Parenting/Family

Not sure why I am awake right now. I fell asleep in the living room last night when I was putting the youngest to bed and work up about 45 minutes ago. I had several posts I needed to get online anyway at one of the other sites so I went ahead and got that taken care of as well as the last one or two here. I have about an hour before I need to get up so I am going to go try and get a little bit of shut-eye.

I have spent the last couple of days just relaxing, although I did get a few posts up last night.

For a change I ended up just turning my phone off the last couple of days. I am pretty much sick and tired of getting 50 work related calls on my days off and my managers are just going to have to start taking care of things themselves when I am off. They are supposed to be adults as well as professionals so they need to start acting like it.

I new I needed the break anyway as I have a manager on vacation starting today and the next four days I have at least one other manager off as well.

I may post a bit more before I go to work but I am going to see if I can get a bit more sleep in.

I was all set to come home and do a bunch of writing but it’s just not happening tonight. I am pretty tired and thing I am going to get a good night’s sleep tonight. A couple of drinks certainly helped me along the way to being ready to hit the sack. They damn sure relaxed me anyway.

For a first day back at work it was rather uneventful. Most of my folks showed up for work, on time even. I had one manager off today, so I spent the majority of the day in her store although I had to visit all three in order to put together the end of week paperwork that they should have all done yesterday.

It was meeting day, being Thursday, so I didn’t get home from work until almost six this evening after making a brief stop at the grocery store. The wife had invited friends over for supper and they arrived shortly after the time I got home.

We had a pretty nice dinner consisting of home-made Fajitas. My tomatoes have been ripening lately and with all the rain we’ve had the last few days they are looking really nice. I only have one Bell Pepper plant this year, and it’s not doing so well because of the dry spell we went through. The banana and jabenero peppers are looking great though. Pretty soon I will be able to start making salsa again. I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about preserving and canning, so I just freeze the shit. It keeps for awhile and it’s not like I am trying to store several years worth at a time.

Anyway, the wife made Margaritas to go with dinner. They were pretty good although she and her friend said they tasted funny. They seemed fine by me, but I only had one and then had a bourbon and Coke after. Can’t drink much on a work night, so that was all for today.

The wife made our reservations for Helen the weekend of October 12th-14th. I still don’t know if I am going to manage to get the weekend off, but the wife will be there at least. We are staying in a cabin this year. Right now the manager has set aside a couple of cabins and something like five rooms aside for us as well, all in the same general area. The rates are pretty damn good as well. There are more details over at V-Man’s site. I had my next vacation all set up to be on the original date we had agreed upon for Helen in September but then the boy had to go off and join the Marine Corps. Damned inconvenient kids. 🙂

I suppose that’s about it tonight. Nothing profound or particularly gruesome and not even a single paid post for the evening. How fucking boring. Maybe I can dredge something up later. If it’s anything like last night I will be awakened around 2am by a small child crawling into bed and be up for an hour or so before I can get back to sleep for that final hour before the alarm sounds.

One of the things that I have really learned to appreciate over the last few years at my job is the limited time that I get with my family. During the normal course of the year my days off rotate so that one week I have two and the next week I get one day off. Since they normally fall during the middle of the week that still doesn’t give me much time to spend with the rest of them except during summer break. It makes me really appreciate the time that I do get to spend with my wife and kids on vacations and those rare weekends off that much more.

One of the things that we really used to enjoy doing was to get together with another teacher friend of my wife’s and her husband and children. We would go over to their house and cook out and then shoot pool for a couple of hours. We had a pool table in the house when I was a child and I always loved getting together as a family and relaxing together over the pool table.

We haven’t completely finished our basement yet, but depending on if I get promoted again this year and move or not, I am considering getting a pool table. My sponsor of this post, Boston Tables, has a really nice selection of pool tables shown at their web site like the one pictured below.

What is really funny is that as soon as I started browsing through the page the wife got up and came over and wanted to know how much they were. She enjoys shooting a game of billiards as much as I do. As a matter of fact in college we were both considered non-traditional students but even being older than other students doesn’t exempt you from the physical education requirements, so she took stuff like Pool and Billiards and I took a Camping class. At least it was stuff we enjoyed. Could have been underwater basket weaving 101.

Anyhow, the prices over at Boston Tables are pretty competitive and they also carry other stuff too, like Poker Tables, Bar Stools, and one of my favorites, Home Theater seating. I really need to take a look at their stuff and do a write-up on it for my tech blog. Anyone that’s hung out her longer than a year or two knows I am very much into HTPC setups and home-brew Tivos, so setting up a home theater in the back room of my basement would be really cool.

Now that I have wandered completely off the subject of Pool Tables it’s about time to stop while I am ahead. There is one over there that I have my eye one though, an 8′ Nantucket Walnut Pool Table for just under $1600. It’s pretty sharp and would fit nicely in my basement.

…for the most part. I was going to post some site reviews and other stuff, but nothing is coming out tonight, thus the lack of posting. I sat and did something I rarely do, watch TV. I don’t watch a whole hell of a lot, but I do like the Law and Order series, so I watched Law and Order: SVU a couple of times this evening/

It took awhile to get staffed tonight. One of my managers called me and said, “yeah, we will be staffed when this other girl gets there, but she is going to be an hour to an hour and a half late”. I have spent the last 48 hours drumming it into my new manager’s heads about how important it was to be staffed tonight after the fireworks (they are doing them tonight for some reason) and he just blithely ignored me. He’s in there waiting tables right now. I did call a girl in for him and she should be getting there any time. Some people just don’t understand how important it is to be on top of stuff when it happens, not hours later.

My other manager decided on her own not to go in for drawer change. She has extra people working, so it isn’t a huge deal but she should have gone on in.

Hopefully I can go the rest of the night with no more phone calls. One more day…

We finally figured out exactly what it is we are doing this week. Thursday evening we will be meeting some fellow bloggers at some Indian restaurant next to a big hotel in Atlanta, as Eric explained it. Boy, that fucking helps don’t it? Anyway, if I forget to email you give me a call or shoot me an email.

Friday morning the wife has to run to the doctor and then we will probably make the drive down to Bluffton and stay the weekend. We will probably be down there until Monday or Tuesday morning and hit Savannah at some point over the weekend. I would stay longer but since I have to be back at work on Thursday morning I want at least one day at home to get stuff taken care of.

The wife and Pete just went to the store to get the makings for a Greek salad. That will be a nice cool supper. Salad and bread. I am sure that I will be craving beef by the time tomorrow morning rolls around.

Just two more days until vacation. I have a manager off tomorrow but my relief manager will be with me as well as a manager trainee. I am going to try and take it as easy as possible before I am finished on Wednesday. I do have to check on the fireworks. Someone told me that they are doing them locally tomorrow evening. That may very well be a problem as I really don’t have the help I need in my stores on a Tuesday night for that sort of rush. I may end up working fairly late on Tuesday night.

It’s nice to have the girls home. I slept much better last night with them here and the wife in bed. I enjoyed the quiet time, but it is much better to have them home. Have to start getting ready for work in a minute but I injured myself this morning and had to whine about it for a minute.

Dinner last night was really nice. We were all stuffed afterward, except for my smallest girls. RePete is just one of those extremely picky eaters and doesn’t eat 90% of what we fix so she ends up going hungry quite often until she gets tired of it and finally eats whatever we have made. Catering to them is not something that we particularly go out of our way to do. If they want to eat fruit or make a sandwich they are more than welcome to but that’s pretty much it.

The wife does the same thing that I do in the mornings and has her cell phone set up with an alarm for the time that she normally gets up. The only thing is that she is on vacation but hasn’t disabled it. The alarm went off a couple of minutes ago so I jumped up from my computer desk and went to run in there and grab it before it woke her up.

Most of their luggage is still sitting there on the living room floor, and I missed seeing a bag and tripped over it, catching my big toenail and snapping it bending it back. I landed on my hands and knees tearing off several layers of skin form my left knee. My big toe is hurting and now I have this nasty fucking carpet burn on my left knee that is oozing blood. Just what I wanted to go to work with. Heck, if I were one of my employees that would be enough to call in to work about, the assholes.

I have to go shower and I am sure that my knee is going to feel wonderful once soap and water hit it.

Damn, it’s only 9:50 and this has been one shitty day. I’m sitting back at home right now, at least for the next hour.

The car acted like it didn’t want to start this morning, but it caught and turned over so I went ahead on into one of my stores. I still have a manager on vacation and another one is off today. For the most part everyone showed up at those two stores today but at my third one nobody but the manager showed up. It took me awhile but I finally got him covered. We are having that multi-unit manager meeting/cookout today so I was planning on visiting each store for about 30-40 minutes then head home to get some shorts on. When I went to crank my car at the first one it wouldn’t start. I am damn sure not a mechanic so I assumed it was the battery. I borrowed a waitress’s car, went to the Wal-Mart and got myself a new battery. It sounded funny but cranked right up. I made it to the bank and when I came out it wouldn’t start again. It smells funny, like a burning belt smell. I don’t know but I am assuming my alternator has gone out.

I called for a tow ($50 damn dollars) to the shop that does all of my automotive work, and the wife came to pick me up and bring me home. I have one of the other district’s coming to pick me up for the cookout. Glenn, the guy that does all of my work said that he was pretty slammed so it may be a couple of days before he even looks at the car. I’m damn sure not going to drive the gas-guzzling van. I will just go in a bit late tomorrow, and I think that the girls are going to Panama City Thursday, so I will have the blue car for a couple of days.

My entire week has been like this. Nothing seriously major, but just entirely too stressful. Most of it is because I have one of my managers on vacation so several days I am trying to run two stores at once. It is expensive because instead of me cooking and running a store as I normally do when a manager is off, since I have to take care of two I am paying two cooks. I can’t let myself be productive on the floor in case there is a problem at one of the other ones.

Just wanted to put a quick post up. I’m going to shower and change into some shorts for this thing.