There's a (brain) storm coming!

Today, I spent the majority of my time in an attempt to get the creative juices oozing for the good of man kind (or at least the good of The School Box). I was trying to come up with ideas for our new summer catalog cover. We really need to get away from the boring picture of a kid sitting in a classroom getting advice from his/her teacher. Those pictures are nice, but ultimately they all look the same in then end and the nice colorful glossy covers lose their ability to catch people's attention and entice them to look and buy. It is my mission to prevent that from happening. Of course it will take some masterful presentation of ideas to persuade the powers that be to venture out in a new direction. I am confident we will be able to reach a cover that is good for everyone. I also spent some time today analyzing our website and what areas we might be able to improve upon. We really do have a very aesthetically pleasing site, and the only thing I have found lacking is the extra stuff that people sometimes look at before placing an order with our company (such as: partners, community involvement, and teacher resource pages). I decided to splurge for lunch today and I had Tausha pick me up some food from McDonald's when she and Blair made a food run. I hadn't eaten out all week so I figured I could afford it. I finally heard back from our UK (United Kingdom) friend today and we negotiated the purchase of the de-duping program. I downloaded it and then installed it. This proved more difficult than anticipated due to the fact that it is a windows based program. I had to have Mike show me how to run the Windows virtual machine on my Mac to install and run the program. Once that lesson had been learned I ran the list through the program and we came out with 2390 unique names/addresses to send out the flyer! The rest of the work day was a blur filled with occasional jokes and some staring into space trying to be creative. I did find out that Aimee, one of our regional managers, is terrified of flying. There will be a group of regional managers and vice-presidents that will be flying out tomorrow morning to go up North for a secret mission, so I made Aimee a paper airplane and reminded her that the plane she will be on is much more technologically advanced and is made out of much sturdier materials. (This did not do much to ease her fears, but I tried my best). I gave up and left a little early today since I seemed to be only watching the seconds tick away on the clock instead of accomplishing something of value.

I spent some time tonight getting some real work done on the wedding reception video. I mixed the intro video together and placed it on the main menu and applied music to the background. I also laid down the first track of video footage and split it into clips to make the editing go more quickly. I also took care of some financial duties and then decided to cook some dinner. I grilled some chicken marinated in a sesame glaze and then diced it up and mixed it in with some penne pasta with garlic basil sauce. It was good and now I have enough left to take to work tomorrow for lunch. I watched the movie Grandma's Boy tonight and while it is wrong on so many levels, it ultimately made me laugh so it was time well spent. I got a head start on packing for my day long trip to Knoxville this weekend. I am really looking forward to going out tomorrow night. Leslie, Brian, Stacy, and I will be going to eat at a Mexican restaurant tomorrow night before ending up at Hemingway's from some fun and live music! Well, I must turn in for the evening now, but I will see you all on Saturday.

Meditation for the day: James 4:2 "You do not have because you do not ask God"