Good News today

I am finally feeling like I’ve gotten over that cold thats been lingering since a few weeks ago. I haven’t missed any work over it or anything but I’ve really felt like I was dragging. It made time slow down while I was at work and time speed up while I was asleep. For the last few weeks I have been in bed by 9:00pm instead of my usual 11:00 or midnight.

Work is also going well. It’s been a pain in the ass lately strictly due to scheduling issues since the higher ups decided I should staff the NOC 24/7 with only 1 1/2 more bodies. At least half my staff has been with the company less than 8 months. I trust the new guys to be here over night alone but they just don’t have the experience needed to fly solo when they will be dealing with our most important customers. It would end up resulting in my needing to be available over night to walk them through stuff.

It’s working like this. I have two guys full time on the over night shifts (5:00pm til 2:00am and 1:30am to 10:30am) during the week. But I have had to rotate those shifts through my more expereinced techs on weekends which results in people working them every 5-6 weeks. I have one guy who volunteered to work the 1:30am – 10:30am shift every weekend whcih helped. And yesterday N., one of my newer guys, volunteered to do the 5:00pm to 2:00am shift every Sunday. That means I only have one shift to rotate people through. That makes things much easier. Well, easier on my people, harder on me, it makes the scheduiling very complex since I am also under orders to avoid overtime unless it absolutely can’t be avoided.

I’ll be ok now until August 9th when one of my techs will start a 6 week leave. She is a very solid tech and working scheduling around her leave will be a bitch. She has told me off the record that she will try to come back after 3 weeks instead of 6 if she is able but I have to look at the worst case scenario and plan accordingly.

The rasberries (New and Improved RazzleDazzle Berries) and blackberries are pretty much done. I will only have a few more cups of berries to find a use for before I can stop for the year. I have read up on how to cut them back and prepare them for maximum berrytude next summer. I have decided that next year, rather than eating them on the fly the way we have this year, I will pop them into a big freezer bag and then when they are all done I will make jam. One of the guys in our Provisioning department makes his own jams and jellies and he says freezing them won’t hurt the taste or texture. I also will need to pick about 20% of the berries I plan to use a bit before total ripeness since the not quite ripe ones have more pectin and they will set better. If all goes well, nobody should be surprised if they get Rasberry/blackberry jam at Yule in 2005.

And the other bit of good news is that Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the government on Wednesday to change a large section of its West Bank barrier, saying the current route violates the basic human rights of the local Palestinian population. The court said the changes must be made, even at the risk of reducing Israeli security. This means that the current barrier route wil have to be changed since it cuts off Palestinian’s from the land they cultivate and it would involve the destruction of over 50,000 olive trees that people depend on for their livelyhood.