Just stuff in general

No news yet whether Chuck gets to keep his job or not. His dad, talked to his boss on Monday but didn't bring up the proposal instead he basically said that since the Beckman office is bringing in so much money they can easily afford to keep Chuck on. I guess there has been many complaints about another office that keeps track of the brine wells (the salty water found mixed in with the oil in the ground), so that they may quit keeping track of them. Chuck's dad brought up the fact that Tom could very well keep track of the brine wells and if he does this Chuck could continue working there. His dad also brought up the fact that once Chuck loses the office job he is gone for good because he will not go back to driving. Chuck says his dad plans to hold off on the proposal until it deems necessary for him to use it. The boss is going to think about it for another week or so. *sigh*I wish they would tell us soon!


Gracie is doing great. She is such a pure joy to have around... especially when Chuck is in a bad mood like he has been since finding out his job may go down the toilet! She may be potty trained now but she still has accidents every now and then. She is not a barker (usually all little dogs tend to be an annoying little barkers) although she will bark when she is playing. Whenever she does need to go out, she will not tell you that she needs out instead she just stands a few feet in front of the door and if you're not watching after a bit she will give up and pee somewhere. That in itself is very annoying! She is still in her puppy chewing stage right now and has totally destroyed one couch and has been caught chewing a whole in the other one. BTW, Dawn I have a couple of the chicken flavored rawhide chew bones that are too big for Gracie. Once you get through this trial period with Reba, would she like to have the unopened one? That is if she can still have chicken.



We are to go over to my father-in-law's tomorrow to celebrate his birthday which was Wednesday. They are having a dinner which is great because we can have a "free" meal I think Maggie is an excellent cook! It is nice to have a good cook in the family (well except for Kelly... she is a wonderful cook). You can tell Chuck's dad enjoys it also (He is a little fatter every time I see him... LOL), especially after Sharon who could not cook even if her life depended on it! I mean this woman would burn popcorn in the microwave! We also may end up with a kid or two... but we'll see.

Management Lessons

*I got this in an e-mail from my dad the other day and I had thought it was funny and very accurate!*

Lesson 1:
A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower, when the doorbell rings.
The wife quickly wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs.
When she opens the door, there stands Bob, the next-door neighbour.
Before she says a word, Bob says, 'I'll give you $800 to drop that towel.'
After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her towel and stands naked in front of Bob, after a few seconds, Bob hands her $800 and leaves.
The woman wraps back up in the towel and goes back upstairs.
When she gets to the bathroom, her husband asks, 'Who was that?'
'It was Bob the next door neighbour,' she replies.
'Great,' the husband says, 'did he say anything about the $800 he owes me?'

Moral of the story:
If you share critical information pertaining to credit and risk with your shareholders in time, you may be in a position to prevent avoidable exposure.

Lesson 2:
A priest offered a Nun a lift.
She got in and crossed her legs, forcing her gown to reveal a leg.
The priest nearly had an accident.
After controlling the car, he stealthily slid his hand up her leg.
The nun said, 'Father, remember Psalm 129?'
The priest removed his hand. But, changing gears, he let his hand slide up her leg again. The nun once again said, 'Father, remember Psalm 129?'
The priest apologized 'Sorry sister but the flesh is weak.'
Arriving at the convent, the nun sighed heavily and went on her way.
On his arrival at the church, the priest rushed to look up Psalm 129. It said, 'Go forth and seek, further up, you will find glory.'

Moral of the story: If you are not well informed in your job, you might miss a great opportunity.

Lesson 3:
A sales rep, an administration clerk, and the manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp.
They rub it and a Genie comes out. The Genie says, 'I'll give each of you just one wish.' 'Me first! Me first!' says the admin clerk. 'I want to be in the Bahamas , driving a speedboat, without a care in the world.' Puff! She's gone.
'Me next! Me next!' says the sales rep. 'I want to be in Hawaii , relaxing on the beach with my personal masseuse, an endless supply of Pina Coladas and the love of my life.'
Puff! He's gone.
'OK, you're up,' the Genie says to the manager. The manager says, 'I want those two back in the office after lunch.'

Moral of the story: Always let your boss have the first say.

Lesson 4:
An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing.
A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him, 'Can I also sit like you and do nothing?' The eagle answered: 'Sure, why not.'
So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the eagle and rested. All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Moral of the story: To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

Lesson 5:
A turkey was chatting with a bull.
'I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree' sighed the turkey, 'but I haven't got the energy.' 'Well, why don't you nibble on some of my droppings?' replied the bull. They're packed with nutrients.'
The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, and found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree.
The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch
Finally after a fourth night, the turkey was proudly perched at the top of the tree.
He was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot him out of the tree.

Moral of the story: Bull Shit might get you to the top, but it won't keep you there..

Lesson 6:
A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold the bird froze and fell to the ground into a large field.
While he was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on him.
As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, he began to realize how warm he was.
The dung was actually thawing him out!
He lay there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate.
Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug him out and ate him.

Morals of the story: (1) Not everyone who shits on you is your enemy.
(2) Not everyone who gets you out of shit is your friend.
(3) And when you're in deep shit, it's best to keep your mouth shut!

Lesson 7:
A very hungry fly was almost out of energy when he spotted a pile of cow dung in a barn He immediately swooped down and ate until he was so full he could no longer fly. He spotted a pitch fork propped up against the wall He thought about his circumstance for a while and then decided that if he could crawl up the handle of the pitch fork he could then fly since he would already be in the air. After a long and arduous climb up the pitch fork, he jumped off the handle only to plummet to his death.

The moral of this story:
Don't fly off the handle if you are full of shit


THUS ENDS THE FIVE MINUTE MANAGEMENT COURSE

No job update

No word whether Chuck gets to keep his job on not. Last Saturday his dad had said that he was going to run an option by his boss that Monday. The option, well it wasn't really an option but more of a "what if we did this...?" kind of thing. If they get rid of Chuck the office will need to put in a $10 secretary to replace him. The only difference would be the pay, he gets a little more than the $10... oh yeah and of course, the secretary would more than likely be a female that 95% of the males would prefer because they are mostly males that work there (come to think of it there are no females at all! His dad is going to propose that Tom and Chuck both work 40 hours a week in stead of 50, Tom will work from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m. every day while Chuck works from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Chuck has been really sick this past week so for now he just gives up and no longer cares, but I do. I haven't been able to eat or sleep very good lately. The boss wasn't in his office on Monday nor on Tuesday and now Chuck is saying that his dad is probably waiting until next Monday to offer his proposal. If his boss does accept this plan, Chuck and I will get to sleep for another hour... yay!

No job

My husband just called me to tell me he may be out of a job soon. It is a real confusing high school drama that is going on at his job. It goes like this:

A couple of days ago Beckman Production Services that my husband works for (Beckman is an oil and transportation service which my father-in-law is a production manager for, my brother-in-law drives the crude oil truck side for, and my husband used to drive the water side for but now works as a "secretary"... which he likes a lot better and so do I) sold off the crude side and is only keeping on the water and hot oiler side. They are keeping most of the drivers that are working now, so thank God my brother-in-law still has a job. One of the guys that works in the office along with my husband has been saying that when crude goes he also is going to "jump ship" and go along with them. More than half of his work load will leave anyway since he is the dispatcher for both sides besides no one really liked him anyway, his personality is really bad and he is very hard on people... not just the drivers but the employers as well. When he said he was going to go, that got me my husbands hopes up because then my husband's job would be more secure for he would be dispatching the water side also. Chuck's dad was talking to one of his bosses yesterday and asked about Tom's position and where he stood. His dad was told there was no room for him to stay on, yesterday evening he asked his boss once again about Tom and was told there was no room... Chuck witnessed this conversation even! Well this morning the crude division found out the new office would be located about 30 to 40 miles north of here. Tom does not like the idea that he will have so much farther to drive just to get to work every day. He mentioned this to Chuck's dad and his dad told Tom there will be no room for you here. So Tom went above his dad's head (straight to his bosses) to complain and they basically lied on Chuck's dad and told Tom that they never said that and that Tom would always have a job. So Tom told Chuck's dad what they said and that there may be only room for one in this office and he knows the computer and what Chuck does anyway. So it is all up in the air right now but it is starting to look like Chuck maybe out of a job.

Please help me pray that he will get to keep his job because here in Michigan the job market is really really bad, that is why he had to go straight for working for his dad right after college. We could not find him a job right after college for a year!

And she gave up

She eventually gave up on the eBay venture and told me I could just keep the all of the money whenever I sold an item. She also told me that I could have everything that was left over to sell for myself. I liked this idea, I figured she owed me something for all of the work I had done for her. She did ask me to write an affidavit about her relationship with Rassell and e-mail it to her lawyer. I did this mainly to stay on her good side even though my husband told me not to.

I really had no idea what to say because I had never met him. I did, however, IM with him a lot on Yahoo messenger and would ask him a bunch of questions of why he wanted to come over here and why he married someone so much older then him. So I wrote this affidavit behind my husband back. I feel she owes me for that too!

She is doing well

Gracie is back from her surgery. She came home Thursday morning... I was hoping that she would not come home until Thursday afternoon, but no, Chuck had to bring her home Thursday morning. They told us to try to keep her from all jumping and running around for the next five to seven days... yeah right! The first couple of days with her was a big pain. She could jump up on things but she could not jump down off of things with out causing her a jolt of pain. So I would end up keeping an eye on where she went, or else I would have to listen to her whine all day! She is doing a lot better now than she was, is really active and is back to stalking and chasing her brother (my cat) around.

EBay and her do not mix

OK, onto where I left off about my mother-in-law... that dreadful phone call asking if she could move in. I did not want her to move in, I figured that the past 8 years was long enough. I knew that once she moved in, I could not get away because I was no longer in school nor could I drive. But on January 1, 2006 she moved in. She put me through a lot during this time that she lived with us, but since it was a couple of years ago I do not want to bore you with the details. Although I will say that she sold the new house... well actually she did not sell it, instead she gave it back to the original owner... and then she got herself a part-time job as a housekeeper at a motel up here, so she could have the income to put in the income box on the Visa form to get Rassell over here. She then asked me to sell all of the items (mostly bridesmaid dresses) on eBay that were left over from a big sale we had scheduled.


They (Sharon and Joanne her sister-in-law) had rented a hotel conference room at to have the sale in. Joanne wasn't going to be there so Sharon had asked me to go to help her with the money and things. She didn't do much for the decorating of the room, all she did was match up the dresses by their colors and throws them on a table... so all the blue dresses were all scattered in one pile and all of the red dresses were in another pile but thankfully all of the wedding dresses were hung up. When the doors had opened we were busy with a lot of onlookers and some buyers but not a lot of buyers.


Joanne showed up later in the afternoon, I should have gone home then but for some reason I didn't. After she showed up we didn't get any more shoppers... not even browsers! At the end of the day we were packing up the dresses that were left for me to put on eBay. Joanne knew that I was going to put the items on eBay, so she folded up the dresses and put them in boxes that was labeled blue dresses, red dresses, green dresses, etc. and she wrote down the size of each dress like kept the list for herself.


I had never sold anything... heck I never even bought anything before... On eBay before so I did not know what I was doing. I was going to sell the simple items like the flowers and the gloves first. I kept getting e-mails from people asking me for pictures or a more thorough description especially when I was trying to sell the dresses. Since neither of them knew the specific sizes or description of each dress, I had my friend Candy come over on a weekend that Sharon would be gone. We opened the boxes and took pictures, when we opened the boxes all of the dresses were really wrinkled and some were not in a proper labeled box. There were black dresses in the box labeled purple dresses and none of the dresses looked the same... so it is a good thing we opened the box or else I would have sold a box of the purple dresses and that person wouldn't have gotten what they pay for and I may have gotten in trouble or even sued by the person! When Sharon returned all she could do was blame Candy for not folding things when she put the dresses back in to their boxes. That made me very angry because I know for a fact that Candy folded the dresses carefully and took some good shots! She wouldn't believe that Joanne (her precious sister-in-law) was partly to blame.

I then sold a couple of the dresses on eBay, the pictures and a better description helped out a lot (plus too I was selling the dresses individually instead of in bulk... selling about 10 mismatched dresses in a box... like I was told by Joanne to do. So Sharon decided to take all the wedding dresses down to Joanne and model the dresses and take pictures for me. They also wrote down a description of each dress. The pictures turned out really good but the descriptions were bad so I ended up rewriting them, the only thing I had trouble with was the sizes. I could say if the dress was a size 10 or a 12 but I could not give the answers to the bust size or anything like that.


Since I was working with Sharon on this eBay venture, I was really starting to see that she had absolutely no concept of money. She did not understand that you have to pay some seller fees regardless if you sold the items or not and that's why he she was not making the same amount that we had put down for she knew nothing about eBay either. I was starting to get a big headache every time I tried to explain this to her so after a while I just gave up and started paying the seller fees out of my share, so I wouldn't make any money but I was doing all of the work!