Suzanne Calling

Week three of the new job has concluded and I'm still enjoying it. There's still lots to learn, but quite a bit of it has become second nature. Last night was the first time I did the nightly settle-and it sure is weird to have so few steps to complete. I got to visit a competitor to do a reduced session the other day, and I'm going to another competitor to do a complete session this week. Rather than have a freezer full of stuff on top of having the products of my employer, I asked my coworkers what they wanted of the competitor's offerings. This way, I don't have to test all the items myself-they can each provide feedback, too. Shopping the competitors won't happen for too long, as they'll eventually know that I work in the business. So I'll try to do as many as I can early on. At least I can share the finished results with others!

So, I'm getting ready for work and decide to wear my sneakers (for the second day) instead of the terribly fugly but oh so comfortable Crocs . This means socks. This means finding socks that match. Uh oh... I have a scary amount of Disney socks. Probably about 20 to 25 pairs of mickey emblazoned socks, purchased the first day of any hard mark sales event at my old store. How can you resist 1.50 a pair socks, post discount? Good, thick, won't get holes in them anytime soon socks, too. Well, my friends, you would think that with that many pairs of Mickey socks you'd find two that have Mickey on the same side. I even followed Ray's Law*. This means there are several pairs with a crew top, several more pairs with a plain top, about 8 pairs with a frou frou red top and even 6 pairs of black socks with mickey icons. This doesn't even begin to cover the Tink, Tigger and Pooh socks. (The Pooh socks were 65 cents, post discount, because they're the itchy, swea...

I want to go out for breakfast. Two reasons: first and foremost, I'm hungry. The second reason is to potentially scope out servers to come work for me. However, Ed can't leave the house until probably 9am-the carriers got a lecture yesterday about not answering the phone when the post office calls them to cover. They could get *fired* for not answering the phone. Even if the call comes in at 2pm. The work front has been going well. I'm into the third week now, and will be closing every night this week. Added to that is the plan to stay past closing with the cleaning lady. My store won't have a cleaning lady. I figured if I stay and see exactly what the lady does, I can possibly hire someone to do the same tasks in the middle of the day. Knocking around ideas on that front, but I'm not going to stay in local motels to recruit their cleaning people, lol. I can't believe it's May already. The kids finish up school in three weeks. Yep, three weeks...

First off, I did say that I wouldn't be blogging much with the new job. I didn't lie about that! The first week was spent doing all the prep work, and it was an *early* day. 3 or 3:30 AM. Yep, before dawn. It's a wonder I didn't oversleep, and when Saturday came, sleeping in was 7:30! This week, I'm running shifts. 7am to whenever. Once the guests come in, you hit the ground running and don't stop until everything is ready for the night team. It's hectic, crazy, fast, and ever changing. Perfect in every way for a hyper person! :) No two days ever are the same. Monotony is the bane of my existence. More later...

What is it with singers trying to turn the "Star Spangled Banner" into an R&B/Gospel song? All the vocal gymnastics are not what I expect of a performance of our national anthem. Do you hear this garbage when someone sings "God Save the Queen" or "O, Canada"? No, because there is a respect that is implicit in performing one's country's anthem. And for the record, the line "Oh, say does that star spangled banner yet wave?", Banner is three notes, not the four that most people sing. "Ba" is one note, "ner" is two. I listen to see if a perform er was formally trained on this-and apparently, not many have. BTW, I sing the tenor part instead of trying to sing that throat shredding melody. Rant off. And now you're saying I get peeved about the *strangest* things. Yep, I won't deny that!

Have you ever played the 'what if' game? Where you'd wonder about something you'd love to do, but there was some obstacle in the way, whether it was money, time, education or lack of ability? Thanks to my Mom, I developed a love of cooking very young. She was an amazing cook. I took a lot of what I learned and ran with it. It was so much fun to experiment and learn from mistakes and rejoice in successes. With my first husband, I'd end up inviting most of our friends for dinner, because I'd been taught to cook for an army, lol. It was fun to hang out in the kitchen, cook and socialize. That factored into each home I've purchased. From my early 20's, I always daydreamed and played the 'what if' game. What if I opened a restaurant? What would the name be? What would I serve? I'd even go so far as to play the location game, where would be the best place to open one? It was a fun diversion from time to time. I knew it'd never hap...

Yep, 9:08 and it is past my bedtime. I'm on 3:30am duty this week and that means getting up at 2:15 or 2:30! Yikes. Loving the new job. Awesome people, fun work and my ears have to get used to the occasional four letter word uttered by coworkers! I'm way too used to having children around. If you don't hear from me much, lets just say I'm dealing with the typical crunch stuff inherent in opening a new store: finding staff, lots of meetings with my bosses and lots of learning going on. I'll be back to posting on a more frequent basis soon. Shout out to Jill's mom, I got a sweet e card the other day. She's headed to town this week and I'm hoping to have both of them over for dinner one night (hint hint!)