From the Desk 7/22/2008

This morning I woke up on time and got ready for work at a more leisurely pace then yesterday. I stopped off on my way to work to buy some gas (still at $3.99 per gallon) and then a quick trip to the ATM so I could mail out the wedding DVDs later today. When I arrived at work I began working on some rough versions of some slips and cards that we could use in our shipments that we send out to customers, thanking them for shopping with us. It went fairly quickly and I think they came out looking pretty good. Now I just have to get with Vickie and see if that is something we want to move forward with before or after Back-to-School. I also set-up and scheduled the next blast email that we will be sending out concerning the Georgia Classroom Gift Card. Now that I have done this process several times it isn't as much of a chore. I don't really have to look at my cheat sheet of instructions to get everything set-up correctly so that also cuts down on the amount of time it takes to set it up. I checked the several voice mails that had accumulated on my phone before going to lunch with Mike, Carmen, Stacy, Tausha, and Blair in the break room. I remembered to bring my left overs today so I was good and didn't go out to eat.

After lunch I worked briefly with Mike to remove a coupon that was expired from our website. I'm not sure what the process was before with this, but we had received several calls that people had received our blast email, clicked on the link to the coupon on our website and saw that the laminating coupon had already expired. This was obviously confusing to the customer and now we have resolved that issue. I spent the better part of the afternoon organizing files and throwing away clutter from my cubical. It is amazing how much junk you can accumulate in such a small space. After finishing the clean-up my area looked a little empty but I know it won't take long for it to fill back up. I also worked up a rough drawing of a character that we are trying to develop to use in addition to "Crayon Boy". It has been a problem that I can't really draw people so I have taken the approach of a modified stick boy doing various things to try and illustrate my thoughts. Here is one very rough example of him "serving up customer service" from the School Box. (I apologize for the color issues, I still don't know what causes that). I walked Christina out at 5:00 as we were both leaving to go home. The hiking trip got canceled on account of everyone being too tired or having too much to do. Christina had to go home and study for 2 tests tomorrow and I needed to work on the video.

I got home, had a quick dinner, and then went to work on the video at 6:00. The editing went much faster than anticipated and I was finished editing the ceremony at 7:15. All I had to do was set the menu links and preview the project before burning it off to disc and I was saving that for tomorrow as I had some other printing of inserts and labels I wanted to get out of the way first. I was finishing up that stuff when Christina called. She had completed her necessary studying for the night so I took "Clue" over to her apartment and we watched it while the rain was pounding on the windows outside. We enjoyed the movie and sat on the couch talking about work and the possibility of another double date with Leslie (from Howell Mill) and Brian. I finally tore myself away and said goodnight. I drove home in almost perfectly cool temperature weather with no rain and no storms. I arrived safely and promptly went to sleep.

Meditation for the day: Philippians 1:3 "I thank my God every time I remember you."