February 23, 2008

I have been doing pretty well with the smoking this week. I’ve gone from two to three packs a day down to a pack every three days. I am going to try and quit again come Tuesday. That’s when I start the new week of Chantix, which is why I picked Tuesday. I am actually starting to feel a bit better, but I seem to be sleeping a lot.

The wife quit smoking a couple of years ago and she’s done great. She also walks a lot. Two to four miles a day. Man. That’s a bunch. I don’t particularly think I would mind the exercise part but I walk from six a.m. until well after lunch at work every day. I think I need to get some exercise equipment, ellipticals or something. There are a couple of local gyms I am thinking about using as well. The hard part is actually getting motivated and using them.

Several hundred people held a vigil last night in the same field where Brianna Denison’s body was found last week.

This is a pretty cool deal. I’ve used VistaPrint before for business cards and came across a pretty nice deal this afternoon while I was over there. First off, VistaPrint offers custom design and print solutions for businesses, homes, web sites, just about anything you could think of, at a pretty decent price. A box of 250 of their premium business cards are just under $20 and they offer free logo design to go along with it. Business cards aren’t the only thing they offer though. Letterheads, car door magnets, marketing materials such as postcards, brochures and rack cards, clothing such as hats and T-shirts, stationary, rubber stamps, labels and more.

I used to print out my own business cards using my deskjet printer, but the quality is just never the same as using a professional service. The ones I did myself printed out in sheets and either I had to cut them (they were always uneven) or they were the ones that were perforated (and they look it too). There’s just no substitute for a professional job well done.

Anyway, back to the deal I mentioned at the beginning of the post. I was browsing through their custom magnets section and found out that if you use the coupon code “Blog25FreeMag” you can get 25 free magnets. Put your business name on them, your website, your phone number to hand out to the ladies, whatever you want to do with them, it’s entirely up to you. I have a ton of magnets on my refrigerator holding up my kid’s artwork, calendars, appointments and other important stuff and they are there. When I want to order pizza I know which magnet to look for, I even have one for the vet when the dog isn’t feeling well. Actually I lie. I don’t really call and order pizza on the phone any more. I order it through their web site, but the magnet’s still there! Anyway, if you want to get 25 free customized magnets head on over to VistaPrint and use the code Blog25FreeMag.

I just have to refrain from being extremely offensive on this I suppose. A black, gay, cross-dressing teenager? Holy cow, talk about being in a minority. Regardless of that, nobody deserves to get shot for the way they act and dress, well, except maybe for Britney Spears, but that’s a different story. Check out this story from MCT news service.

It was a pretty uneventful day, although it was kind of long. For some reason I started waking up at 2 a.m. this morning and had a hard time sleeping, so when the alarm finally started going off at 5 I kept hitting snooze and didn’t get up until almost 6 a.m. I still made it to work shortly after 6:30 though. That’s one of the nice things about having the districts realigned. All three of my stores are within seven and a half miles of my front door. Not only that but it will (should) be an increase in pay for me as well. I lost my slowest store and picked one up that should make me an extra $600 a month or so. Can’t complain about that.

The ladies were pretty happy with me this morning. Apparently they and the customers are used to having their food take 30-40 minutes when it’s busy. The store is nasty, nasty and production crawls when it’s busy, such as on the weekends. There’s nothing on our menu that takes longer than eight to ten minutes to cook and our table turn time is supposed to be 22 minutes. The girls couldn’t keep up today. Most of the day their food was up before they could even get the drinks on the tables. What’s really funny is that although the store has been in a sales decrease for two years straight, my sales were up 15% this morning over last year. Funny how that works.

I think my biggest challenge their will be to get it clean. The restaurant is just extremely filthy. The floors, walls, vents, windows, even the light fixtures need to be cleaned. I left them a short cleaning list when I finally managed to get out of there at 5 this evening, hopefully it will get finished.

I was going to come home and post for a while, but the nasty nap monster caught hold of me and then mean Mr. gravity finished the job and I took a nap for a couple of hours, and THEN I watched Gladiator. I love the movie even if old what’s his name is a jerk.

I do have a couple of things to post, as well as a review and then I think I will hit the sack. I have to go back out to that store tomorrow and I don’t foresee getting out of there prior to six tomorrow night.

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