Pool Saga, Part II

Saturday I took my guys to the public pool. Lk at first was very scared and clung to me like a tick, screaming that he didn't want to go in. But he soon got used to it. He calls it "the beach." This pool starts out very shallow and gets deeper so there is no "baby pool" which is kind of cool, a lot nicer and remodeled since I went to this pool as a kid.

As usual, Lm had no fears and went into the waterfalls and off the slide...

Once home, K helped try to find the leak on the DOA pool. He has an engineering degree and did some sort of voodoo where you fill it with air, then pour in water from a huge tub to find the leak. He found just one leak.

Call me a redneck but we patched it with duct tape! I looked everywhere for the patch kit that came with the pool but with being a single mom of two little Hummers I'm just not as organized as I used to be. I'm not sure if that's the reason or if there is another leak or what, but as you can see the pool just does not look as robust as it did last year!

Luckily my uncle Darrell came over that very night and brought the boys their birthday presents early. One is a giant beach ball and the other is a "spider" water toy that connects to the hose and sprays water all over the place.

"I'm a cowboy," Lm says every time he wears this shirt that I got him in Arizona...

It was pure bliss for my guys, who used both the pool AND the spider water toy.

Then last night my mom came out to watch her grandsons play and I stepped in the pool with them for a bit...

"Lm, pull up your pants" I'm always telling him.

But does he listen to me? Hence, the carpenter crack...

Turns out there is one more glitch. I bought the chlorine and was told the tablets were in there. They are not. So back to Walmart over lunch to get the tabs!

What in the world possessed me to buy this pool last year???

The Pool = DOA

Well, here is the pool I wasted $50 on last year. We used it all of 3 times last summer so that's around $17 per dip. My sister once wrote an article on the whirl tub they bought for their bathroom and calculated some ridiculous figure like $500 each time they went in it as they only have used it twice.

What happened is, just cleaning the pool from last summer took hours, followed by drying it out. finding the level ground, getting out the air pump which had a loose hose so my dad had to spend $20 to get a new hose for that. Then I couldn't find the filter. After a 2 hour hunt, I found the filter. Got the chlorine even!

We got the pool laid out, filled the top circle with air only to discover there is an air leak somewhere. Spent an hour trying to find the damn leak and can't find the patches to fix it anyway. In frustration I threw it aside. Then got out their little frog pool and my dad filled it with his air pump a little too full and THAT burst. So all they have is a sprinkler now as I'm feeling a little too bruised yet to buy another damn pool.

Here you can see the dead grass from the pool that my dad has been pissed about for the past year and he is probably glad if I never get another pool in my life...

So my guys have had to settle for a sprinkler hose until I can round up some water toys! It's a long hose that spurts water out of various holes and has a waterfall effect. Luckily they have not been too scarred from the loss of their pool, as you can see below!

Liam had a ball running through it!

Luke was a lot more scared of the water, he likes to put one foot or arm in it but not get drenched.

I see London, I see France on Liam's pants...

Liam just loves to put his whole face right in the water, say "Uh-oh", run away and then try it again!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Visio = Visio(n)? Me no likey!

I was recently asked to write up a Visio doc on our Document Flow Process. I would rather shovel cow dung on a 100 degree day, seriously. Now, many of you know how long winded I am. But I managed to say it all in 10 sentences!

Well, yesterday I get called into my boss's office. He said my "swimlanes" were wrong, and we had to meet for an hour with a Visio expert on a conference call to make it right. So in that vain, he wrote what he thought we needed said on several white boards with black marker (see photo above as one of many). When I walked into his office, the permanent marker smell was so potent I literally got high.

But my boss would rather "keep it real" and "more creative" on a whiteboard than produce an electronic document, then he says "Theresa, you handle this." The guy on the conference call said, "But this is basically identical to what Theresa already wrote on her document that she emailed me. Should I fly out there?" He lives in Chicago.

"No need for that," my boss said. "Theresa will type this up, revise it and we'll have another conference call." Which meant I had to bring in my camera from home this morning, take photos of all the white boards, (photo above is one of many), then toggle back and forth from Word to the photo to try to decipher his handwriting and type it.

From this, he hopes we will have a Visio doc that makes our jobs look more complicated than performing brain surgery, with all the circles, swimlanes, squares, arrows, pentagrams, color codes, diamonds, etc. He wants this for new hires. I frankly told him that if I was a new hire and saw this document, I would be running for the hills before I'd work here. But he said it's a company-wide project for all departments so that we can all have several more meetings to discuss if any tasks can be switched around.

Lovely. I want to scream, "Can't you people instead of this, make a frigging sale so we can get our health benefits back!!" Since they discouraged us not to go to the dr for the rest of the year, I went for an appt yesterday to beg a nurse practitioner for some anti-anxiety meds which she readily granted. Mercy.

Meetings Galore, Part XXXVIII

Right now I'm supposed to be in a meeting but I skipped it so I can sit here and bitch about how many meetings I have to endure lately!

When my boss was canned back in Nov, his boss asked all of us to write down any areas of improvement we wanted to see. I could not say the bald truth or I would've been fired, but the one thing I dared ventured forth with: I said I spend half my day in meetings that don't pertain to me. What she was looking for was something more along the lines of, we want more training or we want to order materials or we want to do some more team huddles, perhaps design more matrixes, etc.

Instead, I said I want less of this bullsh*t (but I put it more diplomatically). She said in her professionally condescending response, as she folded her puffy hands and wiggled her acrylic nails on the glossy desk, that the entire blame for any of our problems lay at the feet of my boss, who she fired, and she promised FEWER meetings. She said the reason we had so many meetings was that my boss micromanaged and we would not be required to be at very many meetings.

Well, folks, here is regular list of meetings, NONE last less than 1 hour except the first one:

• Daily AGILE at 10:30
• Monday's staff from 9:15 to 10:30
• Wednesday "Communication" meetings, usually 2-3pm, that says "we're doing great" financially but they have to cut our benefits because we're in the hole
• New Database SANT meeting 2:30
• E-synergy Portal Document Process
• Process Flow Development meeting (so far 4 in the past 10 days--see photo above)
• Expense Form Changes
• Bi-Weekly Product Demos that last 90 minutes
• Lessons Learned meetings (these are obviously QUITE long)
• All Dept meeting for Training and Doc (in which nothing is accomplished)
• New Functionality Code meeting
• And today: a 2 hour training session on how to install our software and hardware--this one is what is causing my soap box rant since I am the one who wrote the instructions on how to do this and have performed these tasks out in the field but I have to sit there for 2 hours hearing someone else regurgitate it back to me just because I'm "part of the team" not because it'll actually help with my job. Ya know?
• Oh, and brown bag lunches on how to avoid stress.
  

Shenanigans

I've fallen behind on blogging but lately have not had the energy to take many pictures. I've been working really hard to get my ebay business up and running to where one day I hope I can rely on it as a steady stream of income. Getting anything done with these two corkers is next to impossible though so for now it is on the back burner.

Last weekend we met Heather and Z at the park, then went to Chuck E Cheese afterward. Lm has borrowed Z's glasses here, I see...

Lk on the slide...

Z on the big slide that my guys were afraid to try...

(Will explain the eye thing below... )

The pizza place was a disaster, as I knew it would be. But Kyle kept insisting so I gave in. The food is terrible, and my kids are simply too young to enjoy the games and rides there. Lk freaked out at the people dressed as stuffed animals playing on the stage. We got 30 tokens and have 28 left. Lk looked interested in the Jeep, which is just a small kiddie car that you sit in and it moves around a little if you put a token in. Well, he flipped out when it started to move, stood up, and literally dove out of it and I had to catch him mid-air. That was his last ride. Lm is usually braver so I tried him in a small car with the same result. Lk wouldn't touch the pizza. But I guess we will be back (but not for years!) since we have 28 tokens left.

No, Lm was not hit over the head by an ax. He simply got ahold of my red nail polish which was on a high shelf (but not high enough, obviously) and dumped half the bottle over his head. Then when I looked over at him, he had the brush and was brushing the kitchen table with it. "Mommy, I paint!" he declared. Took an hour with mineral oil to get most of it out of his hair; I had to resort to scissors to clip the rest out. He had some of it left here on his face until I gave him a bath.

More ranting: he was messing around with my alarm clock but I didn't think much of it. He just likes to push buttons. Well, he somehow set it to the default of midnight...and guess when I found out about it?--yup, at midnight when my alarm went off!! I hit the Snooze button and then it went off again 10 minutes later till I was awake enough to reset the damn thing.

Next, he fooled with my phone which I keep on my nightstand when I go to bed with the ringer OFF. So the other morning at 6am, someone called and Lm had turned it on and put the ringer on the loudest setting, which nearly gave me heart failure when it rang. I tell you...he keeps me hopping!

Yesterday he took my salt shaker and poured it all over the table and floor so I put him in time out. Lk marches up to him, points, and goes, "Lm's in time out! Lm here in time out!" I said, don't look at the splinter of wood in your brother's eye if you've got a piece of wood in your own, Mister! Believe me, he has done his share too...

By Company Decree: Do Not Get Sick

This morning we get to work to find a lovely email from our CFO. It went on for 5 paragraphs but I can sum it up for you in one sentence: "Do not get sick, and if you do, don't go to the doctor; if you MUST go to the doctor, resign and go work for another company that can afford to pay your premiums." Basically we were threatened that if we continue seeking healthcare, the company will quit paying our premiums in 2010.

Oh, it was all couched in terms like "nothing is more important than the health of our employees" and "we have control over whether or not to subscribe to these services (ie, going to the doctor!)" and "you have a choice" and this will take a "team effort." Excuse me, but I have yet to meet anyone who, in their spare time, is wanting to run up company expenses by waiting for two hours in a doctor's office, getting poked and prodded or having a pap smear, just for the pure pleasure of it!

It took a lot of self control not to hit the Reply button with my own suggestions as to how the company can save on costs, so to vent, I will go ahead and list them here for my gentle readers in case any CFOs happen to read my blog (God help me though, I hope my own CFO does not get wind of it!). So here I go:

• Stop putting the execs and their wives up in 5 star resorts and paying for their damn rounds of golf, so that they can meet to discuss how to cut our benefits. We have conference rooms for them to discuss how to screw us over; can't they use those??
• Bill, yes actually send an invoice to customers that have actually made a purchase (we lost 2 mill last year from this "clerical error.")
• Don't RIF people for no reason, who have been working here for 20+ years--this is why they then started their own business and have been taking our customers left and right.
• Seriously, why in the world would you spend 6 mill to try to woo an international customer that made it pretty clear from the get-go would never sign with us?
• Making us bring our own office supplies to work now whilst spending $$ on motivational posters and personality tests does little for morale.
• Fix the plumbing problems once and for all so that we don't have to walk across to the other building like we did in the dead of winter every time we had to use the restroom.

There. Maybe I am cut out for a consulting job, I don't know. My former boss is thinking of starting a consulting company and maybe my credentials will get me an "in" there, who knows.

P.S. In case any of you have been gripping the arms of your chairs in anticipation of my score on the personality test that I posted about a couple weeks ago: I am Meditative and that dumbass I don't like who sits next to me is Targeted. Meaning, he is "autocratic" (their words, not mine) and I "refuse to be hurried". I could've said this for free minus the 1 hour meeting--another notch on my belt for perhaps considering a consulting career...

Better MEM Day Wkend but still 5 for 5

This was the best Memorial Day weekend since 2004. Why? Here's my track record:

2005 = in the hospital having laser lap surgery
2006 = in the hospital pg with twins on 58 hrs of mag sulfate, a poison that prevents contractions and makes you VERY sick
2007 = Mom's 70th birthday party of 50 guests had to be turned away when the entire family came down with the stomach flu and terrible vomiting.
2008 = I caught a horrible virus and was in bed for a week
2009 = got a call mid-week last week that Lk projectile vomited at daycare. Lm puked all night. Sat I was so nauseous I took some leftover Zofran that I had leftover from my morningsickness days, sick through that night but could function Sunday.

Saturday at the park...this was a different one than usual but not as nice...



Lk on the butterfly...

Grandma chased Lm to the fence.

We took a break at the picnic table at the park.

All in red!

They met a girl at the park whose 4th birthday it was; she got a new wagon that day and gamely took my boys for a ride in it.

Sunday my sister's family came out. Here's my lovely neice.

I love Lm's new shirt!

My mom and aunt Marylee...

For once the weather was perfect and we all ate outside.

I've got a great family (sniff, sniff...)

The boys just LOVE having their cousins over! They are so excited to play with them and then Lm cries when everyone leaves.

My sister is knawing on corn. This is payback for a bad pic she took of me at a restaurant last year.

I was glad my cousin's husband Tim brought the clan even though she had to work. We had a great time with them. My dad's cousin John is sitting next to him.

My sister sent a balloon rocket toy to the boys this past winter. Needless to say I kept it well hidden until we could take it outside! Definitely not a toy you want to play with in the house.

The way it works is that you pump up the balloons and then let them fly; they make a lot of noise and fly pretty far.

I braided my neice's hair.

What a cutie!

Monday my sister's clan came over again and we had lunch and all played outside.

Me and my goddaughter...

My sis and her nephews.

My peppy BIL and thrilled-looking kids here...

Lm is SUCH a ham!

Gotta love those shades and yellow hat...

Lk with his safari hat and cup of milk "driving" the tractor mower. Seriously, he knows how to work the thing, turn the key in the ignition and everything. Scares me, I tell you!

Sweet Lauren and Soph!

Mr. Serious...

I love Sophia's hair! So luxurious and beautiful.

And Mr. Drama himself...

Notice Lm's bruised legs, he is so active he doesn't care if he takes a tumble now and then. He just loves life and taking risks! My sweetie!

Man, I am lucky to have such a great family! I have about the best a person could hope for. I wish we all lived really close by and could get together much more often.