Long fun day

Spent the morning at Whitefish Dunes. One last day out with the kids before school starts on Wednesday. They had a great time playing in the water & sand. I had a great nap on the beach.

Then this evening went to a cub scout family picnic at Green Bay's community built playground. The scouts grilled up hot dogs for their families.

Paycheck

Pizza Hut has a new way to pay employees. Instead of a paycheck, we get a card that works like a debit card or credit card. Our wages are put into an account the card draws from when we use it. I thought it sounded pretty slick up until the part about a service fee every time I use the card.

Fortunately, there's a way to get our pay direct deposited into a checking account. I just have to go to some website and enter all the right code words. So I'm trying to figure that out this morning.

Floods

I was scheduled to work at 5pm yesterday. So at about 4:58 I pulled up to the corner of Main and Mason, about 1/4 mile up from Pizza Hut, and traffic was backed up from that light all the way to the next light up on Mason. Gah. But I happened to be about middle of the pack, right next to the Walgreen's parking lot at the corner. So I quickly turned in the Mason Street entrance, cut through and noticed as I pulled out the Main Street entrance that traffic was backed up because of a police barricade blocking Main Street. Oops, I looked down the road towards Pizza Hut and realized they were barricading off Main Street because it was flooded out about 1/2 way between the corner and Pizza Hut.

There were two cars right at the driveway entrance to Pizza Hut submerged up over their hoods. A river flowed across the parking lot and flowed away down Main Street. There was no way I could drive there. I literally would have had to swim to the store.

So instead, I returned home, called in and explained that I wasn't there yet because I couldn't get there. "Don't worry about it," said the manager on duty, "We're closing for the night. Just waiting for the water to subside so we can clean up before heading out."

This morning I was scheduled to work 10:30AM. When I arrived, there were puddles all over the parking lot, debris all over the property. Two managers had arrived earlier in the morning to continue cleaning everything up. Dine-in remained closed until about 5PM, and the morning was real slow, so I spent most of my time helping to clean things up until deliveries started coming in regularly about 2PM.

Of course we talked about what it had been like at the store yesterday. Apparently there was about 4 inches of standing water throughout. One of our waitstaff tried to drive in when the water was only 1/2 way up her car door, without considering that our parking lot was a depression. As soon as she started to pull in, her car sank. One of the drivers swam out to help her out of the car. By the time she had climbed out the window, water was about up to the cars roof. One of the customer's cars was entirely submerged.

It was crazy.

Bugs

One thing about living in Manitowoc and Sheboygan that I don't think I appreciated as much as I should have was just how few bugs there were. I mean, there were bugs; mosquitos, spiders, basement crawly things. After each trip back to visit Becky's parents in Wisconsin Rapids, I did notice how few mosquitos we had on the Lakeshore. But man, I'd forgotten how many bugs there are in Green Bay.

There's a park Becky would like to take our kids to for pictures, but it is so mosquito infested that she just can't. And spiders. Wow, so many spiders. Big, healthy, well fed spiders. Sometime toward the end of September or beginning of October I'll have to get a picture of one of the glass walls on a UWGB campus building. The whole thing gets to be a giant spider community. I mean, the community is giant. And the spiders are pretty big too. It's a mix of creepy and fascinating.

Visitors

Becky's sister, Sherry, came up from Wyoming to visit this weekend with four of her kids. Becky's parents took three of Sherry's kids plus two of ours up to Iron Mountain, Michigan for the Ore to Shore bike race. Becky had a great time with her sister. We don't see them nearly often enough. Tabby absolutely adored having another girl around the house.

Exciting work day

I headed out on a double delivery today - taking two homes' orders. A couple minutes on the road and I found traffic at a dead stop at the intersection of I43 North and Manitowoc Road. A couple cars were pulled off the side, everyone else stopped in their lanes, even a couple cars in the intersection itself.

Suddenly, I saw this dark little blur, a Terrier, bolt between cars and someone quickly cut between the blur and the lane of oncoming traffic to herd it back to the side of the road. So I stepped out of my car to see if I could help. About six of us were circling the dog, trying to trap it between us. As we talked to each other, I found out none of us owned it. Apparently, the dog had jumped out of her car as it turned onto the highway and the owner hadn't noticed.

So this poor little thing was scared absolutely to death. Snarling, shaking, snapping and most of all, trying to get away from us. One of the guys even had a bag of Doritos he was trying to lure the dog over with. But no luck. Eventually she found a spot under an SUV that none of us seemed to be able to reach. There she sat.

I knelt next to the vehicle and slowly inched my hand toward her, pausing when she snarled at it and starting again as she calmed down. Eventually I was touching her paws, then her shoulder, then I grabbed her collar. Wow. You'd have thought I put a cattle prod to her. Yelping, snarling, biting, struggling. It was rough pulling out from under the SUV and my hand was half covered in blood by the time I had her in my arms. As soon as I had her in a hug though, she calmed down like nothing had happened.

She had on tags with a phone number. Her name was Zoe. Someone called the owners, took the dog so I could wash off my hand. Dorito guy had a first aid kit, gave me a band aid. A policeman pulled up about that time. He made sure there was no accident, no one injured, asked if either of the two of us who had been bitten wanted to file a report. No, I didn't want to file a report. The poor little thing was just scared to death. The only thing filing a report would do is drive up the owner's home insurance rates.

So I delivered the pizza's, got back to work. We had a manager trainee in today. "Way to go, new guy," said our store manager, "Now trainee here has an extra hour of paper work to fill out. Next time just run the dog over."

I think he was kidding. Kind of.

Yay work!

Today was my first official day. I spent three hours with what Pizza Hut calls the "Learning Zone" - it's training software. Nothing I didn't already know from, well, working at Pizza Hut for 4 years. But I guess that was 13 years ago. Long enough that there was no such thing as a "Learning Zone".

It was just my first "official" day, though, because I actually got called in to work last Saturday. Another driver called in sick (or something), so I was there just in case it got busy. It didn't. But I got to take a few deliveries and a jump start on my training, so it was good.

Oh, and I got paid. That was good too.

On the water

Becky's brother, Mike, took us out on his boat yesterday.



The kneeboard was the biggest hit. Even Becky got out on it.









We had a ton of fun.