New Year New Travels New Weather

Jeff and I are finishing up our long holiday work weeks. We've been working mostly straight through since the middle of December. We'll soon be finished up and back on our regular schedules at work, but after we take a few days vacation to recoup, relax, and decompress after the busyness of the season. 

We have booked a room at a casino resort in Louisiana, but are also aware of a polar vortex heading our way around the same timeframe. While we are looking forward to getting away for a bit, we are taking extra precaution to secure the house for the freezing weather. 

Not something I wanted to plan for while trying to recoup and relax, but we will survive! 

Tornados...Tornados Everywhere

Yesterday, my phone began blowing up with weather notifications. I picked up my phone to look, and two different apps were sending notifications to seek shelter. Like RIGHT NOW. That's unusual - as I'm normally only getting a notice from the pushes to my phone (i.e. the Amber Alerts). But the actual weather app was now also pinging my phone.

The notices said there was eminent (extreme) danger and to seek shelter immediately, as there was a tornado warning in effect. I've gotten tornado warnings before, but never to this degree. So, I did as any normal person from the Texas Panhandle does, and I went outside to look. 

Sure enough, just to the south of our house was a tornado. It was forming, but I could absolutely make out that it was a tornado. It was traveling northeast, so it ended up going just to the east of us, in an open field just past the houses to our left. I could see debris flying up as it was getting closer to us.

I ran inside and woke Jeff up (he sleeps during the day as he works overnight), and made sure he was dressed, and in the hallway for safety. We both looked outside once again, and the tornado had passed us at that point, and was continuing to go east. We found out that two different neighborhoods not far from us were hit pretty hard (Sunterra and Winward). 

The storm carrying this tornado continued on, and the tornado itself bounced around all the way to Beaumont, and possibly beyond! I stopped tracking it when the storm crossed over the Beaumont area.

This marks the second time this year that there has been a tornado very close to our neighborhood. In May 2024, there was a tornado in the fields across FM 529 from us, making its way to Cypress. That tornado did some major damage to some transformers and towers near the FedEx depot at Grand Parkway and West Rd. It also took down some of the power lines along FM 529, leaving our neighborhood without electricity for several days. 

Jeff and I went to stay with my mom and step dad after that one, because they still had power. It was crazy because we could follow the path of destruction of that tornado all the way from Bellville past our neighborhood in Katy!

Speaking of spiraling cones of wind, we also made it through Hurricane Beryl in June. The eye of the hurricane went directly over our neighborhood. We kept electricity through most of it! 

The only damage we took from the two tornados and the hurricane was needing some shingles repaired after the hurricane. We've been quite lucky this year!

Surviving the Holidays

We've made it through another Thanksgiving holiday. Things have been so crazy this month that I almost forgot that I had not yet posted anything. 

I'm still responsible for making all holiday delivery changes for the holiday week. However...it has changed up a bit this year compared to all the other years I have done the scheduling. Looking back, it has been my responsibility now for 5 years, going on 6 years this coming spring. 

Customer Service used to write the schedule for our customers to get deliveries during the holiday week (we are closed on Thanksgiving, so no billing, selection, or delivering on the actual holiday itself). So, customers who normally get either a delivery or they are due in with their orders on Thursdays have to bill and deliver another day. We would double check the projected changes behind them, and then they would implement the changes into the system.

Five years ago, it changed to me making the changes and implementing into the system. The person in Customer Service decided he did not want to continue to do it any longer, so he trained me how to do it. I would go through the spreadsheets (5 in total: Grocery/Frozen, Meat, Produce, DFW area Meat, and DFW area Produce) and make sure everything matched by store by billing, upload into the mainframe, and verify it was correct. Then I would work with Customer Service after they had sent the schedules to the stores to make edits to the schedule as needed.

Now, it is a bit different. Instead of having 5 separate spreadsheets, everything is populated in one spreadsheet. So, all the product types are grouped together by store, which makes it easier to go through. There is a separate team responsible for implementing the schedules into the system, so I have to be quicker in my edits so they have time to get it uploaded and verified. 

Besides all of that, now we have to get approvals from leadership in the warehouse, transportation, and sales before we can send the changes to the teams that maintains the schedules. And...if customer service says that the customers do not like their schedules...OH WELL. No changes are made - we can bill something off schedule, but we cannot edit their holiday schedule. 

As we are in the middle of Thanksgiving planning, I had to rush through and complete the Christmas schedule edits. We are now in the process of getting them approved by leadership so it can begin the upload process to the system. Never ending madness around here!

Get-aways and Holiday Madness...When Will It End?

Jeff and I really do enjoy getting away for the weekend. When I say weekend, I mean our days off. We don't have the typical weekends off like everyone else does. My work schedule is Wednesdays through Sundays, working during the day while Jeff works over night Thursdays nights through Monday mornings.

I do sometimes get bothered by the fact that we work opposing schedules. While most of the time I am ok by it - he's usually in bed asleep for most of the day so the house is quiet while I am working (I work remotely), but when planning a weekend get-away (there's that word again), we can't just leave Sunday afternoon or evening once we are off work and come back Tuesday afternoon or evening. Jeff gets up 2-3 hours after I am completing my work day to start getting ready for his work day. 

That means we can't head out until he gets home from his work day, which is between 6 and 8 am Monday morning. That leaves us with only Monday evening away wherever we are going before we need to head back home on Tuesday for me to prepare for work Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, Jeff doesn't have to start preparing to go back to work until Thursday morning!

We either have to do a short trip somewhere that could normally be done as a day trip, or I have to plan to take Wednesday off work to add that second day in for our weekend together. Occasionally Jeff will take Sunday night off work, so we can go ahead and head out when I am off work Sunday afternoon. I'd love to be able to leave out on a Sunday afternoon, coming back on a Tuesday. But I have a feeling that won't be happening until Jeff retires, or is able to find a less physical no longer outside job, like what he has now.

On that same note...holidays at the end of the year get crazy as well, and I'm looking forward to when Jeff no longer has to deal with that too. I can pretty much work from anywhere as long as I have good internet connection and my laptop. Jeff's job is not remote, and will never have that option to be. Coupled with the fact that the only other person who works overnights at his job takes off the last 2-3 weeks of the year...every year, leaving Jeff to have to cover both their shifts for 21+ days straight is getting really old.

There's no consideration for Jeff being able to take time off to spend with family during the holidays. He's spoken up about it the last couple of years at work, and slowly, other people on other shifts have taken some of the night shifts to give him some time off to be with his family. More needs to be done to correct that.

Hello September...Here We Go!

The arrival of September usually brings stress, frustration, anxiety, and lots of additional work. It marks the onset of "Holiday Season," which is quickly approaching. 

This means decorating for both fall and Christmas, buying and wrapping Christmas presents, deciding if we are going to be able to meet with family for the holidays (we have issues in the holidays due to work schedules), completing delivery schedule changes for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's (all to be completed within the next 3 months), making spur of the moment changes for stores' deliveries...

Not to mention planning and executing Fall and Christmas concerts, publicity for the concerts, rehearsals, social media blasts, emails to patrons, designing and printing the concert programs. 

I have already planned some outings with a friend for Friday nights during this time. It will force me to get away from the work, and spend some time decompressing from everything. I'm already looking forward to it!

In October, we will see "Sleeping Beauty" in a whole new way, as the ballerinas wear LED lights, lighting up the stage as they dance!

Also in October, we will see the Houston Symphony perform "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

In December, we will see a parody of Die Hard, called Yippee Ki Yay.

There are some other Christmas themed attractions I would like to see, and may be able to get around to them in November if available to. The Museum of Fine Arts puts out a Christmas Village every year, and last year the friend and I were able to go in January to see a whole Christmas Lights display set up in the local shopping mall parking lot.

It is Getting to be That Time of Year Again...

I start dreading the end of the year, beginning in August. I know within a few weeks I will have to start working on holiday delivery schedules for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and deal with the headache that comes along with it. 

Also, there are so many neat events and shows going on during the holiday season, and I'd love to experience them all. I am hoping that now that we are fully integrated into the National Routing Team, the new OMS system, and have a department who is responsible for updating and maintaining the delivery schedules, that it will make my duties planning the schedules less of a headache.

When we were in the old system, each product type had it's own sign on into the mainframe (dry goods/frozen, meat, produce, Dallas area meat, Dallas area produce). So in essence, I was responsible for maintaining 5 sets of delivery schedules. If I wanted to update a customer's delivery schedule, I had to make changes on multiple screens.

The schedules are all housed in the same area now, and so I just need to look on one screen to see all the different product types for a particular customer. And when I get the spreadsheets to start working on the schedules, it will all come on one spreadsheet now. Before, I had to get spreadsheets from each product type's mainframe. I used to have to go through all 1,000 customers on for grocery/frozen and make changes for holiday billing. Then go through all 1,000 AGAIN for meat, then AGAIN for produce, then AGAIN for Dallas meat, then AGAIN for Dallas produce. 

As soon as I was through for Thanksgiving delivery changes, I had to immediately start again for Christmas/New Year delivery changes. September through the end of December was hell - having to make the changes, and then as we are going through the holiday week, make last minute changes on the fly.

Excited to see how it goes now that we are all in one system!

Aftermath of Hurricane Beryl

What an interesting, scary, and wild week it has been so far. Hurricane Beryl made landfall near Matagorda, Texas as a strong Category 1 hurricane early Monday morning. When it went over the Yucatan Peninsula prior to that, it spun the hurricane, and aimed it towards Matagorda...it was originally supposed to make landfall near Brownsville.

The hurricane made a direct path to Houston, and the eye of the hurricane actually traveled almost right over our neighborhood. What an insane experience that was, to be going through hurricane force winds and rain, then all the sudden NOTHING.

The company I work for took on damage to the frozen warehouse, which will now need to be repaired. Both the grocery and frozen warehouses are without power, and work is having to be done manually to get loads out since they do not have access to printers or copiers right now.

Over 2.25 million customers were without power after the storm hit. Centerpoint Energy has restored a good portion of those customers as of today, but many are still without power, during the hottest part of the year. 

So far, the death count is up to 11 in the Houston area due to the storm.