A New Look

As you can see, I have been messing around with the blog tonight. Unfortunately, there is no template that has crimson and cream or OU, so I had to do what I could. Hopefully, it is not too annoying. You might also look at my profile. I added an audio clip and I would be interested if anyone knows what it came from. I think it is pretty funny. This little friend of Abbie's is named Luke. His family worships at the congregation we do. The other day Amber babysat for them while his mom was painting at the church building. He is a cute little guy. He was quiet, docile, and almost scared at our house. He sat almost motionless with me for at least 15 minutes before Abbie came over to sit. I just had to have Amber take some pictures of the three of us. It was good to have him over. Thankfully, Abbie played nice most of the time.

Let me know what you think of the new look of the site and if you know what the audio clip in my profile is.

Foreshadowing

Tonight I first want to explain the photos just a little bit. The top photo was taken Wednesday, November 8 at the cemetary in Oilton, OK. Amber and I had not been to the cemetary since Grandma's funeral and we decided it was a good time to go. I spoke about my Mom's mother in a previous blog. We felt it would be good to start giving Abbie some images of her family. Abbie did real well on the trip and aside from some sticky burrs in her shoes, she was a good girl. My mom and dad went with us and with the perfect weather, it was a good day.

The bottom photo was taken sometime after Halloween. Abbie has not quite mastered keeping the spit generated by a sucker in her mouth, as you can see. Thanks to Grammy (my mom) this sucker also had a black jack-o-lantern face that rubbed off pretty easily. Obviously, Abbie had a good time with it.

The title of this blog is "foreshadowing." I have been seeing a behavior in Abbie that is concerning me. I am afraid it is foreshadowing of future behavior. Abbie sometimes likes to survey the house looking for any toys, dog food, books, or other assorted items to pick up, handle and deposit somewhere else in the house. The thing that has been bothering me is that she has been regularly making a bee line to our bedroom to find my wallet. She proudly walks back in with my wallet and proceeds to open it and try to remove any credit card she can find. Tonight, I said, "Abbie, give me my wallet back, please." She got a little grin and shook her head "no." Her mother really got a kick out of that. I am getting a sinking feeling that this little episode may be played out all too often in the coming years.

On a more serious note, Abbie does have an ear infection in her right ear. She saw the doctor today and is taking some medicine for it. Hopefully she will not have any further complications, but you might remember her in your prayers.

What does it profit?

Tonight I am struggling with what to say. I am not able to settle on any one thing to blog about.
I am off for the next 5 days, thank goodness. When I have this much time off, I sometimes feel like I am "cheating" and will get in trouble for it later. It is hard to not get so wrapped up in things at work. I feel like I do a good job of leaving work at work. There are the occasional rants to my wife about this and that, but other than that, I feel like I "turn it off" when I come home. One thing happened at work recently that I want to share. I do not know if it is a story that will be particularly meaningful or interesting, but I have not gotten any satisfaction about it at work, so why not blog about it?
Once a year Wal-Mart stores have an inventory day. On this day, an independent firm comes in and physically counts the merchandise in the store. This is done to reconcile the books and see how much the store has lost due to theft, breakage, and things like that. The term Wal-Mart uses for this loss is "shrink." In the pharmacy, they do not physically count every pill, rather, they count full bottles and partial bottles are considered half of a full bottle. Everything is counted and assigned a dollar value. This dollar value is then worked into the sales figures to determine the amount of shrink the store has had in the past year. Inventory day is probably my least favorite day of the year. It is never good to shrink, and if you shrink too much you are a "high shrink" pharmacy and there is an audit that is done to find out where that money went. I have not had to go through one of those, thank goodness. This year my problem is just the opposite. On the day of inventory, when the counters were done, they gave me a total page that listed the total amount of the pharmacy to be about $320,000. But, when the final numbers were given for the total store inventory, the amount for pharmacy was about $380,000. That $60,000 difference made our pharmacy look like it had an overage instead of shrink. There is no way that could happen. I have yet to figure out where the $60,000 came from. I told my boss about it multiple times, I told our store's loss prevention supervisor and his boss about it, and I was told to fax the numbers to Bentonville. That was the last I heard about it. We got our profit and loss statement for last month this past weekend and guess what was there? An overage from the inventory of about $87,000 was tacked on to our gross profit. Needless to say it makes the store look unbelieveable, but it is WRONG! I thought surely the extraordinary numbers that we posted would raise eyebrows and I would get a phone call from someone higher up. So far, I have heard absolutely nothing. I am afraid my boss does not care about it because it will add so much "profit" to the bottom line. But next year, we will have to pay the piper, big time. I just can not get over the lack of concern of everyone involved but me. OK, that is my story. I am sorry to have bored you with it, but I just had to get that out. By the way, did you notice how cute little pooter is?