TSD and Others

I did the TSD (Trait Self Descriptive) questionnaire of CAF today. It was an easy but interesting computer based type of test. I'm trying to reactivate my CAF application and that was the second step. A lady from the recruiting staff talked to me after that and indicated that my references were not good. At first I thought she meant that the references had not provided good feedback but then I learnt that they were not considered good references by CAF standards. They normally shall be from past instructors, supervisors, mentors, pastors and such people. I have to change them then.

Then she mentioned that I would have to write an exam which to her it was hard and I would receive more forms to fill out.

CAF and jobs such as that normally have a long process. All I have to do now is to wait while I'm applying for other positions. I think she said something such as I would have to write the examination for the job I have applied in March but I could be wrong because here I found what she was saying a bit different from the way people normally pronounce as March. There were another form to fill out and that was for drugs. There was a long list two-sided and I realized a few of the applicants were struggling with that. We were on this day a total of maybe 8 at the most. One of them couldn't help it and showed his dislike for me. I was talking to another one telling him that instead of paying for the expensive parking in Downtown, he could have parked outside the city center area, parked for free and taken the train. The guy just jumped in and said that he would have spent $8 to find the free spot! I ignored his offensive tone and said that he would have been able to find a free spot in a very short time. I also learnt through one of the guys that Basic Training is held for 32 weeks which equals to almost 8 months. I guess that's good to have 8 months of paid training but it's pending my acceptance to the forces! 

(Photo: CAF logo has symbols representing the army, the navy and the air force)

Mt. Ware

I had a conversation with The Hope after we finished our easy hike of Bull Creek Hills to see whether he wants to do another hike before leaving the country for his trip to Down Under. He first said that he would like to do another one. Then he said he preferred to go bicycling and then he came back and said he would join me for another hike! I was going to say to him he should have made his mind but then I thought: What the hell! He brings the car. He drives and he's a good companion. So I don't care if he's moody!

Our plan was to go to Mt. Ware first and then he said he would want to see whether there was anything else available! I gave him the chance to check the other local hikes and then he came back with this message that he would go to Mt. Ware! So we set up everything for that! Gosh! It's just a pain in the butt to deal with someone who cannot make his or her mind up! I had The Lady as someone constantly changes her mind. Now this guy has been added too!  

We headed south toward Turner Valley in the morning and I have to add that I was not able to convince him to start earlier than 07:00 AM although he told me that he had woken up at 04:00 and was not able to go back to sleep! On the way from Turner Valley to Sheep River Provincial Park we were lucky that he missed a baby Deer on the road! He's generally not a good driver but this time luck was with us otherwise our trip would have been changed to a tragedy. Then when we entered the park shortly after the daylight was upon us we saw a pick up truck that as soon as we approached he put up his lights. A guy from Alberta Parks approached us and said that he was looking for hunters. We told him that we were going hiking up Mt. Ware and he said goodbye to us. I don't think Alberta Parks takes a good care of the Alberta parks because when we were out doing our hike of Bull Creek Hills we heard noises several times that to me sounded like someone was shooting rounds. Also when we went to Ghost Valley area, on the way back, we saw a guy with shotgun and the bastard gave us a fake smile but unfortunately we were not able to report the motherfucker. 

You have a 20 minutes of scrambling on a pile of lose rocks before you summit Mt. Ware. Some of the rocks are covered with a type of beautiful green moss

Finding the trail-head this time was not very hard. We drove to the end of a gravel road and parked in Gorge Creek trail parking lot. No one else was there at the time and I guess we started our hike around 08:30 or so. We simply headed west on the trail, parallel to the creek. It's a nice area but lack of snow and rail will have a significant affect in the wildlife and vegetation, if this goes the same for the next few months. It's now Nov.-01 and we have not had even one snowfall! After walking for a while on the easy trail we headed north this time to get ourselves to the foothills of Mt. Ware. Here The Hope believed we had been distracted from the main trail so we cut in to the trees and walked back toward east for a while until The Hope said that we were on the main trail! He has bought this application that apparently has many trail available to us and we can simply follow it although I have done all of the hikes without any map or tracker! 

The last half an hour of the hike or so was interesting. We had to climb up a pile of lose rocks to get ourselves to the summit. Before that we we walked up the mountain to get ourselves to the ridge on the east side. The view to the vest is nice and on your east or better northeast you have city of Calgary easily available to your view. North and south do not provide much. We had a short break, took a few photos and headed back down the mountain. 

A small pool of water in Gorge Creek from top o the trail looks like. It would have been of course much nicer, Had we seen it in early summer or late spring

There was nothing special on the way back to the parking lot. We saw a type of flightless bird, similar to what I had seen on The Wedge but he messed up the photo and I had sent my camera to Canon in Ontario so there's not a clean and nice shot of that available! No one was seen on the trail the entire time and just half an hour to the parking lot a light rain started but it stopped as soon as we reached the car. Generally Mt. Ware is considered a very easy hike with its half an hour just being fun. Gorge Creek is nice but nothing significant that wows you. Maybe its nicer when it has more water in it. Sheep River Provincial Park is not taken care of as good as other Kananaskis area parks maybe because its smaller and does not have as many trails as the other parks and not many businesses such as restaurants and cafes are available close to it. The only place that you can sit for a beverage or meal would be in Turner Valley or Black Diamond and I don't really know what is available in these two small towns but I know they are not as fancy as Canmore. Longview is a bit further and has a few famous restaurants and cafes but I haven't check those ones either. We headed back to the city directly after that. We sat for a latte in The Hope's favorite coffee shop Starbucks. I didn't particularly liked it. It was some $3.45 for a small cup. Maybe I should have added some raw sugar but generally I don't believe paying more than $3 for a small cup every time you want to have a coffee would be a good idea unless you have an income as much as The Hope's! 

(Photo: This was taken by my buddy on the summit of Mt. Ware looking west with Blue Rock Mountain in the back. You can see me behind the summit cairn with my back turned to the camera, taking pictures with my Sony Cypershot)

Three Weeks Later

Three weeks has passed so far and I have applied for 11 positions with receiving two responses only. I've written about the first one and just a few days back I received an e-mail from a well-known company in the city which had posted a position in Abu-Dhabi indicating that they had decided to go with another candidate! I never wanted to work in that area of the world but it's not a time to have many choices available. I should be a little more active in career searching but the problem is there just simply not many positions available or if there are, they are mostly filled quickly by Canadians who are introduced by their friends, family members and relatives. I. on contrary, do not have many people in my circle. 

The other disappointing news is Shell has just announced that they had cancelled one of their projects due to lack of pipeline to transport the crude, indicating rail transportation is not economical in this case. Moving would not be easy, that's another problem. Although I hate Calgary now due to its increasing population, noise, expensive services, etc but moving would not be easy. Too much to freaking handle! 

(Photo: The small town of Peace River in northwestern Alberta felt the hardest after Shell announced the cancellation of Carmon Creek project. Photo courtesy Roe Report)

Hike to Bull Creek Hills (Kananaskis)

The Hope was very determined to do another hike with me but he is afraid of ice and snow and early rising! So we sat together to check the available trips. Due to the ridiculous winter so far we were able to do many hikes but eventually he suggested to go to southern Kananaskis and do Bull Creek Hills. We met at our rendezvous point at about 07:10 and headed south. Bull Creek Hills are close to where I had a hike with my other buddy a few months ago. It is located in Highway 541. It is far away so by the time we pulled in to a road side parking spot, put our gears on and walked to the trail-head, it was almost 09:40! 

The trail goes into the forest and The Hope following a book that he had just bought from MEC took us to to so-called view points just to cover the entire trip that we had read earlier. The first one was supposed to give us a good view of Holy Cross Mountain but due to low fog we barely saw anything! Then we turned back and went up the trail and got ourselves to another viewpoint which was supposed to give us a look at a so-called peninsula. I guess that was a piece of land surrounded by Highwood River but nothing impressive. We continued on a ridge to north from there after a short break and I guess it was almost 12:00 at the time. The Hope felt that we had done such a great deal of work out and found himself worthy of eating an Egg Salad Sandwich which he had already made! I just had a few gulps of Kefir drink which The Lady has made busy herself with recently. I will write about that in a different post. Walking up the trail toward north it took us to the first two hill and then to the highest one which from there you can get a 360 view of the surrounding area. From the top if you look north you can easily sea Downtown Calgary skyline! 

Looking west now the fog is gone and sun is up. Holy Cross Mountain must be one of these ones seen in the photo

We just took a few photos from there and then headed east to make a look to get ourselves to Highway 541 again. There was a little of route finding required at the time but The Hope had just purchased a mobile app which I guess cost him some $30 and helped us very well although we knew that we had to walk east and then south. There was another hill, the forth one and after that our trip started losing its elevation. The Hope is a good hiking partner but first of all he stops too frequently. Second of all he feels he has to eat every two hours although this time he only stopped once. I guess his mind is a little too occupied with unemployment and other things because he forgot his hiking pole once when we where on the top of the highest hill and when we were heading down, he realized that and hiked up and got it! Then when were heading down he stopped to use the bushes and then followed me after a few minutes(!), at the time I looked back and I saw him walking down without his hiking pole and I thought he had put it in his backpack but he suddenly said that he had forgotten it up top! I guess we had descended too far down that made him to forget about the pole! We finally got ourselves to Highway 541 where the big tall Kananaskis Country sign besides the three flags are located. From there we had almost 45 min. walk to west to get to the car. I guess it was 17:15 when we reached the car. It was a good exercise, walking long routes and we got some 700 m. of elevation. The views were nice and we got tired. It's not a challenging hike and requires no technical knowledge or special equipment but gives you a good workout and requires a good route finding. 

(Photo: This is taken from the highest of the three [or four] Bull Creek hills looking north. Calgary's downtown high rises can be easily seen on the center of photo)

A Little Practice

I went for a little Ice Skating practice to Crowchild Twin Arenas yesterday afternoon. To my surprise it was busier than ever! Normally we are there 10 minutes ahead of time to put our skates on and get ready and even after 10 min. barely anyone gets on ice. Yesterday while I was getting ready there were already as many as 10 people on the ice, mostly kids! It's a bad weather now and no outdoor rink and people like skating so they come to a public rink which barely cost them anything. 

I didn't feel very confident the whole time one reason being when I'm in Olympic Oval I'm practicing beside the people who are mostly way worse than me. in Crowchild I'm with guys who have been doing it for years or kids at ages of 10 or 11 who skate like professional hockey players! At the same time I had not been on the ice for almost a month and a half and sadly I had not tightened my skates! So all of them put together made not a very confident practice but overall was not bad. The Lady didn't come but would have been much better, had I have her beside me because she's excellent at practicing. I barely even was able to practice my backward which I had become very good at the end of August when we finished out third course at Olympic Oval. Need more practice and maybe I should get both of our skates sharpen. 

(Photo: The entrance to Crowchild Twin Arenas in west Calgary. It was a nasty dry, sunny stupid fall afternoon. No rain, no snow, freaking dry and nasty wind!)

Back to Mobile Phone

After more than a year I finally was forced to switch back to mobile phone. The landline we had was fine but on different occasions things happened that The Lady was really not happy with that. We checked a few service providers and eventually we went to the cheapest one: Wind. I still have the other mobile which is used by The Lady and I have been with them since 2006 but the handset is old and she's looking for a new one but is not easy for her to chose one. I got this telephone handset by Alkatel which I like so far. I paid $114 with taxes and everything but it is good. I really didn't want to spend this much on a handset but when I first got a Chinese copy of Nokia C2, I realized that it was a piece of shit just after one day! The bastards have copied the phone and eliminated some of the features and are selling it for some $50! The next least expensive in the market was a flip phone from LG for approximately $100. So The Lady told me to get this One Touch phone from Alkatel and I did and so far everything is good but still does not have some of the features that I am used to in my Nokia C2! I had a very durable Alkatel back in the old country and at the time mobile phones would be considered something fancy and people at work were impressed. I was able to do some telephone banking via this phone which was not available to my colleague when I work for that silly ridiculous company, SAIPA. My service is a basic and costs some $25 a month. No downloading, no Internet, no apps, no bullish. I leave it to others to enjoy these kind of services and make the service providers rich. I only talk and barely! And rarely text!

(Photo: Alkatel One Touch is considered an Android OS phone and looks nice. I have all of the apps you see on the screen but am have disabled them all)