My friend Aleta recently got engaged and just moved into a new-to-the-family house. She, her fiance, their roommate, and her three kids will have lots of new room – and new furniture. You know what that means for me? New-to-me furniture!
Click through to Flickr to view some other stuff I was able to do with furniture and bookcases. It looks so great!
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Tagged: furniture
Last night the Detroit Red Wings won 4-3 against the Colorado Avalanche in Game 1 of the Western Conference Semifinals. Yay!
This weekend is a good time to update my Red Wings Squidoo lenses and Zlio store:
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Tagged: detroit red wings
The last few days have been those kind of days that just make you want to disappear into a steamy hot bubble bath and nap for 20 hours. My brain is just fried.
But tomorrow morning it will all be behind me.
The kids did some really cool stuff this weekend! We made stepping stones for the yard and they came out so great! My honey, the hunter, did one with the constellation Orion. It’s great. Photos to come!
Update from three minutes later:
I just spent $160 on voice recognition software and when I went to register the software they made me answer questions about whether or not I’d like to sign up for offers from the same type of companies you need to register for to get “free iPods” and stuff.
Not. cool.
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Yesterday morning I had breakfast with my mom, who formerly worked at a “big box” store and a hotel, and currently works in a different hotel. She was telling me stories about past and current coworkers, and some of the things they’ve done that are just ridiculous and make me wonder how they have a job. One person she worked with refused to take pool towels out of the garbage because it wasn’t his job.
If guests mistook the garbage for the used towel bin, so be it. Over 150 pool towels were lost in four months because of this. How would you feel if your employee knowingly threw out business property because taking 4 seconds to retrieve it from the trash wasn’t his job? We ARE talking about a grown adult, are we not? And would you return to a hotel who never had enough pool towels?
I would never refuse to do something for a boss or client because “it isn’t my job.” If I don’t have the answer, I’ll refer them to someone who does. If I don’t know how to do it, I’ll ask. If it isn’t a service I/we offer, I’ll refer them to a service that does offer it or explain how to find one. But if someone emailed me and wanted to know how to get their children’s book published, I’d never say, “I don’t know, I don’t do children’s books. That’s not my job.” I’d at least throw them a few links to get started.
KFC has been in Medford for some time now. They recently opened after six months of remodeling to become a KFC/Taco Bell. The first few weeks have been insane. On a handful of crazy occasions, I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing human nature at it’s finest, which I say as sarcasm drips out of my mouth. The night they opened I waited an hour and three minutes for my food. Two days later I waited 47 minutes, and only got it because I went up after they skipped my number. The stories about their service roll in. One friend witnessed an elderly woman ask about her skipped number after waiting for half an hour, and the teenager behind the counter replied, “Uh, I don’t know.” He didn’t go check, he didn’t so much as turn around and pretend to look at a screen. He said, “Uh, I don’t know,” and stared at the woman until she turned around and started to walk away. The shift manager caught it and took care of it, thankfully, but tell me something. With no less than sixteen people behind the counter at all times during opening week, do you truly expect to have a job in three months when the madness calms down? Who will be first to go, the person who tries or the who just doesn’t know? How shiny do you think that reference will be to future employers?
A friend of mine is moving. She called the local grocery store at 7am looking for boxes. They told her to call back at 11. She did. They told her the boxes were gone, that someone else had picked them up. She did everything right, and the reply was still, “Well, if you call, and someone else comes and picks up the boxes before you call back, that’s too bad, I can’t help that.” Such interactions make it really easy to decide where I should and shouldn’t shop.
I was shopping for a new health insurance policy. I called a local insurance agency and went online. Four months later the agent called me back, demanding to know if I was going to sign the papers or not. I told her she never sent me any papers, and she huffed, “Well, you never called back!”
Ah.
“Customer service” minus “service” doesn’t equal “customers.”
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Tagged: customer service
I have a problem lately with my writing. Instead of going down on paper, it’s all going in my head.
I was having lunch with my honey yesterday when we overheard a conversation between two other customers. It was a perfect Valley Girl rendition – so amazing in fact, that I had no idea what she was talking about. Thad said he was pretty sure SHE didn’t know what she was talking about.
So what did I do with that exchange? Stuck it in a book, of course. (That’s where I get most of my material. Anyone who says they have writers block should just go sit at a coffee shop in a college town for fifteen minutes.) The only problem is I didn’t really write it down…I’m just kind of thinking about it.
Arnie has been written almost entirely in my head. I hand wrote a 14-page outline for Arnie three summers ago. I think I might even have transfered it to my Life Journal for Writers. Beyond that, I have dozens of scenes outlined, but all in my head. The scene where the Dr. comes home and argues with his teenage daughter while his son watches, the scene where the Dr. makes THE discovery of the novel, the scene where Arnie overhears conversations at his mother’s funeral…all meaningless until I actually get it down on paper.
I have Chain of Fools mostly written, too, and mostly in my head. The opening scene (which mostly IS written and actually in print), Karl and Gina’s wedding, Gina’s car chase, Karl’s move from Seattle, the prison visit from the greasy lawyer…tons of details between a half dozen characters. What am I doing sitting here? My boyfriend used to work as a financial rep and has access to all sorts of great research I could use, for this book especially. Chop chop, people!
The Legacy of Cademus Brown. Started in January 2006. Total words in print: 17,000. Total words in my head: a million more. I really need to get started.
Like most writers, I think a lot about what I’m going to write. I spend a lot more time thinking than writing, sometimes, and that’s a problem. My goal for this summer is to get more of it down in print. 80,000 on each of my three biggest books by September 1st, 2008. Then I can spend the fall editing them.
Oooh. I gots’ta lotta work to do!
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Tagged: coffee shop, fiction, novel, people watching, Writing
Every Monday that I’m able, I go to Wausau with my boyfriend. Wausau is a small metro area an hour from my home that has the most comprehensive shopping and services available within 150 miles. My boyfriend a nursing student and has class here from 7am-1pm, so I have six hours of free time to work, shop, drink coffee, and read at Barnes and Noble. I’ve discovered some interesting things over the past month, mainly relating to the availability of free internet access.
Barnes and Noble charges $3.99 for two hours of internet access through AT&T. McDonald’s near the campus charges $2.99 for two hours through Waypoint. Starbucks charges $9.99 for 24 hours through T-Mobile. If I go to the McDonald’s near the truckstop, I can use the adjoining hotel’s internet access for free.
If I stay home, however, I can get free internet at:
Let’s put this in perspective.
Medford, where I live, has an official population of 4300. All of Taylor County is about 19,000. A double soy vanilla latte in Medford costs $2.30 less than at Starbucks. Yet the business owners in Medford have the wherewithall to offer free internet access, and when I go to NYC it costs me $40 to have reliable wifi for four days.
Hmm.
***
I just updated my I Love NYC Shirts and Gifts lens. I’m going back in May for three days of SquidTeam work! Here are some other great lenses I made about NYC:
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Tagged: internet, nyc, squidstaff, travel, wifi
About five months ago I got a bug that I could take photos of creative still life and sell them as stock photography. Unfortunately, I didn’t get far at the time. I bought a small light box with two lights, a few dozen props, and $30 worth of slotted storage containers. Thats. About. It. (I blame my new boyfriend for distracting me.)
This morning I turned on the Home Shopping Network while I did my hair. Today’s Special is the Fuji FinePix S1000fd Digital Camera. This thing is sah-weet! It features 10 megapixel resolution, 12x optical zoom, 2 centimeter macro range, in-camera panorama mode, max ISO of 3200, uses xD or SD or SDHC cards, and manual or automatic settings for a variety of technical things I’m still learning about. Shutter speed can be set from 1/2000 to 8 seconds, so I’m excited to try those awesome waterfall shots.
Since it’s snowing and I can’t do my landscaping, woodworking, or painting projects, this afternoon I attempted to build a new, bigger light box out of PVC pipe. It didn’t work as planned…so I tried a sheet. That wasn’t cutting it either. Not to be outdone, I went out and bought a bright white roller window shade and tacked it to my office wall. Muuuuch better! I think I’m getting the hang of this lighting and staging thing.
Right now I’m uploading photos to Flickr. They should be ready to view in the morning!
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Tagged: Photography, stock photos
This weekend I’m on ambulance call from 7 AM Saturday through 7 AM Monday. How it works here, is that I’m home and available during that entire time to respond to a page. I carry a pager, and when it goes of, I drive to the hospital to get in the ambulance. Another EMT is also on call, and we have a dedicated driver, and we respond from there.
In one way, it’s a pain. I can’t get too far from the hospital, I have to stay relatively clean, I can’t get caught soaking wet in the shower or in a long line at WalMart. On the other hand, it forces me to stay home and get some work done.
I’ve been looking forward to this weekend. I have a long, long list of things to do around the house, stuff I want to build, and paperwork and Internet work to complete. So far this morning I’ve already delved into my closet to purge clothes and pack away winter stuff. (Which, may not be a good idea since we got two inches of snow last night!)
Speaking of snow, at this time last year and the year before, we were smack in the middle of a dry spring fire season. On this day two years ago, I was fighting a wildland fire 30 miles west of town in 65 degree weather and winds. Today, I’m avoiding starting my woodworking projects because it’s darn cold in the garage! Wisconsin. Gotta love it.
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Tagged: ambulance call, cleaning, snow
In the last few years, as blogs have grown from new to popular to mainstream, the number of ways websurfers can find and follow their favorite topics has skyrocketed. Not only can readers on the other side of the world learn about your new job, your sick cat, and the last book you read, they can learn about your Squidoo lenses.
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Tagged: article, Squidoo, work.com, Writing
…any longer.
After I wowed my boyfriend at Easter with stuffed pork tenderloin and tonight with twice-baked potato casserole, he’s no longer taking my excuses that I can’t cook. The ER staff loves my pumpkin cherry cashew bars and chocolate cherry cake. Grama wolfed down the spaghetti pie. The kids like my smoothies.
And, I can’t say I don’t like to cook anymore. I finally bought a Magic Bullet blender system that I used four times today and love. I have cool utensils I actually use. I have gourmet stuff, like flexible cutting boards and mini-ice cream scoops. I know enough to make a frosting bag out of a Ziploc. I can make substitutions.
On a totally unrelated note, I’ve wanted to try making my own stepping stones forever. I think the boyfriend’s kids will think this is cool.
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Tagged: baking, cooking, recipes, Squidoo
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