Winding Down, Ramping Up

Today I am marking two events...winding down the work week and ramping up to go to WV to visit family and friends.

Work this week (with the exception of early Monday morning) has been light weight, and for that I am thankful. My colleague who is on call has had a nice light week so far. Now, to be honest, all that could change in an instant but as long as I can make it to 5:00 PM, I am ready to begin my down time.

It took a couple of days to decompress from my last on call. Monday and Tuesday I found myself carrying my mobile phone with me everywhere just like I was on call. I even took it with me to my church board meeting Tuesday night.

My wife has decided to go back to work part time (10 hours a week or so) for the same guy that she worked for last time, doing mostly the same work. There are a few differences this time however. The first is that she will be getting a raise. While not "big bucks" (a little less than half of what I make), it still will help get us past this lump of debt that we are facing (surgeries).

The next difference is that she will not be doing payroll. The guy has outsourced that and it works much better than it did with him trying to maintain things. While my wife was doing most of it, it was a mess when he was out of town and to get him to sign the checks. Besides, Quickbooks was constantly crashing on his PC...I could never get it stable. This time my wife will be doing all his invoicing, which he does manually. She understands his system (she is the only one who does) and he asked her to come back and get things back to normal after the person who replaced her left it in a mess.

The final thing that is changing is...she gets to work from home. She is not required to come into the office! And the nice thing is when she does have to go in (for whatever reason) her boss is giving her a gas allowance. Not bad at all.

To celebrate we went out to Mimi's Cafe, one of her favorite places in the world to eat. I ordered light (citrus shrimp, asparagus, and a salad) and my wife ordered heavy (meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and veggies) but I really wanted dessert and saw that they had a chocolate chip pecan pie with vanilla bean ice cream that looked wonderful, so I ordered it. My goodness, it was enough for two, maybe three people. I ate half of it (I have a big appetite for sweets) but I was stuffed. I had to walk a lot last night to work that off. Heck, when I work up at 6:00 this morning I was still not hungry. Good thing I guess since to day is a fasting day.

I woke up an hour later than normal (we had a power outage yesterday and I slept in and changed my alarm time) and let the dogs out. It still looked like it would storm (It stormed all day yesterday) but I need to cut grass or the yards will be a jungle when I get back.

I fed the dogs and then logged on to check e- mail. I took the time to update my PDA and my GPSr with geocaches to grab along the way to WV (I loaded 500 or so, knowing I will get less than 10% of that...I wanted a good pool to pull from) and began packing things for my trip. While I am not as thorough as my wife, there are things I make sure I pack. Since geocaching is a big part of this trip, all my geocaching stuff will be packed (I still need to get things out of the truck) and all my OTC meds. Since I am prone to sinus issues, I need to be prepared.

I am looking forward to this trip. I have only grabbed caches in a couple of locations outside of TX while travelling and this will be a good opportunity to add a couple of more states (AR, TN, KY) to my states cached list. Fun times ahead!