Montreal Parking Meters SUCK!!!

I'm currently downtown waiting for the others to show up to practice improv the summit on Saturday and I'm totally bummed! I had the chance to use my brother's car ro drive downtown but unfortunately I got to learn how shitty the meters here are!

First I put in 1.25 and it gave me about 25 minutes. I went to get 5 loonies and went back. I added 3 loonies and it only gave me an hour! Then I thought maybe I needed to do something special to add time to what I already put in and I hit cancel.

That was the worst mitake.

Not only did I soon discover that no matter what it would just reset what I already paid for, it DIDN'T give me back the 3$ I just spent. So I put in 2$ more and only got 40 minutes! Now I have no change... BOO!

Is it like this elsewere because this really sucks...

The fun side of an (semi) unemployed person

Yes I've been looking for a job but that hasn't stopped me from having FUN!

In the past month or so I've gone out at least once a week. At the beginning of the month I partook in Vaganza 7 and it was awesome! I stood up the whole 24 hours and performed improv almost every second hour.

With work, I went to a sugar shack a few weeks ago. I volunteered to watch a couple of kids from a community church while they were bused to a sugar shack for the first time. I had 3 kids, 2 girls and 1 boy and they behaved greatly (both girls were 11 and the boy 8). It reminded me of the time I worked at Sunny Acres Day Camp. There was a part when the kids were entertained by a guy singing who was teaching them songs to sing and dances to dance. I participated as well and realized I was the only adult having as much (or more) fun then most of the kids.

Two weekends ago, I went out with my friend Emilie. I hadn't hung out with her in ages. We went to see this show spearheaded by Jason Bajada. I never heard of him but he was one of Emilie's favorite musicians and the show was quite good and chill to listen to.

Last week I went bowling with a bunch of people at Sharkx. I actually
bowled pretty damn well. In my second game I got a turkey (3 strikes) and scored a total of 164.

This past weekend was also loads of fun. Saturday was not only St. Patricks day but it also happened to be Aurit's birthday. The night started with dinner at 3 Amigos with a whole bunch of her friends followed by drinking at Thursday's.

Yesturday I went skiing for the first time in 3 years. I went with my brother Lorne and my friend Arvind. We went to Mont Broment and it rocked! I had SO much fun and the view was beautiful. The weather wasn't too cold, it was icy but there was also lots of soft snow and we skied from late afternoon well into the evening (9pm) so we got a bit of day and night skiing in.

Who says you can't have fun when you're not working?

Life of the (semi) unemployed

As most of you know, I graduated from a Graphic Design program in December 2006. I still work at Old Navy part time and have been spending my free time looking for a professional job. By "looking for a professional job" I mean "kinda sort of" looking.

I will admit I have been putting in more effort than before. I joined 2 organizations that aid in teaching skills to help find jobs. Both of them have excellent workshops I've attended and I have a counselor in both who also give great advice. I have about 4 websites I check for job postings and have been sending out my resume a few times a week. I even cut my days available at Old Navy so I could spend more time concentrating on the job hunt. I fixed up my resume and even printed some business cards.

I'm also building a website for the improv summit happening this saturday (March 24th) - http://improvsummit.com
It's not finished yet but when it's complete I'll have something non-school project to put in my CV.

Although I've done all these things it doesn't seem like it's enough. I still need to put my portfolio on the web, make my CV more graphical (it's only in word format now), start researching for companies in the field and start concentrating on cold calling. Cold calling is basically calling a company without knowing the person you are going to talk to. The whole point isn't to call asking for a job but just to learn more about the company/industry. The outcome to put your name out there while also discovering more about what it's like to work in that field.

I will admit I've been a bit distracted as of late (for example I didn't do anything this morning because I went skiing yesterday and I'm completely exhausted).

I'm going to keep trying to update this blog but as you can tell the posts are more spaced out. That's because lately I find it so hard to be structured while not having a concrete schedule, which hopefully will occur in teh next month or so.

Vaganza 2007 - 24+ hours later

Vaganza is OVER! It started yesturday at 12pm and concluded today at 12pm. Due to a meeting I had with a counselor at JEM, and partly due to the snow "storm" we had, I was only able to make it to Vaganza at 12:30pm. After a quick bite, my first performance was at 1pm.
For the most part, until 7pm, there were probably at most 5-10 people in the audience who were not improvers. At 7pm, Uncalled For, the first special guest, took the stage and the audience had definitely grown to 20-30 people. This stayed like so for most the night, with some traffic of people coming and going. 3am marked lock-down with this years theme being After maybe 4am, all the audience members left and remained that way until 11am where a whopping 2 people showed up. It sucks that we had such a a bad turnout due to the bad weather.

In the end, we all had fun, I managed to stay awake the whole time (by 5-6am I was having a great difficulty doing so) and we raised about 200$.

For pictures click HERE!

After Vaganza I went for lunch with my mom in which I found myself blacking out mid-sentence several times. I promise never to make fun of my dad again (who has a sleeping problem).

Until next year!

Also, don't forget the OTHER big improv event: IMPROV SUMMIT! It's on the Saturday, March 24th. Universities involved include Carleton, McGill, U de M and UQAM.