From the Desk 8/28/2008

This morning I got to work and was quickly met by Vickie to coordinate the sending out of the Breast Cancer promotion materials to the stores. I then had James, the warehouse manager, use the forklift to get the pallet of marketing materials down so we could pull the donation bins from last year to relabel with this year's theme. I brought them back to my desk where they would wait until later in the day. I then began the creation of the Bright From The Start class schedule flyer. We hold classes that go towards Georgia teacher's maintaining their teaching certificates in our workshop room in the Spring and Fall. The schedule for the Fall is very busy with 15 classes being held on Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings. My task was to create a flyer that was one sheet (front and back) that would list all the class titles, who taught them, a brief description, where it was held, date & time, and cost of the class. It occupied 4 pages in a regular text document so I knew that it would be near impossible to condense/arrange the information into 2 pages. I also had to incorporate a Fall looking background/border to catch people's attention. I worked on this flyer and got about half way done typing in the front page of information before lunch.

The usual group ate in the break room for lunch today and I brought parmesean noodles with sesame ginger chicken that I cooked earlier in the week. I also brought cookies that I had made last night when I baked some for Christina and I. The cookies were a hit and we ate lunch fairly quickly. Carmen needed to run to Best Buy to look for a present for her sister and asked us if we wanted to join her. Stacy had to return to work as she is swamped in preparations for the 2009 catalog, but the rest of us decided to go with her. We walked in Best Buy and instead of seriously looking for a present for Carmen's sister we became captivated by the video game demo stations they have set up. We played Wii bowling, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Rock Band, and Mario Kart. It was a fun way to break up the day and I'm sure we will be going back sometime to "browse" the new games. We returned to the office and I began to realize my space problem with the flyer I was creating. There was no way to include all the information on 1 sheet of paper so Mike suggested that I adjust the paper size to legal and see if that might help any. It took lots of adjusting the spacing of lines and the size of the background boxes, but eventually I was able to squeeze it all on the front and back of a single sheet of legal paper. I then re-linked the background to the color version that will be posted online. I was then put in charge of temporarily baby-sitting Stella, Aimee's dog. Stella weighs about 4.5 pounds and is a tiny poodle. She is also terrified of me for some reason and once she escaped Mike's empty office, she wouldn't even harbor the thought of coming near me when I tried to steer her back in. Eventually Aimee came and rescued her distressed pet from my "evil clutches". Not long after that Anna, Aimee and Vickie emerged from their meeting to dive into the Breast Cancer promotional items. Anna and I removed the old labels or covered the old labels with blank white ones, Aimee adhered the new labels to the donation jars, while Vickie divided the jars among the stores. We then all put roughly 200 donation cards in each of the store's boxes. Once we were finished with that process I glanced at the clock and it was 4:45! Time certainly passed quickly since lunch which was nice for a change. I wrapped up my projects for the day and talked to Mike about what we could work on tomorrow since he is done with his 4 day meeting with the software company who is providing the new system for our distribution center.

I went home to change quickly and then made my way to Stacy's to mow since it hadn't rained for the entire day (for the first time in 5 days). I arrived and mowed quickly as the grass had enjoyed the rain, but had not grown out of control yet. After I finished, Stacy grilled some steaks for us and fixed some corn to compliment the main dish. We sampled a new kind of steak sauce that she had picked up at Publix. It was a Merlot based sauce that was delicious. (This being said by the person who does not really like steak sauces as they are too bitter for my liking) We ate and talked about work stuff until the food was gone. I put the mower away and then left to head back home. Christina was eating dinner at her parents' house but wanted to come over after she was done. I showered and then started a load of laundry before she arrived. We watched some random things on TV before settling on the Democratic National Convention's (DNC) last night of broadcasting. I am making a much more conscious effort to be educated about both candidates before the election in November. We watched a video of Obama's history and upbringing and then watched his speech where he accepted the official nomination of the Democratic Party to be a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. We soon grew tired of the celebration that ensued at the conclusion of his speech and I decided it was time to go to sleep. Christina and I said goodnight and then I drifted off to sleep thinking about the upcoming weekend of events including Hickey's visit to Georgia tomorrow night through Monday.

Meditation for the day: Ecclesiastes 5:3 "As a dream comes when there are many cares, so the speech of a fool when there are many words."