I certainly don’t need any illegal and pricey drugs? My drug of choice is caffeine. I really didn’t think much about it until my Doctor recently told me that I should go without caffeine. I thought it would be easy. Well, let me tell you that it isn’t. This is my 10th day of being caffeine free, but it is definately my toughest day so far. Last week, I was on holidays, and didn’t even think of coffee until I drove past a Tim Horton’s. Today is my first day back to work, after my vacation. I sit within smelling distance of the coffee machine here. When the fresh pots are being brewed, I start salivating. I try to convince myself that I would rather have water, but who am I kidding. I want coffee. Let me rephrase that: I NEED COFFEE. It is now a force that is controling my life. With my web research, I have discovered that there is no such thing as caffeine free. All of these so called decaffeinated products still contain small amounts of caffeine in their contents. Tim Horton’s has an easy to read listing of caffeine content, so at least I can chose the lesser of the evils. I have decided that it is unhealthy for me to quit caffeine cold turkey, and have decided on the decaf route. I can easily forgo the other caffeine laced treats like sodas, chocolate and teas. Some prescription drugs even contain caffeine. In the end, all is can say is make mine a “Large Decaf with 1 milk & 1/2 a sugar“.

The kids and I are off to West Edmonton Mall this weekend.  My kids have seen so much of the world, but I find it funny that I have never taken them to Edmonton.  My daughter who is 13 years old, is a dedicated shopper, and is anxious to visit every single store in the mall.  My son however, who is 18, has little desire to shop, so he will no doubt hang out in the amusement park or the water park.  I know we will all eventually meet up.  With over 800 stores, I had better wear comfy shoes.  There are all sorts of activities that we can do while we are they also.  We can play ”glow in the dark mini-golf” or just regular mini golf if we desire.  We can even swim with the Sea Lions.  I have done the “Dolphin Swim” in the past, so I will most likely fore go this event, but we will definitely have a look at it.  Sea Lions have really big teeth, which makes this far less appealing to me. 

After we are done with Edmonton, we are going to do a loop back to our home in Calgary and visit a few more places.  We are going to spend a few days in beautiful Jasper Alberta.  My kids have never been here before either.  It amazes me that they have traveled all over North America, but have seen so little of Alberta.  Well, it is time I change this.  There is so much to see in this beautiful province, that I am sure we will enjoy our little “stomp” around Alberta.

I was away camping on the weekend, and suffered my first ever “Vertigo” attack.  It was a strange feeling, not being able to walk a straight line while completely sober.  We were sitting around the campfire on Sunday evening when I first noticed the vertigo.  It hit me just as I stood up after sitting for about 1/2 an hour.  I just about fell into the fire.  I thought I had just tripped, but then found I couldn’t walk without weaving.  At this point I started feeling nauseous and thought I should just go lie down in bed.  Everything is great when I am horizontal, and I have no symptoms whatsoever.  But the moment I stand or sit up, my world starts spinning.  I knew that I had to improve, as I was in no shape to drive the 4 hours home yesterday.  I decided to leave my tent trailer at Wasa Lake, and have my friends 16 year old son drive me home.  It was fun hanging out with him, and he did a great job of driving.  Today I am pleased to say, my symptoms are less, but still evident.  Hopefully this will be a short lived event.

Most people define a disaster as something that affects just them:

• A broken fingernail,
• A fender bender,
• A missed promotion or,
• A pimple may qualify,.

Public disaster definitions may include:

• 911 the Twin Towers Disaster,
• The Sinking of the Titanic,
• The Hindenburg dirigible explosion,
• JFK’s assassination.

I suggest the truth for most of us is somewhere in between:

Ø       The loss of a relative,

Ø       The loss of a business,

Ø       A marriage breakup,

Ø       Serious injury or illness for ourselves or a loved one.

Of these, the loss of a business is probably the only one we can prevent.

I lost a business once and in hindsight it was totally unnecessary. It was a viable, very successful business, growing, profitable and I lost it. Why? Well almost without exception, financial advisors, bankers, and accountants will use terms like; “lack of financial controls”, “inadequate capitalization”,  “unrealistic sales forecasts”, etc.  However that type of advisor rarely has started or held the ultimate responsibility for managing a business and that lack of first hand experience makes their opinion lack value. Or that I value anyway. The “why” was my fault as I failed to follow a principle that my business was based on (preventive maintenance of computers) well duhh! I failed to meet my primary responsibility of protecting my business by failing to anticipate and plan on avoiding any and all disasters!

I’ll come back to “why” in a minute; first let me tell you “how”. My business was a computer service. The computer service industry is one where “the only constant is change”. So one year end when we were completing our financials, our accountant recommended we significantly write down the value of our parts inventory as recent changes in our service offerings had reduced the value of the parts. A simple accounting change that did not have much impact on our bottom line.

Wrong!

Our loan manager at our bank freaked! Her position was that as the parts inventory was a significant asset in support of our loan, we had “torpedoed her!” We met with her and her boss and managed to successfully resolve the problem with an accelerated payment plan.

Wrong!

A week later the bank called our loan.  O.K. lets deal with that. As we were sorting out our new plan and budget to pay the called bank loan, we addressed the fact that we were slightly behind on our submissions of employee withholding to Canada Revenue Agency (nothing new, we had been operating this way for years and CRA had always been co-operative). So we met with CRA explained the bank situation and presented CRA with our plan to pay them up to date and they accepted it – no problem.

Wrong!

The next day CRA faxed out a demand to all of our customers to remit all payments due to our company directly to CRA!

Payday was 2 days later & we were dead! We were totally unaware that CRA had just lost a court battle with our bank to establish who had first dibs on the assets of a company that had failed. So CRA covered their butt, by instigating a proactive strike by scooping up our cash before the bank.

This was my disaster defined. If I had been thorough in preventing, planning for and avoiding the issues that triggered this disaster it could have easily been avoided. So I learned a very painful lesson that to avoid a business disaster you must:

Ø       Research thoroughly (What happens if),

o        There is a fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, major power outage?

o        How about a postal strike, a serious flu epidemic, a death or incapacitation of a key employee, a labour dispute?

o        What is the impact of the loss of a key contract or customer, or the technology shifts and some of your processes are suddenly obsolete?

o        Or your IT hardware fails and you lose your data and/or you attempt to reinstall from your backup tape or disc system and the data is not all there.

o         What if the bank calls your loan ?

Ø       Determine what needs to be addressed,

Ø       Identify the mitigation of risks through redundant systems (two banks instead of one), (backup and insurance of key staff), etc.

Ø       Ensure you have the best data backup for your computer (and test it)

Ø       Develop and implement full disaster avoidance and recovery plans.

There is an old saying, “Defining the problem takes you 50% of the way to solving it!”

This is especially true in “Disaster definition” and the design, implementation and maintenance of your Disaster Avoidance Plan.

I apparently am really good at thinking of ideas at the last minute.  I am an avid gardener, and pay a small fortune for the flowers I plant.  They are all so beautiful, sitting on and around my deck.  With Calgary having such a short growing season of only 115 consecutive frost free days in the average year, I am only able to enjoy my flowers for a short time.  My other summer enjoyment, is getting away from the city.  The problem is that I have to rely on my neighbourhood kids to come and water my plants.  Needless to say, when I come home from vacation, there are always tragedies awaiting me in my backyard.  Last year alone, I lost 80% of my plants while I was on my 2 week summer vacation.  The real injustice came later that day when i realized that I still had to pay the inept teenager who looked after my yard and cat (Luckily, the cat fared better than the plants).  To alleviate this from ever happening to me again, I thought I would purchase a deck watering system from my favorite store, Lee Valley.  I thought I would have this thing up and running in a few hours.  This however was not the case.  Besides continually running out of parts (poor planning on my part), and having problems with my timer on my water lines, this project has become all consuming.   I am under the crunch because I am going away this weekend, and do not want to risk the loss of plant life with the teenagers looking after my yard.  I am hopeful that my next blog will not be on the death of plants.

One of my favourite weekends is happening this coming weekend.  I get to have a little mini-vacation out to beautiful Wasa Lake, BC.   Actually it will be a good test for me with my recent purchase.  I bought a used Coleman tent trailer.  For you people east of Alberta, I have been told that you call them “Pop-Up” trailers.  I haven’t taken it out yet, and am slightly worried about how my vehicle will handle this heavy tent trailer in the mountains.  My SUV is rated for 3500 lbs towing capacity, and my tent trailer is 3200 lbs.  I took the trailer to the weigh scales just south of my home, so I know for sure how much it weighs.  With the added weight of food and cooking/tableware supplies, I am sure that I will be close to the 3500 lb limit.  I have done all of the prep work however.  The bearings have been done, the brakes have been serviced, tire pressure checked, and I had new chains installed.  I also had to make some changes to my vehicle to accept this new trailer.  I needed to install a 7 prong plug for the lights, as my vehicle only had the straight 4 prong system.  I had also scheduled my vehicle in with the Ford dealership to have a transmission cooler installed, and was surprised to learn that newer Ford vehicles have these already built into the air-conditioning unit.  I called 3 different Ford dealerships, as I wanted to make sure that this was the correct information I was being given.  Nothing is worse than breaking  down on your holidays.  I am hopeful of an uneventful drive, great weather and good times with my family and friends.  Have a great weekend yourself!

5 months ago, I ordered some chairs from Costco.  I love using Costco for online shopping, as they have selections that they don’t offer in the stores.  I saw these chairs, and fell in love with them, so I proceeded to order them.  I knew it was a 2-3 week delivery window, which I was fine with.  Costco contacted me shortly after the order, and said the manufacturer has delayed their shipping date to May 1st, as they were behind in production.  May 1st came and went, and I followed up with Costco again.  I understand this was not Costco’s fault, as the problem is at the manufacturing end.  Costco has been treating me great and contacted the manufacturers again on my behalf, and was told that delivery wouldn’t happen until July.  Well hooray, I just got notification that they are being delivered on Wednesday.  That’s the good news, the bad news is that they are now being delivered to my OLD employer.  The manufacturer, would not alter my shipping address.  Luckily, I am still on great terms with my old employer, and they have no problem storing the furniture for me until I can pick it up.  I just wish they would deliver them directly to my home, or my new employer Toggle Networks.  Now my next challenge is getting them to fit into my new car, as I just sold my truck, plus,  my family is currently on holidays  right now, so it is up to me to move the furniture into the house.  Timing is everything, and apparently, my timing sucks!  Ha Ha. 

Thanks for reading………

Cheers, Nelle

I am excited to say that I have finally been given an opportunity to venture into a new and exciting career opportunity.  For the past few decades (I won’t tell you how many!), I have been a dental assistant,  dental administrator, and finally ended up being an area manager, managing 4 dental practices at one time.  I can speak great “dentalese“, but have now entered the world of IT.  Although the IT language still perplexes me at times, I love the challenges this opportunity has presented. 

I was surprised to learn on my first day of work at Toggle, that all of the data backup I had been doing within all of my dental companies was ineffectual.   I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent doing daily back ups (first with tapes and then CD’s), and even using a dental software recommended automated system.  I thought that I had protected my dental practices sufficiently, but in fact I had not, as most of my data I had backed up would not be retrievable.   One of my old dental offices has already signed up with my new company Toggle Networks.

Signed, the ever hopeful to one day being an IT Wiz,

Nelle