Finally sitting down to write a new post. It's been so long since an update, we'll see if we can't can't you up-to-date on our lives. Since our last post, we celebrated Chirstmas. We had a great Christmas. We were able to spend time with our families and celebrate the season. We had a nice Christmas dinner out for the two of us, a couple of weeks before Christmas (yes, this isn't very traditional, but it's the best we could do). We were given "Christmas Dinner Out" by a friend, which was very nice. And then we spent the remainder of our evening together, and opening our gifts. With our schedules, both working retail, we didn't have a lot of time left to do our Christmas, that's why we did it early, or a lot of energy, which is why we decided to have dinner out, rather than making it at home. We spent Christmas Eve with Cory's family, and then spent Christmas day with Lindsey's family (breakfast at Grandma's {Dad's side} and lunch at AuntKrys' {Mom's side}). In the next week or so, we went back to Great Bend to have Christmas with Lindsey's parents and sister. We brought in the New Year with Chris & Claudia (Cory's brother & Sister-In-Law) and some friends at the Stadium Club, with a live band. Also, on January 2nd, Cory celebrated his 26th Birthday.
At the last post, Cory had just started a new job at Hastings as "Manager-In-Training". Since the last post, some things hve changed. The manager who hired him, and was to train him, accepted a new job outside of the company. A new temperary manager was brought in for a time, to help continue his training, but she has since left to take over her own store. This has left Cory to take over many of the Manager's duties, while still trying to learn what all the duties of the manager are as well as how to perform those duties. As one of these Store-Manager duties, he was required to put together a full financial annalysis of the store for last year, and present that to the President and Vice-President of the company (no pressure...haha). He spent 4 days in Amarillo, Texas during the week he made that presentation. During those days, he also met some store managers from the Amarillo area, and was able to meet with them, and learn some things from them. That was the first week of Febuary. Currently, he is in Amarillo again (for a week this time) participating in the Hastings Leadership Academy. During this time, we will learn to read all the financial documents he had to use to compile the financial analysis, along with other activities that are required of him to become a store manager. After this week is over, he will return home to continue his training, until he trained to do the job as store manager, at which point we will find out if we stay in Hays, or relocate.
As for Lindsey's work, she is still at Simply Charmed. It's been a busy year already. The first business day of the year, is always spent doing inventory. For those of you who have never been in the store before, Simply Charmed has a bead studio, and part of inventory is counting thousands, upon thousands of beads by hand, as well as hand counting all of the additional inventory in the store. After all the employees help count everything, it is Lindsey's job to add everything up and come up witha total inventory number. Things at the store have been so busy, that that has become the project for Lindsey's days "off" the last couple of weeks. After inventory was done, the store was reorganized to sell prom dresses. For the last 2 prom seasons, prom dresses were sold in a seperate building, but this year, will be sold out of the main Simply Charmed building. On Febuaray 5th we had 4 designer fashion shows held in the store throughout the day, with 14 high school models. Last week, we rearranged the entire store, including large fixtures that had been in the same place for 7 years. At the store we keep saying that we have been sprinting, just trying to keep up. Hopefully things will get caught up soon.
During a weekend in February, we traveled with Lindsey's parents and sister to Oklahoma City to see Dave Ramsey Live at the Cox Center in Bricktown. We left Great Bend early Friday morning, made a quick stop at Grandma's house to say hello, then Headed ot OKC. While we were there we toured the Oklahoma City Bombing memorial (an aweing experience). We got there shortly before ticket sales ended and were the last ones to leave the museum for the day. After the memoial, we headed to Bricktown to spend our evening and ate some delicious steaks at Toby Keith's I Love this Bar & Grill. We spent the remainder of the evening plaing games at the hotel. We got up in the morning, and spent a little more time at Bricktown, then went to the show, and then headed home to Great Bend afterwards, arriving home at about 11:30 p.m.
For now, I think this should bring you up to date. Hopefully, it won't be as long before the next update! {I am sorry for any typos or misspellings, the spell check isn't working...}