Job Update!

Good Mornin' Ya'll!

So I just thought I would give everyone an update as to the status of the dry cleaning operation I posted about a few weeks ago.

Drum roll please! After all the waiting and anticipation, we have FINALLY taken over and are now working at the dry cleaners!

This past week Jordan and I started training with the previous owner, Song. He is a Korean guy that has been in the business for ten years, so he know his stuff! He has been training Jordan and me quite intensely for the past week making sure we understand all the steps and all the details that go into making a dry cleaner successful.

The process at a dry cleaner is pretty easy to remember, it is all the little details that get me caught up. The basic process is as follows: go through the clothes and create an invoice for the order, tag the clothes with the customers info and invoice number, sort the clothes into their respective bins for cleaning, clean/wash the clothes, dry/press the clothes, inspect for perfection, sort clothing and match to their invoice number, place on conveyer belt, wait for customer to pick up their clothing.

Within each step of the process there are TONS of details you have to remember, for example, what the difference between a sweater, a sweater top, a sweater jacket, and a heavy sweater are because they are all different and have different prices in the system. The the most important step that Jordan is learning is what cleaning product takes out what stain and making sure the correct clothing (rayon, wool, cotton, polyester) goes into the proper machine for cleaning. Like I said, lots to learn.

I don't know if many of you know this (I didn't) but in the dry cleaning business there are two different kinds of dry cleaning places. First, there is just a normal drop-off location. This where customers bring in there clothing to have cleaned. Second, there is a store called a "plant." This is where the actual cleaning gets done. We have one of each, a drop-off location and a plant. This past week I've been training at the plant, but this week I'm going over to the drop-off location to train/take over. After last week I think it might be best if Jordan and I work in separate places...for our marriage's sake! ;)

There are many really great existing characteristics about the business as-is, but Jordan and I are excited to change some things we think might make the business even better! There will be some ideas, I'm sure, that will flop, but I know there will be some really really great ideas that will inspire growth.

Overall, the experience has been exhausting yet so rewarding. We are so so grateful to finally be working and I'm so elated that Jordan can finally be doing what he has wanted to do his whole life, be his own boss, but only while he is as work. ;) I'm so thankful for those surrounding us that have supported us and cheered us on from the beginning. Over the past few months I have, again, realized that the Lord has His hand in my life. His timing is perfect, His will is perfect. I'm so thankful for the struggles Jordan and I have gone through the last little while, for without those, this time in our life could not have been so sweet.

Happy Birthday To ME!

I always get excited for fall 1) because it is fall and 2) because it means my birthday season!! Yes people...season....my birthday lasts all of October because it is my favorite month AND my birth month!

Anyways...to the good stuff. My birthday was on a Friday this year (which is seriously the BEST day to have a birthday) and so the entire week before my birthday there was a dilemma, "what are we doing for Lexi's birthday?!" There were all types of plans and heres and theres and everywheres and so honestly I had no idea what in the heck was going on until about 11:00 a.m. Friday morning.

Jordan and I slept in late and watched a little TV and mostly just relaxed. Then we got ready and met Ma for lunch at a little modern Mexican place.

Oh man! It was so stinkin good!

 

Mom and Me

 (I got that shirt for my birthday from Jordan!)

Right after lunch Mom took me shopping at this CUTE little clothing shop. Now, I'm from the Northwest and I had never heard of this shop, Charming Charlie's, and the first time I went to one I fell absolutely in love! They color coordinate their stores with jewelry, shoes, purses, tops, scarves, and TONS of other accessories in each color category. Oh man, it is heaven! Jordan left us women to our business while he wandered around the shopping area. It was so fun doing a little shopping/spending one-on-one time with mom for my birthday and she, so generously, got me a couple tops and a couple necklaces for my birthday! (Thank you thank you!!)

Once we were done shopping Mom dropped Jordan and me back off at our car and we went to see the movie Pitch Perfect which turned out to be fricken' hilarious! I would  pay money to go see it again...yes, yes I would. 

After the movie Jordan and I went back home and cleaned up the house a little and kept on relaxing until it was dinner time. At about 6:30 we headed over to The Cheesecake Factory for some delicious dinner with his parents and sister and bro-in-law.

 From left to right: 

Marlys, Del, Jordan, Me, Kylie, Mike

 What a huge pile of crunchy noodle thingies!

Kylie and me with our delicious meals!

Once we were all stuffed to the brim with food we loaded up into our cars and went back to our apartment. While there Dad surprised me with a birthday gift:

This is a really terrible picture and it does not do the table justice, but he gave me this! Now a little background on this table. Last year when Jordan and I were living in Idaho we had NO furniture...we did not own a single piece of furniture, we were borrowing everything. So one day we are pulling into our parking lot and we notice a little coffee table and a papasaun chair sitting next to the dumpster. They looked like they were is fairly decent condition so we grabbed them and brought them home. Upon further inspection the table legs were glued together lengthwise (you could see the glue barely holding each side together), the screws and such that connect the legs to the top were busted and needed to be replaced, the whole thing needed to be sanded and stained/painted; it was a mess. The papasaun chair was the same, the cushion was nasty and needed a cover, the frame the cushion sat is was busted as was the base. For some reason we kept both pieces of furniture and thought they would be good "projects". Yeah....projects that required equipment/money we didn't have. Since we didn't have exactly what we needed what did we do? We committed the ultimate no-no, we bought a few cans of black spray paint and went at 'em. We did the whole chair frame and half of the table and then gave up. When we moved down to Texas, for some stupid reason, we brought both the table and the chair...ended up throwing the chair away and gave the table to dad. I told dad when I gave it to him that he could do anything he wanted with it...throw it out, use the pieces for something else, light it on fire, whatever. After that what did Dad do to it? He sands it down, repairs the problems, stains it, and gives it back as a stunning piece of furniture. Dad is a miracle maker, thank you Dad!!!

After he surprised me we all sat down and played games and topped off the night with a big fat slice of pecan pie and an heaping scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

Once everyone left for the night Jordan gave me a few gifts I had been needing, clothes and such. I also enjoyed opening the gifts from my mom and sister, kitchen supplies I desperately needed. 

I also enjoyed the birthday present I bought myself. New makeup! Can't get better than that!

It was such a wonderful, low maintenance, relaxed evening. I couldn't have asked for anything more.

A Muddy Adventure

This past Saturday was our nephew's birthday and we celebrated by going out to his house to eat lunch and watch him rip open presents. Now I'd first like to note that they live about 20 minutes out into the "boonies" well it is considered "boonies" for the area that we live in, but not by my standards. We live in Frisco, which I have mentioned in previous posts is a hugely populated and developed area, but the father north you head the less developed it becomes, it is not uncommon for a gravel road to just pop up.

Anyways....back to the story. Jordan and I went for the small birthday gathering. We were supposed to meet at a local petting zoo, but that plan changed due to unstoppable, so we just did lunch and presents. We ended up staying out there for the rest of the afternoon so Kylie, Marlys, and I could go to a Church meeting later in the evening. The meeting got over around 8:30 p.m. and we got back to Ky's house at 9:30 or so. Jordan and I stayed and chatted for a few minutes longer and left about 9:45 p.m. and it was still raining. We got on the road and planned on taking our normal route home, which included a short drive on the highway and then the rest of the way home on a part-paved-part-gravel road.

The highway was fine, and the first few miles of the paved part of the last stretch home was fine and then we got to the "gravel" road. Red flags and bells should have been going off in my head when there was a small lake at the end of the pavement. There should have been bells going off...but there weren't. We plowed right through puddle with no problems and then we got to the mud. Twenty-five feet in I'm thinking, "Okay, Jordan is a good driver when it comes to weird circumstances like this, but it looks like we are going to need to go to the car wash on Monday." Right as this thought came into my mind I realized we were slowing down. Fifty feet in I'm thinking, "Man, this mud is kinda thick, we sure are slipping around." Mud had accumulated on our tires so much we had zero traction and we weren't going anywhere fast. One hundred feet in I'm thinking, "Why is Jordan steering the car into the ditch? This was a bad idea." On the right-hand side of the road there was a small shallow ditch and on the other side of that a hay field. Jordan's idea was to get up on the field and go as far as we could before getting down on the mud road again....well that idea was almost a disaster. It turned out that the ditch was more of a rut the perfect size of our tire. So we are sitting in the car and I'm convinced that our left front and rear tires were off the ground while the right front and rear tires were snuggly in the rut. There was a definite angle shift to my view out the windshield. At this point in time, if I would have rolled down the window I would have been able to touch the ground...

At this point I'm just laughing. I can't help it...Jordan and I get into these weird situations all the time and I just have to laugh. Of course, Jordan is sitting next to me trying to figure out how in the heck we are going to get out of this mess, so he throws it in reverse and then in drive, and then reverse, drive, reverse, drive, and then finally he magically get us up onto the field. I say magically because I literally don't know how he did it. So we are up on this hay field driving parallel to the muddy road and we go probably a quarter mile and then Jordan's shouts "we're goin down!" and before I know it we are down the small hill, over the ditch, and back into the mud. We went maybe twenty-five more feet and then a terrible metal on metal sound. Bad, bad idea. We just sat there and looked at each other and then I said "welllll, should we call someone?"

We made a couple quick phone calls to his cousin, Sean, who had just bought a new truck. No more than five minutes after we made the call a kid with a huge truck pulled up and asked if we needed some help. We told him that we had someone coming and he asked what kind of truck he had, we told him a Toyota Tacoma, and he suggested that we let him help because a Tacoma might not have been able to do the job (sorry Sean!). Of course we said yes and after a couple minutes we were all hooked up and off to the races we went. The mud was so thick that the guy towing us was almost having trouble pulling us, but after gathering a little speed we seemed to be okay. As we gained speed all sorts of mud was goin' everywhere! After a quarter mile this was our view from the inside of the car...pure mud.

 

Since Jordan couldn't see out the windshield the next logical option was the head out the window choice...

 Resulting in....

Finally we got to the end of the "gravel" road. We were towed maybe a mile and a half and we had to deal with this:

 

That is three inches of mud...

Sean and his wife, Becky, met us at the end of the muddy road and escorted us back to their house for a little spray down.

 

 

After ten minutes of scrubbing...

Only partial view out of our windshield and headlights. Our poor car!

When we pulled out of our parking spot in the morning there was a pretty good amount of mud on the ground. We had no other option but to drive to church with our car all muddy. We got so many looks and laughs, it was funny. I don't think many people had ever seen a car so stinking muddy!

After all is said and done our car is fine and our marriage is still intact. Being married to Jordan is a huge adventure. I used to fight it and get upset at the crazy things he gets me into, but I've learned to just enjoy the fun of it. Sure one day we may get pulled over for popping a curb and driving where there is no road, sure we may break our car and have to pay thousands of dollars, sure we may get caught sneaking in an 'employees only' door...but that day is not today. I've learned to enjoy the crazy, embrace it even. I love my crazy, unconventional, adventurous husband.