chauffeuring invalids...

things that are fun: puppies, flowers, more puppies, naps, ya know the usual...

things that don't quite fall into that category: darwin being sick and hopped up on pain meds.

that translates into me taking the reigns. now that he isn't quite so gorked out of his mind things are better. but not fully back to normal because he most certainly can't speak. so sign language and notes are what we are working with now.

monday i drove the truck around making deliveries, picking up lumber, and then get this, unloading the lumber by myself at the shop...that was a fun filled day full of caffeine (yes i broke my no caffeine rule). darwin slept on his couch while intermittently sending me text messages.

tuesday i drove darwin to the doctor. and waited, and waited, and waited some more. eventful. once we were done with that, i hauled tail out to the shop to meet some clients. only about 20 minutes late...

i guess this makes me morgan freeman and darwin miss daisy.

today (wednesday) i drove darwin to yet another doctor's appointment. (i'm beginning to feel like a chauffeur for the invalid). once i dropped him there i drove over to the shop and unloaded the truck (yes again and sans caffeine this time). drove to the pharmacy.  hopped back in the truck to pick up some heart pine - sketchy sketchy drive 300 yards that i would like to never do again. dropped off said heart pine. picked up finished heart pine. drove back to the pharmacy and then finally back to the shop. unloaded. drove back into town. stopped in kennesaw to drop of a contract and then, only then made our way back home....

things i learned today:

1. don't ever drive around your boss for a day while doing your job  (not exactly the most calming thing in the world)

2. if you don't take the exact way your boss thinks you should, he will point it out until you oblige accordingly....that only happened 3 times today

3. i cannot talk on the phone and drive at the same time - absolute can't

talking on the phone and driving, i am physically capable of, but when it comes to talking on the phone and actually paying attention to what the person is saying while trying to determine just exactly where you are is not my strong suit.

i can't make clear decisions when i am distracted by someone on the phone. darwin doesn't seem to quite grasp that concept.

some things i am quite capable doing while talking on the phone, but giving my absolute attention to the phone and the road i just can't do. i've tried. it doesn't end prettily.

i'd prefer to not end up with any more wrinkled vehicles this week. 

ciao.

so much with so little.

i may not be the most eloquent person (writing, speaking, etc.), but when it comes to pulling something off for a deadline, with very little to work with and very little time, well let's just say i am pretty good at pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the proverbial hat.

so this story i promise has a point and i may get to it by the end, if, and that's a big IF, i can remember where i was going when i started. ---again not one of my best qualities. perhaps i should start outlining my blog posts or maybe even writing down just key points...who am i kidding, that is most certainly never going to happen and takes out the fun "word vomit" approach i am so fond of these days.

back to the rambling - yes i know you can hardly contain your excitement - and on with my story.

it is a long roundabout story, that is further explained here Urban Reclaimed (read the dinner expo bit), so i will spare you all the details and you can go there and read for yourself/selves(?) - whatever. long story short, darwin approached me about 3 weeks ago about doing some tables for an underground dinner club for our friend rob. (UGDC - Push Start Kitchen (yes their latest post pertains to this post as well), Rob - I Love LA Eats - these links are making my brain hurt...)

well those three weeks drifted by quickly and we are approaching said deadline...ahem friday...

let me back-peddle a bit and state for the record that i was not entirely in favor of doing these tables...i send my mea culpas out now, but at the time (and currently) we were juggling a lot of projects that involved micromanaging money...ugh, and i just didn't have it in me to put another thing on the list...

but with enough badgering and coaxing full of backhanded compliments, darwin and rob sold me on the idea. so that meant my last week was sent scrambling to find metal fabricators....that is the easy part...the hard part you ask? finding one that doesn't cost you more than your entire life savings to make one silly little base in the shape of an inverted trapezoid...jesus pete. i fear a purchasing of metal fabricating equipment in our near future....

yes that is me in the background. darwin wanted to use me as a reference point...

well we (read: i) remembered our good friend MC over at Lemay Designs (i know, i know, again with the links) and she has graciously offered to help us under this intense deadline. she is so amazing that she has actually already sent me a picture of one of the bases. WOOOO..

yesterday, i thought was going to be a harmless day of gathering supplies, driving to bumble, and dropping off supplies (along with lunch...life lesson number 2, never let the bossman get hungry), dropping off snacks for later and turning my little red jetta around and fleeing back to atlanta. i was mistaken. horribly, horribly mistaken.

i am getting ready to leave atlanta, when darwin sends me a text about how i am going to be sanding the cedar slabs (that's what the tables are being made from if i didn't already state that) while he goes to a meeting. translation: you will be sanding these because i am tired of doing it.

with supplies in hand, i drive on out to bumble world. i arrive with lunch and snacks as to be expected. i eat my lunch. and then my day ends with a preposterous amount of sawdust up my nose. granted, i rather like sanding things. it's calming - i don't do calm. the sawdust up my nose, i could do without, but it's cedar and it is a scent of the gods. no moths will be living up my nose any time soon. (bad, bad joke. well aware)

as of right now i seem to be making this deadline work. i am not going to jinx anything though, because after all, it's only wednesday and there is a lot of time for things to go horribly awry.

i said i would remember the point of this, but alas, i don't. just another post about the day in the life of working for a small business that has taken on starting another small business under it...

yay small business! (that was a serious yay, not a sarcastic yay)

ciao.

above ground?

this happiness project i have stumbled upon seems to be working.

i feel a bit happier and less tense about meeting new people and doing new things, but i am exhausted. i am just not this entertaining. by any stretch at all. i do really well in small spurts, but then i need to go home and rest. my poor voice is gone from the amount of talking i have done.

i was going to tell you all my funny story that i wrote about earlier, but who am i kidding, i have absolutely no idea as to what it was even vaguely about. with that being said, i guess i should come up with something to tell you.

*tosh.0* this is my mental image of above ground pools.

monday i drove to cairo, georgia. that's 4 hours south of atlanta. SOUTH. i did have a great time entertaining myself, while trying not to die. people in south georgia drive like the apocalypse is coming for them at any minute. 

first game i played: how many above ground pools can one see south of albany? well for the record it was about 6. i am sure there were more, but these were the most prominent ones: i.e. front yards....i was unaware that above ground pools really still existed and that people would put them in their front yards of all places.


second game i played: how many tractors does one have to pass before the share the road with tractors sign is relevant. i passed two, so i am saying that is enough to warrant signs. always entertaining doing 70 down the highway in a giant truck and see a tractor wheel onto the highway like it's not big deal.

south georgia is a very entertaining place to say the very least.

ciao.

cheers to above ground front yard pools. who knew? i thought i was trashy by purchasing a slip and slide for my birthday...go figure.

alpha.beta.charley.

have you ever been so tired, that you aren't sure you should be driving a motor vehicle? because i have. today. right now to be precise.

the past few days/weeks have been a tiring bunch. we are officially ALL moved! wooooo. but man it has been an intense round.

for starters. remember when my car got stolen? oh say, 3 months ago. well as of today it has been found. to be more exact. as of 4:22 sunday morning, beta has been found. i know this because that is what time the APD decided to call me. FOUR TWENTY TWO IN THE FREAKING MORNING. like i am going to jump out of bed and go retrieve her? seriously? i call them sunday at a more reasonable hour. ya know, like 8 or so. get the run around for a while because turns out they weren't entirely positive where beta was. she was somewhere in cumming, ga. i was informed i would need to talk to the forsyth county police department (cumming's police), but i would have to wait until monday, because they were closed on sundays. OH REALLLLLLLLLLLY. no crime is committed on sundays? geewhiz.

so here we are monday. i finally get through to someone who then has to call me back because he isn't entirely sure where beta is....fantastic. well. turns out. once beta was stolen from me, my stuff was apparently ditched and then beta was sold. the guy however wouldn't give the title over the buyer until he finished making payments. well. i guess the buyer got mad and ipso facto beta was found. ya know, because there was no title, because she was STOLEN! i am also beginning to think that buyer had beta longer than i did, which if we all remember was 2 weeks. i also find it entertaining that the APD thought i was really waiting for them to find beta. it has been 3 months. i did wait 2 months before charley was purchased...

but moving on past beta, i then sunday went to my cousin's first horse show. absolutely precious. but took all day. so needless to say, i was exhausted. and come this morning., i got up at 5 to make sure my cousins got to school and that everything went according to plan. which is where the too tired to drive a vehicle comes into play...

i picked darwin up this morning for our final run through at the metro. sad, bittersweet, and really really exciting all at the same time. we hightailed it out of there. i stopped at the bank and then drove to meet darwin at the new shop and help unpack - daunting. driving there was fine because i had a mission. get food, get to new shop, go home. we get to the go home part, and we are driving and darwin tells me. - i normally trust you with everything, but right now i don't really want to be riding in your car...all i could think, was thank god, i so don't want to be driving right now. we stopped by home depot for some supplies and switched places. totally for the better.

it's funny and sad when someone says exactly what you are thinking. especially when it comes to operating a motor vehicle. i apologize if this post is jumbled, but clearly i am in overdrive. or as darwin so lovingly put it today, you are operating on about 6 out 8 cylinders. i told him that was being generous.


ciao.

back in the saddle again.

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

oh ralph, words have never been more true. now if i could just find a way to actually follow said words....

crisis. management.

i do a lot of crisis management around here. i've learned to expect the unexpected or at least fake that i expected it to be coming. doesn't matter how ludicrous it is, someone will undoubtedly ask for it and you have to be on your toes. it makes for an awesome day.

take last week for instance. darwin decided that he wanted to be beach bum and leave me in charge of the company. -that rat bastard - so naturally, i said whatever and went right back to what i was doing. fast forward to the middle of the week, when darwin then tells me that i am in charge of this huge order that has to go out friday, and if it doesn't then we've lost a huge potential client. no pressure or anything....after wrestling with the freight company and finally getting that straight i figured i was in the clear. WRONG. they screwed up the pick-up date and thought it was the day that i started scheduling everything, not friday. son of a...we moved onto round three with the freight company. dot: 0 freight: 2. not good odds. i did however bully my way to a victory. it wasn't pretty and i was almost in tears, but i won.

friday rolls around and everything goes according to plan. so i am sitting pretty. i have managed to get all the ducks in a row and darwin isn't even town. amazing. i log out of work early, because i mean darwin is at the beach, so there is absolutely no reason for me to be there, and proceed on with my weekend. monday comes and everything is still kosher, the delivery is on time. tuesday hits.....cue impending doom music....i am at darwin's house (my new home office...pretty swanky) and i get a frantic phone call from the people who are receiving the material...uh oh...

the freight carrier decided that they weren't going to actually deliver it on time and were holding the material hostage. PHENOMENAL! so i race to work. call the freight company, get passed to about 80 gajillion people before anyone figures out what the heck i am talking about. i have to make up a release form - no, if you are wondering, there is no standard release form from the freight company, go figure...- and fax it off to the world of faxes and hope for the best. made for an exciting day and it was only 930.

the problem with crisis management is that once you solve one, it's then a waiting game for the next one. the other problem is that you can't hunker down and wait for the crisis - that would be a terrible existence - so instead you mosey along with your day/week/month/life and then wham blindsided by another crisis. i unfortunately don't usually get the month long respite, or even the week long for that matter....

ciao.

wild goose chase

have you ever had one of those days when nothing goes according to plan? i have those days quite a bit around the lumberghettoyard. there is no way to really predict what will go wrong (or in fact how terrible it will really be), but it is guaranteed. you just kind of close one eye and squint and hope for the best.

well tuesday i was tasked with stamping the ends of freshly cut timbers with our logo and then also putting the dimensions on the ends of them. not a terribly difficult task. i found some bright pink spray paint and wandered outside. first timber goes well, stamped and later dimensions added (that task was added later). second timber...bright pink spray paint explodes in my hand. pink spray paint is everywhere: covering both of my hands, down one of my arms, all over my uggs, and in my hair. it was like a rave gone horribly wrong. i tried without success to get the paint off. i keep finding remnants of it, and also it turns out that if you have blond hair, yea pink spray paint isn't coming out. just my luck. so looks like i've got pink paint to keep me entertained for the foreseeable future.

this is not the worst thing to happen to me, not even close. that actually is something that i should have come to expect after all this time. what i didn't expect was to walk in to jersey mike's one day and call darwin and ask him if he wanted me to get him a sandwich and to be greeted with: "i threw it out the window." - you threw what out the window? - "it took me to the wrong side of (expletive, expletive) town and i threw it out the window. it's gone." - excuse me, what, what is gone? - "the gps, i threw it out the window." - well okay, do you want a sandwich? - "get me the biggest expletive sandwich you can, and order a new gps." - well alrighty then.

you just never know what storm you are going to walk into around here. i handle them fairly well, but the gps one caught me off guard. i just didn't think a grown man would throw a gps out the window...clearly, that is a lie, i totally expected it. i mean, i've been frustrated and all, but i don't think it would occur to me to throw a gps out the window. maybe hurtle a phone across a room, but certainly not out of a moving vehicle. (well okay maybe occasionally, but honestly who hasn't?)

i learned a few valuable things that day: gps(es) do lie (proven fact), throwing things will fix them (logical), don't poke the bear, feed boys regularly (if you don't, they become cranky and whiney and apparently angry at the world), and of course, never, ever question the logic of a hungry guy who has been taken on a wild goose chase, when he tells you that he threw the gps out the window...ah the little lessons in life.

oh. the new gps...she certainly has a stutter...it's adorable.