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  • Uhg. Walked into an email about this http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm476512.htm
    this morning. That stuff amounted to over half of the Morrissons and
    Pioneer products we have on the shelf. Three banana boxes full of
    reclamation stuff.
    The email actually arrived yesterday but I wasn't there to check.
  • yikes. terre, can you sift the mixes to make sure they are not contaminated or do you have to get reimbursed for all that food? good luck! we don't get those brands here, except parade and that's cream of chicken soup, and that's only because the little market gets his groceries from dollar tree. i hope you'll be ok.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • The store will get reimbursed for all of it. I figure if customers come in with packages they want a refund on I'll ask AFI to send me another copy of the recall notice and package the stuff up and send it back to them.
  • oh, you don't mean food in your kitchen? i misread. yikes times a lot more. sorry.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • No problem. I wasn't very clear on that part. :)
  • We have shingles in the front yard. Time to call the insurance company.
  • good luck, terre.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Nature's April Fools joke on Portales New Mexico. We are getting the kind of weather we normally get on Easter today (while Easter was actually pleasant). IE: It's been cool and damp all day. With an added bonus: the temps have fallen enough now in the mid afternoon for the sprinkle to turn to snow.
  • wow, terre. i have friends on the east coast saying it has snowed recently and we're into april now!
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Yep. The northeast had snow over the weekend.
    * A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five!
    * Isn't it wonderful how cute weapons of mass distraction can be?
    * Those are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others.
  • This was Super Smart Buy (IE: HUGE batch of warehouse TPRs) weekend. The boss wanted me to pull the old tags Saturday night instead of morning to get the most out of the batch going off as this is also the weekend
    on the 1st. I said OK and told Jim that I was going to have a double shift on Sat. I'd also been asked to save some hours (I'm hourly not salaried). I had managed to save a couple of hours by the time I clocked out Thursday.

    Then.......

    Just after I finished breakfast Fri morning (normally one of my two days off) I get a call from the meat manager saying they have an emergency and only I can handle it. He wasn't exaggerating. If he hadn't called me we wouldn't have gotten most of the stuff we needed delivered on Sat.
    So what happened? Thursday afternoon the PHONE COMPANY in Lubbock cut the fiber optic line between them and Amarillo where AFI is. This resulted in LOTS of AFI supplied stores not being able to transmit orders in both NM and Tex. They were originally going to try and get me to email an order using an xcel spread sheet. While I was trying to figure out how I'd manage that since my options for email are an ipad (which has to use xcel online) and my home compy which is an XP (and doesn't have a paid xcel license) they realized that the store was set up for web ordering. So I log into their site after having been given the store's user name and password and have the computer tell me that the site wasn't responding when I clicked the retailer login button. Called TrueNo, Eventually the tech realized what I was sure of from the start which is that he needed to call MD
    Tech to tell the firewall to let it through. So then we start getting a mix of being able to get through and "internal server error' messages. They call AFI. AFI was having issues with that server and working on it while we were trying to get me in. Over two hours after I got to work I finally could start typing in the more than 1500 items that needed to be entered in using their order numbers, quantity, and department in every entry. The system is actually set up as a quick order on so each file was only 15 items long. Click on "add to truck" and continue. I had to read the numbers and quantities from the little screens on the two telsons that the orders had been scanned into. Eventually I got done. I put in about 5.5 hours total on Fri. Some numbers wouldn't go in so I
    wasn't surprised when we were missing some items that were expected. The bad ones included a couple of pallets that had been ordered for a three day sale that started today. This stuff will be on an emergency order
    arriving tomorrow morning. At least it better.
    Saturday I tried to put in a short morning but only left maybe an hour or so earlier than usual. New items etc, Went back at 6pm and spent a little over two hours walking all over the store looking at expiration dates on little yellow tags and pulling the ones with 10/01/16. Had 49.39 hours on the clock for that week when I left.
    Go in today and had to make the three day sale my first project then help with the TPRs then mess with the weekly price changes. Fortunately I'm allowed to ask for help with the big
    batches of TPRs so that got done by late morning. I got everything but hanging the new base price tags done today and will go back tomorrow morning (also usually my day off). Meanwhile we started having EBT foodstamps say the com line was down while other cards were fine. Called TrueNo. The NM server which handles foodstamps had lost power.

    Today I got the last of the Sunday work done. Took about 4.5 hours. I left Sunday without getting it all done because it was about to get busy and I'd be in the customer's and vice versa.
  • terre, eeeeek! i hope all of that gets settled soon. what caused the outage? do your bosses know what a godsend you are? they should give you a raise!
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • No word on what caused the outage. My boss does know that I'm irreplaceable and had made me one of the highest paid hourly employees. It's still low pay by most areas standards but this is a low income part of the country.
  • terre, i'm glad your boss appreciates you! congrats. you are very valuable.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • How are things going?
  • hi, terre. happy thanksgiving! i have a friend having to get tested for cancer on friday and another friend in the hospital.

    we're ok. made in to market in the rain slowly wednesday night in our new rain ponchos with solar lanterns on our walkers. got some fresh food. we'll survive. hoping the drought will end.

    how are you doing?
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Happy Thanksgiving!
  • Doing well here. We now have a pro-grade thermostat for our heater. Consumer grade junk needed to be replaced every year or two. Pro installed it to. Now we'll just need to replace the batteries every 2 or 3 years. That's fine with me.

    I hope you friends come out OK. Cancer is scary. I hope if that's what the person has that it's one of the ones that can be treated. My sympathies to the person stuck in the hospital.

    A friend had to have a 15lb tumor removed shortly before Halloween and is doing fine. She is getting a course of chemo and awaiting the biopsy results.
  • i missed these posts somehow! my friend in the hospital, still, was badly injured overseas while trying to help children get to safety. i was not given details for obvious reasons. she is facing more surgery. my other friend lost her cat and refuses to even deal with whatever he doctor tests results are. i ask and she changes the subject or just doesn't reply.

    i hope your friend recovers completely.

    congrats on your thermostat, yay.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Good morning.

    I hope things are going better.
    Here we're getting a lot of customers asking about the upcoming change in the store. They are relieved to learn that the employees will be kept and the product line won;t change as we'll still have the same suppliers and vendors.
  • that's good, terre. merry christmas, all. we survived another one and our 24th anniversary as well.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Merry Christmas. :D

    Our 29th was back on Halloween.
  • Merry Christmas to y'all. We will be celebrating on January 7, Russian style.
    Suspiro ergo sum.
  • That's not far off. :)
  • Good evening. :)
  • hi, terre, suro. you'll have to share your russian christmas with us. :)
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Suro? Do you do the second new year too? Svetlana at work says there is a second one on January 13th that she celebrates.
  • Hah! The "second new year" is a weird one. It comes from a conflation of something that was necessity for emigres, misunderstanding of how dates (Gregorian vs. Julian calendars) work, and the loss of a sense of sacred vs. profane celebrations.

    For emigres, the "Old New Year" (read: New Year (secular/profane date, but according to the "old" or Julian caldendar) was marked on (or as near as possible to) January 13th, because:
    1) The Gregorian date (Jan 1) was already taken by the official New Year's celebration
    2) The emigres needed some significant date for various organizations to mark the beginning of the year of Russian emigre life

    So Julian "new year" it was. Which is wrong, because the Julian calendar being a Church calendar, the year (or annual liturgical cycle) begins on Sept. 1 (Julian).

    Confused enough?

    Well, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when it became OK to discuss openly matters such as Catechism and Church holiday dates, and the New Year celebration became once again separate from Christmas (or rather Christmas became once more recognized/admissible), the matter of the calendars resurfaced. People got confused about the 13-day offset. And by the nickname "old calendar" or "old style".

    So they started finding ways to work less and drink more and instituted the "old new year" as the "Russian new year" -- a weird thing that doesn't really exist, or rather exists only since after 1991 "officially."

    Clear as mud, yes?

    And no, we don't celebrate it, except to use it, if need be, as a convenient and amusing target date for a Russian-themed beginning-of-year party/meeting/something like that. Of which we have none this year.
    Suspiro ergo sum.
  • She believes the bit about it being the older one because of the calendar.
  • Yeah, I'm not surprised. And she'd be very difficult to disabuse, if I know anything about my ethnic brothers. She'd be wrong, though.
    Suspiro ergo sum.
  • Probably best to let it be. I don't know if she's actually Russian or is just a Russian speaker because her homeland has been Russian controlled territory for so long. She isn't sure if anyone there speaks anything but Russian as a native language. No one that she grew up around did anyway.
  • Update on the Boss' dad. He flew to Houston yesterday and has/had an appointment at the MD Anderson center today. From what I can find that is the top rated cancer center in the nation.
  • terre, i'm still praying for him to get a miracle.

    suro, that's a fascinating bit of history. thanks.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Good morning. :)
  • Good morning. :)
  • good last evening of 2016.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Good first morning of 2017. :)
  • Good morning. :)
  • Good morning!
    Suspiro ergo sum.
  • Several of us have growing lists of things to ask the new managers about. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
  • Good morning. :)
  • Good morning. :)

    We're supposed to have a chance for snow tomorrow.
  • terre, did you get your snow? we have been having very cold, rain, frost, 2 portable heater weather.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • We had a couple of light freezes here in South Texas. They promise temps in the 80s this week. That's our winter.
    Suspiro ergo sum.
  • We got some snow but it was only about an inch.
  • suro, 80's? 80's? in january? ok... near galveston maybe?

    terre, an inch is at least an inch. a friend up in washington state is completely snowed in for days. we just have dry cold, not even the fog horn.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Suro is in San Antonio so yes, she's not too far from Galveston. :)

    We've had rain much of today. I'm glad I don't work tomorrow as it's supposed to freeze tonight and the streets will have a sheet of ice in the morning.

    Dry cold is no fun either. I hope you are staying warm.
  • terre, it technically is warmer but i'm not. our wok pitted and was compromised before we realized it. we got really sick. but thankfully we had our old iron wok packed away. it came from san francisco in 1999, pre internet, from the wok shop the last time we were in the city. but it is huge and upstairs for so many years only had a tiny stove. downstairs has a normal stove and so shadow cleaned and seasoned the old iron monstrosity after throwing out the cheap one we'd bought via the internet over 10 years ago because it was smaller but rarely had used until lately... note. never buy a cheap wok. you get what you pay for. food poisoning is really sh, cr, um... not fun at all. :( good wok makes good food.

    friday is shadow's birthday. he wants rain.
    ~^..^~ ladyfur
  • Happy Birthday Shadow!
    I hope you get the rain. We got a nice (but verrrry cold) one when Jupiter passed just east and north of us.

    My sympathies on the wok. I agree on the cheap stuff. That's why we had to get a heating professional to order us a thermostat for our heater. Even the ones we could buy at a hardware store were cr@p.
  • we went from thick fog in the 50s to balmy low 80s today. And last week we had a couple of light freezes.

    San Antonio has been known to deliver 100F spikes in January. And back to freezing in March. Yep. Texas does weather big.
    Suspiro ergo sum.

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