One More Day

One more day then a day off... Last week was a rough schedule with flopping from 8am-5 to 11am-8pm every other day all week. Then this week my two days off were Sunday and Friday... Next week my days are back to back and the following week my days off are the weekend. It'll be a bummer when we roll back the clock this weekend. I'll loose that one hour of light I have when I get home. Oh well, no reason to fret about something I can't change, but it is a bummer. Spring will come back around before I know it and I'll be back to plenty of light at the end of the day. I don't have time to train dogs in the evening except when the kids are on summer break, but I do have time to exercise them as a group. I typically have 3-4 days a week to train/play. I have 2 days a week off, and normally 1-3 days a week are 11am-8pm, so if I'm on the ball I have enough time before work to do a little something with them.

Sunday we all went to VA Beach just for something to do away from home. There was a fall/Halloween thing I had found online, but it turned out to be nothing of interest. The festival part was pretty much limited to kids much younger than ours and the evening Halloween part was THIRTY bucks PER ticket... :-( So we sprung for an out-to-eat lunch (my favorite), browsed the book store in the mall, then headed home. Oh, the kids did get a pumpkin at the festival. The kids both have book reports due on Friday that they've known about for a month. They've been plucking away at them all week. I told them they needed to work on them Monday night (I worked till 8pm), then Tuesday they could carve their pumpkins (which they did), then they have to get the reports basically done tonight, then tomorrow night I can help them with the final touches on them. Ben left Tuesday morning for a community service type thing with the Navy. They are working on a huge farm in PA. He had to pack like they were tenting, but they ended up in a cabin. He'll back tomorrow. He'll be here tomorrow, have duty on Friday, then Sunday they leave for the whole month of November....

Work is a lot, but our new store manager is great. He is very knowledgeable, but more importantly he is a teacher. He's a "teach a man to fish" kind of person. He's very approachable. He's okay with saying you don't know, and he's very understanding that those of us that are just learning how to be managers don't have it all worked out yet. But along with all those compassionate traits, he is also very serious about the business and the productivity of his employees. People have and will quit and people have and will piss and moan enough about being held accountable that they may very well end up in a position lower than what they are at now, or maybe even in no position at all. People that have been "allowed" to skate by tend to get all worked up about being held accountable. I say "Ahem!" What I'm expected to get done in a day can sometimes be really wild, but I'm finding it easier and easier to find ways to get it done. I'm figuring out how to manage people to my benefit and I'm realizing that when he says I need to get it done, he doesn't usually mean I physically do it, I get my associates to do it. So I am physically doing less and less, but Lord knows my head is spinning all day keeping everything straight because I can't just willie nillie wing out tasks to people, (or at least I shouldn't- I've been "managed" that they before, and it sucks) they need to do know the plan and what role they play in the plan. I still walk a 100 mph all day long non-stop, but I am slowly feeling less and less like a one man show. (Although with me being over dry grocery and consumables I'm sure I'll always feel like that to some extent.) I bet I have 3 note book pages of notes each day... That's one thing I learned right quick. I got called out one time about something I was asked to get done and completely forgot about it. There may be a time I'm asked about something I just didn't manage to get done, but I'll never again have to say I completely forgot about it... One thing our new store manager is doing for us is adding an element of organization and communication that we didn't seem to have before.

So that's basically been the week. I'm looking forward to Friday. It might sound awful, but I'm kind of glad I don't have a weekend day off. That way I can spend all day with the dogs and not feel bad about it. By the time the kids get home at 4:30 I'll be about done outside for the day. The dogs haven't had a lot of training, but running them with the atv and ball playing is keeping them in decent shape. They love running with the atv, and it's a nice way to for me to relax. I get a kick out of them having so much fun.