August 3
From my brain
Contents |
2009
Me 16:40, 3 August 2009 (EDT)
I'm a little mindspun right now. Here's an email I just sent to explain why:
- Good morning Chefs (at least, I'm assuming you won't read this until morning),
- While I'm not currently one of your students (I'm first-term in Chef Harms' class C), as I understand it from EC in admissions, one of the two of you will most likely be my baking instructor first term. With that in mind, I wanted to get advice from one or the both of you on planning for the Brandford Bash in September.
- I bake bread. I think in bakers' formula when I see flour and yeast in the same room, and look for a scale and a baking stone. For the Bash this year, I was initially going to obtain a table for my wife (who sells Tastefully Simple products), but E and a couple others have convinced me to sell some of my various breads along side her.
- For the majority of 2003, I ran a small bread business out of my home while I also worked full-time second shift for my (now) former employer. I would take orders on Monday and Wednesday for the respective next Wednesday and Friday, and the morning of, I'd wake at dawn, bake 4-9 batches of bread, and deliver them to my coworkers at the office by 3pm (my start time). It was a magical time, a nice bit of pocket change, and the rekindling of that brought me to Brandford now.
- So, I know how to bake bread. I'm confident I can produce a fair amount of bread in a short amount of time. What I don't know is how I should prepare for the quantity of people who could be showing up for the bash. I've only operated on a "I'd like a loaf of basic white bread, and a bag potato sandwich rolls." I'm completely clueless on what to expect to sell to a large crowd...without being stuck with a LOT of bread afterward.
- If either of you could assist me in this, I would be VERY grateful. I'd repay you in bread like I do so often...but you teach the breads and pastries classes. What do you need me for?
- Regards,
- Me
Yeah, so the other day, I gave EC a loaf of bread to thank her and she's begun propagating it out to several people throughout the school. She also worked hard to convince me to sell bread along since of Wifey's table where she's selling Tastefully Simple stuff. As I said in the email to the two chefs who teach the baking classes...I'm clueless though. How much is too much? Too little?
Additionally, the placement director at the school is trying to hook me up with the New Albany Country Club as they'll be working with the school in the very near future to run an event. This could mean a job. Will it pay as much as unemployment? Probably not. Will it r0x0rz my s0x0rz if I'm able to pull out a really cool baking job? Absolutely.
I need to take a break and sit and watch TV. Too much to think about.
2007
Me 08:35, 3 August 2007 (EDT)
Managed to get a good night's sleep last night. I got the same 5-6 hrs I've been getting, but I felt surprisingly well rested. Maybe it's just that I finished the ad page for the Summer Party this month.
Wifey's Tastefully Simple booth at the Ohio State Fair didn't go as swimmingly as planned. She said she thinks she just had higher expectations than what was reality. She had expected maybe 20-30 new leads, but instead got around 10. We figured it this way: at least she got 10 new customers that she may have never had before.
2006
Me 06:50, 3 August 2006 (EDT)
Damn it. I've been meaning for two solid weeks now to call and cancell this life insurance policy that my bank got me hornswaggled into a couple years ago. It routinely screws up my personal account by -- without much warning -- charging me $49.50 twice a year. It usually hits me right before a pay period rather than right after.
It came in this morning while I have $8.97 available in my account.
So now, I'll be jumping through the hoops of attempting to stop payment on it, and calling them to cancel the policy. The calling them to cancel isn't a biggie, but the stop payment is gonna screw up a couple auto-bill pays that I have off of my account (namely the water softener and the Kirby). Thankfully, those aren't set up to go through until Monday, so I can reschedule them a couple days out.
Gah!
Me 14:34, 3 August 2006 (EDT)
I'm growing VERY weary of being the "go-to" guy. I've got nothing but a 10-year old application to work with, but still I'm asked to produce miracles. Regardless of the ego-inflating fact that I typically accomplish said tasks, it doesn't change the fact that it's reaching moronic levels.
Take it for today: I'm being asked to rework a manual process. Currently it entails the following for a person to do:
- Log onto ABC Railroad's website
- Go to their "Preliminary Charges Report" page.
- Enter in a date range and click "Display"
- When the report displays, they do -- and I shit you not -- CTRL-A (select all), and copy.
- Open MS Excel and paste it in.
- Filter out about two dozen duplicate column headers in the midst of the data
- Delete about a dozen columns
- Save it as a CSV out to our AS/400
- Save a backup copy
Then a program runs on the AS/400 to import the data and populate some fields in our system.
We pay like a gajillion dollars a year to have EDI transmissions go on, but we're doing monkeywork like THIS? Worse: I have to write a program to do it all for someone because they can't find people who have the time / know-how to format it all.
Calgon...take me away! crap, I hate taking baths
