It's almost Friday!

Today I woke up after getting some extra sleep and felt refreshed. That feeling disappeared after I walked outside to leave for work. The sky was overcast and the air smelled of rain. My car also had pollen on it in such amounts that I can compare the hood of my car to a beach with the wind blowing the pollen around like loose sand. This will undoubtedly do wonders for my allergies and is sure to keep the Kleenex industry posting profits for their next quarter. I spent the majority of the day at work again working on creating a larger mailing list for our Early Childhood piece. I made great strides in building the list for Knoxville businesses where as yesterday's main focus was the metro Atlanta area. I took a break for lunch at McAlister's Deli where I met Ed Barker. Ed is the engineering adviser/leader for a high school team that participates in robotics competitions and design competitions. He is employed by Kell Robotics which is a firm that specializes in designing, building, and implementing robotics to help clean up the environment. You can check out their site here: http://www.kellrobotics.org . We batted ideas around about how The School Box could support this effort while still benefiting our business at the same time. It will be interesting to see where these talks go once I meet with Dave. I see the merit in supporting the 3rd grade art contest associated with this, but I don't see us spending much money to support this effort since it only involves 3rd graders in Cobb County. I returned from lunch and began to work on the mailing list yet again. I took a break every now and then to print the remaining flyers promoting the Bright From the Start workshops that will take place here in the Summer. The copier was playing nice today and I did not have to threaten it to make it work correctly. (Operator error you say? I'm sticking with my analysis of it begin possessed by one or more demons) The rest of the work day crept along and five o'clock came, but only after what seemed like 3 days.

I went home to eat some of my newly purchase food. It took me almost as long to decide what to eat as it did when I didn't have hardly any food, except now my problem is choosing from all my options. I selected the Santa Fe Chicken Caesar salad. It was a good choice as it filled me up and was somewhat healthy. I then realized that I needed to get my hiking pack ready for the weekend trip with Jubin. I pulled out all of my supplies and then began the difficult process of deciding what not to pack. I always follow the same process when preparing for a trip like this. I put everything in the pack and then remove 5 items that are not absolutely necessary to get rid of some unneeded weight. I finished after about half an hour and then decided to weigh my pack to see how I balanced things out and to determine how much weight I would be carrying. It weighed 24 pounds (close to my best weight, my worst being 34 pounds) as you can see by the picture here. I spent the remainder of the evening working on a special video project for Leslie and trying to motivate myself to start on the reception video. I hope that the weather will hold off for at least part of my drive up to Knoxville tomorrow evening.

Meditation for the day: Proverbs 19:22a "What a man desires is unfailing love"