Catching Up

Alright, I have not written in a while so it is time to do a summary post to let you know what I have been up to.

• In the middle of October I flew home for about 10 days.  Primary reason for visit was to surprise Kim for her birthday.  She ended up having three surprise parties that week and I was glad that I got to be at all of them.  Thank you Jason for taking care of the airline ticket!
• While in town, I tried to visit my friends and family but was not able to see everyone.  Sorry.
• While walking through Sky Harbor to catch my flight home, my lower back went all to hell.  Still not sure what caused the pain, but it was not pleasant.  Could barely stand, let alone carry my luggage.  Luckily, I convinced the staff at the gate to give me an early boarding pass so that I could pick out a window seat and use the wall to prop me up.  I could not stand while I was waiting for Linda to pick me up, but found that if I propped myself against a wall it wasn’t too bad.I had similar back problems about 3 weeks prior to this after my first Saturday at my new job.  I was out for most of Sunday but was doing ok by Monday.  Unfortunately, this latest time was worse.  I had to skip work on Friday and spent the day between ice, heat and baths.  Sleeping is a real pain when you can’t roll over without waking up.  I went to work on Saturday, but brought a stool so I could sit and relax.One thing that worried me a lot through all of this is that I was getting a dull pain in my thighs.  Although back pain is not new for me, this pain in the thighs is.  I have an appointment with a back specialist tomorrow in San Antonio and hopefully I will be able to get an x-ray or MRI or something so that we can see if there is anything out of wack.  Thank goodness I got health insurance!
• Work is going alright.  I am not much of a sales person like the female staff are, but I think I do alright.  One thing that bugs me about my job is all of the waste we generate due to all of the packaging that the items come in.  Men’s button up shirts are the worst: plastic bag around shirt, cardboard under collar, plastic inside collar, tissue paper inside folded shirt, piece of plastic around collar button and then pins or plastic tabs to keep the pieces of the shirt in place.  When you have to do this for lots of shirts, this really adds up.  Shoes come in a close second in waste due to each shoe being in a plastic bag, then each shoe having paper stuffed in it and then tissue paper around everything.  Someone really needs to come up with a better packing scheme.
• Hunting season started this last weekend.  Nothing like waking up to gunfire first thing in the morning!
• Daylight savings kicked in this last Sunday.  This is the first time I have ever had to worry about resetting the clocks.  It is weird getting off work now and it being dark outside when two days ago there was still plenty of light out.
• I haven’t done much on the Ranch lately due to my back.  Today I helped Linda in the garden by cutting the tomato plants down.  Afterwards, my clothes make it look like I was in some kind of tomato food fight.  There were still some tomatoes in decent shape on the vine so we threw them over the fence for the ducks.  Watching a duck eat a tomato is pretty entertaining.Since I haven’t been able to do much outside, I have spent time in the office learning Quickbooks.  I am hoping that I can move Linda from WordPerfect to Quickbooks for her businesses.  So far so good, but I still have a looooooooong way to go.

That’s all for now.