him before. He has his strengths but I don't think I'll have any trouble.

Tomorrow I get up and go back to work at my writing and everything else I'm doing.