Over lunch, I asked Justin what he did with the spider.  Because, generally, he’s on the side of letting the things go free outside.  Because he’s much nicer than me.  I made the comparison of spiders and robbers.  Once they’ve made the decision to cross the line into my house, I feel very little compunction about using violence.  I’m also apparently more violent than my husband.

Anyway.  He did let it go outside.  However, to my great delight, it was in the 40s this morning.  When he went back to look a while later, the spider had curled up into a tight, frozen, dead lump.

Ha!  Take that, freaky legs!!!

You know, let’s make those Friday Photos.  That would be perfect!

A few weeks ago, Justin declared that Wednesday night was “Wife Night.”  It took me a few weeks to realize that he was actually serious and that it wasn’t just a one-time event.  Wednesday nights, he tells his friends that he is unavailable to chat and hang out online because he’s spending time with me.  The entire evening is about spending time together, instead of sitting in our own offices and poking or working on projects or anything.  Yesterday Justin apologized to me because a friend called him and he spent 15 minutes getting out of the conversation.  He’s very serious about the whole evening being focused on me.

It’s fantastic!

So yesterday we spent some time snuggled up on the couch watching TV, I had a glass of wine, we had dinner, and it was wonderful.  Justin listened to me babble about my day and the projects coming up at work.  He told me about stuff happening in his office.  The glass of wine I had before dinner made me very sleepy and a bit loopy, and he tucked me into bed around 9:30.  He didn’t really sit down at his computer until after I was in bed, a huge change from most other days of the week.  It doesn’t bother me that he spends a lot of his time at the computer when he’s home—I sit at my computer and poke at things and spend time working on projects of my own.  But it’s wonderful when he’ll take time for an entire evening and just focus on me.

This morning, after a solid eight hours of sleep, I got ready for work and woke Justin up to let him know I was on my way out.  He got out of bed to walk me to the door, which made him my hero.  Because as I got to the top of the steps I saw that there was an enormous spider on the wall near the bottom of the steps.  And I do mean monstrous.  The legs on that thing were about 3 inches long.  And I’m not sure if seeing the fiend freaked me out more than knowing that I’d walked past it two times without knowing it, but I was definitely freaked out.  

Justin trapped it under a piece of Tupperware, I gave him a piece of paper, and then ran out the door to head to work.  (I’m getting shivers just thinking about this and resisting the urge (so far) to check to make sure there are no spiders under my desk.)  When I got Justin a piece of paper from my office, I was worried about touching the light switch and touching a spider instead.  I ran out of the house, not just because Justin was going to take care of the spider, but because I was worried more spiders were going to crawl out of the shadows and jump at me.  When Justin went down the stairs to put the container over the spider, I had the irrational thought that it was going to jump into his mouth.  What is that all about?  Why would it jump into his mouth?  But I’m always worried that spiders are going to do that and . . . kill me, basically.  I mean, there’s more, but I can’t write about it because then I actually have to think about it and it scares me too much.  (More shivers, dang it!)  After bolting from the house and the whole way to work, until there was light enough to look around my
car, I kept thinking that there must be more spiders in my car.

I called Justin when I got to work to make sure that he’d gotten rid of the spider and he assured me that he had and, when I told him about being really afraid that there’d be more in the house, he reassured me that there wouldn’t be.

I’m wondering now, though, what exactly he did with the spider.  I mean, did he trap it so he could let it loose outside or did he trap it so he could kill it without making a mess on the wall?  Sorry, all of you who might think it’s better to keep those things alive, but I kill spiders.  There are plenty of them outside.  Plenty!  And I’ll generally leave them alone when they’re outside.  But when they start to invade my space, then they’ve crossed the line and I’m going to eliminate them (or, more accurately, ask someone else to do it for me).

So that’s where I am this morning.  Last night was fantastic.  I got lots of sleep.  And my husband saved me from the spider this morning.  Work is crazy busy and I’ve really got to focus on that now.  I go to new-hire orientation on Monday (bad timing, really, since Monday is going to be very busy up here) and get my new badge.  The weather is still fantastically fall-like, with clear blue skies, crisp cool temperatures, and the smell of dried leaves on the wind.

It’s a wonderful time of year.

Oy!

So yesterday did not go nearly as planned.  It wasn’t bad—in fact it was a lovely day for the most part.  It just didn’t leave me any time to write or take pictures.  I’ve really got to get into the habit of writing these things a few days ahead or something.

Anyway!  I’ll put up pictures tomorrow for a Wordless Thursday and I’ll write stuff today because I feel like it!  And I can!  And exclamation marks are wonderful!!!

So yesterday I had Lean Six Sigma training.  It’s a tool or strategy or whatever you want to call it that asks people to look at what they’re doing and evaluate whether there are better ways of doing things.  If I’ve mentioned 5S here before, Lean Six Sigma is the parent to that tool.  I’m a big proponent of 5S because it’s all about organizing your workspace and making it work better for what you’re doing—keeping things clean and organized and standardizing so that it’s easy to follow along and find things.  It’s wonderful!

Six Sigma looks at processes and production and how to make it more streamlined and effective, which is also fabulously exciting to me.  I love having the opportunity to look at what we’ve been doing for ages and ages and get to ask the question:  Is this really the best way we could be handling this?  Why are we doing it this way?

Yesterday’s training was all about Value Stream Mapping and learning how to implement it and use it as a Lean tool through simulation.

We built airplanes.  Sky Streak airplanes.  Balsa wood airplanes.  It was so much fun!

What we were supposed to do was construct 10 planes, factory-line style, as quickly as we could.  Our first run-though, we had roles and placement on the line assigned to us.  It took us 36 minutes to complete all 10 planes.  The first one through to completion took us 17 minutes.  (I forgot to mention that we weren’t just popping them out and putting them together like is typical.  We also had to “paint” the wing by adding a large sticker to the wing, add stars to the wing in a specific place and color order determined by the “customer,” and add a tail number on the tail.)  I was in Flight Test (Final Phase) this time through.  I had to take the planes outside, wind them up, and make them fly from one point on the ground to another without going off course or running into anything.  It’s harder than you’d think!  Sure, they all fly, but they don’t all fly in a straight line, especially with added weight to the wing and a gusty tailwind!  I’m proud of the fact that I only landed in the pool area once.  And I missed the water.

Anyway, we had to then break down the process and examine what we were doing that was actually necessary and how we could make more of the necessary processes more efficient and how to staff the line so that it works better.  We broke out into groups to evaluate different parts of the line that were having problems and to look at the whole-picture flow of the process.

I went to the flow-process group.  I’m such a nerd that when we broke for lunch in between the simulation and the discussion on how to fix it, I sat and tried to map out how I thought we should do it.  So I sat there and tried to convince the three other guys that we shouldn’t even have Flight Test because of course they’re going to fly!  It’s a model plane with no possible unseen defects!  And it’s one of the part of the process that takes the longest time!  Sadly, I was out voted (I may have been the only one in the room of 14) and we kept it in.

We were able to shorten our time to get the first airplane completed down to 7 minutes, though.  This time I sat in “Paint” and had to cut out the shape of the wing from the 8.5×11 sheet of computer label that I had.  And because of that I sat in the group the next time around that discussed a better way to handle the “painting” process.  Actually, I was in charge of the discussion group because I’d asked the question that got us going.  We decided that it must be more efficient to attach the wing to the label right at the start, instead of tracing it, and then cut around it.

It would have worked, too, if we’d only had the right tools.  Because, as it turns out, the scissors stuck to the label too much and it ended up being more slow that it had in the previous round.  But we were still able to shorten our completion time down to 4 minutes.

Anyway, the point of all this babbling was that I really enjoyed the session.  I’m probably one of the few people who finds this sort of thing much more stimulating than my actual job.  I’d rather spend my day talking about how people are organizing their material flow and information flow than look at my computer and check numbers.  I do the number checking because I’m good at it.  And they’ll pay me good money to keep doing it.  But when I have the chance to do this other stuff, I enjoy it fully.

Except for when I get frustrated because it’s a stupid process taking the plane outside and trying to fly from one tape mark to another and it’s really not necessary to the process of completing the plane!  I mean, come on!

*Sigh*

Anyway, yesterday evening I got caught up in an organizing project that kept me up later than I should have and occupied much more of my time than I expected it to.  Justin insists that we keep all receipts for 7 years just in case we get audited.  I insist that if he’s going to do that, we have to keep it organized.  Because his method for saving receipts when he moved into his apartment was to stick them all in a cardboard box in the back of his filing cabinet.

When I started saving mine, I also started snagging his current ones and organizing them with mine.  And my method of organizing them was to collect them all in a central location (the same door-hanging pocket-thing where we keep the bills) and then, periodically, take them out and file them, by month, in envelopes.  Which I keep in a plastic shoe-box for a year and then file with the archive files (because he insists that we keep pretty much everything for 7 years) at the end of a year.

When we moved, I took Justin’s shoebox of receipts and stuffed them all into two manila envelopes.  I wrote “Justin’s box of receipts” on them and threw them into a box.  When I unpacked that box, I set those files on a shelf in my office.  When I cleaned off that shelf over the weekend, I decided that I really do need to take care of that mess sometime soon.

So last night, I sat on the bed with the TV on (Dirty Jobs!) and sorted out all the receipts for 2007.  And then I sorted them out by month and put them in envelopes.  And then it was after 11:00 and I had to go to bed.  But either tonight or tomorrow I’m going to go through and pull out all the 2006 and do the same thing.  (Hopefully there won’t be anything from years before that, but I guess I’ll find out when I get there.)  And then I’m going to put them all into a manila envelope and beat my husband over the head with it until he gives me chocolate pudding.  Because, seriously!  If he honestly thought the best way to organize files that he might need for an audit was to stuff several years worth of receipts into a cardboard box (along with several bills and all the information for his phone plan), he and I have to have a long talk about organizat
ional concepts.

But I won’t beat him too harshly.  After all, I could have just left them in the large envelopes that they were in when we moved and stuffed them into the back of the file cabinet.  It’s only my own sense of organization (and insanity) that insisted I actually break them open and sort the slips out by month.

And it all just goes to show how much of a crazy I really am.  Isn’t it grand?!

Monday already!

I’ve been sitting here staring at my screen for 10 minutes trying to figure out how to write about this weekend.  It was a wonderful weekend, don’t get me wrong.  One of the best in a good long while.  But I can’t figure out how to make this post sound like something other than a “And then I did this, and then I did that” sort of tale.  It just sounds boring.

But I haven’t been able to think of anything else, so I guess that’s what you get!

I left work Friday morning later than I had anticipated.  It was raining, just like anticipated.  What wasn’t anticipated was that the a/c repairman would call and cancel because he can’t fix the coil in the external unit when it’s raining.  It makes sense, when you think about it, I just hadn’t thought too much about it.  So, since he’s rescheduled to this coming Friday, I didn’t have to leave work early to get home for him.

Friday early afternoon was spent running errands.  I went back to the DMV once again, this time with everything I needed and then some, and finally registered my car.  I have a South Carolina license plate!  It’s sitting in the front seat of my car because I haven’t put it on the back yet, but I have it!

I hit Target for some essentials.  We were almost out of shampoo and conditioner.  I needed deodorant because I’ve been having problems with mine.  Problems like it doesn’t appear to be working any more and I don’t know why.  And it’s one of those products where you don’t want to buy a brand at random and then get home and learn that the new one doesn’t work either.  So I got a few of those travel-sized ones.  I’m still just baffled as to why the brand I was using before started to fail me.  But whatever.  I also got some hooks for hanging pictures on the wall.

Then I stopped at the post office.

And this is going WAY too slow and it’s starting to drive me nuts.

I can’t remember what we did Friday evening.  It must not have been very interesting.

Saturday, I slept in, which was lovely.  It was grey and cloudy for most of the day, which kind of put a damper on me.  Plus my brain was all sorts of wonky.  Later in the afternoon we went out to a local produce shop and picked up a few pumpkins.  We plopped down in front of the TV in the living room on plastic bags and pulled out all the innards.  And as an example of my wonky brain, I actually broke into tears thinking that I was cutting the top off wrong.  Seriously.  Crazy in the brain.   We actually left off carving them until Sunday so I could get some rest.

Sunday was a bright, crisp day.  The weather was absolutely perfect and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  It was exactly what a fall day should look like.  It was amazing.

We went back to a church we’d visited a little while ago.  Their main pastor still wasn’t back from his sabbatical, so we’ll try one more time before we decide whether or not we like it.  If the trend of sermons continues, then we probably won’t stay.  It just . . . wasn’t well thought through.  So we’re still looking around for a church, but it’s slow-going.

We stopped at the grocery for some items, and then the afternoon was all about getting the house looking fantastic.  I did some cleaning—dishes in the kitchen and vacuuming all the floors.  Justin hung up almost all of the pictures for the house.  It’s looking so wonderful in the house now.  Hanging pictures really does make a house feel more warm and inviting.  And so much more personal.  I love it!  I’d just sit on a stool in the dining room and look around the first floor admiring all that we’ve accomplished.  There’s still more to be done—the entertainment unit isn’t organized at all and there’s a box of stuff that we’re not even sure what’s in it.  But that won’t be hard to take care of at all.

After working on the house as a whole, I went up and worked on my office.  I filed all the papers that have been piling up and cleaned up the scattered messes.  And then I took everything off my big bookshelf and organized it so that each of my book-related hobbies has a shelf.  I have a shelf for professional organizing, writing, photography, and office stuff.  I don’t have space to display all of my books, so the space that I do have I filled with books that I’m more likely to read anytime soon and made them look all pretty.  Again, there’s more that needs to be done, like in my desk drawers and the closet.  But when I go in there now, I feel like it’s a relaxing gem of a space and it makes me happy.

That evening we sat down with the pumpkins and finished carving faces into them.  Unlike Erica and Tim, I haven’t done pumpkin carving in a very long time.  I think it turned out pretty well, though!  I’ll put pictures up on Wednesday.

Even dinner on Sunday was fantastic.  Justin had this great idea about a meal, so we took sweet potatoes and made them into fries.  Justin browned some hamburger and added chili spices.  And then we baked the potatoes, hamburger, some stewed tomatoes, and more cheese than is healthy all together in the oven for a while.  It was so good!  We’re having more tonight and I can’t wait.

And that’s pretty much it.  It was a really fun weekend, even though it doesn’t seem like we did anything that was much fun.  It’s just so wonderful to finally be settling into the house.  With pictures on the walls!  And an office where I feel like I can actually work!

It was lovely.