Parenting/Family

It’s been kind of a slow weekend here at the house but too darned busy at work. We are all gearing up for Christmas at work, which means lots of extra preparation to get ready for next week. I get asked all the time why we stay open for Christmas. This is normally by people who assume that nobody goes out to eat on Christmas day. That’s about as far from the truth as you can get. Christmas is by far the busiest day of the year for us out of the entire year. Some stores aren’t that much busier than a normal weekend but in the case of my three my business literally doubles. My slowest store will do about ten times the normal business, which is insane. On a normal Tuesday that store grosses about $500. Christmas Day last year it did $5000. We don’t really make that much more money because we spend so much more money on payroll. Not only that but since it’s busier, the margin of error for pricing mistakes and register errors goes up as well.

The managers are supposed to be starting their thaw and extra prep work today and I have to make sure to go around over the next week and verify it’s getting done as well as get a couple more people working in some of the empty slots that aren’t filled. Everyone works on Christmas Day with no exceptions, and even with that I have several empty slots in two of my stores simply because I can’t just hire and train five or six more people just to let them go on January 2nd, which starts the slowest time of the year for me and the couple of months where I will be really cutting back on expenses.

It looks like we will be doing our Christmas on the 24th after all this year. As a store manager I would typically get two days off the week prior and Santa would visit the kids then but this year Carroll County is starting their Christmas break four days prior to Christmas and I just won’t have any time off. Not only that but my brother won’t be in town until around the 23rd. I think that most of the family is going to be here for it, which will be nice.

Once the holidays are over I need to get back down in the basement again and get some cleaning done. It is getting full and unorganized again and the perfect time to do some straightening up will be when we go to store the Christmas lights. I at least wouldn’t mind organizing the back room. All of the Marine’s stuff is stored in there as well as old furniture and decorations. I would kind of like to move some of my computer equipment out of the garage and into the back room, such as my wireless router and cable modem as well as my home automation equipment.

I am going to try and get out of the stores by four this afternoon. While I was just off on Thursday I spent seven hours in meetings and am tired. I want to spend some time at home with the girls, even if it’s just watching them play and fooling around on the computer. It all depends on my staffing. I guess it’s just that time of the year but I have had about eight people call out in my district over the last two days. Part of that is because the manager’s put up with it.

It’s time to start getting ready for work now, I will hopefully be back later this afternoon.

I guess today is just the day to catch up on all of the shit I have been meaning to do for quite some time. Twice a year I have to get my blood drawn and then visit my doctor so that she can tell me to eat right an quit smoking and then renew my prescriptions for Vytorin (Cholesterol) and Protonix (either an ulcer or some other gastric nastiness). I ran out of medicine about two weeks ago and have not had the free time to go get it done. The only morning I have been off up until now I was so damned tired from the previous 10 days of work that I slept in.

I would have loved to sleep in today but the wife and girls made sure that I got up and took care of business. I arrived a couple of minutes after eight and the nurse tried to get it out of one arm and then the other, sticking me four or five times in the process. No go. I guess I must be dehydrated or something. Possibly my diet of garbage and coffee combined with 18 hour days has something to do with it.

After sitting for an hour and drinking so much water I wanted to puke, the other nurse tried to get it out of my arm with no success. She finally got a bit of blood drawn from my hand. I breathed a sigh of relief when it finally started flowing, although a bit slow) because I thought I had woke up dead and somebody forgot to tell me. Now I will have to wait a few more days for the doctor to call and set up an appointment for after the first of the year. I am going to have to deal with heartburn and this crappy prevacid until that point.

Prior to coming home I stopped at one of our stores (the one in my little town) for a much needed cup of coffee and breakfast. I actually had a point in stopping there. The manager is fairly new and she is a pretty nice lady, a single mom. It is hard enough to run our restaurants but being a single mom is pretty damned tough. She gave her two week notice a couple of days ago, and I know that several of the big cheese dudes have been down to talk with her, but they won’t do anything but lie and promise her the moon anyway, so I thought it might do a bit of good to go give her a bit of honesty and try to keep her from leaving in the process. As a store manager it can be hard at times, but certainly not impossible, and she would be making a mistake leaving. Hell, I bitch about holidays and weekends, but for the most part I worked a 40 hour week as a store manager and was home by 3PM most days. Not a bad fucking job to have. That’s one of the reasons it took me so long to decide that I wanted to take this promotion. I knew that I would literally be doubling my money but only taking about a $20-30k pay increase.

I think that maybe she is going to stay but hopefully my bosses will continue to visit and reassure her daily for awhile.

Once I got home a little while ago I did what you always do on Friday afternoon four days before your birthday, renewed my car tags and driver’s license. Nothing like waiting until the last fucking minute! I did renew my license for ten years though, which is cool because it means that the picture that’s on my license from 2000 will still be on there when I turn 52. Sweet. Hell, I even have a moustache and goatee in the picture. Sooner or later someone is going to say ‘that’s not you’ and call the law on my ass.

I had originally planned on doing a bit of Christmas and grocery shopping today but my damn head is pounding from lack of caffeine and I am pretty beat. Maybe tomorrow after the Christmas parade I can get it done. I have managed to get a bunch of Christmas lights and stuff like lighted deer and trees on clearance recently so I will most likely decorate the yard as well tomorrow afternoon and then post photos. We did get the tree set up and the girls and I decorated it Wednesday evening, so it’s starting to feel a bit like Christmas even if I do live with the Grinch.

My ten year old loves the Bratz dolls. She wants to see the DVD that was just released but I just don’t see that happening any time soon. I did come across this video a few minutes ago and knew I needed to post it. I’m sure that the wife will see it when she wakes up in the morning. She pretty much agrees with me on the Bratz and thinks that they are certainly not the kind of message we need to be sending to our kids. Trailer Trash Barbie would be a better play toy than the darned Bratz (says the guy that bought a Bratz play set for Christmas last year. Not happening this year though).

Completely off the subject of the post at hand, I checked a new manager in to my problem store today. Thank goodness. The last couple of weeks have been pretty darn rough and although I would have preferred it to the last manager I had, I was not looking forward to running the place through the rest of the holiday season.

Here’s to hoping that this guy lasts longer than the last two. He’s my third manager since I took the district back at the beginning of May.

Yesterday was a fairly long day. There is so much that I need to do in the store where my manager just quit and I have only so much time to get it done. I finally ended up shooting out of there around 4:30 yesterday afternoon and came home to veg for awhile, then went back in around 8.

The big thing about most of these folks is that I’ve only been there one or two days a week over the last few months so they pretty much do whatever the heck they want and think they can get away with it. I am having to seriously crack down on them in order to get things right. We are going into the busy time of the year and I have to get these people right in a very short time. I have one girl that I can already see I need to let go very quickly. I am doing inventories of the floor at the beginning and end of every shift in order to see what their food usage has been and last night they were pretty slow so the usage should have been low. When I did the count last night I noticed that seven pieces of pie had been used. No huge deal when you think about it, but if the stuff weren’t rung up I might as well take thirteen bucks out of my checking account and burn it. I told my waitresses that when they turned their tickets in at the end of the shift I need the pie tickets separated from the rest. Shortly after that the biggest thief up there comes back with seven dollars and says ‘I need you to ring me up, my daughter bought a pie and I wanted to make sure it get’s verified’. Yeah right.

So she paid for the pie, which was most likely just given away to whomever and not sold as a whole pie but at least we’ve set the ground rules and she is going to have to come up with a new way to steal from me in order to make her money. I imagine she will be quitting before the month is out anyway since now that I know for sure I am going to stay on her ass daily. I already have her replacement starting training Wednesday anyhow.

The wife is driving up to the Carolinas on Tuesday to pick our son up and bring him home for Thanksgiving. I think I’ve gotten her to break the trip up and go see our friend in Hilton Head. I means a total of a couple of extra hours but it’s better than trying to drive eight or nine hours straight. We still aren’t sure where the girls are going to be yet. She might take them with her but we may also have them with a friend of ours. The only problem with that is that I will have to pick them up at certain times and there just isn’t any guarantee that I will be able to leave at those times. Unfortunately for me as a district manager, we (and the guys above me) actually work MORE hours during holidays and make sure the store managers get the heck out of Dodge to be with their families.

I woke up this morning not wanting to get out of bed. I am not sure if it’s because I feel sick, which I do, or just didn’t get enough sleep last night. I had a hard time getting a bit of shuteye. The darned cat is in heat and just would not shut the fuck up. I finally locked the cats in our bathroom with their food and litter box and had to put something in front of the door so that they couldn’t get it open. Our bathroom has double doors that you just push/pull to get open rather than having a door knob that you turn and the first time I put her in there last night she rammed the door hard enough to get it open. The second time I put them both in there I made sure to put something in front of it. I really need to get the stupid cat fixed. Over the long run she’ll be safer that way and won’t be quite as interested in getting outside as she is now.

Looks like the Marine will be coming home for Thanksgiving. He’s got four or five days of leave, so I reserved a car yesterday. The wife is going to drive up on Tuesday afternoon after Pete’s dentist appointment to pick him up and then she will be taking him back on Sunday I guess. I wish I could be a bit more help. Originally I was going to take Tuesday off at least, and that was going to be my last day off until the 1st of December. Now I just don’t know if I will be able to take it off since I don’t have a manager in one of the stores (but that’s a good thing in it’s own way). At least I know I can stop the attrition with the employees quitting.

Anyway, I am really looking forward to seeing him. The family is doing Thanksgiving dinner at my Aunt’s house in Smyrna and I should have just enough time to get there by 4PM on Thursday if I hump it. The biggest challenge will be to make sure that everyone shows up for work.

I guess it’s time to get ready and head my happy ass in to work now.

RePete does this much better by herself but Pete (the eldest) wanted to be part of. This was the third time she had sung it and some of the enthusiasm had died by the time I actually recorded it. They had a good time though, obviously.

Some days just feel like they were made to stay in bed. Today is one of those. Add to that the fact that I was up until around midnight and you can see why I just didn’t want to get up today. It should be an interesting day to say the least. I am already dropping stuff. Naturally clumsy and tired as hell to boot.

Today is our 20th ‘date’ anniversary. 20 years. Damn, that’s a long time. Happy anniversary baby.

You know, I just did not want to get up this early today. I am still trying to nod off as I sit here and write this. Just a couple more minutes of sleep…

This is the type of day where I would lie back down while waiting for the coffee to brew and then wake up two hours later. The wife is smart and all-knowing though and set it up on a timer. It was waiting for me to get out of bed and have that first cup.

Apparently I fell asleep on the couch last night because I woke up at two and went to crawl in bed then. I must not have slept very well. I don’t normally have this much trouble waking up.

I am spending today and tomorrow down in the hole. That’s my store with the incompetent manager. It really does sort of sit in a hole back away from everything, thus the nickname.

I’ve had two of my day shift waitresses give their written notice so far since this woman has taken over the restaurant. Both of them I am transferring to busier stores in order to keep them from quitting. I may be a picky asshole but they are my employees and I don’t like losing people unless I plan on letting them go for some reason. This close to Christmas I certainly don’t need to be losing any help, not to mention the fact that heavy turnover is never good for business. 90% of my business is repeat business and people like to come in and eat and see the same friendly smiling faces every day. It’s hard for people to learn your name when they keep switching.

Thursday is normally our meeting day but apparently my boss and his boss have to drive to Norcross to meet with our senior vice president. The meeting has been moved to Friday. When I reminded my boss that we also have a football game to do tomorrow evening all he said is, ‘yep, and we have a football game’ which pretty much means a fifteen hour day tomorrow. Not exactly my idea of fun going into the weekend.

We had a pretty good time last night, although it was kind of quiet. We took Pete to O’Charley’s for her tenth birthday dinner and let her pick out whatever she wanted. Both of the girls were extremely well behaved, an unlike the Marine she didn’t pick out the most expensive thing on the menu. Although I let her order from the normal menu she still looked through the kids menu (and colored on it for a while) and she was extremely impressed with the fact that the kids menu is for ‘ten and under’. She made sure to let us know that she won’t have to order off of it after next year.

As I mentioned night before last, although we are having her birthday party on Saturday I stopped and picked her up a couple of gifts on the way home from work Tuesday night to wake her up with. One of them was this Technosource Rubik’s Revolution…

Both girls have been having a pretty good time with it. Pete decided to share with her little sister RePete and she has had as much fun as her older sibling. It’s pretty good for hand-eye coordination and as you play it speeds up. She has been doing pretty good with it.

The other thing I pick up was this i-dog thing. It’s a plastic dog-shaped thing that you hook your iPod into via line out/in…

It light’s up when the music is playing through it’s built-in stereo speaker, taps it’s foot, wags it’s tail and moves it’s head up and down. Oh yeah, it’s face lights up too. I made a pretty good choice with this one. Both girls were singing and dancing around the dog (as you do) at six AM yesterday morning. Pretty damn funny actually, but they had a good time.

Although it seems like I have spent more money on gifts than I would, we are kind of toning down the amount of them we are giving out. I want to get a bit more simple, particularly when Christmas comes. The only caveat to that is that my brother and his family normally come down and spend the holidays with us and it sort of sucks to get my kids a couple of gifts and then they get to sit and watch as their cousins open a ton of them. I usually go slightly overboard in compensation.