Travel Blog

So have you recovered from Christmas yet?  We are still suffering the aftereffects of too many Christmas cookies.  Sure we are on our own this holiday season, but that has not stopped us from cooking like the gang was all here.  We had a turkey with all the fixings for Christmas dinner and a batch each of gingerbread and sugar cookies.  The last few days we have been eating leftovers and are down to turkey soup for dinner tonight.

The day after Christmas we figured we would brave the crowds and see if there were any good sales.  But to our amazement there were no crowds.  I don't know if that was just an Albuquerque thing or if it is because of the economy, but it was quiet enough that we even went to Wal-Mart.  But it was towards the end of the shopping trip that we saw something we thought we would never see again.


No we expected the snow.  But diesel fuel was selling for less than two dollars a gallon!  We got some weird looks when we got out of our truck and were doing the happy dance in the middle of the road.  But I'm convinced that these prices won't last, so I'm still pushing for an in-bed fuel tank for our truck.

Next week we start back to work.  The temp agencies we have gotten work through in the past already have stuff lined up for us, so we have been getting in all the lazing we can this weekend.  We have also been adding in our old posts to the blog.  You can navigate the blogs by using the buttons at the bottom of the blog or the calendar.  And the comment screen should be working again if anyone wants to give us a shout out.

We finished up our three week stint at Amazon last Saturday.  We spent most of the last two days wrapping gifts in the shipping department.  Now I have to apologize to the poor folks who got the presents I wrapped.  Little Jimmy in Katy, TX, Santa thinks that wrinkles in the wrapping paper add character.  Liz in Jasper, WY, if Hanna Montana shows up dented, it wasn't me.  And on a side note, Mr. W in Akron, OH, dude maybe you should cut back on the Japanese anime if you expect that book on dating for the chronically single to help out.

Truth is we got pretty good at wrapping.  Like everything else at Amazon they have it down to a science.  We had tidy well stocked work stations where we would grab the boxes from a conveyer, wrap the contents, and dump them onto another conveyer for the final packing.  This was the only time where we could see who was getting the packages.  While we were picking we had no idea who was getting what.

One suggestion if you have the folks at Amazon wrap your presents, make sure you check off everything that needs to be wrapped.  Some people would have one thing wrapped and you could see they probably wanted everything in the package done, but they had not checked off each item.

Sue loved gift wrapping.  She had never gotten into it before because her sister is the kind of gifted person who Martha Steward calls for tips.  Gina would make her own paper from the pulp of local fauna and design patterns rivaling the Renaissance Masters before wrapping the strangest shaped gifts with crisp smooth lines.  So Sue said she knew her limitations and would just wrap her gifts in the Sunday paper since she figured no one would be paying attention.  But the setup at Amazon let her inner-wrapper blossom and now she wants to do it again next year.

Personally I did not mind the wrapping, but I liked picking better.

One last Amazon observation.  We have probably all heard how bad a season it has been for retailers.  From our point of view picking and wrapping it seems the main winners this season were Nintendo, whose Wii games, systems, and accessories were flying off the shelves, and Disney who got Hanna Montana and the Disney Princesses to outsell Barbie.  So if you are a recipient of any of that stuff, you are in good company.

On our last day off, we were driving around looking for an oddity on our map.  Our map has a listing for the Little House on the Prairie near Coffeyville.  Now Sue was a big fan of the TV show (please no flames about poor taste) and was sure they lived in Minnesota. So we drove over to check it out and it turns out, as readers of the books know, the Ingalls lived in Kansas for a year and their third kid was born there.  This little cabin is very likely the same house that they built, and has been preserved by a local historical society.


To find out more about this you can go to www.littlehouseontheprairie.com.

After finishing up at Amazon, we headed off to get our living room slide fixed.  We thought it was the same problem as we had last year, the pin that connects the crank and shaft broke, but it turns out it was a faulty gear box..  This is good because there was no way we could have caused or prevented it from failing, but it was bad because we had to shell out the dough to replace it.

After that we had a frigid trip to Albuquerque with some days reaching a high of nine degrees.  But now we are back in the sunny high desert ready to go back to work..  One of the temp agencies we worked for last winter already has jobs lined up for us, so that made the decision to come back here for us. Stay tuned to find out what they have us doing this year.  Meanwhile we will leave you with a campground cow.

Sue:

Our two days off went by too quickly, but what can you do? It's back to work tomorrow. We found out we only work 10 hours instead of 11, though, so that's something. I think I forgot to re-size the picture of where we work, but I do have this one:


The building is no great shakes, so you're not missing much. It's just your basic warehouse.
Driving into town yesterday, we noticed this sign:


We googled Coffeyville, and found out there was a massive flood here last year. To make matters worse, a refinery here dumped gallons of oil everywhere as well, so it was oily flood waters. We were wondering why we were passing empty lots everywhere. We could see the foundations, but no buildings. I'll take pictures of that later, but if you're interested, there's videos of the flood on UTube. It's kind of sad around here now, though. There's For Sale signs everywhere, and businesses are closed down.
We're parked at a municipal park on the edge of town. It's a nice place. I think they have rodeos here in the summer. We're not in the main part where all the other RVs are because we got here late, but I like where we are. We have 30 amps of electricity and access to water. There's no sewer, but a honey wagon comes three times a week to take care of that.


And if we're ever in the mood for a good swing, we have a playground right behind us.


And a cool train is right in front of us. Not sure what we can do on that, but I'll leave that alone for now.


Not much else is going on right now. We have to get our butts in gear and figure out what we're going to do after this to make money. Maybe I should have picked up my sax while I was home for street corner cash.

Our first couple of days on the job at Amazon.com are finished, and we are feeling better about it than sugar beets.  But, come on, how hard is it to top that?  The first thing that we found out in training is that we will be working five eleven hour days instead of four ten hour days per week.  We don't mind the schedule change too much because it means a lot of juicy overtime.

After a quick overview - no stealing, gum chewing, or running in the halls - Sue and I were assigned to be pickers.  Now to get an idea of what this facility is like, picture a Sam's Club or Costco building and then imagine it ten times the size.  As pickers we run all over the facility carrying a hand held computer terminal that directs us to areas to pick a particular product.  Then we put the stuff in plastic bins and send these off along the thirty miles of conveyer belts that run through the place.  Along the way the stuff gets sorted out until it is shipped off.

We have no idea what stuff is going where or to whom, but I can't help imagining who would be buying some of these things.  I was mostly picking in the apparel section, but Sue and I both got to work the areas with the popular items like video games, dolls, and toys.

I like the work so far, but I can see how it gets a little monotonous over time.  Amazingly enough there are people who have been working here for ten years or more.  But for the holiday season there are about seven hundred of us temporary workers swelling the ranks to make sure everyone gets their gifts.

Yep. You've read it here first. We are officially boneheads who don't back up their work. We lost all our blogs for the past three years because some asshole hackers had something to prove with WordPress, the blog writer thingy we used. But we have only ourselves to blame. We always said we should back up our work, but we never did it. Boneheads. We emailed the folks at WordPress to see if there's anything we can do to recover all those lost blogs, so we'll see what they have to say. I'm not holding my breath.

Now the good news is that my mom bought me a digital photo frame for Christmas, and as I was going through all my old pictures and transferring them to the frame, I got the idea of how to salvage my lost memories. I'm not going to re-write all those blogs, obviously, but I'm going to do a sort of photo-journalism kind of thing for our new site that will document our travels. I remember all the good stuff, and let's be honest, who would go back three years and read all our old blogs anyway?

And we know this page looks strange right now, but it looks really good in the new site. We're just not ready to launch the new site yet, so that's that.

We're currently in Coffeyville, Kansas. We meet with the Express personnel people tomorrow morning and hopefully soon we'll be making a living again. That will be nice. We can't get by on our looks forever.

Keep checking in with us. Life is never boring.