Getting over the sick & stuff

Boy, it’s been a while.

My littlest little one got sick last Thursday and didn't really get better until Sunday. She threw up a little the first day and had the soupies for the rest of the time. Poor girlie. She’s feeling a lot better now but guess who picked up where she left off….

I haven’t been that sick for a very long time. Every time I thought I couldn’t possibly have anything left in me, my body would find something else to discharge at an extreme velocity. Come to think of it, it’s been 6 years. I still feel pretty crummy but I’m back at work. Everyone’s calling my office the ‘quarantine zone’, which is fine by me except it seems people are visiting anyway. Maybe I should put up a sign to make it official. Then they might leave me alone.

My stbx got yet another job. Selling cars no less. I’ll give her props for never having been fired from a job, but why does it seem like she still can’t keep a job? This will be her 4th employer in 2 years. She’s not quitting her other job, just cutting back on hours. I’ll bet you anything she didn’t quit just so she could keep her employee discount. And rack up yet more debt because they only let employees use a company credit card to get the discount. *sigh*

I don’t unnerstand…

I think I’ve lost a significant amount of my ability to speak. It just seems a lot harder to put thoughts together very quickly and then get them out of my mouth in an orderly fashion. I probably think about it too much…or I’m just getting dumber.

I found this picture on Google Maps. It’s a mesocyclone that happened somewhere in Wyoming at some time. Pretty freaky.

I sat in on a web/teleconference about Lean Six Sigma today. If you don’t know what that is…well…that’s ok. I think it’s a good idea to do these things every once in a while, but as I know, and as the presenter even said himself, the ‘Lean Six Sigma’ concept will not work unless it’s a top-down effort. And since I’m not really at the ‘top’, whatever excitement I might drum up to get it done is somewhat wasted. *sigh* again. But it’s still good to listen to it every once in a while. Maybe some day we’ll actually implement it.

I am so ready for this company to make some money. This struggle to eventually watch ends not meet is getting old. As in 3 years old. My division is pretty much breaking even, but it doesn’t make up for the other 3 who are all losing a lot of money.

Sometimes I really miss my days as a designer. I always new what I was going to do the next day and I could put on my headphones, bury my nose in a set of plans, forget about my problems, and not give a crap about other peoples problems.

Thems was the days.

Hope you’re all feeling a lot better than I am. In health and heart.

Horn tooting & hilarity

It seems I can publish from Windows Live Writer on my work computer. I didn’t install the update on this machine, so I wonder if that’s the issue…?

I haven’t tooted my own horn for a while. No one else toots it, so why not me?

I started working my current job in November of ‘07. Just over 2 1/2 years ago now. The division was losing a lot of money then. We still are now, but not nearly as much. This morning I started putting together a little presentation for my guys to show them how well they’ve been doing and I’ve made even myself pleasantly surprised at how much improvement we’ve seen since then. Just some facts:

- 20% increase in our ‘efficiency’ rating (projected job time vs actual)

- 12% increase in productivity (getting any increase in productivity is difficult when there is only half the work to get done)

- 30% decrease in overhead (coinciding with a 50% decrease in sales) (I know, not quite enough, but still….)

- 15% decrease in average wages (I know it’s not nice for the people making those wages, but it does have a big effect on profitability)

- Sales are up 38% so far this year and losses are down 60%!

We’re fighting some uphill battles though. Most of the equipment, mainly the forklifts, are coming up on the end of their lifecycle. Some are well beyond. We’ve spent 70% more on forklift repairs this year compared to last year. That sucks.

On a totally different note. Has anyone found the Old Spice channel on YouTube yet? It’s hilarious!! He’s responding to customer tweets.

Have a great one!

Enter new title here - Yeah, I couldn't think of one...

For some reason, my Windows Live Writer can't connect to my blog. So much for decent text to picture alignment...

It seems part of the separation involves me losing the 2 pieces of furniture I’ve built myself. Not that I mind so much, I really think of them as the girls’, and I can always build another, but still…

The first was finished years ago. A decent sized bookshelf that’s served us well over the years.

I would really like to keep this one, since it was my first project. Maybe I still can, since when we decided how to split the stuff she was the one who was going to move out. Now it’s me who’s moving.

The second is this mini-picnic table. It’s only about 4’ long, built out of 2x6 pine. Very heavy! I can drag it around by myself, but forget actually lifting it. It was the girls’ craft table inside for a while, but the wife commandeered the office so it went outside and has actually served as a picnic table. Most of the artwork has been washed off by the rain and faded by the sun already. It took me all of about 4 hours to build and didn’t pay retail for the lumber, so not a big loss.

When I find my new place, I’ll need to replace the girls’ beds. I found some free plans online for bunk beds built out of 2x4’s. Should be able to do it for less than 50 bucks. (Just for the frame though. I’ll still have to buy mattresses.) Since I’m probably only going to get a 2 bedroom place, I may even try to build ship style bunks, to fit all three beds in the same footprint as one. Wouldn’t give them much head room though. Either that or a 2 bed bunk with a trundle underneath. Anyone have any thoughts or experience about that?

On a very nice note, my 2 oldest girls, G who’s 7 and A who’s 5, have recently taken to giving me unprompted & random kisses. *sigh*…the heart goes pitter patter.

So Pamela mentioned in a recent comment to go ahead and feel free to write those depressing posts. Well, it’s not that I don’t feel free to, or don’t plan on doing it again, it’s just that I feel like most of my posts have been depressing. In real life, quite a few of the conversations I’ve had with friends over the last year or so have revolved around my failing marriage, as is understandable. But for some of my friends, that’s all we’ve talked about and it seems like they’re drifting away. Which to me, is also understandable. ‘Venting’ to people all the time isn’t a fantastic way to build friendships and I don’t want to continue that route here on this blog or in real life. So, I’ll certainly write what I feel like, and sometimes that’ll involve the depressing stuff, but not always.

Along those lines, I was somewhat enlightened by a friend of mine recently. We were talking about the depressing stuff, specifically about how my wife and I talk to each other. I feel she’s been repeating the same things over and over to me, I suppose to get me to understand something as she feels I don’t yet understand. (I believe I do understand but have failed to convince her of that…but that’s another topic.) I said to him that common sense tells us that if we continue to say the same things to someone and they don’t understand, that we should either change how we say it or change what we say, and why hasn’t my wife thought of that. His very simple response was, “Well, common sense doesn’t really apply here.”

Oo

Thinking of that has certainly affected my expectation of our conversations. In other words, I don’t expect anything except a waste of time. Of course we’ll have to figure things out, but it seems it’ll be on her time. Oh well. Live & learn.

Thanks for reading!

I wanna get outta here!

I’m sure ready for a change. Whenever I can scrape up the money, I’ll be moving out. It’ll probably be a few months. With all 3 girlies in daycare, every extra penny is already called for until school starts again. So I’ll get through July & August and hopefully by November 1st I’ll be living somewhere else. Same town, different hole.

This whole separation/being poor thing is a pain in the butt. I’ll be filing for bankruptcy too. (Shoulda’ done that 2 years ago…) It just recently occurred to me that all the money I’ve been paying out every month for the last 2+ years for debt reduction is only touching 25% of our actual debt. And by all that money, I mean $1,300 a month!! And none of it’s for a mortgage! I accept responsibility for being in this situation, but I’m not the one that actually spent the money. I just turned a blind eye…..*sigh*

So it’s a little early to be looking but I’m checking out apartments & houses for rent. I need to decide whether or not I want to pay the extra $’s out for a house. Probably not. I’d really like to have a yard for the girls to play in, but it’ll probably end up being a ‘just do without’ situation. Although I just checked and craigslist has a couple of low rent trailer houses on there. I’m sure something will turn up when I’m ready.

It’s fun to read some of the listings on craigslist, which are either mistakes or scams. Someone listed a house for rent, $500 a month, and only 3 subway stops to the city! Woohoo! There is not a single subway in all of Wyoming. (Unless you count the sandwich place, in which case they’re all in the city, so it still doesn’t work.)

I’ve discovered a weird thing around here though. Almost no one does month to month renting, only leases. If they do monthly, it’s only after completing a lease. Back in CA, everything was month to month. Or at least you had the option. I wonder why that is.

I’m just teasing myself by looking though, since it isn’t going to happen for a while.

(I just deleted about 3 paragraphs of depressing relationship stuff.)

What else should I talk about? Did a whole bunch of nothing on the 4th. Didn’t see even one firework, but there was lightning, which I think is always very cool.

I told myself when I started blogging again, I would always include a picture, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the main topic:

This is a picture of an old circular saw. It was at the pioneer exhibit at the Museum of the Rockies. One piece of equipment in our shop is called a component saw. It has 5 big (24”+) saw blades in it and it’s computer controlled, meaning that it can move all those blades & change the length with a push of a button. I should show this old one to my sawyers, “How’d you like to cut 5,000+ boards a day with this?”

And here’s a picture of the ‘redecorating’ I did in our office waiting area (a long time ago.) The new stuff is the trusses on the walls and the floor truss coffee table. Just showing off the different shapes we can create. The previous decorations were this wreath and these little hats with flowers on them. No, we don’t make anything with flowers…

Thanks for reading!

Vacation! with a severe lack of personal updates…

The blog is alive! Yup, I’m starting it up again. I hope it doesn’t get hijacked again, but it’ll be what it be, I suppose.

If I were to update everyone on everything that’s happened, it would be quite the overwhelming post. Even if I were to hit the highlights, it wouldn’t be much fun for anyone…

So, I’ll post some pics! I took my girls on vacation the 2nd week of June up to Montana to see family and then to Yellowstone for a couple of nights. We went to the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University in Bozeman. They had a really cool exhibit on DaVinci’s inventions. Did you know he invented a tank? It carried 8 men, 4 to run the wheels & 4 to shoot the cannons. The description said they chose not to have horses in it because “it probably would not be a good idea to have 4 men, horses, and explosives in such a confined space.”

I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped as far as playing shutterbug though. Most of the pics I got were in Yellowstone.

My girls got to see their cousins for the first time in 2 1/2+ years.

If you’ve never been to Yellowstone, it’s the freak show of all national parks. I highly recommend it, even though Old Faithful isn’t as faithful as it used to be. They had an earthquake back in 1959 that messed up the very regular eruptions it used to have. Maybe next time we’ll be able to stay at one of the lodges there. I’d like to stay at the Yellowstone Lake Lodge.

So on our way home I took a wrong turn. There are all of 2 ways out of Yellowstone into Wyoming and I took the wrong one. And once you get lost in Wyoming, there’s really no point in turning back. It’s usually easier to just keep going and find one of the 2 highways that’ll take you back home.

The good thing about the wrong turn was getting to see some of the Shoshone National Forest, which has some pretty neat rock formations. And talk about a lot of water! It seemed like hadn’t stopped raining while I was gone. All the reservoir's were full and the rivers were over their banks. And it got worse the closer to home we got (which didn’t happen until 10:30 at night…sheesh.)

It was sure nice to get away though. I don’t think I had ever looked forward to a vacation like I did this one and there is no way it could have disappointed since I was with my girlies.

Thanks for coming back!

We’ll end with more pics. Enjoy.

Sunday Random Update

Well, I haven’t been browsing the blog world much lately. A lot occupying my mind & time.

- Work has picked up quite a bit. Praise the Lord! In fact, it’s almost doubled in the last couple of weeks. I hired 3 guys back and considering hiring 3 or 4 more. I really really hope this is going to last. I’m sick of this crappy building market.

- Told my wife I’m going to divorce her and that I’m done trying to reconcile. If nothing else, it’s been an interesting psychological journey. I’ve learned a lot about how differently we react to, or just view, similar (or identical) situations. But that doesn’t get me past the fact that she’s kind of overwhelmingly needy. Overwhelming to me but not overwhelming to God. In a large sense, I hope a separation will force her to stop looking for a person to fill certain needs that no one on this earth can.

- The girlies are doing ok. It’s obvious there is some stress between their mom and I. I’m certainly not so diluted that I think we’ve entirely protected them, but G and A are doing great at school and after a spell of too many ‘yellow’ days earlier this year (green is good, yellow not so good, red is bad), they’ve been doing a lot better.

- G’s turning out to be a wonderful student. 100+% on most of her quizzes. If I could just get her to slow down when she writes. She’s starting out like I ended…which is not good. My penmanship is horrible.

- A’s still in kindergarten and while they don’t really test her ability to regurgitate information yet, her drawing abilities are progressing on track and she’s obeying the teacher better.

- About that ‘psychological journey’, I’ve been wondering a bit about people’s tendency towards exaggeration. Even between my girls there are differences in how, when, and to what extent they exaggerate. My wife has been saying extreme things for a long time now, about how I treat her and what she feels about things. I won’t really go into specifics, but it’s very interesting, especially when I don’t really care anymore that those particular statements are directed at me, personally. I’ve started explaining to her that those extreme statements are absolutely destroying our conversations. I hope someday she can see it.

- Haven’t seen a lawyer yet. I’m sure that’ll be interesting. Not fun, but interesting. I’m really curious to hear what the likelyhood is that I could get full custody of the girls. I’m sure it wouldn’t be cheap because she’ll probably fight it, but if there’s at least a 50% chance, I’ll go for it.

- Holy crap this sucks.

- I had lunch with my friend the other day. Who’s also my pastor. Didn’t get quite the ass-chewing that I expected, but he said what I expected. Good for him. Not so good for me as I’m pretty much choosing to ignore it by divorcing her.

- But there are some good things going on and this post is getting too long. Have a great day!

Great Inspirations…

Work’s picked up quite a bit…praise the Lord!…so I haven’t been perusing the blogosphere much lately. Figured I’d better get something out there and I thought the Friday 5 was a decent place to start…and then I tried to think of something to write…and failed.

Lately, I’ve been reading books about some pretty extraordinary people. Even did a bit of a study on John Calvin. Most of the people I’ve been reading about were scholars (‘were’ as in ‘long been dead’.) Some are businessmen and entrepreneurs, like Dale Carnegie.

Reading about these extraordinary people is a little daunting for me. I find myself quite unremarkable in almost every way. I can make some very pretty children, but that’s about it. It’s not that the stories make me feel inadequate, I just have a hard time putting myself in their shoes, so to speak.

I’ve wondered about the way I react to their stories. I enjoy them. I appreciate the struggles they went through, although I’m sure I don’t really get it most of the time. But I can’t say I get very inspired. The Dale Carnegie courses seem to revolve around using other peoples stories to inspire yet more people. And his courses are very popular. But do the majority of people react that way? Are you inspired by hearing and reading the stories of great people? People who overcame huge obstacles to get somewhere? What do you do with that knowledge?

Maybe you’re like me and just tuck it away as a story to tell to someone else as a means to inspire them, even though we may not have taken much inspiration ourselves.

Maybe you can take the ideas from those stories and can easily apply them to different circumstances in your life. That takes some imagination I suppose.

So how about it? Do the stories of great people inspire you? And if so, anyone in particular?