Class yesterday, expensive dump, final cleaning, the weekend

I had a visitor with me in class yesterday. He is coworker who is being evaluated for teaching the class I teach most often, which is about twice per week. My management has seen the need to expand our instructor pool especially in light of the fact that 85 classes were added to the Instructor Led Training schedule – classes I am responsible to teach – through the end of the year. That is a heavy schedule for one person, hence the need for getting more instructors on boarded to fulfill that schedule. Anyway, yesterday’s class was a fairly typical class, eight participants, little feedback or interaction from those eight participants, seven hours of constant talking on my part.

My colleague was impressed as well as intimidated by the very lengthy dialogue. The fortunate advantage I have in such a setting is that I have 40 years of experiences to share stories and anecdotes from in such a setting because of the chemical plants, refineries and control rooms I have worked in. Many of my past experiences overlap with the real world of the class participants. I like to tell stories and people like to hear stories. All of the stories I tell fit into the material presented in the class. My coworker worried because he has no such experience to draw from, but he will figure out how to fill the time properly as he gains experience in presenting the class. After all, when I first started working at Energy Worldnet, we had our sales staff teaching the course I now teach. None of them had any real-world experience in the areas of work that our clients manage on a daily basis and we had gotten by what that for years.

As soon as I got home from work Mama and I hurriedly fed, and I loaded a king-sized mattress Grandma and Grandpa had discarded to be offloaded at the little dump station we have near us. Surprisingly, it cost us fifteen dollars to leave the mattress with the dump. Mama and I loaded the box springs at the rental house when we went there for our final cleaning assignment. She had not had room to haul them off the previous day. Today I will see how much it costs to discard those two box springs that were the foundation for the mattress, but I am expecting about the same charge to offload those furniture items. Thirty dollars to discard a bed seems a bit expensive, but at least it will be properly discarded.

At that house, the power had already been turned off to the house so we could not vacuum as we had intended, so Mama wiped a few things down and scrubbed a little in the refrigerator. All in all, the house looked well cleaned so our work there was light and quick. It was not until after we had left the house that Grandma told us that left a quart of ice cream in the freezer. That is going to be a mess to clean up. We did not see it because Mama had emptied the freezer the day before and did not check it when we were there last night. Mama called the landlord to let him know of our oversight as well as to alert him that we had hauled off the last of the items left at the house. Sadly, the ice cream mess will his to deal with. I do not think Mama is going to make a return trip to the house to clean up that mess.

Tomorrow, sometime in the later afternoon, I will put the honey supers on three of the hives. I am looking froward to that chore. While I am in the hives, I will need to refill the syrup feeder on the newest hive. Mama has a several hours long meeting tomorrow with a trainer working for the National Guard. Since Mama agreed to be a treasurer for Kenny NA Kim Cantrell’s Boots and Badges ministry, she has had several trainings. This one will be one of the longest. Kimberlyn was supposed to come and participate in the training but it looks like that is not going to happen. However, Katy Shaw will be here with Mama while the training is being presented. Mama is not looking froward to the training because she is always hesitant to take on something new – especially something this new. She will do fine with the information and it will be a great growth experience for her. Having Katy here during the training should allow her to bounce questions off of someone other than the trainer.

Other than the hive work and training, I will continue cleaning up around the farm. In some ways I would like to start thinning out the growth of small trees around the pond we have in the barn lot, but I am not sure I am ready to tackle that yet. It will be a lot of dragging and lifting to get the brush collected and piled away from the cleaned area. I do not know how my back will hold up for all that. My constant back pain is one of the reasons I have tackled only light duty chores around the farm, but there are a wealth of chores requiring more effort that still need to be done.

I will need to pace myself in those chores and choose the time to tackle them carefully since I am doing the work by myself.