Church fundraiser season
I have been very busy lately selling pumpkins for our church fundraiser. I have been taking the Wednesday evening shift, from 4 to 7 PM, so for the last 5 weeks I had to leave work an hour early every Wednesday and make up the time on other days. However, for some reason I also had doctor or dentist appointments most of the weeks, so I was really rushing around. Our pumpkin sale went great this year! I had great weather -- warm and sunny -- for most of my shifts. One week it rained buckets every day, but during my shift it stopped raining. However, the weather was also great on the weekends, and so we made almost $15,000 on the sale, which is the most we have ever made!
Thursday evening was pie crust night for our church apple pie fundraiser. This year I got Michael to come with me. He seemed to really enjoy making the pies. We have our process down to a science, so 12 of us were able to whip out 200 crusts in an hour and a half! However, we need one more process improvement, because the person measuring the flour kept getting distracted and only putting in 3 cups.
At the beginning of the summer, Joann, the lead soprano in our church choir, told me she wished she had not gotten rid of her flute, because she knew I wanted a duet partner, and would like to play duets with me! So I loaned her my spare flute. It is a little frustrating because it is hard for her to find time to practice enough, but it has amazed me how quickly she has been able to take it up again. We played a few duets at the beginning of August, while our choir director was on vacation. We decided to surprise him when he came back, so I told him we had something planned, and he didn't have to worry about the offertory that Sunday. He was VERY surprised when he walked into the sanctuary and saw Joann standing there with a flute. He immediately decided he wanted to do a trio (him on recorder) and so a couple of weeks later we did a nice arrangement of Vivaldi's Autumn from the Four Seasons.
I had something planned for the prelude this week, but when we looked at the hymns at choir rehearsal, we realized there was a hymn that is not familiar -- an African-American spiritual named "Oh Lord, What a Morning". It's very nice, so we decided to play it in the prelude. I took the music home and made a nice duet arrangement. This is easy to do with Finale Printmusic. Joann and I practiced it this morning, and it sounded really good. I will play the piece I had planned for the prelude a week from tomorrow. We also practiced another arrangement I did, of "Wonderful Words of Life" to do as the offertory next week. Our choir will be short of people, and I would rather do a duet on flute than a duet singing.
After our rehearsal this morning, we stayed at the church for four more hours making pies. Joann rolled and I crimped. Michael came today too, and operated the apple peeler. There were about 20 of us today, but assembling the pies takes a lot more time than making the crusts. Our biggest problem is keeping the assembly line balanced. It seems like someone always has to stop to wait for someone else. Last year we kept having to wait for apples, and the people peeling the apples kept having to wait to get the bowl back. We solved this by adding a bowl that was the wrong size, which they could use to put apples in while they were waiting to get the real bowl back. This year, that bowl got sent through once by mistake, and Betty tried to put it away, because it had the wrong amount of apples in it. However, we grabbed it and gave it back. This year, the apple peelers kept having to stop because we could not assemble the pies fast enough, and we kept having to wait because we didn't have enough people rolling crusts. I bet we could have left an hour earlier if we had had one more roller.
I have been having terrible problems with my product at work, and we have actually had to shut down production. I had felt there was a problem for at least a year, but I did not see it a whole lot, and was not able to convince my boss to give me the resources to work on it until customer complaints started to mount up. It turned out that there were actually 4 problems: one we fixed a year ago (adjusted the motor filter to reduce noise). One was a hardware problem (faulty part would randomly quit working, causing the motor to go wacko). One was a firmware problem (infinite loop). We thought the firmware problem was the last one, but when that was fixed we found another problem, which seems to be in the USB routines. This one is really a bear, because we have not figured out how to reproduce it. A few customers are having terrible problems with it, but it only seems to happen about once a day in house. So I have to be ready to take full advantage of every occurrence. I think I am almost at the bottom of it, so I can't wait to get to work on Monday and try out my proposed solution. It will be so nice when I can quit telling the customers we are working on it, and start telling them to download the latest version of the software/firmware.
Thursday evening was pie crust night for our church apple pie fundraiser. This year I got Michael to come with me. He seemed to really enjoy making the pies. We have our process down to a science, so 12 of us were able to whip out 200 crusts in an hour and a half! However, we need one more process improvement, because the person measuring the flour kept getting distracted and only putting in 3 cups.
At the beginning of the summer, Joann, the lead soprano in our church choir, told me she wished she had not gotten rid of her flute, because she knew I wanted a duet partner, and would like to play duets with me! So I loaned her my spare flute. It is a little frustrating because it is hard for her to find time to practice enough, but it has amazed me how quickly she has been able to take it up again. We played a few duets at the beginning of August, while our choir director was on vacation. We decided to surprise him when he came back, so I told him we had something planned, and he didn't have to worry about the offertory that Sunday. He was VERY surprised when he walked into the sanctuary and saw Joann standing there with a flute. He immediately decided he wanted to do a trio (him on recorder) and so a couple of weeks later we did a nice arrangement of Vivaldi's Autumn from the Four Seasons.
I had something planned for the prelude this week, but when we looked at the hymns at choir rehearsal, we realized there was a hymn that is not familiar -- an African-American spiritual named "Oh Lord, What a Morning". It's very nice, so we decided to play it in the prelude. I took the music home and made a nice duet arrangement. This is easy to do with Finale Printmusic. Joann and I practiced it this morning, and it sounded really good. I will play the piece I had planned for the prelude a week from tomorrow. We also practiced another arrangement I did, of "Wonderful Words of Life" to do as the offertory next week. Our choir will be short of people, and I would rather do a duet on flute than a duet singing.
After our rehearsal this morning, we stayed at the church for four more hours making pies. Joann rolled and I crimped. Michael came today too, and operated the apple peeler. There were about 20 of us today, but assembling the pies takes a lot more time than making the crusts. Our biggest problem is keeping the assembly line balanced. It seems like someone always has to stop to wait for someone else. Last year we kept having to wait for apples, and the people peeling the apples kept having to wait to get the bowl back. We solved this by adding a bowl that was the wrong size, which they could use to put apples in while they were waiting to get the real bowl back. This year, that bowl got sent through once by mistake, and Betty tried to put it away, because it had the wrong amount of apples in it. However, we grabbed it and gave it back. This year, the apple peelers kept having to stop because we could not assemble the pies fast enough, and we kept having to wait because we didn't have enough people rolling crusts. I bet we could have left an hour earlier if we had had one more roller.
I have been having terrible problems with my product at work, and we have actually had to shut down production. I had felt there was a problem for at least a year, but I did not see it a whole lot, and was not able to convince my boss to give me the resources to work on it until customer complaints started to mount up. It turned out that there were actually 4 problems: one we fixed a year ago (adjusted the motor filter to reduce noise). One was a hardware problem (faulty part would randomly quit working, causing the motor to go wacko). One was a firmware problem (infinite loop). We thought the firmware problem was the last one, but when that was fixed we found another problem, which seems to be in the USB routines. This one is really a bear, because we have not figured out how to reproduce it. A few customers are having terrible problems with it, but it only seems to happen about once a day in house. So I have to be ready to take full advantage of every occurrence. I think I am almost at the bottom of it, so I can't wait to get to work on Monday and try out my proposed solution. It will be so nice when I can quit telling the customers we are working on it, and start telling them to download the latest version of the software/firmware.