HoundBlog

Happy Monday! I hope you enjoyed lovely weather this weekend like we did! We had a nice trip to Lake Waccamaw, NC — enjoyed the company of friends both old and new and put a point on Tigger (his first). He makes the 6th out of his litter of 12 to be pointed, so his breeder is very happy!

We met Leslie Merril and her husband and learned that Saturday was their 25th wedding anniversary. We invited them to dinner with us and while they declined dinner, they did come over later and we enjoyed dessert and a glass of wine. Swapped dog stories with them 😛 and just enjoyed the company.

Ken told me that he will be going either to Talladega in June or Daytona in August and may also be going back to Germany for a month. Will tell you more later when everything is finalized.

Came home to find my other hybrid Azalea had bloomed. What glorious color it has! While the one is flaming orange, this one is the brightest yellow I think I’ve ever seen! Of course I took photos of it and will post them later. I put photos of the orange one in my webshots album, so you can see it HERE. The buds start out this really dark red, then the blooms are so bright they almost hurt your eyes.

Guess I need to close this out and get back to work. Have a wonderful day today!

Love to all,
Margaret

Good morning! It’s Thursday, but for me, it’s Friday! Tomorrow I’m taking a much needed vacation day and Ken and I are going to Lake Waccamaw, NC for a dog show. It’s one of the most fun shows we go to — dress code is labelled casual and shorts, Hawaiian shirts and sandals are the required dress. The club also does a great job of decorating and in general work very hard to make the whole weekend a really fun one.

Econ finally solved their problem with missing files, so we are back in synch. I composed an email to them thanking them for getting the issue solved, but complaining about the lack of feed-back and asking for help in devising a plan to get a quicker turn around if this should happen again. Waiting 3 days for the solution was NOT good for our business! It’s the end of the month and we are trying to get billing in and calls closed.  I sent the draft to Wes to review as I was still pretty aggravated with Econ when I wrote it and, although I re-wrote it 3 times, was afraid it contained too strong of language (no, there were no cuss words despite what I was THINKING) when we want to continue our business with them for the time being. He said the wording was fine, but he wanted to make sure it got to the right people and not just the ones we’ve been dealing with.

The area managers finish up around noon today and head back to home. I think we’re all ready for them to be gone. After all, fish and company begin to smell bad after 3 days 8)

Well, I guess I had best get back to it myself. I hope you all have a really nice day and a wonderful weekend!

Love to all,

Margaret

Just a quickie here.

My part of the AM presentation is over (thank DOG!). However, I am still having issues with Econz not returning all my data. This SUCKS! To top it off, no one worked on it yesterday because it was a National holiday in NZ — DOUBLE SUCK!! I’m waiting to hear from them on the issue.

Well, back to the grindstone.

Love to all,

Margaret

I took this photo Sunday in front of a store. Guess which one 🙂

Just to let you know, I uploaded a video of the amateur race at the Blockhouse to YouTube HERE.

Love ya!

Margaret

 I’ve been in meetings all morning, so this is my first opportunity to post today.

I’ll probably be in meetings all day tomorrow, so may not post at all.

Yesterday, my site was down for 3-1/2 hours. They tell me it was due to an htaccess file in my files, but I never added one, so don’t know where it came from. Why did it all of a sudden decide to break the site yesterday?  I’m confused…:cry:

Am still having issues with Eservice. Yesterday, I got no files from them from 1:30 am until 8:15 pm. although that 8:15 pm file was pretty big and I got a lot of information, I’m still missing quite a bit as well. I’m trying to get them to resend the data from that open time period.

My hair is turning greyer by the second. 🙁

Need to run.

Love to all,

Margaret

Morning all! Today the area managers all arrive for a week (well 4 days) of meetings and presentations. I baked cookies last night for everyone. I’m not too thrilled with how they turned out because they seem to be rather dry. Oh well — it’s been awhile since I baked anything, so guess I am rather rusty.

We went to the Blockhouse steeplechase Saturday. The weather was GORGEOUS!! Not too hot and not too cold, but I did get a touch more sun than I probably should have. My face and arms are a bit pink, but not painful, so think it will just turn to tan. I also didn’t get as many photos as I really wanted to. We arrived a touch later than we have on other occasions and I never seemed to get in step with the day after that.

Yesterday we spent doing stuff around the house. Ken mowed the grass and washed the cars while I cleaned the camper, did laundry and mopped and vacuumed. I fixed fried tilapia, garlic pasta and cole slaw for dinner (YUMMY!!). Ken’s sugar was a nice number this morning, so his worry that the pasta would do him in (despite my assurances that these were egg noodles, so wouldn’t push his sugar up). He also stole a couple of cookies last night before he went to bed.

Had an email from Erin this morning that she took Scarlett and Rose to a lure trial over the weekend and little dynamo, Scarlett took the blue ribbon from Open! Sweet Rose was 5th (or NBQ). I’m really proud of those two girls and thrilled that Erin could take time away from her studies to relax in the sun with them.

This week will hopefully not be too crazy. Last week about did me in!

Got to run!

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning! It’s Friday! YEAH!

Yesterday’s problem seems to have resolved into the fact that the girl who issues PM’s flooded the system with over 300 PM calls (that’s preventive maintenance) and the ECON system processes them one at a time which ended up taking over 8 hours to process those calls. Everything is back on track now and my world is once again calm and peaceful (well as calm and peaceful as it ever gets 😛 )

Tomorrow is the Blockhouse race and Ken may actually not have to work and can come to it! Yeah! 😆 That makes me a happy person.

The BB lady came by my desk a few minutes ago wanting to know if I was going to be here all day as she may want me in a meeting later this afternoon. 😥 I had to tell her that yes, I would be here all day, but I do have a meeting for 2:30 this afternoon with the call center personnel. Although I don’t really expect that to take more than 30 minutes tops, I definitely DON’T want to get dragged into another interminable meeting with her a the helm. Working late today is not on my want-to-do-it list!

Speaking of work, I suppose I should get back to it.

Have a wonderful day!

Love to all,

Margaret

Good morning! It’s only 7:14 am and I’m already nearly 5 hours into my day. When I left my afternoon meeting yesterday at 5:15 (with the bb lady who took a 30 minute meeting and stretched it into 2-1/2 hours), I had voice mails asking me to add someone to the Econ (California guy — they are 3 hours behind us, so it was early when I was asked to add him out there anyway), but when I tried to log into my computer to do the work, it would not get on the network. That essentially screwed me. I had to go to the server room and make the necessary changes directly on the server, which was a pita enough, but really no big deal. At any rate, I started obsessing about my computer not finding the network, so called the network guy and told him the problem which he promised to check into first thing this morning (well, first thing for him which is 8:00 am). However, the more I thought about it, the more I stressed because I knew that if I needed to get into the system from home that I would be really toast, so I called the NAS guys who are typically here late and asked them to see if they could check it out. They found a loose wire and I was back in business!

Anyway, I still worried, so logged in at 10:00 last night right before I went to bed. UGH! Bad stuff in my email. My Econ job sent me over 200 emails telling me that it was failing every time it ran. I was pretty sure I knew what the problem was, but was just too brain dead to work on it then. The brain was evidently not as dead as I gave it credit for as it got me up at 2:30 and forced me into the office to work on the problem. I not only found and corrected the issue I was pretty sure was the main problem, but found and corrected another problem that I didn’t even know existed! Now she sings like a bird, but I am truly brain dead.

I have a conference call at 11:00 this morning with a customer and sales, but might be able to skip out not too long after that.  Depends on what my boss says.

Back to the grindstone……

Love to all,

Margaret

Writing a bit late today. Met Brian at 6:00 am this morning to begin working on solving problems. Worked through two or three of them and discussed several more. Then he moved on to other people with whom he needs to help on their part of this project. I hope he is able to get them settled on their course of action as I’m waiting on those pieces for the final part of mine.

**As you probably can tell, I had to finish this at another time since I got interrupted.

Hot gossip 😆 — The people renting Charlotte’s daughter’s house were arrested yesterday for Cocaine possession/dealing. The mother was released with no charges filed, but the 17 year old is on America’s top 10 most wanted teens list for crimes committed in North Carolina and he was apprehended yesterday as he tried to leave the state.

What is it about that house that seems to attract these criminally notorious people??

This weekend is the annual blockhouse run in Saluda. This is a steeplechase (about 8 or 10 races) that is really one big party for those who are not riding in it. Not to worry — neither Ken nor I ride in it, but we do go to the party 😛 We have a lot of fun although we don’t drink (alchohol). I’ve gotten some great pictures of horses going over the jumps and a video or two. This year, with my new camera, I hope to get even better photos. I’m with Colin that landscape photography should have as big a spot as “people” photography, but confess to not really knowing if photos of a steeplechase qualify as landscape or people 😆

Well, I guess I need to get back to work. Trying to resource @@error coding examples.

Love to all,

Margaret