Still alive!

[Cayden]

Hey everyone. It's been quite a while since I checked in here. Figured I'd drop by and say 'hello'.

I've been up to a lot recently. I recently started a crowdfunded campaign (Link withheld in case it's seen as advertising) so that's been keeping me busy as of late. Other than that I've also taken up writing fanfiction, for those of you who do not know what fanfiction is, it's basically home made fan versions of a game, movie, TV show, comic, etc.

There has also been some bad news, I've very recently been laid off from work - but there's some good news for that too. My provincial government provides money (not a loan) for laid-off workers or workers on employment insurance, so that I can take two years of college or university for free. That is absolutely fantastic because supporting my mother and paying for tuition is not something I can just do.

In more nerdy news, I recently tried Puppy Linux and I think it's become my preferred choice for distros (except that SeaMonkey is God awful.)

Also, my teenage years are coming to a close! in 6 days I will be celebrating my 20th and I'm very excited, so I've been preparing for that too.

Hope all is well in the World of John and Co. :thumbsup2:

 

[Corrine]

Hi, Cayden.

Sorry to hear the bad news but it is great that you can continue with your education.

 

[niemiro]

I also wish you all the best.

And with that title, we've got to have the song

 

[Cayden]

Classic, niemiro! Yeah it's a shame I lost the job, but everyone knew something like this was going to happen, at least for the past week or so. For those of you whom don't know, I work at Target - it's a chain of department stores popular in the United States. They decided to expand to Canada with virtually no market research and build 132 stores in less than a year. So now, customers are paying more for less variety and sometimes completely different products/brands. This all means that Target is losing money, hard. That's why we're having layoffs. It's all over the news, they lost in upwards of $350m.

They made the terrible mistake of replacing a Canadian department store known as Zellers which is basically the Canadian equivalent of Wal-Mart so, as you might expect, the communities around there have expected Wal-Mart like prices and brands for many, many years. I'm talking well over two decades. For Target to have the gall to simply move right on in and say "No, you can't have this anymore" is a massive undertaking. So you can see why this is an issue and now people are out of work.