August 2007

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.

Angry With God

When I read about this story the first person I thought of in St Augustine was Velociman but this asshat is 23. Then I realized that it was a Catholic Church that he ran into with his Ford F-150 and all was well with the world.

Jack McClellan arrested near UCLA child care center

CNN entitled their story Blogger’ arrested near UCLA child care center but I think more focus needs to be put on the fact that he is such a scumbag rather than the fact that he is a blogger. McClellan has a restraining order against him which forbids him loitering or congregating within 30 feet of minors but he was caught near a university child care center with his camera.

I’ve posted about McClellan once or twice and he (along with all of the other scumbag pedophiles) is why I joined the Vigilante Justice Blogroll. If you are interested in the blogroll, scroll down the mile long sidebar or go over to Texas Fred’s place. He has blogged extensively on McLellan and his antics.

I hope the scumbag doesn’t make bail. He is unemployed anyway, maybe he will get to spend some quality time with old Bubba in the jail cell. Those guys just love pedophiles 🙂

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Adam’s Blog, Big Dog’s Weblog, Inside the Northwest Territory, Nuke’s News & Views, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, The Florida Masochist, Conservative Cat, Adeline and Hazel, Public Domain Clip Art, Pursuing Holiness, Conservative Thoughts, third world county, Faultline USA, Wake Up America, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, 4 Time Father?, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Planck’s Constant, Gone Hollywood, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Tramp Stamp Tuesday

It’s a threefer…

(more…)

When The Cat’s Away…

…the asshats will play. Maybe it doesn’t go exactly like that but in my experience it seems to be that way.

I have three managers. My strongest manager is also the newest so she doesn’t have 100% control over her folks yet but they are quickly learning that they need to behave. My most experienced manager is too damn nice, not quite wishy-washy but close. I am fixing that. I trained him a couple three years ago when I was managing so he knows how I am. The store he took over in February was his second one and it happens to be the one that had the perverted camera dude prior to that. Before that manager the one that opened the store about a year ago also had no backbone so these people have gone close to two years with no discipline or direction.

The employees at the other two stores love it when I work with them but these folks hate it because I spend two days being a complete asshole to them because close to 90% of the things they do are the wrong way so it isn’t just a matter of gently correcting ands redirecting. I am constantly correcting and in some cases criticizing, which is something I hate to do.

My third store the manager has absolutely no control over his people and they have no respect for him. He’s lazy and treats most of them like shit and goes out drinking with the one or two that are his favorites which is a big no-no as a professional. As a matter of fact it’s part of our written policy that we don’t fraternize with them. That kind of stuff can lead to all kinds of problems.

Either way, when I am spending time at the stores they behave. They also show up for work and on time because they know that if they aren’t at least in the parking lot prior to shift change I have no problem calling in replacements. Too many people that want to work to deal with their drama and bullshit.

My managers each work six days on and two off and I generally take one or two of the days in between. That way they eventually each get a weekend. There are some exceptions to it during holidays and race weekends but for the most part I don’t mess with their days off and I leave the rotation alone. Occasionally something will come up where one will request a different day off and I generally try to get it done. This was one of those weekends. My new manager is off today and tomorrow and I had promised my most experienced manager the weekend off. Rather than make one of them change I decided to just deal with it. I spent the day at my busiest store and left the other one in the hands of two manager trainees and my relief manager. You would think that with three of the eight employees working being some type of management that shit would get done but you would be oh so fucking wrong.

The waitresses left out of there without doing ANYTHING that they were supposed to. After I finished at the first store I had to go take care of the paperwork and banking at the one I wasn’t at today and when I got there it looked like they had been through a damned hurricane.

I have worked with most of the folks at that restaurant and have pretty much decided that most of them are going to have to be replaced, or at least a few key folks. My manager doesn’t like getting rid of people or hiring and training new ones so I will just have to run them off myself. I’ve already started by firing the girl that hung me today.

What I have found interesting is that some of my old employees are starting to come out of the woodwork. The are where I run these three restaurants only had one until 2000 or 2001. I ran that restaurant all through the nineties and at one point it was the busiest one in the state. I have had a lot of people work for me and several of them have been popping back up lately. It’s nice because they know how anal I am about cleaning honesty, timeliness, and no drama and stuff like that but they also know it makes them more money as well. I am slowly but surely replacing people with some of them.

The Dark Knight Trailer

Doesn’t really show a lot, but here is the trailer to the Batman sequel, coming out next summer.

Lisa Nowak Video

Apparently it was a slow news day…

Pastor Charged With Assault At Boot Camp

Man, this sucks. They need to drag this guy behind the damned van for a few hundred yards and let angry rottweilers chase him.



Talk about Christian brotherly love.