February 2015 Greetings

New month new thread.

The weather man predicts 10"+ snow coming. Sales in my dairy and frozen were up 66% and 44% respectively. Its first of the month and some bowl game is on later tonight.

Hopefully in the next couple days I should hear something from Norfolk Southern.

Pastor said the super bowl is here. He said is that a self cleaning toliet? I laughed. I might go to see one of those self cleaning toliets! HA!

Party tonight at the Ranger Annex. Super Bowl I am trying to get out of it. I would rather stay home and do COA stuff.

Mark Jones

Church canceled due to bad snow storm. For the sporters it worked out on Super Bowl Sun.

Yeah. It rained here last night, and it's going to take the better part of a day to dry-out.

We got a foot of snow and its still coming down.

We got a foot of snow as well

Oh! I surely miss that big-old house on a double-corner lot in Milwaukee on days like this.

Fine for unshovelled walks = $78.00 per day. It kicks in 24 hours after the snow stops falling.

I did a truck and tool yesterday and knocked out 6 of my 40 safety training refresher courses while it was cold outside I was in the heated garage! It was a long day but it was warm.

Got 124 Council of Achievement Certificates printed last night and did some District work for Rangers. Wed night I get to watch the Annex for Ranger Derbie Crafters. I enjoy that stuff.

Mark Jones wrote:

Got 124 Council of Achievement Certificates printed last night

Mark, how many kids are you supporting?

One of my titles is Advancement Coordinator.  So I do the whole outpost of Central AOG in Springifield.  We take about 65 to pow wow and we go from 70 to 100 on a average week.  About 15 of these certificates were Certs of Participation.    COA next Wed night we take that same data entry and port it out to one power point for each boy.  

We had a short 2 months this time. Only 124. It can get as high at 400 certificates. I record, order and then print certificates and do power points from the same one data entry per award. The 124 certs the other night took about 45 minutes to enter the data and then press print. The Leaders all get the awards list from the same entry and double check it to be good. After a few days I do the power points. It's a point and click one time per boy and the Ranger Database creates the power point (It's really a pdf but we display it like a power point).

Mark Jones

I am teaching a class on how to do it at our Commanders Conference. District Commander requested me to do it. Many years back I had a Commander and his wife and his mother in law work for 2 nights trying to print all of these certificates. I told him I just press print and it does them all. His job was to get the merits out of the supply we had at the time and fill the envelopes or order more. Now being a stones toss from Headquarters we don't stock any awards. IT works great.

Mark Jones
http://readyrangers.tzo.com/rangers1.exe is the program it's free. It might take a while as it's big best do it at night before you go to bed. The exe will scare your virus protection but the file is safe.

Funny how sidewalks belong to the city but we get fined for not maintaining city property...

They tried getting homeowners in Oberlin to pay for fixing public sidewalks that aren't in their property lines.

Woo-hoo Rangers is finally back after a 6 week hiatus

Our taxes pay for our sidewalks here in Springfield.

I think it's a good idea to have public sidewalks. With out them we would have lot more children/people ran over in the streets.


Mark Jones

RRCmdrBennett wrote:Funny how sidewalks belong to the city but we get fined for not maintaining city property...

They tried getting homeowners in Oberlin to pay for fixing public sidewalks that aren't in their property lines.

Thats my point sidewalks are paid by taxes and should be maintained by taxes. Yet to fine an owner or renter for not plowing the sidewalked they don't own or asking them to fix cracks isn't fair in my opinion.

Man was it cold this morning 0 degrees when I got to work

RRCmdrBennett wrote:Thats my point sidewalks are paid by taxes and should be maintained by taxes. Yet to fine an owner or renter for not plowing the sidewalked they don't own or asking them to fix cracks isn't fair in my opinion.

My understanding is that, prior to about 1980, the City had a "Bombardier" Mini-Plow that would plow the sidewalks if there was more than 2" of snowfall. Less than that, the walks were to be maintained by the residents.

I guess that they figured that they could save the money of plowing the walks and make more money in fines, if they got rid of the Bombardiers and put the responsibility totally on the homeowners.

It's been a little rough up on those poles these past few days. That cold wet wind up about 26 feet makes you puker up. It's gonna be nice today though!

Mark Jones

ccm2361 wrote:Man was it cold this morning  0 degrees when I got to work  

Little league has kicked off and yours truly is assistant coach this season. I had talked about doing it for fall ball last year, but was too busy to commit. Things are slowing down now, so I decided to commit for this spring. Seth is developing as a ball player coming into his third spring season. He's moving from center field to first base. Hopefully we'll have a good season. For now, it's just a bunch of cold practices for the next month or so.

I didn't get either terminal for Norfolk Southern. Still trying they say keep trying. I'm looking into CSX as well I hear they pay better as well.

RRCmdrBennett wrote:I didn't get either terminal for Norfolk Southern. Still trying they say keep trying. I'm looking into CSX as well I hear they pay better as well.

Sorry to hear that Dan. I'll be praying that something comes up.

I'm thinking of changing career fields as well. The last five years have taken it out of me. I took over the family business on a high note. Then we had about 2 1/2 years of deadness, then the past 2 years of going like crazy, and now back to slowing down. I know it's the nature of the business, but it's starting to wear on me. Let's analyze: I go from working crazy hours, usually away from my family, making really great money, to no work worrying about how long my "nest egg" will stretch out. So if I average out the money from the great times to the bad times, the average ain't that great depending on how long the slow time goes. Did I mention that I'm getting tired of this roller coaster?

I've been in this trade for nearly 20 years. I feel like I'm at that fork in the road where I either head down and keep trudging through accepting the bad with the good, or I take a turn. I know everything has negatives. I guess the negatives of my trade are wearing on me more now than they used to. The biggest being that I'm away from my family so much. Last month my first baby was born. Today he's almost 12, and next week he'll be moving out and starting his own life with his three younger siblings close behind. Yes, it goes just that fast...

I'll keep you posted how things go. The front runner for my options right now is to get into poultry farming. There are a couple of farms for sale that I'm looking at. They definitely don't bring in the cash flow that I do in my business in a good year, but I feel like it's steady money unless the whole economy completely crashes at which time all bets are off. Everyone eats chicken... It would also keep me home every night in my own bed! Of course the flip side is that I would ALWAYS be home. Meaning, it's hard to ever go off when you're farming like that. You can't just tell the chickens to be good until I get home. And don't too many of you die, because I won't be around to pick up the dead for a few days. Don't work like that. So there's always pros and cons, but I feel like I could deal with those cons.

Phillip Jr was born on a Saturday. I left on Monday to go back out of town. I'm tired of it. It's been long enough...

Man, good luck with the poultry farming.

I have found farming chickens to be a dirty, smelly, crappy (literally) business. Chickens (especially those in close quarters) seem to be extremely vulnerable to disease. I would also be careful not to stop walking too fast, for fear of having a Federal Inspector bumping into my backside.

And gooood luck in taking a weekend off for a camp-out or bike race.

Yes, you've hit the nail on the head for the negative aspects. I've been thinking about this for the past couple months as I saw things starting to slow down at the end of '14, and I'll still put time into thought and prayer for some time to come. I don't want to make a rash decision based out of frustration. But the truth is, I'm frustrated.

I also feel a general draw to become more agrarian in my lifestyle. Maybe that's due to the thought in the back of my mind that things may go bust at some point and I'd like to already be set up to be a food producer in some capacity rather than only a food consumer.

The one negative aspect of conductor is being away a lot of the time. At the moment I have no kiddos to miss and the $ is terrific. It would be like going from impulse power to warp 6 in a single year. I broadened my applications to terminals in other places in Ohio and TN where I would have to relocate. We've discussed TN and I'm cool with it if it happens.