Well, here we are at August 15th already!! June was the hottest and driest June on record. July was the hottest July on record. Between the two of them we had another record – ten days where the temperatures were 100° or over. Add humidity, and temps felt 105° to 113°. The previous record with temps 100° or more was 9 days. We didn’t break too many daily records, though. Some of the record highs were set in the 1950’s, one was set in 1900. But record or not, June and July were much too hot and dry – much of our grass burned up; some of it is coming back, but we’ll be doing some major reseeding this fall. We’ve done well in taking care of weeds, so we don’t have the green weed cover that some have.
August has been beautiful so far! Temperatures have been “normal” for August – mostly in the upper 80’s and low 90’s with showers, thunderstorms (some quite damaging, unfortunately) and just really comfortable for sitting outside on the deck or front porch. With the cooler temperatures, the cicadas are buzzing in full force. They began buzzing in early July – normally they don’t begin until mid-July around Dad’s birthday. But they haven’t been nearly as loud as normal – until now. Today has been overcast all day; we had a heavy shower on our way home from church – after eating at the Track Side Restaurant in Ashland first. A neighbor couple just opened the restaurant several months ago. Good food – reminded us of the Smokey Pig, which is no more. Anyway – enough about the weather! Except to say that it’s really nice to see things greening up again!
Things have been really busy at work – I’ve been going into the office every day and will probably continue to do so until things get back under control and running smoothly! The end of June Jennifer called me into the conference room for a meeting with her; Tom (president/owner of the company) and Marie (HR Manager) were there as well. Jenn informed me that they were going to be putting a hold on the database for at least 6 months while they try to get the company rolling again. Some poor decisions have been made in the past year, plus with the sluggish economy things that are normally brisk are not doing as well. So Tom and Jenn decided to make some drastic cuts. They decided to let all the accountants go and bring all their work in house. (All the accountants except the one corporate accountant worked from home and were part-time employees). They were going to give the accountants the opportunity to continue with the company if they would come in house and if they would take a 50% reduction in pay. That’s like a blow in the face, and none of them took the offer. So 15 accountants were let go, three non-accountants were let go (two gals who helped me with data entry on the database and one who was a corporate accountant assistant handling NSF checks, etc.) A third gal who helped me with database and human resources quit about two weeks before the heavy news came down – Kathy had seen the writing on the wall and had found another job working in the document control department of one of the local hospitals. One of the accountants, Sheryl, was given a reprieve at the very last minute – they decided to let her continue working from home with the properties she handles. She has two year round facilities – one in Texas, one in Maryland – and all the seasonals. Once we get everything going smoothly, she may also “lose” Stonebriar and Reisterstown, but the seasonals can be a real challenge!
The good news for me – they were going to keep me on!! J I think that’s partly because I was in the office four days a week – had I continued working at home as I was originally hired to do, I probably would have been let go as well. However, my entire job was to change. The idea was to bring all the accounting work in house and divide it between three employees plus Jennifer, the controller. Karen (a friend/sister from church who was instrumental in my getting a job with Rink Management in 2001) is doing the banking and receivables – she makes calls to the GM’s if they didn’t send proper documentation for PO’s, etc. Amy will do all Accounts Payable (both Karen and Amy have signing privileges). Jenn will code all the bills. “All” I have to do is data entry! I enter all the revenue and bills plus print the checks for 13 properties. I had a TON of questions the first week and I still have a lot to learn with Quickbooks – especially how to pull the files in, where to park them, when to delete them, and where to store them!! I’ve made some boo-boos, but Jenn keeps assuring me she expects it to take me six months to actually master it. Because I’m not doing all the accounting, just data entry, I’m really hoping it won’t take me that long. We shall see!
So that’s why I’ve been super busy! I’ve been going in every day because there are times when Jenn wants me to do a check run, etc. But once we get things fully organized and in place, this is going to run like clockwork! It’s been stressful the past three weeks, but it’s going to be so much fun when I finally understand what I’m doing!! And I still assist Marie with HR – New Hire paperwork, entering and filing incident reports, etc. Plus I’ve been given the go-ahead that the two weeks between closing when there isn’t all that much for me to do, I can continue maintaining the database, sending out labels for birthday mailings, etc. This month I sent labels out to three rinks because they contacted me and requested them. All three are Texas facilities – Stonebriar in Frisco, ICE at the Parks in Arlington, and Ice Skate USA in Houston.
On to other things – John turned 61 August 4th. His sister Lucille was 67 the same day and niece Brenda’s birthday was the 5th (I’ll let her tell her own age if she is so inclined!) Because the 4th was a Wednesday, we celebrated on Friday, the 6th. We went to P.F. Chang’s with friends from church – Chuck and Joyce. Chuck will be 81 next month, Joyce will be 71 in December. We hadn’t thought about phoning ahead to make reservations, so we ended up sitting in the lobby visiting until our buzzer went off – about 45 minutes. We had a lovely, leisurely dinner and a bouncy server named Sarah – she asked us to call her Sarah 1 because there was another Sarah serving that night! John left for Ontario Sunday morning – there is major construction on the QEW and he gets caught in traffic for a couple hours, which delays his arrival into Kitchener to about 3:00 am. That’s not fun when he has to be in the office or at a meeting at 8:00! So he decided to leave before church rather than after. I got to church and saw Abigail with her camera hanging on her wrist – which made me think of my camera – I didn’t remember taking it into the house after we got home from P.F. Chang’s!! So after church I called Chang’s and sure enough! I had left my camera there. So I ended up driving back down the other side of Richmond, and across the “Rivah” to retrieve my camera. I stopped at Panera’s on my way home for a bite to eat.
The next big event coming up for us is our biannual family reunion in Indiana over Labor Day weekend. It’s going to be a sad one this year with four more family members gone – the biggest hole will be the one left by Aunts Dee and Ann who were killed in a single car accident in January. I still find it difficult to get my mind around it and realize they are really gone from us – temporarily, of course, but still gone from our presence.
I must go – no pix this time. Probably next time!
