For my lunch hour I walked outside to get a feel of the weather. On the way, I stopped to take a picture of a cluster of people who had found a good, small hill to sled down.
Later that day, our district manager called to find out what was going on with the weather and to let me know to keep an eye on things and if necessary call the closing team and tell them not to come in due to weather hazards. I then called our general manager to let him know. Continuously throughout the day I felt like the middle man. Our DM would call inform me of things, then I would call our GM and tell him. It was a bit frustrating even though I know the DM is the bigger boss, I wish she would have gone through out GM. Each time I talked to our DM I got the feeling she really wanted us to close the store. About midway through the day, I pulled a meeting and we started to treat the day as if we were closing - all projects stopped and we just started to clean up. About an hour later, we got the call to officially close.
I had to kick out a huge family who had decided to camp in our cafe. We make closing announcements for the last 15 minutes we are open to let people know they need to get their stuff and get ready to head out, so I was a bit pissed when AFTER our announcement that we were now closed, I hear the mom ask if any of her twenty kids needed to go to the bathroom. I mean come on, do you have no consideration for my people? The whole reason we were closing early was for THEIR safety so they could get home before the roads got really bad. How rude! And just to make it worse, I made the announcement one hour before we closed and on the half hour.
In the end, we closed early, but ironically, I stayed an hour later than scheduled to help us get a good close.
Everyone was praying for a snow day today. Me? I already had the day off, so in my head, I officially called a snow day just for fun.
Driving home yesterday was scary, the roads were so icy that every couple of feet my tires would slide and the light on my dashboard would blink indicating ice. I stopped at Target to get cat food (I was running low and was worried if I got snowed in), wood, soup and milk. I drove extremely slow and just let those who needed to drive fast go around me. After a drive home that took twice as long, I dug in and shoveled my driveway. It was quite a bit of work due to the fact that it had all day to develop.
I have zero plans today. Okay, so I need to do a load of laundry, but other than that absolutely nothing needs to get done. I'd like to clean out my fireplace and just empty the leftover ash into the trash. I do have enough to make another batch of PB Kisses Cookies which I think would be nice to have and share. I'd like to play a couple of movies that I got for Christmas and I borrowed an eReader from work thinking about downloading that new book, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand that we are literally selling by the loads. (excerpt below)
The Story of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Growing up in California in the 1920s, Louie was a hellraiser, stealing everything edible that he could carry, staging elaborate pranks, getting in fistfights, and bedeviling the local police. But as a teenager, he emerged as one of the greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he put on a sensational performance, crossed paths with Hitler, and stole a German flag right off the Reich Chancellery. He was preparing for the 1940 Olympics, and closing in on the fabled four-minute mile, when World War II began. Louie joined the Army Air Corps, becoming a bombardier. Stationed on Oahu, he survived harrowing combat, including an epic air battle that ended when his plane crash-landed, some six hundred holes in its fuselage and half the crew seriously wounded.
On a May afternoon in 1943, Louie took off on a search mission for a lost plane. Somewhere over the Pacific, the engines on his bomber failed. The plane plummeted into the sea, leaving Louie and two other men stranded on a tiny raft. Drifting for weeks and thousands of miles, they endured starvation and desperate thirst, sharks that leapt aboard the raft, trying to drag them off, a machine-gun attack from a Japanese bomber, and a typhoon with waves some forty feet high. At last, they spotted an island. As they rowed toward it, unbeknownst to them, a Japanese military boat was lurking nearby. Louie’s journey had only just begun.
That first conversation with Louie was a pivot point in my life. Fascinated by his experiences, and the mystery of how a man could overcome so much, I began a seven-year journey through his story. I found it in diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs; in the memories of his family and friends, fellow Olympians, former American airmen and Japanese veterans; in forgotten papers in archives as far-flung as Oslo and Canberra. Along the way, there were staggering surprises, and Louie’s unlikely, inspiring story came alive for me. It is a tale of daring, defiance, persistence, ingenuity, and the ferocious will of a man who refused to be broken.
The culmination of my journey is my new book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. I hope you are as spellbound by Louie’s life as I am.
Currently I am sitting in my PJs drinking coffee curled up in a blanket playing on my laptop with the tv in the background. Saved by the Bell just ended and I switched back to the news. Every once in awhile a good gust of wind blows a bunch of snow off the roof and into the air. It is really cool looking. It is still snowing, lightly, but I imagine it will continue most of the day. I need to get up and go shovel the driveway from what collected overnight, but I am not ready to actually move anywhere other than from the coffee machine to the couch.
Tuesday enjoying the fire
