No picture tonight, so this post will probably be considered boring by some, lol.

The past few days have been tiring. I was bad and stayed up too late Sunday night and Monday night. So last night (Tuesday) I was ready to crash early. Ready but not willing. I think it was about 11pm before I actually turned the light off to go to sleep. Needless to say, my ass has been dragging all week.

Work has been steadily busy for me since the first of July. In June I had hardly anything to do, now I can't seem to get it all done each day. Because I was so slow, new customers with orders were being directed to me in the hope that at some point they'd start shipping and I'd then have something to do. Boy howdy, did that ever happen!

Plus, tomorrow I'm going to go visit one of these new customers, located in Peru, IL. About a 2 hour drive from home. The salesman that I am going with wanted to go down the night before, stay in a hotel, get up in the morning, visite the customer and return to work in the afternoon. I couldn't grasp the concept of driving an hour to work, then towards the end of the day, deal with rush hour traffic to go back the way I came, practically go by my apt, to go down to the hotel in Peru. So he agreed that I would drive down in the morning, while he went down this evening and stayed in a hotel.

On top of all this, is it's end of month, and tomorrow is the last day we can complete July transactions and date them in July. I had to try to get it all done today. Then, my boss decided he wanted to have a meeting at 2pm today about this stupid checklist/form that we will have to start filling out for EVERY ORDER as part of our Japanese Sarbanes-Oxley certification. The meeting lasted 2 hours, which I could have used to get stuff done. Our department is contesting the logic behind this checklist, because of the added time it will require of us. Unfortunately, when this was all discussed, and the areas were decided upon, as to what was going to be put on this checklist, our accounting department didn't talk to our department. They didn't even talk to our international department. They went out to California and talked to the 2 people out there, who handle a miniscule fraction of the orders we do. Are we supposed to pay because they don't follow the rules? Apparently!

Our computer system automatically checks the customer credit line when we enter an order to determine if their credit is good. Now we will also have to check the customer credit before we can invoice. What good will that do, when the mill has ALREADY shipped the material, and in some cases, the customer picked it up themselves? We HAVE to invoice it once it ships. And when we pay the mill for that material, it cross references the individual coil number and our PO number to the mill, along with the mill invoice number. Yet we are still supposed to write the payment voucher number on a line, next to the invoice number for that coil (after we've generated the invoice to the customer). I could go on and on and on with these stupid procedures we're going to have to follow. AND after the 2 hours discussing this? We weren't even DONE! We are having another meeting on Friday morning to talk more about it.

After exiting the meeting at 4pm (the time I would normally leave work), I still had work that I needed to get done since I'm not there tomorrow. Nothing important, just invoicing customers and paying mill invoices. By the time I left it was almost 6pm. Because I'm visiting a customer tomorrow, I'm driving the company car (why the salesman didn't take I have no idea). I left my car in the parking garage at work, and filled out the form so security knows my car will be there tonight and tomorrow night. Nice thing is, the company car is the same as mine, just an upgraded model. So it drives the same and feels the same. I grabbed my IPASS transponder out of my car so I would pay the cheaper toll rates coming home tonight and going to work on Friday. It's easy to just add the company car to my IPASS account for a couple days, then remove it.

I also stopped by the library on my way home. I had reserved Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, and they emailed me to let me know it was ready for pickup. Since I saw the movie on Sunday, I wanted to read the book again so I could see what all they left out. I already know of a few things, but can't wait to read it again to get all the details. At least I have three weeks to read it before it's due back, so I don't have to rush through it like I did with The Deathly Hallows.

Well, I think that's enough rambling for tonight. Keep cool everyone, and pray for the injured people in Minnesota who were on I-35W when the bridge over the Mississippi collapsed.