Barons May 5th

Some of you have asked how my job is going. Overall, it’s fine. It’s kind of a weird job but a good fit for me because you have to be kind of good at a lot of things and – that’s me!

Some days it’s really quiet and I can just do my own thing and nothing exciting happens and other days I’m really busy.

Some things I do are daily get the mail and put it in the mailbox for the different people renting from us or some people are on a mailbox plan where we scan the outside of their mail and email it to them and they come get it when they feel like it. I book the conference room and put out the sign of who has it when and greet people coming to use the conference room.

I make sure everything is clean, answer emails, invoice renters and try to get payments from the ones whose credit cards didn’t go through, and pay bills. That’s kind of the regular stuff I do. A lot of my day is doing random, one-time things like put the thermostats on a schedule, finding the covers for the thermostats and getting a key made so they can actually be covered and people quit messing with them.

I went through a big pile of mailbox keys and tried them in up to 120 mailboxes trying to figure out which mailbox they went to, trying to get the cleaning people to actually clean, figuring out why things aren’t working, moving furniture around for the renters, taking quite a bit of items to DI, throwing away even more things, getting bids for getting our key fob door system either fixed or getting a new one, fixing problems in the invoicing system, making some small changes to the website and trying to do a little marketing if I have any extra time.

It’s kind of annoying to have to actually go somewhere every day and get dressed up and drive there, etc. for only 2.5 hours. I’m really not making all that much money but it’s nice to have some of my income be stable. It’s really not bad because I get home, eat lunch, then start on my plant job. I’ve been really busy with my plants lately because they are growing pretty fast (which is a good thing) but my sales aren’t all that great because a lot of what I’m doing is getting plants ready for the future.

Mostly, what I’m not getting to is my personal to-do list. I keep thinking I’m caught up on plant chores and I should be able to have at least one afternoon off but this is the first time that’s happened in almost a month since I’ve been working – and my children are home from school and it’s Friday afternoon so I’ll probably only do this blog post and call it good for the day.

It will all work out. I’ve been less stressed because I know I’m at least making some money and there’s only so much I can do in a day and really, my children should be doing more around the house anyway, and I think part of it is I’m just more chill as I get older because I know things will work out and the important things will get done eventually.

Megan and Tyler are graduating soon, which is kind of scary for all of us. We haven’t done anything all that exciting lately. A lot of school, work, and volunteering at Scera.

Norm and I did go on a hike with my brother Matthew’s family last Saturday, which was really nice. We went to Battlecreek, which is a pretty short hike but long enough I was worried about being tired and sore but the nice part is that when I got home I wasn’t any more tired than normal and I was only a little sore the next day.

A year ago I would have been wiped out for a few days after doing something like that so I must be doing something right. I think it’s a good sign my energy levels are much better in general. I would also like to think my plant chores help keep me in shape. I do a lot of going up and doing the stairs, carrying things, bending, reaching, squatting, etc. on a daily basis – all that on top of doing yoga pretty consistently.

So I may try to go on more hikes. Here’s a selfie I took. You can barely make out the waterfall. I forgot to take a good photo and didn’t feel like walking back down the steep, slippery slope to take a better photo. Guess I’ll have to go back…