Archive for May, 2009

Rain, rain, rain

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

Well, so much for yardwork.  It’s been raining all weekend long.

But all the laundry is clean.  The ironing is done.  All my sewing projects are done.  The house is clean, even the bathtub.  I made muffins from the over-ripe pears.  The checkbook is balanced and the bills coming due while I’m out of town have been paid.  The reciepts are organized and I know which ones I’m still missing.  My office closet is organized.  My luggage is out and ready for filling tomorrow.

I’ve kind of run out of projects.  I’m not really sure what to do with myself….

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All about last week

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

It’s time for another weekly what-I’ve-been-up-to post.  I’m sitting here with an episode of NCIS that I’ve already seen playing on the background and delicious Hawaiian barbecue chicken pizza from Papa John’s sitting in my belly.  Admittedly I keep losing track of my thoughts here and watching the show, but I wanted to make sure to write something.  It’s been busy.  Sorry, Erica, this is going to be another long one.

I worked 10 hour days the last several days.  Monday was a really rough day.  I got back into the office and apologized to people who I’d upset, brought in Chex mix for the department to try to soothe feelings, but it was still really hard.  I sat in the bathroom crying once—people weren’t talking to me, weren’t looking at me.  It wasn’t good.  It might have been because it was a Monday, too.  Either way, I came home to my fantastic husband who drew me a bath on my way home and I sat in there for a long time, drinking a glass of wine and reading.  It was the perfect way to relax from the day.

Tuesday was much better.  People spoke to me, acted normally, no one was mad at me anymore.  It was much better.  The Chex mix finally got eaten and people mentioned that it was yummy.  We had an audit for the 5S clean up and got a 4.8 out of 5.  Our last audit was a 0.8 score, just for reference.  (I’ve really got to find a way to make this whole thing *not* just about the numbers….)

I worked frantically on a document for an airplane that was completing on Wednesday and got confirmation that I would be heading to Atlanta on Tuesday (the 26th) and started working on all the details that go into that—business credit card, car rental, hotel reservation, reading up on travel policies, and so many things that I’d never thought about because I’ve never traveled with a corporation before now.  Private colleges handle things much differently.

Wednesday we had a departmental meeting that was dull and a little irritating at moments (like when the 5S lead once again glossed over my contributions by not even mentioning me but thanked the other people on the team), but when my zone was mentioned for the audit scores, a coworker who had been sitting in our zone until just lately, stood up in the meeting and said that it was because of all my work and me pushing people along and people actually clapped for me!  To go from people being mad, to being slightly okay, to having people clapping for me all in the same week is a little overwhelming.  I blushed bright red and people around me started making comments about roasting marshmallows.  Someone came up to me later, who wasn’t even sitting at my table, and commented on how brightly I blushed.  Even so, it felt really nice to be recognized, and in front of the director, even!

I finished my document, with lots of unexpected revisions and updates and good gosh!  Those things get complicated.  Like, okay, it’s not a “crew rest” it’s a “flightcrew sleeping facility” and the pads that make it into a bed have to be included in my document to tell how to attach them to the berthed divans to make a bed.  That’s new!  And I really have to check my drawing list in the appendix to make sure I’ve actually inserted all the drawings because I saved a copy of the drawing but apparently forgot to insert the pages.  But this is why there are 5 other people who look this thing over other than me.  And God bless the ladies who wrangle up all the text and put the first copy of this thing together for me because that is a rough, thankless job. I need to bring them baked goods one of these days.

And then it was Thursday and my last day in the office and how the heck did we get to this part of the week already?!  My business credit card arrived at the house on Wednesday, my rental car and hotel rooms were reserved and ready for me to arrive on Tuesday and all my details were set.  I confirmed with the woman I’m meeting in Atlanta about where and when and what I’ll be doing and suddenly I’m all set to go on my trip!  I gathered up maps and information and anything I could think of that I might need for the time away and I’m pretty sure I’m all set to go.  I’m very thankful that I don’t have any deadlines this coming week because they just wouldn’t have been met.  With everything else in the last several days, I couldn’t do any working ahead.  But no planes are completing next week that require the documentation I provide and the next draft isn’t due for a couple weeks.  It makes for a nice change.

What I did work on this day was a lot of small projects, like a folder for a guy in our department and getting the schedule all updated and functioning.  We keep track of deadlines and milestones in an Excel document that pulls from a master schedule.  It’s a really complicated macro that another guy in our area developed.  I’m trying to teach myself how to do macros in Visual Basic but it’s complicated and this thing goes *way* over my head.  He’s using object definition and I haven’t even scratched the surface of that one.  Anyway, it was having problems because of people errors, basically, and we had to find a workaround that would make sense for our document and then I had to show the project coordinator all the changes and how they work so he could be prepared to update it correctly and how to read it and all those things.  The new macro cuts down on so many things we’ve been doing by hand.  It’s *yummy.*  I won’t really know until I get back from Atlanta how well it actually worked, but hopefully it’ll cut down on how long we have to fuss with the schedule by like 80%.

And my boss brought in cheesecake for everybody as a reward for how we did on the 5S audit.  It was delicious!

Unfortunately, that’s where the good things ended.  Justin’s boss told him that he was going golfing on Friday and no one else was going to be available, but someone had to stay in the office and make sure that there was someone there if any of the clients called or stopped by.  And by “someone” he meant Justin.  So we weren’t able to leave for Toccoa directly after getting home.  We weren’t able to drive 6 hours into the foothills.  And we weren’t able to crash-land at my brother/parent’s house at about 1:00 in the morning and then wake up and spend the next day and a half working on the house with my parents and little brother.  It sounds like it would be a lot of work and I should be relieved, but it was actually really frustrating and sad.

I called and told them the news and suggested that maybe we could meet halfway and have dinner.  Mom called me this morning and said that while it would be nice to see us, it just wouldn’t make sense for us all to drive 6 hours to spend 1 hour chatting.  And I agree.  I just wish we could have made it up there to see them.

So, instead of spending today with my family or getting ready to drive up to meet them halfway, I spent this morning cleaning the house.  Then I made a lunch and went to eat lunch with Justin as his office, where, astonishingly, three other people were working today, all of whom left while we were sitting on the front porch eating.  After that I stopped by a client’s home to drop of a handful of business cards.  And then I stopped at Target for a handful of things like dryer sheets and soap (fascinating, I know!) before going home to keep on with my cleaning.  My office looks great!

Justin got home, we ordered pizza because I have been wanting Papa John’s for weeks now, and we’re spending the evening relaxing.

Tomorrow we’re going to do some more cleaning (I hate cleaning bathrooms) and yard work (it’s been raining for days and the lawn looks like a jungle) and that’s about where the plans stop.  We weren’t planning to have a long weekend.  We thought we’d be out of town until tomorrow evening.  We thought Justin would have to work Monday.  And now we’re looking at three more days with no work!

Tuesday Justin is driving me to pick up the rental car at 8:00 and I’m meeting the woman in Atlanta around 2:00.  I’ll be there until Thursday sometime, probably around 5:00, and then I’ll drive back home.  I’m not sure yet if I’m going to be working on Friday.  I do plan to have organizing work Friday afternoon, but I have to confirm with that client this weekend.

And now I think I’ve rambled on for longer than long enough.  I’m going to go watch this other episode of NCIS that I haven’t seen before and then curl up in bed because it has been a long couple weeks and it’s just not getting any easier.

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What I’ve been up to lately

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

Last week was a very busy week for me.  It was a good week, but it was very busy.  And actually, it wasn’t just last week because the week before it was pretty crazy, too.  And really, “busy” isn’t exactly the right word for it.  “Full” covers it better.

Last week, I was out of the office all week.  I’ll get into that in a little bit, but the point was that I wasn’t going to be in the office to handle my normal work.  And, as it turns out, I had a lot of work that was due last week.  And I had considerably less time to complete it in than I would have normally.  So I was insanely busy trying to get everything accomplished on time.  I was honestly a little impressed with how much I was able to get done.  I didn’t finish everything, but I was able to leave it for other people to finish without too much trouble, I hope.  I have to check in with those people on Monday.  And some things that I did, I did poorly and I’ve been apologizing for them already.  I learned some important lessons through those mistakes so I can hopefully avoid those again in the future.  But I might be picking up the pieces on some of those for a while.

So I was out of the office all last week.  I was in Lean Specialist training at a campus located nearby work.  If you type “Lean Specialist” into Google, the top results you get will probably all be job listings looking for people to fill positions with that job title.  This wasn’t why I took the class, but I find it very interesting.

Lean Specialists are part of Lean Manufacturing.  If you’re not familiar with that, it’s taking a look a processes and ideas in the production of a product and making it work better—more efficiently, more productively, with less waste, and less effort.  “Work smarter, not harder,” right?  It’s looking at how things are done and thinking, “How can we do this better?”  Yeah, there’s actually a whole school of knowledge and resources that looks just at that.  And Lean Specialists are trained in how to take tools that help look at these processes and figure out where exactly the problem is coming from, how to quantify it, how to measure it, and how to pinpoint the problem and figure out how to fix it.

Lean Specialists work with a team of other Lean people—champions and process owners and lots of other people, so it’s not like they do it all on their own.  But they’re the people who have a great deal of knowledge about how to work on the problem.  I wanted to have that knowledge, so I volunteered to take the class.  Most people in my workplace are ordered to take it, but a small handful of us are crazy enough that this stuff interests us.  Plus, I’ll get a nifty little plaque to hang on my wall once I’m certified.

Anyway, it was a whole-week class.  13 of us, at the start of the week, all listening to a set of instructors and working our way though different processes and tools and learning how to work both with the tools but with the team dynamic.  We were given a production process (fold, staple, and write on a piece of paper) and worked our way through the tools so we were able to go from a beginning production of 11 units in 3 minutes to exactly 30 in that same amount of time (no more and no less was the key).  We learned how to use DMAIC, SIPOC, FMEA, VSMs, and lots of other acronyms.  And we worked as a team.

And that last part was what made me so unbelievably tired by the end of every day.  I’m not used to dealing with so many people so constantly for such a long amount of the day.  All day long, we were either learning about different tools or we were problem solving and negotiating and resolving conflicts and working out process steps and . . . it was hard.  Generally, I don’t consider myself to be someone who stands up as a leader.  But when it comes to this sort of thing, in this type of environment, then my brain just starts to go and I can’t help but stand up.

It’s something I’m learning about myself.  When it comes to organizing and working on things like this, I get downright bossy.  I don’t mean to be, but I have an idea in my head and I’m so sure that it’s going to work and that it’s what we should do, that I forget to take that step back and listen a little more.  It’s one of the most significant things I did poorly before I was gone for the week.

So every day for the last week, I would go to class, be jazzed up about what I was learning, discuss and learn and work with my teammates, and go home at the end of the day absolutely exhausted.  It was great, it was fun, I got to eat my lunch outside every day of the week, but it was so very hard.  I went into the office Friday afternoon for the first day all week to see what had happened on my desk while I was out.  I had a lot of email, a few phone calls, a whole lot of scanning and schedule work, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be.

Moving slightly off topic, the lay-offs happened on Thursday.  It was a difficult day to be in class, everyone wondering all day how things were going in our departments.  We didn’t lose anyone from my department, but several people who I knew in passing were walked off company grounds.  One of the guys from the class was included in that count.  It was a difficult day all around.

And the thing I was bossy about to the people in my department was about the 5S clean-up and when I got back to my area, it was unbelievable the difference that they were able to make in one week.  5S is all about office organization—getting a workspace clean and tidy and looking really pretty.  We’d been doing really poorly about that and the audit we’d had recently graded us obscenely poor.  We were charged with the task of cleaning up for a re-audit in two weeks.  So I went around and gave suggestions on how to improve their space, emailing people who were out on Friday when I went around.  Lesson #1:  I am not allowed to email people when I’m (a) tired, (b) in a rush, and, most importantly, (c) dealing with 5S in their office space.  I learned that some people are very particular about me going into their cube when they’re not there and under those conditions, I really don’t communicate well.  At.  All.  I’m not allowed to do that anymore.  I’ve emailed a few apologies out to people who I know were upset at me.  And I’m going to approach those people in person on Monday.  And hopefully 2 gallons of Chex mix with an apology note will help, too.

But they really did some amazing work last week!  Most of the suggestions I emailed out where taken care of and even more!  I know it has a lot more to do with our lead actually stepping up and telling everybody to get their butt into gear than my awful little emails.  But it was still really, really impressive to walk about the area Friday afternoon and see the transformation that went on while I was out.

Anyway.  Enough retrospection.  Before I close this, this is an overview of my next 6 weeks or so.

This coming week, I’m working 10-hour days Monday through Thursday so I can take off Friday to go see my parents in north-east Georgia.  Long hours, but not too bad, really, because I have a lot that I’m going to be trying to get done.  We’re still not sure when we’re leaving for the trip north because Justin’s boss is being a jerk (again) and saying that he doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to let Justin have the time off.  Right.  Like work has been so steady and like anything that would need to get done couldn’t wait until after we got back from a short trip up to see my parents, who, just a note, we haven’t seen SINCE THE WEDDING.  Oh!  And it’s not like he gets paid vacation EVER anyway!  Ugh.

But we’re going to get up there.  We’re just not sure exactly when.

After that trip, either the week after or two weeks after, so either May 26-29 or June 1-5, I am taking a business trip up to Atlanta to help 5S the desks of a few people who receive paperwork from my company.  They’re an oversight corporation over my business and if I named it, you’d know what I was talking about.  But I don’t think I should name it for ethical reasons.  It’s an incredible opportunity for me, though.  It’s going to be difficult, I’m sure, and I have to remember not to get bossy.  And I’m going to be away from Justin for a long time, longer than we’ve been apart for over a year.  But I get to organize the offices of people who have really important jobs!  I have to talk with a few people yet to figure out when exactly I’m going and then were I’m going to be staying and all of that.  There are a lot of details really up in the air still, but I’m excited about the opportunity.  It’s really a big thing for me.  And I really hope they let me borrow a laptop from somewhere because it’ll be a long week sitting in a hotel room by myself with a handful of books and a tv remote.  Ugh.

Either one or two weeks after that trip, depending on which week I end up going, Justin and I are flying up to Vermont to go to his sister’s high-school graduation.  We’ll be up there from June 11-15.

And then I’ll be back at work for 2 weeks before being on furlough for four weeks.

Kind of crazy, huh?  I’m definitely staying busy!

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Grace in Small Things

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

4 May 09 (Monday)

  1. Making a lot of progress on projects due this week.
  2. Absolutely fantastically delicious Jade and Ivory pasta for dinner.
  3. Watching Justin work on a web design and having fun and making beautiful, beautiful stuff.
  4. Curling up to read in my “nest” for a while to relax from a very long day.
  5. Snuggling up with my handsome man to watch yet another amusing “Castle” episode.

5 May 09 (Tuesday)

  1. Clocking in to work on time even though I accidentally turned off my alarm and didn’t get out of bed until two minutes before I needed to leave the house.  I haven’t showered, but because I had clothes set out the night before and my lunch made and because my loving, wonderful husband gathered up my lunch while I frantically dressed, I was able to get out of the house 5 minutes after I bolted straight up in bed.
  2. And then, even though he put my lunch together for me (and threw a Twix bar in my purse that I found a few hours into the morning), he picked me up for lunch and took me to Cancun’s for delicious Mexican food, something he hadn’t done in a really long time.
  3. After getting home and exercising, I *finally* got to take a shower and it was absolutely divine.
  4. Justin set up email settings for my new, yet-to-be-disclosed website for my business.
  5. The evening was filled with lots of fun, quality time with Justin.  I like that guy.  So funny and smart.  And handsome, to boot!

6 May 09 (Wednesday)

  1. I showered this morning.  Don’t knock it.  I have a lot of hair and it gets greasy really fast.
  2. I’ve received confirmation about the class I’m going to be in all next week.  This is lovely because I couldn’t find anywhere in the system on my end that I was even registered to be in the class.  And it’s secondly lovely because I’ve been given the opportunity to expand my training in an area of the business that I really enjoy and I think I’ll be able to do a lot of great things through it.  I’m going to be a Lean Specialist!
  3. Continued progress on several projects that need to be accomplished before the end of the week.
  4. It turns out that I have a whole extra month before my next doctor’s appointment.  I thought it was this month.  Maybe I can kick off some of this weight before I have to go step on that scale again!
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Grace in Small Things

Monday, May 4th, 2009

30 April 09 (Thursday)

  1. I *love* my Pr!vo shoes from Clark’s.  Best.  Shoes. Ever.
  2. Feeling useful by doing things that really help the people in my department but really don’t require a lot of effort on my part.  Like teaching one guy how to print a PDF so it’ll show up the right size on the page.
  3. I was called the strongest person in the 5S group by the Lean/Six Sigma leader in our area.  The one that reports directly to the director.  I work my butt off.  It’s nice to see someone sees it because the guy leading the 5S meetings sure doesn’t seem to.  One of the guys at my level in the committee also kept calling me the 5S goddess, which was another nice boost for my ego.  :)
  4. Sexy time!
  5. The feeling of accomplishment for rollerblading 5 miles, half of it into the wind.  It really wasn’t the smartest idea, but it sure as heck made me work hard and it feels good to get to the end and know that I can do that.

1 May 09 (Friday)

  1. Once again, I love that I spent the money on this WWF calendar because today I flipped to the month of May and there’s adorable pictures of lions and leopards.  Easy, visual place for sticky notes to show deadlines and out of office plans at a glance, with the added “Awwwww” bonus feature!
  2. I lost 2.5 pounds last week!  Go me!
  3. Justin took me to Applebee’s and Barnes and Noble on a geek date.
  4. And then to the beach where we sat reading for a long time and then splashed in the surf.
  5. And then back to Applebee’s for dessert and home to curl up in bed reading together.

2 May 09 (Saturday)

  1. Fresh cut fruit for breakfast.
  2. Visiting the local pool for the first time this season.
  3. Getting a lot of small things accomplished (balancing the checkbook, washing most of the laundry) but not feeling like most of the day was spent doing “work” stuff.
  4. Easter egg hunting in WoW.
  5. Watching the “Dollhouse” episode that we missed on Friday because of our date and *loving* the surprise of it.  Also: Alan!

3 May 09 (Sunday)

  1. I sat on the back porch reading for a while and the weather was so beautiful and the sound of my fountain so relaxing that it was tempting to sit out there all afternoon long.
  2. We figured out what to do about the website situation for my PO business and started the steps to get that into motion.
  3. Playing video games together.
  4. Finally not hurting anymore from rollerblading on Thursday.
  5. We went to see the Wolverine movie, which had a charming amount of naked Hugh Jackman bottom.  Delightful, really.  Oh!  And the rest of the movie was quite good, too.
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