Site News

Tuesday is my last day in my current store. Six months there. I am taking Wednesday off and picking up three stores in my general area on Thursday. It should be interesting. Out of the three managers that I will be getting, one has already given his notice and Tuesday is his last day, one of the other two is very shaky and in need of a lot of direction and tutelage and the other knows what he is going and will be the only thing keeping me from pulling out all of my hair.

The meeting didn’t last quite as long as I thought it would so I did manage to get home for awhile. The wife is napping and I have to be back at work around sevenish so I thought I would relax for awhile and post a couple of things.

My current boss is f’ing pissed off. Not necessarily at me, but they may be leaving her without a manager as well, so she is fit to be tied. It should be a fun four days with her before I check out of the store.

It is officially race weekend. I talked a bit about it last night and unless you are a serious race fan or live in an area effected but the race it’s hard to understand. People that live near the Atlanta raceway or any other track around the country understand and avoid having to get out and drive unless absolutely necessary. Something like 140,000 people will attend the race on Sunday and a large portion of them have been traveling from around the country all week in their motor homes and campers and setting up shop at the International Speedway.

The traffic on I-20 past my town (and my restaurant) is almost unbearable, and starting this morning they will all be stopping for gas, a break, and food. Of course we have saturated almost every exit between Atlanta and the state line now but at one point up until about ten years ago, we were the only game in town. Where there are now ten restaurants there used to be three and ten years ago you really KNEW it was race weekend. It was actually busier than Christmas week, which has traditionally been our busiest time of the year as a company.

I like being busy, but honestly they can keep this shit. It’s too hard to double your staff just for a three day period. It’s certainly not worth it to me or to any potential employees just to waste my time and money training them for a couple of days. I get paid off of employee retention, so I am only going to hire people that I am relatively sure that I am going to keep for quite some time.

Damn. I don’t know why I am even posting this except that most of you will see it in the morning and blow that first cup of coffee. hehe.

This looks to be pretty cool. The Mixed Martial Arts League Total Fighting Alliance is sponsoring the broadcast of TFA’s War on the Shore over the Internet for free. It’s this Saturday from 6pm to 9pm Pacific time and is being held at the Santa Monica Civic Center. You can Visit TFA’s Official Web site Here!

Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection (preferably broadband obviously) can watch, you just have to go Download the FREE video Player! You can also watch pre-match interviews right now until the broadcast.

NFT (Network Foundation Technologies) is partnering with the Mixed Martial Arts League to bring this to fight fans everywhere. They are starting to become a very big player in the realm of broadcasting large, live events to Internet audiences world-wide and this promises to be a pretty big show. I like watching martial arts matches much more than any sport and this should be a good one.

I stole the links from their site. Hopefully I won’t be stuck at work Saturday night, but chances are I am going to miss this one.

This is the weekend. Tons of NASCAR fans are starting to converge on the raceway in Alabama. I started seeing mobile homes and trailers headed that way on Monday morning and the number has been increasing steadily all week. By tomorrow morning the influx will be in full flow and of course I will be getting hammered at work. Not drunk unfortunately, just hammered with business. It won’t slow down until Monday and if the race is rained out and they have to run on Monday then I will stay busy until Tuesday.

Even though it meant a farther drive, that is one of the things I didn’t miss about being off of I-20. Race weekend is almost as busy as Christmas for me at work, perhaps busier since it lasts longer.

Tomorrow I will cook most of the morning, do a waffle party for Pete’s class from 2-3PM, then have a meeting from 3-6, and have to go back and cook from 6-?. The question mark means I don’t have a fricking clue when I will get out of there. I really just don’t have enough help to get through the weekend unfortunately, at least not cooks.

I’m sure I will get a bit of time at home between now and Monday and will get online for awhile when I wake up and before I go to bed. All of my associates are excited because it means more money for them, but I would be completely OK with not doing any business this weekend.

I didn’t post quite as much yesterday as I normally would for a day off, I was extremely busy most of the day. I did spend the greater part of the morning doing the ads and whatnot, and managed a couple of posts, as well as trying to get my template fixed.

I spent a couple of hours in the yard as well. I planted several more Elephant Ear bulbs, a Dwarf Spruce, Confederate Jasmine, a Mandeville (sp?) Vine, four more bougainvillea and a couple of small trellis in the front, three hostas, a coffee plant, and I think that’s it. I had to clean the pond pump as well. That pump is pretty darn strong and the filter pretty small, so I end up having to clean it every couple of days or it just won’t let any water get through. I am considering hiding a large Home Depot bucket over there somehow, and submerging the pump in that to pull water out of the pond so that I don’t have to fool with getting down in the pond to clean the filter. I will have to come up with a decent plan before I go to fooling with that stuff though.

Normally on Thursday’s I have meetings, but I think that my division manager is having it tomorrow which is pretty damed stupid. This is race weekend and we are going to be extremely busy probably starting today as people travel to Talladega. I also have to do a waffle party for one of the local schools tomorrow afternoon as well.

As you can see, I have most of the template finished and working correctly. This afternoon when I get home I will mess with the fonts and get those right.

My wife and my son are Catholic although they are not practicing. Actually my son, although he was christened, has never been a practicing Catholic and doesn’t believe in any kind of higher power. Her family is also Catholic, and most of the older members are very devout. One of the things that I never understood about the Catholic religion was the heavy use of rosaries and what they meant.

I do have a very good friend who went to seminary school who finally explained some of it to me, and he used to talk a lot about the mysticism involved in religious objects, and their use. Even though it’s just not my thing I have always found it extremely interesting and I like to hear and read about it.

I had almost forgotten about this. Once I take that district promotion in a couple of weeks I need to go get some business cards printed up. Since I will have three stores it’s not a simple matter of telling people thy can get in touch with me at my store, I need to be able to give them my email address and cell phone number. There are other ways to get the info to them, particularly if they use an electronic gadget, but not everyone does, and one of the simplest oldest ways is to make sure that I carry a few cards around with me just in case, particularly since a big portion of my job is going to also be recruiting new managers.