Holly’s Happenings

And before you ask, not, it hasn’t been bad crazy, it’s simply been busy crazy. It feels like all I’ve been doing is working lately, but that’s OK because I know it helps to pay the bills!

The beginning of the week started off cold and wet! The morning temps were below freezing, and we had a rain/snow/sleet mix come through the beginning of the week. Thankfully it didn’t last long and as the week progressed, the temps really warmed up nicely! Yesterday afternoon it got up to 70 degrees and this morning when I woke up the temps were already at 60 degrees. That is VERY nice for November temps!

The week also started off with us having to replace the shower head in the front bathroom. When we moved in here a year ago we replaced it with an inexpensive hand held model. We should have known better, because the old adage “You get what you pay for” really stands true when purchasing stuff like that! But at the time we just needed to buy something that would work! We didn’t really have the cash flow to replace the one that was originally here with one of the really nice Danze faucets for showers that I had seen. And Monday morning, when my son was taking his shower for school, the shower head completely fell apart on him.

Thankfully when we called the company who manufactured it, they were very nice and understanding and said they’d ship us a new one to replace it, but it would take a couple of days and since that’s the only usable shower in the house, we had to buy something that would hold us until the replacement came.

Then on Wednesday evening I got a phone call from an old friend from high school that I haven’t heard from in a few years. He was calling to let me know that my best friend from high school asked him to get a hold of me to let me know that her father had passed away the day before and that the funeral was the next day, Thursday. And of course, I was working a training shift on Thursday that I couldn’t switch or miss, so it wasn’t possible for me to attend her fathers funeral. I felt so bad because she was there for me when I lost my father in 1979 and she was there for me in September of this year when I lost my nephew. But I called her and talked to her and explained, and she did understand. She knew because of how quickly they were doing things that there were going to be some people that weren’t going to be able to make it to the funeral. She and I are going to get together sometime next week, which will be nice, but I still feel very bad!

Since Thursday I’ve worked what feels like a TON of hours and I still have a full shift today as well as an opening shift tomorrow, then a meeting at work after close. And sometime in between now and the meeting tomorrow night I have to bake some cookies or something sweet to take into work for the meeting. So it’s definitely going to be a crazy busy weekend!

I was emailing back and forth with my sister last week about my new job. She wanted to know if I still liked it, which I told her I really did. She then asked what types of things they were having me do so far, so I told her about the different things that I had done so far. She then wrote back and said “I could never work there, I’d end up gaining a ton of weight because I LOVE bread”. I had to chuckle after reading that, it just made it more obvious to me that she knew very little about working in the food industry.

I’ve worked a few different jobs in the food industry over the past 25 of so years. One of the things that has never been allowed in any of the food establishments that I’ve worked in is eating on the clock, and although some provided a free meal if you worked a long enough shift to take a lunch or dinner break, others only offered a discounted meal. But the fact is that you can never eat what you want, when you want to. Just about every last food item has to be accounted for, even if it’s something that is thrown away.

And if you think about it, if people who worked in the food industry were allowed to eat what they wanted, when they wanted to, we’d have to use appetite suppressants or we’d probably all end up enormously over weight. And I can tell you that the vast majority of the people I work with don’t even come close to having issues with weight problems.

After hearing just how bad the current unemployment rate is in my county the other day, the thought of simply moving away from this area crossed my mind again! I basically grew up in the area I’m living right now, only difference is that I’m currently living in NW Ohio and I grew up in SE Michigan.

I do love living in this area, it offers the beauty of all four seasons of the year and some of the prettiest fall foliage you’ll ever see! The only thing I don’t like weather wise about this area is when we have bitter cold winters, those are something that I could really do without! But as much as I love living in this area, with our local unemployment rate sitting at 9.2%, the chances of my getting any calls on the numerous resumes and job applications that I’ve put out this summer are slim to none!

Some of the areas that I would consider living in would be Northern California, Washington State and both North and South Carolina. A couple of my choices would be automatically ruled out simply because of how high their cost of living is, and after checking out some of the beautiful Wilmington NC real estate that’s available, the North Carolina area is looking better and better!

But then we have my husbands job to think about. The possibility of his hours picking back up are looking a little more promising and do we dare take the risk of walking away from a good paying job that might have a decent future to move somewhere unfamiliar and start all over? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens and weigh our options when it gets to the point where we have no choice but to decide!

What about you? If you could move anywhere right now, where would you move?

Well, as much as I wanted to spend today getting the rest of my stuff ready and priced for my sisters garage/yard sale, doing so just wasn’t in the cards I guess. I got a phone call from my mom last night asking me if I’d come up and help her work today. My mom has owned her own cleaning business since the early 1980’s and on Friday’s my sister in law works with her, but my sister in law is sick and mom really doesn’t want to clean this house by herself today. I can totally understand because it’s a HUGE house (like 6 or 7 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms and a total of 3 floors), so I told her yes, I’d help her.

My mom amazes me! She’s been cleaning houses and offices since just a couple of years after my father passed away. She is now 70 years old and still works 5 days a week, sometimes doing 3 or 4 jobs a day. Us kids keep telling her she needs to slow down and even consider retiring, but she won’t, she says her jobs help her keep her mind sharp and her girlish figure without having to rely on weight loss pills. Personally, I think she’s afraid to stop working, but that’s a whole different post!

So I’ll be heading out here in about 15-20 minutes and won’t be home until later this afternoon. If you’re the person that left me a comment on my Boost Mobile Update post, I promise that I will get back with you when I get home today, so bear with me! I’m more than happy to work with you about this situation, I just have a few things I have to take care of this morning (i.e. my mom). Have a great day everyone!

Both kids ended up not having school today because of the ice storm that our area received yesterday. Even now the trees and things in my yard still have a good coating of ice on them, but we were very fortunate and we never lost power, phone or TV. That’s a good thing because if those were out while the kids were home today, they would drive me NUTS!

Even though the kids and I have the day “off” today, my husband still had to go to work. On a normal day, it takes him about 40 minutes to get to work. This morning, it took him almost an hour and a half. He said the roads out this way were definitely the worst and are what caused the longer commute, because once he got on the expressway the roads were pretty good. But he just called a little while ago to tell me he was on his way home. The plasma cutter that he was using broke down and they aren’t going to be able to repair it within a couple of hours, and they don’t have any other work for him to do today. The good news is that he’ll still get paid for a full shift since it wasn’t his fault that he had to cut out early.

My shop manager is also a landlord. He owns several rental homes and a few apartment buildings as well. The other day he was telling me about how someone managed to get break into the cbu mailboxes at one of his apartment buildings this past week. The mailboxes were already installed when he purchased the building and he said he didn’t know where to go or look to find new ones to replace the damaged ones. Do you think he’ll give me a finders fee for finding them for him? LOL

I talk about my job and my boss quite often, mostly because I enjoy my job and many things I do in life are related to my job. But I also talk about it because I learn many things from my boss by how he runs his business. I also learn many things about business from things that I come across while surfing the net, some of which I pass on to my boss. I can’t help but wonder if he had some sort of budgeting software in use in his business if it wouldn’t benefit him and help the business grow a little better.