Crazy Busy Thanksgiving

So it is officially two days after Turkey day and Daniel and I are still making the rounds. Thursday was a pretty insane day - we were in 5 different cities visiting a throng of different people. Wish we had more time for longer visits, but so thankful we are seeing so many. Hate that we can't see everybody.

Wednesday we left Charlotte around 3:30 PM to head to Chattanooga. Traffic from Charlotte to Greenville was horrendous. We almost had a wreck due to the insane drivers that don't know how to drive. Surprisingly Atlanta wasn't too bad and we made it to Chattanooga after only 8 hours in the car (it should have been less than 6).

Anyways, we spent the night at the Reynolds on Signal Mountain - don't think we could have found their house (that close to midnight) without our trusty GPS.

Thursday morning started with visiting with the Reynolds. Andrew told us the story of the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving during breakfast, then after breakfast Andrew gave me a tour of the house and Sadie entertained us. We were on the road again by 9:30. Getting off the mountain we got a little lost and then ran into a wreck which made our trip to LaVergne take a little longer.

We rolled into LaVergne a little after 11 am and celebrated Thanksgiving at Daniel's grandmother's house with their traditional Thanksgiving breakfast. After breakfast we headed to Smyrna to see Emily and Josh's house and for more visiting. After that we headed to Murfreesboro to see Daniel's dad. After a quick visit with him we headed to Springfield to meet up with Mark and the Allgoods at the Gores (sound confusing yet?). We ate leftover turkey there and visited for about 2 hours before heading to Bellvue to see Kristalynne (and meet her boyfriend Nick). After visiting until after midnight, we headed back to LaVergne to spend the night at Grandmothers. Whew... saw lots of people and dropped into bed around 2.

So that was our Thanksgiving day. Yesterday was more mellow. We hung out at Grandmothers for a majority of the day - even helped Daniels' grandmother and mom set up the Christmas tree and decorate it. Then we headed to Madison to meet my brother for dinner and a movie. This led to another late night of getting home after midnight.

Today is lunch in Murfreesboro with Daniel's dad and extended family and then back to LaVergne to celebrate early Christmas and Emily's birthday with Daniel's mom and extended family.

Whew...

Yesterday was go, go, go for me... Started with a 7:45AM doctor's appointment followed by work craziness. Ten-minute lunch around 3PM. Cranked out a last minute project with a 5 o'clock deadline. Didn't have any time to prepare for class. Stayed at work to type up all of my notes/PPT. Daniel brought pizza at 7:15PM. Ate quickly, then headed to Rock Hill to teach. Barely made it in time. Taught the full hour and 15 minutes. Afterwards, one of my students (who was recently laid off) talked to me for 20 minutes about realistic expectations for the field. Didn't get home until 10:30. Took a bath to relax for the first time all day. Went to bed.

Long, Short Week

This week was a long week since I crammed 51 hours into four days. It is a short week because my boss gave me and my co-workers today off.

It was a pretty crazy week, but it definitely could have been worse (some of my co-workers worked more than 60 hours in four days, so I shouldn't complain too much). Also, we were all in it together, which made it more bearable.

For me, the culmination of the week was Wednesday night, when there were six of us in the building until midnight and four of us until 3am. One guy was there later than that.

So, what were we doing that caused the late night craziness?

Well, at the beginning of the week, we were cranking out package design for a sales pitch to Lowes (Wednesday meeting) and WalMart (Thursday meeting). As my boss says, we crammed 6 weeks of work into about 10 days - the whole shebang included naming the products, creating logos and developing package design.

The name of the game was to crap it out in order to meet the deadlines - we will perfect designs later. Note that I definitely had the lightest workload compared to my co-workers.

The second part of the week's craziness involved creating a brand/theme for a new bar/restaurant that is going to open in Third Ward. The name of the bar is LOCAL. We created four distinct brands to pitch to the client. This involved creating mood boards for the feel of the restaurant, logo, signage, direction for artwork that would support the themes, t-shirt designs, coasters, napkins, etc. etc. etc.

Needless to say, Wednesday became a very long day. I was at the Enventys building for close to 19 hours without leaving.

Yesterday's pitch to the client went well and our boss rewarded our hard work by giving us Friday off.

Crazy Week

It seems like life always seems to be at one end of the pendulum or the other. In recent weeks I have had very little to work to do at work. But then this past week hit with a vengeance. Thankfully I prefer the craziness of having too much to do verses having little to do.

The week started with wrapping up the August issue of Inventors Digest. With the editor out of town, this made things tricky. I had some last minute craziness with Photoshop corrupting a good portion of my images as well as some other occurrences of Murphy's Law coming into play.

On top of that we have been preparing to pitch campaign ideas to March of Dimes (MOD) this coming Tuesday. As a group, this has meant extra meetings to hone in on the three best ideas and then more work to continue to tweak those ideas. The concepts are the MOD equivalent to the Red Dress Campaign for the American Heart Association... except our campaign revolves around awareness of what MOD is doing to make sure every baby is born healthy. Hopefully the presentation will go well and we will get the project.

I am also working on rebranding a non-profit organization called Harvester's International Ministries (HIM). They connect churches with indigenous missionaries in Africa and India. I am very excited to be working on this project. I have a presentation to them this coming Thursday so this week looks like it will be hectic as well. Like I said, I would rather be busy that not.

This weekend we are continuing work on the shower. We are on phase three - installing a Kerdi liner. Once this sets up we can start tiling... probably next weekend at the earliest.

Three More Nights

After tonight, I only have three nights left of teaching for this semester. I am planning on taking the summer off from teaching in order to have a break from the craziness that I currently call my life.

Busy... busy... busy...

So I am procrastinating. I have a ton of work to do, but I am sitting here, catching up on facebook instead.

I have a powerpoint presentation to create for one of the partner's in my company to pitch at an investor's meeting at 10 a.m. Monday morning. I have midterm tests to create for the three classes that I teach. AND I also have a freelance project that I am doing for a friend... I really had not anticipated being this busy.

It is a good thing that I love what I am doing, because I constantly seem to be doing something.

Still Adjusting

I am still adjusting to the craziness of my new work schedule, but I am loving everything that I am doing. I really love teaching - but the prep work has proven to be very time consuming. I think if I teach another semester, if will definitely be more enjoyable and less time consuming outside of school.

Working at Enventys has been great. I am learning new things and being able to contribute to such a creative group is a blast. I feel very blessed to have both of these opportunities.

Being able to play wii at work or use IM as a form of communication with my co-workers is also nice.

Next weekend almost everybody from work is headed to San Jose, CA for a casting call for Everyday Edisons... maybe in the future I will get to go on the casting calls as well.

First Full Week

This week has flown by. Some parts are a little overwhelming and having a cold has not helped, but overall I am very excited about the future.

I have a lot of stretching to do. The most overwhelming task that I feel the least equipped for is our product-naming sessions. We have had two so far and we are all expected to show up with lists of possible names for new products that are in the lineup. This is an area that I definitely need to work on and hopefully will get better at this with time.

My cold is easing, but it has been no fun to have a head cold all week. Hopefully I will get over it this weekend.

I am looking forward to a relaxing weekend... after I clean the house and go buy groceries.

No Time

The past four days have been a whirlwind for me. To be honest I am still reeling from everything working out so beautifully. The only downfall is that I have gone from zero to eighty in an incredibly short period of time and am still trying to transition.

The best way I know to try to give an overview of my current job(s) is to go over a PROS and CONS list of my week.

PROS
1) I can carpool with Daniel (we rode in together twice with his bike attached to the bike so that he could bike home. He rode his bike once both ways and once he drove in separate.

2) I can eat lunch with Daniel downtown because his office is less than 1 mile from mine. This is especially handy on Mondays and Wednesdays when I teach in the evenings and don't see him until 10 p.m.

3) I have a new Mac with a huge screen and I get to use Leopard and Adobe CS3. (If you are a Mac user or Designer, you will understand why this is a wonderful thing)

4) I finally have an office. Actually they are in the middle of building it right now. They literally built the walls around me today and yesterday. I am calling it an office instead of a cubicle b/c it has 10-ft high walls and a door, but it is not much bigger than a cubicle).

5) The colors on the walls make me feel like I am at home. The wooden parts of my "office" are painted the same color red as my kitchen. One wall of the Creative Area is the same blue as my bedroom. Another wall is the same green as my guest bedroom. And yet another wall is brown - and my hallway and living room walls are different shades of brown!

6) Enventys has a Latino Division to the company and if you want to learn Spanish - there are plenty of people around to teach you. I think it is awesome that every department seems to have someone who speaks Spanish.

7) I am getting to work on types of projects that I have never worked on before. With the amount of new products coming through our doors, it is an amazing and wonderful place for innovation and I find that incredibly inspiring.

8) I get a consistent paycheck.

9) Hopefully within a week or two I will be able to bike commute to work with Daniel on the days that I don't teach.

10) We play wii at work. In the center of the Creative Area is a large flatscreen TV. Yesterday, for fun, we took a break for bowling. I actually just watched, but the fact that we all stopped as a group to play is an awesome perk.

CONS
1) I was really worn down after the first day of working 7 hours then driving 30 minutes to Rock Hill, SC to teach 3 night classes at York Community College.

2) By Wednesday night I was pretty much worthless after three 15-hour days in a row.

3) I have no time to wash dishes, clean house or do laundry or anything of that nature. Thankfully Daniel is picking up some of the slack. It will probably take us a while to learn new routines.

4) I did not have time to grocery shop this week. Truthfully this affected Daniel the most as Monday and Wednesday I am not here and he had to fend for himself. Again this is something that we will have to work on together.

5) I have not yet figured out a good time to exercise. Unfortunately this has gone by the wayside this week. I am hoping to get over this exhaustion and start getting up early to work out OR rely on biking with Daniel for my exercise.

6) I came down with a cold Monday night. This not necessarily because of work, it is just that time of year and I am in a transition period and probably more prone to such things.

I am sure there are other PROS and CONS to my job, but this is just an at-a-glance based on my first four days. I have really been enjoying teaching college. I wasn’t sure what to expect and the preparation really takes a long time, but I love the interaction with my students. I love answering their questions and seeing that my excitement about what I do is contagious.

As for Enventys, there is so much to learn and see. The company had a total of 9 employees four years ago and now the Creative Department alone has eight employees and two interns. The company as a whole is growing by leaps and bounds.

I love to walk down the halls – it is an incredibly friendly place. Most of the employees are in their twenties. There are public relations people, a sales force, a commercialization group, programmers, web designers, photographers, cinematographers, people that work on the magazine, engineers and probably many, many more that I have yet to learn about. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to wake up in the morning and look forward to going to work.

keeping busy

i got up early this morning to finish a project - it can be difficult to separate life and work when your office is 10 feet from your bedroom and your cell phone and email gives everyone instant access to you.

the last couple of weeks have been insanely busy.

this week either daniel or i have something going on EVERY night so we aren't seeing much of each other, i will be glad when it is the weekend.

Communication Addiction

My 21-year-old brother is spending the next 6 weeks in New Zealand on a mission trip with his university. Yesterday he posted this on his facebook notes: 

So I have:
...no phone/text 

...no personal computer
...no tv
...no car
...no music
...no summer hot time

I feel like I am at a drug rehabilitation center or detox center for some reason. Well we do have these routine schedules that we follow and we do these service projects and have devos and meetings and talk about our feelings a lot. It's just so weird to only have internet really to contact people I guess we humans have become to interconnected for our own good. I think this will have a positive effect on me. I think everyone once in a while to remove one's self from one's life and just breath and not worry. And I guess that's what I'm doing.

His observations got me to thinking about my own life. I can barely go on a weekend getaway with my husband without taking my laptop. I constantly want to know what is going on with my family, friends, business, the world, etc.

It is strange to me that I put off getting a cell phone until several years after college. Now my husband and I do not even own a home phone line. In general it is good to be connected. I can be online in North Carolina and my brother can be online talking to me simultaneously in New Zealand. The world sure has gotten smaller.

Some days I need to make more of an effort to "unplug" from it though. Maybe this weekend, I will leave my laptop at home when I go camping...