If you weren’t aware, Lloyd and Faith have been gone for a week now. Russ has been sick, and Tom left for Colorado Monday morning. That left Rachel and I in the office these two days (Monday / Tuesday). Basically it’s taken me till around 3:00 in the afternoon to pack everything and take care of what I can with Faith’s emails and orders and stuff. Sure will be nice to have them back again.
Once the packing and stuff is done, it’s hard to get into another project. So I just took some pictures and added a case product on our store to help people see that the case lot is available.
Since it was the nicest day so far (or close to it—it was around 60) I decided to go for a bike ride after work. 18.3 miles in 58:52. Not my fastest, but very encouraging for not having ridden for over 5 months.
After church this morning (Buck going through slides of Jerusalem) I read a book (Come Rest with Me.) I guess this is the place to do a book review. It was really good, and recommend it. Sorry, don’t have the time to do it justice right now…
And in the midst of that, ran 5 miles (38:15). Basically took the day off, which was nice to do.
After Bible Study this morning, I spent the rest of the day working on my heating system. You know, the one I started 2 years ago? Yeah, that’s the one. Looks hopeful it’ll be finished (ductwork-wise) next Saturday, if I can get to it.
I ran out of bananas the other week, so on Tuesday I hopped down to Costco to replenish my supply @ $1.32 / 3 lbs. The trouble w/ Costco sometimes, is that their bananas are usually green, and you have to wait several days sometimes before you can enjoy them. I got tired of waiting. Now Friday (3 days after I bought them,) I had enough. Still green, I thought it wouldn’t be that bad, so I proceeded to eat.
After spending some time trying to get the peel off, and as I crunched away, I realized it wasn’t worth jumping the gun. Not only did I have an awful taste in my mouth, in the process, I also destroyed the pleasure that was to be mine if I had waited just a few more days. I ended up cutting off as much as I could (to let get ripe) and stomached the rest, so as not to be wasteful, as well to enforce the lesson I was to learn that day.
And so my lesson on patience. It’s better to wait. Better both in the short run and the long run!
It seems that the time you need an archive is after everything’s been sold and there’s nothing left! I mean, why archive something that you have 15,000 of sitting around? Well, today I figured I’d pull a list of things that should go to an archive, and the pictures are some of what I came up with. It’s actually quite amazing how many products we have these days. I can remember back to when we only had one book : )
Some things done today: Drove the truck in this morning and took a load of pallets to the dump (at least a dozen.) Then worked on archiving until the Internet came back up (TimeWarner had troubles this morning.) Packed the orders, processed them in Quickbooks. Re-stocked the shelves. Lunch was in there somewhere. And by the time I had all that done, it was 3:00 in the afternoon. Makes a day go by rather quick.
After work, I went to church where Avi Lipkin spoke to us tonight. Typically, Wed night is our supper / study / prayer time, but this time we just had supper and Avi spoke. He is a straight-shooter, and definitely worth the time to read up on his books / talks. Google him to pull some of his talks. You’ll be glad you did!
Just for the record: Church this morning, DRZ ride on Canfield, nap, 5 mi run, fixed my neighbor’s stove (replaced the broiler burner), Iotts, Rm 6 study session 2, Undercover Boss.
Today started out w/ Men’s Bible study at church (my normal routine) and we are in Acts 18. After which, I went to the office, where Russ was in moving mode. We moved the exercise equipment to Unit 7, and a desk out of Russ’ office (which is now comfortably resting in my house! I’ve been needing a desk, and this one is perfect for me.) Freeing the space in the warehouse was to re-position stock that is off-site in a storage unit. But before I could move them over, I had to rip up the carpet and scrape the glue off first. Then I moved the 8 skids of Tabernacle Furniture Sets.
I drove the truck over and was hoping it would be easy enough to throw them in the back of the truck and drive them over. This proved to be too much work, so (using the forklift) I took the topper off my truck, drove over to the storage unit, walked back, drove the forklift over, filled up the truck, drove the truck back, walked back, drove the forklift over (with a skid), unloaded the truck and repeated. It was a work-around, but I didn’t want to just drive the forklift back and forth, as it’s electric, and didn’t want to run it down (and get stranded!)
At the end of the day, I had everything moved over, the storage unit swept out and canceled, and most of the inventory re-stacked in the warehouse. All in all, it was a good day. Sure was nice to be outside, for sure. Otherwise I would have been in my crawl space at the house working on ductwork. Hopefully next Saturday I’ll be able to get to that.
Nothing major, but had a bout of vertigo again this morning. Sure wasn’t as bad as the fist time a few months ago, but enough to keep me out of work till 1:00. I went in and left early. Didn’t sleep well last night - too much tossing and turning, I reckon! The good news is I knew what to do, and caught it early. Still, it upset the stomach, and that was the main thing that kept me home. Hard to work when things are upset. : ) Oh, and I learned that it’s not the best to watch MI-3 in this condition…
I see I haven't updated for a few days. So here goes a crash course.
Friday
Among other things, I added a few items to our web stores. Well, only got one finished (The Ark of the Covenant.) The other was started, but not finalized quite yet. Re-formatted an old computer to Windows XP w/ sp3.
Saturday
Men's Bible study in the morning. Helped a widow move over lunch. Worked on cutting all the holes in my floor for the heating system.
Sunday
Church. Ran 4 miles. Watched USA hockey team take SILVER! Read.
Monday
Was on the phone for about an hour. Inventory -- I started at around 7:30 a.m. to help be finished before Lloyd came in and start packing the day's orders. Monday is also my phone-answering day, so I had messages to call, orders to track, fears to calm, and orders to place. Then there were missing receipts to reconcile Faith's bookkeeping. All in all I finished inventory at around 3:30 p.m. It seemed to be a really short day. At night paid bills.
And now, it's Tuesday.
Mostly catching up from what I missed yesterday. Like getting an order placed for GoodSeed Canada, getting an order from Korea placed, finishing up adding The Menorah to our Tabernacle website, fixing a few images on the same, and getting a computer to back up that way I want it to.
So, there you have it. Nothing out of the ordinary (other than us getting silver.) All in all it's been good and very thankful to be a part.
After many hours, we finally shipped out the skid going to Australia. I’m not sure what’s happening with all this, but it seems as though each shipment has it’s own problems. One would think that the process would get easier as time goes on, but it appears the opposite. I’m thinking it took about 4 hours to finalize the paperwork this morning. Well, that’s half because of the phone seemed to be ringing off the hook with many unique situations that cause distractions in the paperwork concentration :) But thankfully, it did manage to sort out in the end, and was able to put some time to re-formatting a computer. I remember thinking that this is not what I signed up for… in that when I started with GoodSeed, my responsibilities were more centered around content creation, videography, audio, etc. But now it’s more menial or mundane. Or as some have said, like eating cardboard. That’s ok. I have to keep reminding myself that someone needs to fill these shoes so that others can benefit. Like today, I shipped out over 2,000 pieces of material to Australia that will help that many (or more) understand the Lord a bit more. Not everyone can be up front. It does take a team effort, and I thank those who help keep me here.
Yesterday, I spend the day working on my taxes. Going through last year’s finances is not the highlight of the year, but after it was all said and done, it was good. Morning started at men’s Bible study (finishing up Acts 17). Around 1:30 I had to get out because it was a beautiful day (~43 degrees) so I went for a 5 mile run (39:51). Just what the doctor ordered for working on taxes!
Today, after church (Mat 2) I came home and again we had a really nice day. So I climbed Canfield Mountain, 7.3 miles, 3 hours, 17 minutes or so (w/ 30 min stopping to talk to folks.) Slept on the couch this afternoon and rested the rest of the day!
Been working on a clip from a long time ago, a little video when we first produced The Lamb. Since then, it's been translated into Simplified Chinese, French, German, Luxembourgish, Pa-O, Portuguese, Spanish and Yakut. More translations are underway.
This morning I spent probably 2 hours on finalizing the print job for The Stranger. I’m not exactly sure why it took so long, but there were details that I missed and had to have resolved before signing the quote.
Our last print job I failed to see that the quote had glossy lamination on the cover, where we usually use a flat finish. Part of the problem, is the technical term is “glossy lay flat lamination”, so it has both flat and glossy in the description. I originally requested the cheaper “flat lam” and they took that and used glossy because it’s cheaper. And it lays flat. And I didn’t see that on the quote, so that’s what we ended up with. No harm done in the end.
The other problem is I had crossed off shrink-wrapping off the quote, as we didn’t want that for our WorkBooks this time around to save some money. However, they went ahead and did that for some reason, and the good news is we didn’t have to pay for that mistake.
Oh, and they couldn’t find my signed quote, and the quote I signed didn’t have the shrink-wrapping price on it anyway (though it was listed.) I actually was willing to pay half the difference on the wrapping, and they were worried that I wanted to take their half off the invoice. Reason why they were worried, is the invoice didn’t have the pricing for the shrink-wrapping on it in the first place, so I wasn’t paying anything for it to begin with! Eventually we got it all sorted out and realized we both needed to pay a little more attention to details the next time around.
So, as you can see, lots of problems with the last print job, and trying to be extra careful on this one, as it’s our main book (The Stranger.) In the end, I think it all worked out. I got the final quote, signed it, emailed it back and send the files.
So far this year, I’ve had at least 6 print jobs to handle. Books and DVD’s, but each needs a good attention to detail! Some of my troubles can be compared to the seasoned traveler who is the one who makes the mistakes because things are too familiar.
