Blue Door Warehouse

In the back alley at work we have a warehouse that we call the "Blue Door Warehouse."  It has (as you might have guessed) a blue door.  We also call it the "Old HGF Warehouse" because before we moved all the materials to the blue door warehouse they were in the office building that used to house HGF's offices.

It has books and marketing materials.  The books are mostly partial boxes that our real warehouses don't really want to store and one or 2 full boxes of each title so we have some more accessible.  It also has most of our marketing materials: t-shirts, buttons, pillow cases, folders with materials about how great we are, etc.

In December 2012 we planned to do a full inventory of all warehouses, including that one.  The inventories of our 2 "real" warehouses were completed in December and we are on schedule to finish the blue door warehouse physical inventory tomorrow.

It doesn't help that the person hired to do the inventory has worked 4.5 hours in the past 3 months, but some interns have also been helping.

After the inventory is done then some of the items need to be reorganized because they weren't all put back in a useful place.  Hopefully we can use the hired help for an extra pair of hands to do that next Monday or the Monday after.  It's going to be really nice to have that finally finished.

Of course, in September we are scheduled to move the office 15 minutes away, but the warehouse isn't scheduled to come with us.  After 7-8 months of getting everything in order we are going to be a 15 minute drive from all of the materials we need to have access to.  Mostly we need them so they can be boxed and shipped out.  I don't know if the plan is to box them up from the current office or drive them to the new office first.

I can't figure out why they aren't moving the warehouse and why they don't expect that our staff will need to be near the warehouse basically every day, sometimes several times per day.

If money wasn't an issue

I've been thinking lately of what I'd do/buy/get if my access to money was unlimited.

1. Quit my job and spend more time with my family.
2. A new couch.  Nothing too fancy, just a sleeper sofa for the upstairs family room.  Maybe something like a sleeper sofa from Ikea like this this Ektrop or this Moheda.  
3. A foam floor for the upstairs living room like this one from Skip Hop, but we might need 2 to cover all the area I want to cover.
4. Carpet for the basement to help insulate it.
5. A whole house humidifier.
6. A whole house water filter.
7. Redo the garage floor so that it slopes slightly so that when snow melts off the cars, the water is directed out of the garage rather than just sitting around and rotting the shelves in the garage from the bottom up.
8. New shelves for the garage
9. A swing set.
10. Have someone to help clean the house once a week or so.  Vacuum, change the sheets, wash the kitchen floor, clean the bathrooms etc.

None of this is too exciting, but it would be nice to be able to do it all someday.

New Life

It is like what they say in those commercials: "Having a baby changes everything."

Besides being tired (even though our little guy is a pretty good sleeper (knock on wood)) I'm loving it!

He's getting so big so fast!

Martini?

Dippy loves to drink her water out of cups. Our cups of water if we leave them sitting around. We first thought that she just preferred drinking out of a cup rather than a bowl. But even after we switched both of her water dishes to bowls she was still drinking out of our cups.

Eventually we realized that Dippy also really likes is fresh water. You may think that this was an obvious discovery, but when we went out and bought one of those fancy cat water fountains she didn't seem to care for it. She ignored the fresh flowing water for the cup of water sitting next to it.

Once I realized that Dippy liked fresh water best I started a new bedtime routine. Every night I fill up a cup of water for myself and Dippy stares at me. So I started filling up a cup for her too. So every night I would bring up a cup for her and leave it at the top of the stairs.

In the morning I bring down my cup and the 2 nights ago water cup and the last nights water stays there all day.

Of course Dippy is a cat. She doesn't drink a whole cup of water every day. And I have to fill the cup to the top so that she can reach the water more easily though she will stick her head all the way into our cups sometimes.

I started to feel bad about wasting so much water every day so I wanted to find a smaller water holder.

Now we switch back and forth between a small glass bowl and a glass that holds less water than our drinking glasses...

You never know who's on the other end

At work there are only two people who really call me with "Unknown" on the caller ID. Morgan and a PJ program professional. When Morgan calls she always calls my google voice number which also rings to my cell phone. My cell phone usually rings after about 2 rings on my work phone.

So today I said good bye to Morgan and told her to call me if she couldn't sleep. About 30 minutes later my phone rang and the caller ID said "Unknown." I thought oh shoot the program professional called me yesterday and I forgot to call her back. But, I was working on something with Diane so I figured I would call the program professional back in a minute. But then my cell phone rang too. So I told Diane, "it's Morgan, this will be quick."

Then, completely certain that Morgan is on the other end of the phone, I pick up and say, "hey baby." Then I hear, "... is this Lauren?" I then had to explain that I thought it was someone else. I had given my google voice number to JESNA so if they had any questions about the file I sent them they could reach me over the weekend.

Luckily the woman on the other end of phone, after I apologized said, "I don't mind being greeted with 'hey lady'". The whole thing was really embarrassing.