Ranting in Adventures in paradise

I'm doing pretty good. Plodding along in life, as I do I guess. I'm getting a little restless though, wondering how in hell I'm ever meant to own a house one day. I guess the answer is to set short-term goals leading to medium ones to reach the ultimate, right? Some days I look at it as reachable. Others, like today, I feel like it's impossible. I guess it's all perspective. Doing it alone seems far reached. Doing it on my currently lifestyle is laughable haha. But it's a far off dream, and in the back of my mind it makes me smile. It's also the idea of still renting when I'm 40. God even the idea of renting at 35 seems dodgy to me, although I know a lot of people do it. I guess people rent at any age. Most people look at rent money as dead money. I've always seen it as more sensible, I guess given the way I live. I don't have a huge mortgage to stress out over each week, or interest payments up to my arse, but I guess at some point in life, people decide if they ever want to own something of their own to do what they want with, they have to take that plunge.

I guess this has been on my mind every so often throughout the years, but it's resurfaced ever since my parents sold their farm and have just bought another house. They are also annoyed that they just lost $300,000 from a company that just went bust. My God, it sounds like they are ROLLING in it. That's ONE PAYMENT. I've never seen anywhere near that much money in all my life haha, which is at least what I'd need to buy a house. Currently I have around 1% of that haha! Which, again perspective, is better than being in negative figures.

Tax time is next week - it's come up so fast again. I never really get much back, usually a couple of hundred, but anything helps. I'll be 31 this year, which means the sensible thing for me to do would be get health insurance again, which has also just gone up in price again ergh. Why can't things ever just stay the same? I'm kind of glad I don't have a car. If I did that thing would be guzzling away at what cash I do have. So I guess a car would be a second goal. I'm still keeping my eye out for a second job that appeals to me. I know what I'm like when I overwork myself from previous experience and it's holding me back. I break. I have been known to get to a point where I feel like I've just finished a shift and I have to go back for another long one, and I think "Fuck this shit." How do other people do it? How do they balance the work/life balance? And why is the word "Work" listed first in that?
Can we ever win? I guess some people figure it out early and there's people like me who prefer having my own money and having a roof over my head rather than working to pay mindless interest payments to a bank over 30 years. But I'm 10 years off 40 and that's kinda making me kick my own arse.

It looks like we may be getting a new manager at work, if the current manager gets his way. He's going to recommend a mate of his who works for the the major opposition to be our manager. It quite annoys me when people from the competition are appointed in head-roles within the company I work for. But my company seems to love doing it for whatever reason. They must tell them secrets about the other company or something. If I owned a company, I'd look for the best employees within the company and promote them. Doesn't that make more sense? Our 2IC doesn't want the manager position apparently, but so many fake rumours fly around the company that I never know what to believe. So it's always crap when there's a shakeup within management, but it happens that often I guess the staff get used to it. A friend of mine is trying to get me to get her a job doing what I do as a second job so she can save for a house more. There's that house thing again! I'm sure if I told her we work every Friday and Saturday night that she'd have reservations about it. So she's sent me her resume and all to pass along, but it's all done online and through HR, so I'm not sure what the point is. I'm happy to suggest her though. Not only that, my company has started advertising on TV for people to apply! TV! Fuck, we're gonna be inundated haha.

So I guess that's been an incentive to do more hours whenever I'm requested. It's pretty rare I'll ever turn it down. I'm doing 31 hours this week (so far), so that's way more than I usually do. Got called in randomly last night and said yes, and it's pretty cruisy work. And I'm doing an extra shift tonight again and extra hours tomorrow. Most customers are nice on the days I have to start early. A customer will request something and I'll go to a lot of effort going downstairs and searching for it among the complete pigsty of pallets and cages down there. I'll be down there looking and a manager will tell me to just tell them to fuck off and come back later. I shot back on Monday night, saying, "That's not customer service!" - I ended up eventually finding what I was looking for and apologized to the customer for taking so long as I had trouble finding it. He was much appreciative, and that makes me happy. These days, policy is we can even offer a customer a more premium item for the homebrand price if it's not available. I've always respected the company perspective for going the extra mile for the customer, just not so much some of the people who work for it.

There's a variety of things that annoy me about work, and it comes down to some of my lazy workmates. Especially the guy who "does" (I use that word lightly) my old position. Ergh, he didn't even put tickets up for one of the highest-selling lines and so pretty much lost a whole day of sales because of it, and then when I asked my manager to help me print some off (as I wasn't completely sure I remembered how to), he tries to tell me "There's no point because it happens every week." There's no point!? You mean all that stock in the stockroom that came in will magically sell itself? Ummm, that's not solving the problem is it!!? Man it frustrates me because it takes 5 to 10 fucking minutes to fix it up. I was thankful that he said he'd do them for me (he is a very good worker), and as I was back doing my work, he brought the tickets up to me, which I put up immediately - "Thank you very much," I told him. Fuck, sorRY for trying to help you get your bonus this year! I'm sure when I go into work tonight, sales will have quadrupled at least from yesterday.

I'm just someone who likes to get in and get my job done (well) and go home, satisfied with how productive I was. I always have been. When it's a combination of dominoes falling from the initial laziness of one fucker-workmate, I wonder to myself why the hell they are even working there, when there would be thousands of others who would be thankful for that position and do a really good job at it too. I have respect for my current team, but there are certainly others (some of them even my friends outside of work) and I look at and think, "WHY?". DO YOUR JOB FUCKERS. It's not even hard!

I go to gym after work, despite finishing at 1am or 2am. There's always this guy who is asleep on the couches when I walk up the stairs haha. Christ, this isn't a hotel, mate! He has his hoodie over his head to block out the light. He doesn't bother me as he's well out of the way, but if I owned that gym, I'd probably have an issue with someone using it as their makeshift home every single night. The only time I haven't seen him there was on one of my nights off when I went there a little earlier than usual.

I had a pretty good workout, as it was leg day. I like leg day. I'm quite happy with my legs, they just need toning up a little bit more. I'm doing 160kg on the 45-degree leg-press and it's killing me. I've lost so much strength from my legs, as a few years back, I was doing 200kg at one point, but there's no way I could do that now unless I broke my back. So 160kg it is for now. I'll try upping it to 180kg in about a month and see how I go.
I'm very weak in the back muscles too. It's my most dreaded exercise but i force myself to do it. I reckon if I was looking at myself doing my back exercises as the personal trainer, I'd be laughing at myself attempting it. My form is all over the place because I'm attempting less weights than I used to do, and even that is too much for me to handle because I've simply lost the strength. Amazing of what 5 months of not doing weighted back exercises can do. I need some serious rehab haha. Tonight is chest and back night, so I'll see how ridiculous I feel after work tonight and hopefully it'll be just me and the potentially homeless guy there, and he'll be asleep so he won't laugh at me.