Cruise wear

The kids finally got to checkout their dress-up duds and they took these pictures of each other.

What a busy week

Work has gotten to be pretty intense. We had some really good things happen this week. Including announcing our partnership with Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children and our intent to distribute the True/Lok product in only six weeks. I may not get to sleep for the next six weeks but its going to be fun and I really like the product.

We also finalized our acquisition of Blackstone Medical and passed our microbiology audit. I didn't have anything to do with the Blackstone purchase but the audit was a big thing for me and I'm glad that it went so well. The auditor made a few very good suggestions all of which I think we will incorporate. More importantly there were no real surprises that means we have a pretty good idea of what we are doing and we've already identified our few weaknesses and have plans in place to correct them. Of course some things still have to wait until we get a Quality Director but he should start within the month.

I also had to train myself to implement some of our changes because of a pair of unexpected events in the lives of our documentation department. I like to know that I can step in when they need me somewhere but I'd rather step in to train someone else to do this particular on a regular basis. We need a full time back up for that department and no one seems to want the job. I don't know why its such a hard job to sell. The other operation people consider the job to boring (its data-clerk-type-stuff) and the people outside of operations appear to be intimidated by the federal regulations. Oh well. One of the two women should be back in the office by Tuesday and maybe both of them.

Little Suit

I managed to pick up a boy's two-piece blue suit at lunch time today.  I hope it fits Sunil.  He gets to dress up for dinner on the cruise.  I found it at the Kid to Kid resale shop for less than $9.  Now I'm glad I didn't cave yesterday and spend $28 on a tuxedo.  Ebay has a slew of them listed for $13 (plus $15 s/h).  It sounded like a bargain, but then I'd have to buy Sid a tux and Sheela and I would have to go a little bit more upscale too....  you just can't let the five-year old show us all up. 

I managed to get a very pretty dress for Sheela too, even though I think Jaz has her covered.  It was a bargain and is very pretty, black with red roses.

Kid to Kid was the franchise that Sid was looking to buy before I was transfered to NC.  Amazing how many different turns that life can make.

First Place

SuperBlue held on to the first place spot in the girls 3rd grade select division.  They've won their first three games, but the other undefeated team had a bye this week so the field isn't quite level.

Singer Sewing Machine

Sheela is borrowing Her Grandma's sewing machine to make her Halloween costume this year. I'm glad that she wants to try this for a couple of reasons...I'm not wild about the store bought costumes though they are more elaborate and cheaper than what we will probably make and Sheela wants to compete in Destination Imagination this year. DI is a team based creative problem solving competition that usually involves making costumes from scratch (along with some math, science, research and playwriting). During the actual competition the kids have to do all of the work and research. I figure this will be good costuming experience. She wants to start simple, just a black cape with a hood (she will be a witch when its all said and done) she may or may not make a gown to wear too.

We bought an actual pattern instead of freehanding something. I wanted to show her how to choose a real pattern and the how to figure out what to buy. The pattern that she choose had a couple of extra frills like a tassel hanging from the hood that she chose to omit.

With the sewing machine we started with following lines on paper: straight, curves and corners. Before moving on to small pillows. She made a very cute pillow for Sunil. Tonight we will learn how to wind the bobbin and then layout and cut the fabric. The actual assembly may have to wait until next week.

Portraits

Fall school portraits are back.

Rec-n-Roll

The 3rd-6th graders have a Saturday Night out option up at our local recreation center. They call the program Rec-n-roll. From 7-11PM on Saturday nights the facility is closed to everyone except the registered kids (and a hefty number of chaperones). Sheela went last night with a group of her friends for the first time. There is a room for dancing, a room with bounce houses, some arts and crafts stations and pizza is brought in for a small fee.

Sheela and her friends had a blast until one of the boys attempted a more adventurous maneuver in the bounce house and landed wrong. In Sheela's words "he broke his back and was petrified." He had to be strapped to a back board and taken away in an ambulance. The girls didn't see the boy get hurt nor do they know him. All of the kids got herded together to keep them out of the way while the ambulance was there and the story got passed from kid to kid. Lisa was so upset that she decided not to spend the night with us. Sheela was still shaking when I got home (about an hour after it happened)and had trouble falling asleep.

Passports - Second Attempt

I managed to get the passports on order. Now we just have to hope that they get them back to us, with the birth certificates, before we leave in November. They should make it with at least a week to spare but I get nervous. The "unexpedited" cost was $82 a piece and they are good for five years.

New Camera

I must not have mentioned it but Sid bought me a new camera for our anniversary (along with a diamond necklace). The camera is as small as the old one it fits in the front pocket of my purse but it has a much faster action and a stronger zoom. Its a Nikon Coolpix S5. Here is the first picture that we took in the hotel...

Here is a picture from last night's soccer party at the coaches' house. Chris and Stacy (the coaches) have three black labs. Two of them spent the majority of the evening playing fetch in the swimming pool for the entertainment of the kids.

I also did find the cable for my other camera, so the kids will be able to use it when we go to Mexico.

Balloon Festival Weekend

Its time again in the Metroplex for the Plano Balloon Festival. We wont make it over there tonight (dinner party for the soccer team) and we wont make it over there in the morning (8am soccer game), but tomorrow evening looks like a winner. My favorite part is the "glow" after dark anyway. The kids aren't old enough to go up in the balloons, and the bounce house/face paining/midway games section is just too pricey to be worth it for me.

Celebrity homes

Sheela's soccer team has moved their practices to a new location. There is a very famous soccer player (from the 90s) that still lives here in McKinney. He is known as Tatu. He has a series of soccer fields at his house that he rents out. He coaches for the Sting Soccer Club (SuperBlue is Sting's Academy Program). Anyhow Sheela says the fields are nice but they are nothing compared to the house. I snapped a picture of the house last night when I picked her up. Its beautiful and slightly larger than your average Texas home, but not as ape sh** as Deion Sanders' house. We drove by it a few months back (I didn't think to take a picture). It was at least twice as big as this one.

Career Day

This is Sunil's class all dressed up for career day...

Officer Sharma

Today is Kindergarten Career Day.  Sunil has been planning all week long on dressing up as a Kindergarten teacher for school, but at the last minute he decided he just had to be a policeman.  This is why advance planning is a waste of time.  So he chose to wear navy blue shirt, shorts and socks.  He wore his hiking boots (no PE class today so they're allowed).  He accessorized with a junior ranger badge and Sid's navy cover (that would be a hat to us civilians). I still can't find the cord to transfer pictures off of my camera so you'll just have to imagine the overall effect.  Mighty cute and pretty easy. 

15 Years

Happy Anniversary to Us!  We've been married 15 years today.  That's pretty good if I do say so myself.... especially as I was talking through the preliminary custody arrangements for my friend's divorce first thing this morning.  I'm ignoring their situation for the rest of the day and focusing on us.  We aren't going to do anything special tonight, but tomorrow we are going to stay at the Marriott on the rail line and take the train downtown for dinner atop Reunion Tower.  We went there for our 5th and 10th anniversaries too.  It is easy for me to picture us married for 15 years but not easy for me to picture living in Dallas long enough to celebrate in the same place so many times.  I managed to pick up the first of Sid's presents at lunch today and I'm hoping to get the second on my way home tonight.

Birthday Wishes

Yesterday was Mommy's 70th birthday.  We didn't do too much but we did hit Macaroni Grill for dinner.  It's one of her favorite places and has been for years.  We did the big celebrations in Tennessee over the Summer.

Passports - First Attempt

I will be more comfortable taking the kids out of the country if they have passports than if I take them just with their birth certificates.  So I've gotten their pictures made, I've filed out the forms and gathered up all the extras.  I left work at 2:30 in order to pick them up from school and get all the way back to the Post Office here in McKinney (where I work) to file the forms.  I've done my reading and I'm prepared.  The US government prefers that both parents be present but with a notarized letter of acknowledgment I can get around that.  I have my notarized letter from Sid and I'm ready to go.  At the last minute I swing by the house and grab my passport and Sid's just in case.  The kids and  I wait in line and got to the counter with about 10 minutes to spare.  So far so good.  Unfortunately, I only have one notarized letter from Sid with both kids names on it.  I need to have one letter to put with each application.  We are rejected. 

Bringing the IDs was a good idea though, I need to have copies of both of our ID to send along with the applications too.  They don't tell you that on the website, but the clerk explained that sometimes, but not always,  the paperwork gets rejected if its not there.  Better safe than sorry.

If that wasn't enough fun, I found out from a friend that she has tried to travel with just the passport for her daughter and they wouldn't let her on the plane.  They had to go back home and get the birth certificate too.  She was born overseas and its something of a hassle for her to get additional birth certificates if this one gets lost, that was the whole reason she got the passport in the first place.  She wants the passport to stay safely at home.  Now she travels with both.

Mad Science

Both kids enjoyed their first "Mad Science" class yesterday after school.  The program is eight weeks long and the theme is "NASA".  The classes are held in the school science lab after classes are over.  Then they just walk back to Kids Club. 

Sheela is in the "old" kids section.  They made meteors out of superballs and streamers.  They are pretty and cute and they learned a lot. Sunil is in the "young" kids section.  He built a two-foot tall rocket, with fins and detachable nose cone and a parachute.  It seems like he got the better project.

Happy Ending

I screwed up.  I reserved flights for our trip to Florida a week or so ago but I completely forgot to confirm the tickets.  I figured it out about five o'clock this morning.  It was a real struggle to book the flights the first time since our return is so close to Thanksgiving.  I was pretty well panicked this morning.  We cut short our bike ride (our first in a week) so that I could begin piecing together a new itinerary.  It worked out to be okay.  We are now flying out on Sunday morning instead of at noon and its a connecting flight instead of direct.  This is a small price to pay for sleeping last weekend when I was supposed to be taking care of details.

The A Team

This is the logo for our new Internal Auditor shirts. We now have a trained crew of 14 auditors in a copmany of 300 employees. That's a pretty good ratio. Most of the auditor will only perform 1-2 audits each year. The lead auditor will do 3-6. I've already done three and have three more to go. I'm training to be a lead auditor, so I've doubled up this year. We all wore our shirts today and got to sit for a team picture for the next company newsletter. I really like the shirts and the team.

Let the season begin

Tomorrow is opening day for youth soccer in North Texas.  Sheela leads off with an eight AM appearance in the 3rd Grade Girls Select Division.  Luckily we only have two early games scheduled this season.  The early games used to interfer with getting to sleep in, now they interfer with getting to go for our morning ride.  The weekend rides are the fun ones.  We've seen toads, frogs, armadillos, swans, vultures, great blue herons, cattle egrets and now peacocks.  Technically they were peahens flying around wild or I guess ferrel downtown Allen.  Anyhow, I'm ready for the season to start.  Sheela has only played one game since June and I've missed it.

Cell Phone Woes

For the first time in nearly two years I'm having problems with my cell phone.  It's a fairly outdated Samsung flip-phone.  Today it doesn't want to flip.  I can still open it but it feels like I'm grinding up glass in the hinge.  This is not a good thing.  I was hoping to make the phone last until April.  We've been trying to get out from under the oppressive thumb that is Verizon for a year or longer and I'm only a few months shy.  I might be able to wrest Sid's old phone away from Sunil and use it for a few months.  Part of the reason that the phone belongs to Sunil and not Sid is that it lacks the battery power to last all day without charging.  Stay tuned...

Labor Day

The Labor Day holiday was very well timed this year.  Work has been rather frustrating the last couple of weeks.  I've come to accept that I'm not going to be promoted to the departmental manager... in fact it looks like they aren't intending to allow us to have a manager at all.  We've been without a Quality Director for six months and without a President for four months.  The big decisions that we keep putting off as not ours to make are all becoming critical.  We are finally being allowed to make them, but the delays have cost us.  The layers of indecision and the apparent corporate direction shifts are just beginning to surface just as next years budget cycle has begun.  We don't know what we will be doing next year but we have to set in stone how much its going to cost us to do whatever it is that they ask us to do and of course to justify our numbers.  Our third quarter audits have gotten underway.  I ended up on four audit teams instead of one so that I will have the experience to lead all of the fourth quarter audits.  Our independent lead auditor quit, he was the one tasked with auditing the audit system, the corrective and preventive action system and the complaint files.  These three systems are all under the direct control of our other lead auditors.  They are not allowed to audit themselves.  As an added bonus our most problematic product line of the year had another major incident.  We've been very lucky in that these issues have all been brought to light prior to patient involvement... which means that no ones been hurt.  But every issue makes us dislike working with this supplier just a little bit more.  We did not get to choose the supplier, he was part of the package deal when we bought the product line and it has been the biggest draw back.  We also had another labeling issue (internal only but that's about five too many this year).  I want to fall back and revamp the whole system but I am much too close to it to see it clearly.

The three day weekend was a glorious time of doing NOTHING.  I think I read three books this weekend, all of them so low on the intellectual scale that I may actually be dumber now than I was before.  Escapism is for lowering your stress level and it seems to have worked well.  I'm back at work today with a new and improved attitude.  I took all of the papers off of my desk pushed them in to an empty carboard box and I'm taking them out to the parking lot to use as a small fire for roasting marshmellows. 

Its still raining too much to start a fire so I guess I'll just organize the pile by priority and get back to work.  I'll go buy a s'more flavored candy bar out of the vending machine to keep me company.

Rainy days are here again

Last weekend we had a few hours of drizzle, it didn't do much for the lawns but it definitely cooled things off. Most of the week was dry again but in the low 90s. Its raining again this weekend, but longer and harder. Today its only in the low 70s. I love it! Of course Sheela was planning on spending the day swimming with Aneleise so she's not quite as happy about it as I am.

Sunil earned his bell

A few weeks ago we bought hand bells for the kids' bikes. Sheela earned hers for some rather dramatic room cleaning that was long over due but Sunil had to learn to ride his bike to earn his. Technically, he starts, rides and stops without assistance. In reality the stops are controlled falls but I think that the control is important. He is also better suited to riding in large open parking lots rather than to narrow trails. But he made great progress this week and we put the bell on yesterday.

I have some half decent pictures of both Sunil riding and of Sheela riding her new bike. However they are trapped on my camera. I can't find the cable to transfer the pictures. I've apparently either worn out or damaged the chip I usually use, so I switched back to using the camera's internal memory.

Picture Day

The kids are having pictures taken at school today. I learned a valuable lesson last year about putting too much effort in to picture day. This year I didn't try to influence the backgrounds choosen or the clothing worn. I just let 'em go. Sheela chose her favorite white blouse, a gray background and to leave her hair down. Sunil chose a green background, his new red t-shirt and I think his hair was down. It has recently been cut and so we've been spiking it for him.

If I get off work early enough (think three o'clock..... think three o'clock) then I'll take the kids to Wal-mart to have passport photos taken today too.

I just got back from Wal-mart where I picked up the portraits that we had taken a few weeks back. There are seven poses. I've selected my favorite seven to share.

Dress shirt, shoe box and paper bag....

What do these three items have in common?  These are the requests from school this week for Sheela to bring in.  The man's old white dress shirt is supposed to serve as a lab coat for the science lab.  The child's size shoe box is to become a diarama of ancient Greece.  The paper grocery bag's function is still a mystery.

 

Sunil surprisingly went a whole week without needing to scrounge up anything.  I'm sure he's teacher will get back in the swing of things next week.