Time Wasted - RANT!

Yesterday was our first "closed Monday" for the store, so I scheduled a doctor appointment at 1 pm. My primary doc referred me to this doctor for some nerve testing because I've had a problem with my left hand since early August . I'm left handed, so it makes my life a little difficult - doing beadwork repairs for customers has been a real challenge. When I made the appointment, the scheduling person said that the testing itself would take up to 2 hours and I couldn't get an appointment earlier in the day because the doctor has limited slots on his schedule for this kind of testing. That didn't make me happy, as I like to have appointments early in the day so that even if the doctor is delayed a bit, it won't be a huge chunk out of the middle of my day. But, since we were closed on Monday, it wasn't too big of a deal

Got to the doc's office early - we'd skipped lunch so that I wouldn't be late. Being a new doctor for me, I knew that there would be paperwork to fill out and I didn't want to show up at 1 and then spend another 20 mins filling out papers - wasting even more time! When I signed in, the receptionist told me that the doctor was running "a little" late and that it would be about an hour AFTER my scheduled appointment time before I got in to see the doctor. That meant about a 90 minute wait, plus 90 mins - 2 hours for the testing. I said it would have been nice if they'd called to let me know. Even worse, there wasn't any place close enough to get lunch while I waited.

My first instinct was to just re-schedule and leave, but since I'd given Mike my cel phone and he'd already left to cruise around the area (he'd planned to drop in at a friend's store to visit them while he was waiting), I didn't want to make him turn right around and come back for me. So - I decided to fill out the papers and HOPE that the doc would not be as late as the receptionist had predicted.

Well, as in everything else lately, the HOPE thingy wasn't working this time, either. The waiting room was warm and stuffy, there was some insipid channel on the TV, I was hungry and the hormone therapy that I'm on for menopause isn't working, so I had almost non-stop hot flashes, not to mention my attitude getting worse after each flash. Mike came in at about 1:30 and asked what I was doing sitting there. He also was not happy with the wait. Finally, 2 o'clock came and still no sign of the doctor. Mike said he was going home. I told him to wait a minute and I would probably be going with him. I went to the window one last time and asked if there was any idea of when I'd see the doctor. Same answer - I don't know how much longer it will be. I said, just cancel the appointment - no, don't re-schedule, just cancel. I was aggravated and I used my slightly louder than inside voice and stomped out of the place complaining about how unprofessional they were.

I was almost to the car when the receptionist came out and said, "The doctor's ready now, you can come in." Oh, really? It was a complete coincidence that, as soon as I started making a fuss, the doctor magically was ready. Yeah, right - I was born at night, but it wasn't last night. I told the receptionist that I had cancelled the appointment, and I wasn't coming back - of course, since I was half way to the car, I couldn't use an "indoor voice". She got upset that I was "yelling" at her - it wasn't her fault. No, it wasn't her fault - it was the doctor's fault for acting so unprofessionally and putting her in that position.

I called my primary doctor this morning to get a referral to a different doctor. The receptionist said that the other doctor's office had called yesterday to complain about me.
She asked, "What happened?". I told her the whole story - including that I was loud and maybe a "little" obnoxious. She said, "I don't blame you. We'll make a note not to use this doctor when making referrals in the future."

The thing that bothered me most was that this was the second doctor in about a month that had done the same thing. I know it's a running joke about the time that people wait in a doctor's office, but I'm pretty well fed up with it.

The first time it happened, I had closed my store an hour early so that I'd be on time. Walked in exactly 1 minute before the appointment. The receptionist said, "The doctor is running late - about 50 minutes to an hour." I asked, "Why didn't you call me to let me know? I own a business and I wouldn't have had to close early, if you'd called me!" She said, "I'm sorry, but we don't do that." and gave some wishy-washy reason why. I grumbled about it being unprofessional and asked if I could re- schedule the appointment. I re-scheduled - which moved my appointment to October, 2 months later!

Note to Doctors' office staff - you have our phone numbers, PLEASE - if the doctor's going to be more than 15 minutes late, have the courtesy to CALL and let us know. If we are more than 10-15 minutes late, YOU cancel our appointments and often charge us for the missed appointment. Our time is no less valuable than yours is, even if we don't have an MD at the end of our name!

In the Wake of Destruction

My previous blog had a photo of the recycled blue jeans quilt I made to cover the destruction wrought by our Great Dane/Basset mix, Biggs. Biggles or Biglets as he's also known - thinks he's a miniature, teacup, runt-of-the-litter, Chihuahua puppy. Unfortunately, he's actually 45 - 50 lbs of livewire energy that SHOULD have calmed down, now that he's 2 1/2 years old.

First, the backstory. Mike and I have done dachshund (and sometimes mixed breed) rescue for well over 25 years. We specialized in rehabilitating biters and normalizing "weird" dogs. The latter is more of a challenge, since "normal" is not generally used to describe our family.

Biggs came to us just over a year ago. He had been a backyard dog - not socialized, not taught manners and he didn't even know his name. We took to calling him "big dog" and that got shortened to Biggs. Biggs is a gorgeous black and silver dapple color and has an almost classic Great Dane profile. However, he looks like a Great Dane that was chopped off at the knees - very short legged and long eared. He's a wonderful and sweet guy, just lives to be loved. But, sometimes, he gets a wild hair and winds up being a little (ha,ha) destructive. When we come home at night, a "happy bomb" goes off and it's "Katie bar the door" until he and his cohorts (the shorter and smaller hunds) settle down.

Before Marshall (his older "brother") the mini red dachshund came to live with us, Biggs had chewed up a couple of store chairs when we left him at the store to have dinner. He gets bored and chewing is his entertainment. Marshall and Biggs are best buddies and partners in crime. They are a real Mutt & Jeff team. One of their favorite antics is for Biggs to steal a roll of toilet paper and Marshall shreds it. Our back patio occasionally looks like a TP party gone wrong!

We have a denim sofa and chair that we bought 10 years ago, when Mike moved to AZ. We reasoned that demim would be a sturdy fabric and would hold up to our population of dogs. Our late Karl had made his mark on the chair when he lost a tennis ball under it. We had to have the front panel re-done. No sooner had the chair come back from the upholstery shop when the sofa suffered a similar indignity.

Since then, the furniture has been relatively unharmed, but the incidents did reinforce my plans to make a recycled denim quilt as an extra cover. We did have a small hole on the top edge of the sofa nibbled by Scooter - about the size of a quarter. I figured I'd fix it "someday when I have time".

Then came Biggs. After he and Marshall joined us, he settled down quite a bit, though we did find cushions from the chair or sofa on the floor once in a while and sometimes with small holes in them. Sometimes, we'd even find the cushions piled up at the doggie door. Thank goodness they were too big to fit through! Other than being ticked off and using "Sergeant words" to express our displeasure, it wasn't that big of a deal. I figured the cushions would wind up with an unintended patchwork design.

For a long time and after using at least a gallon of Bitter Apple spray as a marking/deterrent, Biggs seemed to settle down and except for an occasional roll of toilet paper, nothing succumbed to his destruction.

Then one night, we came home to find that Biggs had made that quarter sized hole "disappear". He did it by removing half of the inside back of the sofa, pulling out some stuffing and leaving the straps exposed. That got lots of LOUD "Sergeant words" and the dogs all cleared out. They know when Mom starts hollering, SOMEONE is in BIG TROUBLE!

I patched it up and vowed to finish my planned recycled jeans quilt sooner. A few nights later - before I could even get my sewing machine out - we came home to find the rest of the back pulled off the inside back of the sofa.



On Christmas Day, I finished my originally intended quilt (see previous blog) and decided that it was too nice to put on the sofa to possibly become a victim to one of Biggs' "playful" assaults. I decided to do a simpler version to cover the back of the sofa - quick and easy. I cut the legs of jeans to 13" long and sewed them together and then connected them with 2" wide strips. Easy! Then I grabbed the staple gun and stapled the whole thing to the sofa. It may not look like something from Martha Stewart, but it looks a lot better than it was!



SUCCESS!! The sofa was repaired well enough that the dog toys and our butts no longer fell through the open back and it didn't look half bad, either.

With that accomplishment under my belt, I went on to work on the pillows. These will be a similar pattern to the original quilt. I got the tops for 5 cushions made, then made the strips to connect the tops. The hard part was assembling everything so that all the pieces lined up correctly. Took a little "frog stitching" (rip it, rip it out) to get it done right, but I was pleased with the first one. While working on it, I came up with a couple of improvements for future cushions, which is even better.

This is what the cushions are SUPPOSED to look like:



Maybe this would be a good time to mention that I didn't have a "pattern" for the quilt or cushions. The entire project has been imagineered (apologies to Walt Disney) with templates for the squares and strips and guesstimates to come up with the correct sizes and shapes to achieve the final result. The final results weren't bad at all, if I say so myself.

The day after I completed the first cushion, I was working on the next one and my sewing machine started sounding funny, so I had to quit sewing until I could get the machine into the shop.

My daughter and her two little ones had been staying with us, and in the rush of getting everyone out of the house, we forgot to put the cushion in a secure place. We came home that night to find the cushion on the floor with a couple of small (fixable) tears and a little stuffing on the floor near it. "Sergeant words" were said loudly and all dogs removed themselves from the target area!
I spent my evening repairing the tears and re-stuffing the cushion, which wasn't exactly on my agenda for the evening.

The next morning, I remembered to secure the pillow in the spare bedroom with the door shut - I thought. We came home that night to find the door to the bedroom wide open and the cushion on the floor in the living room with a trail of cushion innards leading from the bedroom to the cushion. A second casualty was a feather pillow that wasn't quite as lucky - it went out the doggie door and our back yard looked like the aftermath of a bizarre voodoo ceremony with feathers all over. And of course, he had to tear the cushion's fabric, instead of just ripping the seam apart.


This time, in addition to the usual "Sergeant words", I bopped Biggs on the nose with the cushion, while saying "NO, NO, NO!". It didn't hurt him, but he definitely got the idea that Mom was mad! He sat behind Mike for a couple of hours, until he decided that Mom wasn't so mad any more.

When the sewing machine gets fixed, I'll start again. I think I'll incorporate a good dousing with Bitter Apple to remind Mr. Biggs that he needs to leave MY stuff alone!

Here's our miscreant with his final (I hope) victim - doesn't he look so sweet and innocent?

T'was the day after Christmas and...

We had our Christmas party at the store on Friday. We snacked on veggies, chips and dips all day and had bagels and lox for lunch. For dinner, we had spiral sliced ham, baked potatoes, green beans and peach pie for dessert. The highlight of the day was awards presented to Lenny for Outstanding Employee of the Year, Jill for her outstanding work as an instructor (and vault organizer), and to Pam as the best Wire Wrap Instructor in Apache Junction!

Our Christmas Day was a quiet one. I used the morning to catch up on some much needed house cleaning and did some mending, while Mike slept in (that's HIS holiday tradition ).

We went to brunch at our usual Chinese buffet, then came home and watched TV (mostly Dr. Who marathon) and I did more cleaning. The furkids "helped", especially Biggs, who was "guarding" the trash bags from the rest of the crew. I'd have probably finished hours earlier if it wasn't for having to dance around the dachshunds under foot! Mike played with the pups for a while and then took a nap.

When he woke up, dinner was ready - ham, turkey (no-flavor-to-it roasted turkey breast - remind self not to get one of those again), cranberries and carrots. I forgot to grab the canned olives and the 2 leftover baked potatoes from the store, and forgot to get rolls when I picked up the other supplies at the grocery store. I had planned to make a quick, pick up the last stuff trip to Wal-Mart on Friday evening, and discovered that everyone had closed at 8pm, instead of 10pm.

After dinner, more TV and I worked on my jeans patchwork quilt. I finished the top this morning - it's big enough to cover the sofa! Now, I've got to get cushions done. I just hope I have enough jeans to get all 8 of them finished!

Now, we're back to work, where it's quiet today - except for the football game. Everyone must be standing in line making exchanges, or shopping for the after Christmas bargains!

GO PACKERS!

Marshall, Marshall, Marshall - with apologies to Marsha Brady

It's long past time to introduce the final 2 pack members at Weller's Wild Wiener Ranch. We've stopped doing rescue, but these two wound up joining our herd anyway.

We added a Great Dane/Basset Hound mix just after Thanksgiving. He looks like a low-rider Great Dane. We call him Biggs, because, compared to the dachsies, he IS big. He weighs about 45+ lbs and is not quite 2 years old. He is black with grey dapple markings and is a BIG PUPPY! He thinks he's a miniature Chihuahua puppy and acts like it. Not funny when he comes barreling into the house and brushes past you! He was kept outside, wasn't socialized and didn't know his real name (Charlie), so we've been trying to teach him how to live with people. He's learning, but he's got a very LLLLLOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGGG learning curve! It's always a Hallmark moment when Biggs greets Mike when we come home from the store. He clears the arm of the sofa and hits Mike like a freight train! Then, it's non-stop kisses until bed time. The good part about Biggs is that he doesn't drool like a Great Dane, so they aren't slobbery kisses!

Our sofa had a small (quarter sized) hole where Scooter had nibbled it. One of the first days that Biggs stayed home with the rest of the herd, we came home to find the hole was GONE! Of course, so was the entire length of the fabric on the back of the sofa! He's chewed up a couple of cushions from the sofa, another cushion from the chair, a leather chair at the store and the corner of another chair. We've been buying Bitter Apple as a deterrent - every morning, I do our "leave stuff alone" routine. I grab Biggs cheeks, stare in his face and growl, "DON'T CHEW ON STUFF". Then I spray the furniture with the Bitter Apple while he (and the other dogs) watch, chanting, "No - NO - NO - NO!!!" as I spray. Most of the times it works, but not always. Until it does, the sofa is not going to get replaced!

Then we come to the subject of this post - Marshall. His full name is Marshall Tucker Longhorn, though we usually just call him Marshall. He's also known as Marshy, Martian Mellon, Marsh mellow and "You little ratfink"! Marshall is a red, mini, smooth coated dachshund who weighs about 10 lbs soaking wet. He joined the family about 2 weeks after Biggs did. He'd had 3 families in 3 weeks and had separation anxiety. We brought him to the store for 2 weeks and he finally settled in. Nowadays, he and Biggs are partners in crime. One of their favorite heists is for Biggs to grab the toilet paper and take it outside, Marshall joins him and has a great time shredding the toilet paper - the patio winds up looking like a snow storm!

Marshal and Biggs are best buddies - inseparable, as the photo shows. Marshall is older by 6 months and he absolutely adores his "little" (as in younger) brother! Biggs loves Marshall - they play and Marshall will chew on Biggs from nose to tail and the big doof just lets him do it.

I actually made something with SEED beads!!

Let me start this by saying that I do not like messing with seed beads. I have a slight aversion to beads smaller than 4mm or so.

Gary taught me how to do this spiral rope stitch in about 5 minutes. It took me longer to get the beads, needles and thread together than it did to learn the stitch!

I really like this stitch and for me, that's saying a lot, because I don't normally like using seed beads. I can see a ton of possibilities with this - now, it's going to be a challenge to find the time to play with them!

BIG NEWS!!!!

If you are looking for displays, gift boxes and other supplies, we've just gotten set up as a distributor from one of the biggest importers of displays. We will have the necks, busts, ring stands, ring and jewelry boxes, plastic trays, tray liners (velvet pads and the compartment kind) and lots more.

We will be putting these items on the website and will probably use a combination of e-mail and telephone to process orders. Haven't gotten all of those bugs worked out yet - I'm still trying to figure out where we're going to put everything when the shipment gets here! Mike says it will "purt near" half fill a semi truck.

If you need displays or gift boxes, we'll have a very wide variety available. If there is something you've been looking for and can't seem to find, let us know and we'll add it to our first order - just for you!

CSI - LBS style!

Is there anyone out there who doesn't understand that a sign saying "Electronic Surveillance in Use" with a picture of a security camera means "Smile and don't EVEN think of stealing anything"?

Obviously, as a friend said, you don't have to be smart to be a crook.

We were robbed a week ago. Nobody was hurt and they didn't even steal from the cash register or anything dramatic. What was stolen was the Breast Cancer 3-Day donation jar with between $50 and $100 in it! I don't know for sure, because I don't remember how much was in it the last time I counted. YES - I *know*, I SHOULD have thinned the cash and put some in an envelope in the safe, but I didn't.

In the 5 years we've been doing this, we've NEVER had a donation jar stolen. The guy who took it came in with a woman and I asked him a couple of times if I could find something for him. He even sat in the comfy chairs in the findings room for a while. The most aggravating part is that because it was warm in the store, I even gave him and the woman with him an ice cream bar and then he goes and steals from me!!! THE NERVE!!!

I have gotten so used to the jar being "right there", I didn't even notice it missing until Weds. morning when I was talking to a customer about HER fundraising for a 3-Day walker. I told Mike to check the video and I called AJPD, who sent an officer out to take the report. In reviewing the video, we not only caught the thief in the act, we also got a good photo of HIM, including a very prominent tatoo!

The PD arrested him that night on an unrelated charge. When the officer on our case spoke to him, the crook confessed to stealing the jar. He's up for his preliminary hearing for the store burglary on Thursday morning. You bet I'm going to be there - I intend to prosecute and combining this with the other arrest, he'll be going away for a while!

I replaced the stolen jar with my old reliable pink piggy bank (taped securely to the desk), so if you have any extra change, we'd love to use it to fill his tummy!