I was wandering through Wal-Mart looking for strapping tape yesterday when I ran across a bunch of paintball equipment among the sporting good section and it got me to thinking about how much the Boy loved to go out with his buddies and their paintball gear and spend the afternoon just having a good time. The could go through two huge cases of paintballs in one afternoon. I almost broke down then and there and purchased a bunch of paintball guns and paintball gun parts. I would probably be better off ordering through an online paintball store though, which is what kept me from making the purchase. That’s one thing I never had the chance to do with him that needs to be rectified soon. He will be home for ten days around the middle of September and prior to me going back to work from my vacation I would like to do a couple of things with him. Maybe now that he has spent the last few weeks at boot camp we could play a couple of games of MilSim paintball.
August 15, 2007
Looong Day…
Man today seemed like the longest day so far this week. I am tired, hot and I hurt. My feet hurt, my head hurts and my back hurts. The wife thinks I’m not drinking enough water which is probably the case. As hot as it has been working inside on the grill certainly isn’t any more comfortable even with air conditioning.
I had a couple of people not show up for work today so ended up working a bit later than I normally would have. This being the last day of the week I should have finished quite a bit of paperwork but didn’t get a single thing done. I am going to end up having to go in in an hour and a half or so and spend several hours getting my stuff finished. I’m not particularly happy about it, but I have stuff that I just have to get done.
Portrait Painters
I am not a huge art critic by any means. My idea of fine art is a couple of Norman Rockwell prints, some posters from the Shakespeare festival and an oil painting of my kids. In my living there hangs the aforementioned Shakespeare Festival Poster (framed of course), a picture of Buddha from some art show and a framed photograph of a swamp scene with a dock and a boathouse. It’s actually a pretty cool picture. What I don’t have are any paintings of the family. We do have plenty of photographs of the kids that hang on the wall in the stairway but nothing large in the living room yet. It’s not even the money. It’s more a matter of time and getting everyone to sit down at the same time in the same place.
Paint Your Life is a company that will take your photographs and turn them into 100% hand-painted portrait. The paintings are all done by portrait painters that are skilled in wedding portraits, child and pets portraits as well. You can have your photograph turned into an oil painting, watercolor portrait, charcoal drawing or pencil sketch and it’s very affordable as well. Paintings start at $99 and the charcoal and pencil sketches start at $69.
All of the portraits are painted by artists and are not prints or computer generated. They can also combine more than one photo into a painting. Say you have three separate pictures of your children that you like and want them together…They can do that. Check out this example…
Even more so than getting a picture of my kids it sure would be nice if I could get an oil painting of my parents and give it to them for Christmas. If you want to see what some of their customers have to say, head on over to the customer testimonials and take a gander at what they have to say. Both of my Aunt’s are professional artists and painters and the paintings that I have seen are as good as anything that I have seen them do.
Dragging Today…
That bed sure was comfortable this morning. I had a very hard time getting up and although I am on my second cup of coffee right now I still want to crawl back in the bed and go back to sleep. At least this is my Friday though. I was planning on taking Thursday and Friday off (the real Friday) but I have been having some issues in a couple of the stores and will end up working on Friday and only being able to take one day off now. I’m not particularly happy about it and while I don’t have any intentions of making people miserable the folks that are the cause of me having to work on my day off are going to feel my displeasure on Friday when I spend the entire day with them.
My left heel has been killing me the last few days. I don’t know if my shoes need to be replaced or what but it feels like a severely sprained ankle, except right in my damn heel. It’s almost difficult to walk on it Hurts so much. All I can do is get through the day day and hope I don’t have too much to do tomorrow that requires walking. I do have to get out first thing in the morning and work a bit on the new pond area before it gets too hot but other than that I’m going to try and take it easy. I wonder if that Freeze It stuff will work on my heel. I still have a little bit left that I haven’t used yet. I am afraid to try it before work. I’ll need it just as much when I get home as I do now though, so it’ll wait until then I suppose.
Scratch and Win
People are funny sometimes. You can take a handful of people that don’t gamble, enter contests or buy lottery tickets and give them a couple of scratch scratch and win cards and watch them ‘go to town’ on the things. The stores that I run are fairly busy in the evening, more so than the company average and that means selling more steaks and other supper items. As a result my food cost is higher than the average as well. It’s a constant battle to get it down to where I want it. We are actually running a couple of contests for my hourly employees in order to raise awareness and to recognize the associates that are doing a good job. One of them is that whichever store has the most improvement this fiscal period, all of the associates get T-shirts. The other thing we are doing is with smaller stuff like gift cards and scratch off cards with different prizes and monetary amounts. The associates love it.
Instant Win Productions is a company that specializes in scratch and win games. We’ve also used the scratch and win cards to give out coupons to customers as well and they handle these types of things as well as huge monetary amounts as well. They have very competitive prices and supply a quality product when you need it.
In addition to scratch off cards they also manufacture Phone cards, Internet Access cards, scratch-n-sniff cards and Bingo game cards as well. Instant Win Promotions is one of the quality game printers in the United States and they are based in the Chicago area, so when you buy from them you know you are supporting and American company and not some guys sitting in Asia making money on the cheap.
One thing I mentioned at the top of the post about people loving scratch-off games is very true. I don’t play the lottery very often and I never play the scratch-off games but if you give me some of them, it doesn’t matter what I am doing, I will commence to scratching to see if I have won anything. The scratch off games from Instant Win Productions are printed on high quality paper that won’t bleed or smear like you might get from some of the local printers or if you tried to create them locally with your own resources.
On occasion I will have a small stack of the scratch off games that we use as customer coupons and they go like wildfire. I usually do my business with the places around my stores and the people that work there seem to be able to sense when I have them because they will literally ask if I have any of the scratch off cards. We give out very simple prizes such as free drinks and the occasional meal, but they definitely can’t get enough of them.