Random thoughts

I think my grandson's favorite word is Random. That's what my blog post is today. Just random thoughts.... We had a deer visit us in the back yard yesterday. The dogs spied it out the patio door and set off the "barking" alarm. They even growled at each other as if to say "I saw it first!".... We had a snow/rain mix this morning. I think it caught the road crew off guard as there were no cinders on the road or that chemical they spray. The road was icy all the way to town. Down there it didn't look like it had even rained.... Terry was stuck in Seattle area since Friday night and just left around 4:00 p.m. headed for Palo Alto, CA with a load from the IKEA warehouse. If I had known soon enough I would have driven up there to see him. Would have been a long drive but the weather was like spring and it would have felt like a mini-vacation.... It is hard to believe that it is the end of January. At this rate, I will blink a couple times and it will be December again.... It is supposed to get cold here again this week. Glad brother Jim loaded my garage up with firewood for me.... I want to praise the Lord for his many blessing to me and our family and His care and mercies. Nothing is "random" with God.

Time goes by so fast!

It is hard to believe that two more weeks have gone by. It has just been whirling past me. Still putting in long hours but thankfully not as long as the cutover and go-live weeks. Only around 57 hours now!! Things are very slowly settling down. Still lots of data issues and one time when I relayed the problem to my supervisor she replied "hummm. I will have to ponder that". We have a habit of coming up with "new and different" problems!!

On the home front, Terry has had a hard time "keeping trucking". He gets to a place and then it takes 2-4 days to get another load to somewhere else. Then he has to wait another 2-4 days. Very frustrating and boring. Believe it or not, Terry was stuck in Las Vegas and was happy to get out of there!! When you have a big truck, you can't go far and usually the company yards truck stops are not close to the casinos or shopping. That is probably a good thing!! Pretty boring when the highlight of the day is doing laundry or getting a Subway sandwich. Now he is on his way to Fort Collins, CO. Will see where he goes from there. He hasn't been home since Christmas...sigh.

I haven't done anything but work so there are no pictures to post unless I take one of my office!! Thanks again to everyone who has been praying this project will go well. I certainly am learning A LOT about the "new" system, mill procedures and office politics.

We did it

Got done with this week's work Saturday at 1:45 p.m. So the week after Christmas I put in 69hours (even with taking half day off to go to Dr and get meds for my sinus infection AND a much needed nap!!). I have improved greatly but still coughing some. This week I put in 88 hours. The project implementation went well. The Prineville team did great (there are a couple folks that are struggling with the transition but overall folks have good attitudes and are learning fast and making progress.) There is still ALOT of data setup issues so most of my time is still dealing with data instead of support for the folks. My supervisor put even more hours in than me but went home Saturday after being here for 2 weeks. We had several folks helping us from corporate IT and the other mills. One of my worries is that since I have spent the last two months AND implementation week on data, I will be learning the support role as I go but I will be able to make lots of phone calls and get help. Overall it was very successful considering it was a total change of systems and our folks had to change their way of thinking (from tracking units of wood with individual numbers to tracking it only my part number and quantity and going from one Work Order per sales line to mutiple Work orders because now there is a work order for each component used to make the final product). The support will get lighter as they learn more and do more on there own but the stabilization will take about 3 months. To get an idea about how big the project was - there are 10 different screens of data that need entered to set up one part and we set up over 11,000 parts. Some of the parts have 2 to 10 components. I wrote the scripts to pull the information from the old system and created the spreadsheets used by data entry folks - about 130 spreadsheets (so far). Anyway, the Lord has sustained me. Local Management were really supportive and even the Millwork Division Manager came from corporate offices to be on hand for support. I have always felt that the Lord wanted me to have this job and He has made sure that I have been able to help the folks to be successful. By His mercy and help, WE DID IT. Praise His Holy Name!!!!!