My Weblog

On the heating pad again

What a way to spend a day off! Five days ago I woke up with pain in my neck down into my left shoulder and upper back. I fought that with muscle relaxers (very weak ones) for four days and worked three shifts on my feet. It was miserable, but I got through it. One of the worst things about it was that I was continually assigned to the even numbered registers. Due to the way they're set up, that meant I spent the day trying to grab customers' receipts with my left hand. Extending my left arm that way was painful and aggravated the muscles in my shoulder, neck, and back. Finally by last night, I felt reasonably well. Repeated doses of muscle relaxers and anti-inflammatory NSAIDS had broken the siege. But much to my surprise, I awoke this morning to an aggravated ball of muscle in my right hip. I tell you, I nrver know where I will hurt, but it seems inevitable.  But, God--my hope................

I've tried to stay busy today without aggravating that ball of pain too much. I've made my way through a big pile of mail, paid some bills, done some laundry, and watered the shrubs outside. I've also carried multiple bags of trash out and managed to get the trash can to the curb. I still need to make at least two more trips outside to deal with the recycling and then move that receptacle to the curb. 

My mailbox these days is flooded with two things--political mailers and senior insurance plan mailers. There is one candidate for state senate from whom I have received, no exaggeration, at least 10 mailers. I'm probably just perverse, but it seems to me such a candidate has big money backers. Big money people and I have little in common. Add to that the fact that her opponent has the backing of the metropolitan police, and see if you can figure out for whom I am voting..............

Are you stocking up on food and other necessary supplies? I'm pretty well convinced that we're facing hard times ahead. I look for trouble after the election. And there's still a "pandemic" which is apparently going into a second wave. My state has a Democratic Governor who won't think twice about throwing another quarantine our way. And there's been so much weird weather cutting into our ability to grow food, for example, the derecho in Iowa which devastated corn production. For a real awakening, start reading the ingredients on stuff you buy--everything contains corn. Also, corn makes up a good bit of animal food. Big demand for corn added to reduced supply means prices will go up on everything from meat to grits to ketchup to candy. Corn is also a source of the additive ethanol which we see in gasoline. If there is unrest in the country, and liberal 'thinktanks' are already talking about "a street fight, not a legal one", we can't expect truckers to take their lives in their hands to deliver a load of goods to Walmart or Kroger. The shelves may well be bare...........and what is there may be unconscionably expensive.

Of course, it's just me, and I don't need a lot, but I've been trying to lay in backups of everything. An extra 5 pound bag of flour, Kleenex, TP, laundry and dish detergent, and so forth. Not buying much that's perishable so I know I'll eventually be able to use up whatever I've bought at today's prices, before the demand far exceeds the supply and prices escalate. 

Late Night

The last time I had two days off together, I canned some pork roast. I ended up with 4 pints. (I had ordered a Boston Butt at a good price. They ran out so I got a much better cut at the same price. Score!) The pork was canned in cubes. There is the obvious problem that a jar full of cubed chunks will weigh less than a jar of ground meat. The usual measurement is that a pint jar will hold about a pound of meat. I figure each jar of pork will yield 3-4 meals for me. 

Tonight I canned about 9 pounds of ground round (15% fat). I got this at the amazing price of $2.99 a pound. I have 9 jars, as expected. I figure that accounts for about 4 meals of ground beef per jar. 

So, this week, I've put up sufficient meat to make about 50 meals for myself. All at bargain prices. And because I've canned it, I no longer need to clutter up my freezer with it. It is now shelf stable. I have been cleaning out a filing cabinet for which I no longer have a business use. My canned beef roast and canned pork roast are in one of the filing cabinet drawers now. I figure this is a pretty decent place to store this stuff as it's inside the house where the temperature is pretty stable and there's no light inside a filing cabinet. Thus, the filing cabinet meets the two requirements for the best way to store home canned goods. 

I've checked and I can double stack jars in a drawer with cardboard or thin plywood between the layers. This meets safety standards for storage and greatly increases my available storage space. I also happen to think it's a pretty creative way to "use what you've got". 

The canning job just finished at 11:20PM. I now have to wait for the canner to come down off of pressure so I can safely open it and extract my beautiful jars of ground beef. That's likely to take close to an hour. Glad i don't have to work tomorrow til 1PM............

Next up, a pack of boneless skinless chicken breasts I got for $1.79 a pound............

California, keep your smoke!

For 3 days in a row now, I have come home from work with my eyes burning and tears streaming down my cheeks. Just miserable. It took a double dose of Benadryl last night on top of the allergy suppression pill I take daily before the burning stopped. This morning the tears were running down my face as I drove to work. And we won't even discuss what all this does to my oxygen level....... I come home where things are sealed up a bit better and filtered better and, if I can last a couple of hours, the symptoms fade. Yesterday I thought the smoke was very light. so, I was mystified as to why I was so exhausted (low oxygen?) and why my eyes were bothering me so much. Then, just around dusk, I happened to look out my master bath window. The mountains to the north of me were shrouded. I could just barely make out that there were mountains out there whereas I usually have a clear view of them. I really feel for folks who are closer to the fires--they must be struggling.

We have a different person working on our schedules at work. I'm lovin' it. I had Thursday and Friday off (two days together!), worked three days and now, tomorrow and Wednesday, I have two days together off again! I make much better use of my time with two days off at a time. Last week, I canned some pork. I see some barbequed pork in my future. This week I think I will work on canning chicken. And then next week I have Tuesday and Wednesday off! What a relief--I was getting two days off together only about once a month, sometimes even less often. 

I had something well-intentioned but harmful happen to me. I don't think I've told you that the store has added a new front end software to our system. There has been NO training. One of the head cashiers saw a video which consisted of a screenshot with different buttons labeled. That's it. I was told there's a new system we're supposed to use and I was told the keystrokes to use to get into it. That was the sum total of my training. Mostly it's pretty intuitive so that has helped. However, the system has many glitches. No one warns you of the glitches and/or ways around them. In the meantime the system locks up and the customer is left tapping his/her foot while you try to get help or try to figure out how to fix it.

For example, there is a law that you can't sell spray paint to anyone under 18. Originally, the system just asked the cashier if the customer was over 18, you clicked on "yes", and got on with the process. Then one of the IT gurus decided cashiers couldn't subtract 18 from 2020. If you can't accurately do that, then looking an the customer's drivers license to determine the birthdate is useless. So, they "updated" the new system to ask, "was the customer born before October 5, 2002?" The problem was that this fix locked down the system if you happened to click yes. (The vast majority of spray paint customers in our store are well over 18.) So you would have to exit the new system and go over to the old system. For days, this meant you had to exit the new system in certain ways and start over in the old system. You can imagine that this cost a lot of time, ringing many orders twice. Somewhere along the way, they fixed up a different way to exit the new system but save the order in the old system so that you just rang up the paint and whatever was left in the cart and you were done--no more ringing stuff again that you had already handled.

Here's another glitch. The company sells store gift cards. We have been required to slide the gift card through a reader on the keyboard. We have also had to strip some very sticky tape off the back of the card to reveal the card's pin number and then enter that in the system. We were using the new system for three weeks before anyone told me that now the gift card has to be processed through the card reader (the machine you put your chip in to pay). And, the pin is no longer required at point of sale.

So anyway, one of the head cashiers went to the woman who supervises the cashiers and asked that I be allowed to work in the old system because I was having trouble. This was probably intended to take the stress off of me, but, in my opinion, it simply makes me look like a dunce--to my boss!!!! She came and told me what she had done. I allowed it to stand for a couple of days and then went to my boss. I told her it was not that I couldn't do what was required. Rather it was a lack of communication. There are new buttons popping up on our screens that I do not know when or if I should use. There are time-saving fixes that have happened that no one has communicated to me. It took three weeks for me to find out we have a new way of processing gift cards. No one warned me about the system locking up when you clicked "yes" on the new system with paint sales or that there was a completely new way to exit the system when that happened which would save the time required to re-ring a customer's entire order. 

These people simply HAVE to find a better way to communicate. As I told my supervisor, I can do what needs done--I just need to know what needs done. 

I spoke to the head cashier who started this whole mess. She stated she tried to tell our boss there were communication problems. She made some suggestions on how to lessen the problem. The boss's answer was that we have e-mail. Yes, we do. But, first, no one sends us an e-mail about these problems or suggested work-arounds. And, second, e-mail is only accessible on certain "special" machines. A cashier has to request time to go somewhere else to check e-mail and wait to be relieved in order to do that. Hardly a solution!

One of the problems I see at this place is that our managers are sales people who have been elevated to managerial positions. They have no managerial training and they seem to lack the ability to walk in an employee's shoes--to figure out what can be done so an employee can work smarter, easier, and with less stress. Will it ever get fixed? I have my doubts............

 

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