From the Desk 8/18/2008

This morning I woke up feeling rather tired, considering the amount of sleep I gained over the weekend and turning in early last night. Perhaps my body knew it was Monday morning and decided to inflict the typical mood of Mondays upon my morning. I got to work and was pleasantly surprised to have no voicemails and no new emails. I decided to spend the morning working on refining the donation cards for our Breast Cancer promotion and sending out requests for quotes on printing and trimming the cards down to size. I received a quick reply from Printing Impressions and took the rough version of the card and the estimate into Vickie's office to make some decisions. Once the quote was presented we decided to reduce the card down to a one-sided card to save on printing costs. We also altered the front graphics a bit to allow more room for people to write the names of their loved ones on the card. I sent a re-adjusted request for a quote and hopefully we will see a significant drop in the price. My next project I began was the creation of a "Marketing Worksheet" that we will use in all future marketing projects. From a sales flyer or special catalog to a one sheet bag stuffer, we will use this new form as a way to keep track of who is involved with each project and what the deadline are and the cost of the project. The goal is to use this tool to increase the lead time on projects so that we are planning for something a minimum of 3 months in advance. It took longer than expected to create this sheet as I began working on it around 10:00 and finished around 12:30.

At that point I decided to take my lunch. I would have eaten with the family, but I was driven to get this project finished while it was still on my mind. I tried something new for lunch today: Oscar Meyer's Flat bread Creations - Chicken, Bacon, Ranch. It was a round piece of flat bread with chicken, Swiss cheese and a bacon ranch sauce spread on it. You had to heat it for 50 seconds, fold in half, and enjoy! It was good, but not really enough food to justify its $2.99 price in the store. Luckily I had grapes to accompany the dish and together with that and pretzels it made for a relatively healthy meal. When I returned from lunch, I took some screen shots of MapPoint windows to use a s demos in the marketing meeting to demonstrate how zip code information can help us plan better and market more effectively. I also sat down with Chris and we came up with the basic idea for a Fall mail out piece that promotes only a few products but includes an aggressive coupon offer to entice our customers to continue shopping with us even though the school year has begun. We selected some product to go on the flyer and chose a color scheme that instantly leads people to think about Fall. I took that design and began working up a rough version to edit, revise and finalize. I worked on that for most of the rest of the day. Vickie gave me another document to reproduce as an Excel Spreadsheet to send to our vendors for updated information. I didn't get very far on this as I started it at 4:45, but I wanted to lay down the header information before I left.

5:00 arrived and I went home. I checked Facebook and Myspace and then noticed that I had received 13 emails in the time from when I left work to when I got home. They were all from various vendors who had sent images of their products for use in the Holiday Toy catalog. I decided to mark them as School Box emails and would open them tomorrow morning at work. I dusted the apartment and will vacuum tomorrow when I get home. I stopped cleaning to eat some dinner and then ended up playing Guitar Hero III to pass some time. I also talked to Hickey on the phone for quite a while, planning his trip to visit me next weekend. Christina called when she got out of class around 9:15 and said she would be at my apartment in about 10 minutes. She arrived and I wrapped up my conversation with Hickey after a few more minutes of hilarious conversation. Christina told me all about her day and her classes and I shared my email loaded day with her. We watched (flipping back and forth between commercials) Family Guy and Family Matters. Apparently, we were in a family TV kind of mood. Though, the families in each show were about as opposite as day and night (but both made us laugh). After just hanging out for a while, I walked Christina out to her car and we said goodnight. I went back inside to go to sleep. I am determined to run tomorrow whether it be before or after work and to continue that for the next month (every day) to get myself in excellent shape!

Meditation for the day: 1 John 5:12 “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”