Sunday, November 02, 2008

Evening to ya and welcome to November! Where the heck did October go, and September and the rest of the summer? I guess that it'll be the holidays again before we know it and I'm thinking that I'm not going to be liking that time change thing as it was all ready getting dark around here at 5pm. But I guess that it's a fact of life and there's not much we can do about it so I guess I'll just accept it and make the most of it ..... at least it will be lighter for a while in the morning. And changing all of the clocks back was certainly a pain in the butt.

Yesterday was beautiful around here and was close to 70' and felt great after having such a cold and windy week. But I didn't end up doing much as the lawn didn't need anything from me and the leaves for the most part are still on the trees. I did end up going to Lowes and checked out new doors and am thinking that I need to find someone to help me replace both my front door and the door leading out to the garage. And at least I got the garage door to open and close again but it's not the smoothest operation that I've ever seen. I am trying to get one of the Engineers at work to help me but I haven't found the right one yet but I'm pretty sure that I can talk one of them into it one day - and it'll cost me less that hiring a contractor to do it for me. I almost took on the garage door project myself and the door is easy enough to buy but I am a little worried about ripping out the old one and then not being able to get the new one in.

The irrigation guys were here last week and shut off the sprinkler system but then the ended up ticking me off as they called me on Thursday demanding a credit card number for payment. I guess that they normally only work by prepayment but the principle of the matter turned me off on them for life. I am going to use the company that replaced my water line a few months back and told the other company where they could take their billing issues.

I also got my 4th quarter tax assessment from Loudoun County the other day and it's like a double whammy when your assessment on the value continues to go down but then they increase the assessment rates so that you are paying more in taxes overall. Something is just not right about that picture but again, what are you going to do about it? And election day is just a couple of days from now and I'll probably go and vote before I go into work on Tuesday and my voting place is at the elementary school right around the corner and the lined hopefully won't be too long. I've got to tell you that I'm registered republican and have always voted that way but I still haven't made up my mind yet and might be leaning the other way ..... to tell you the truth I can't believe that these two are the only two choices that we have.

And we had our budget review meeting on Friday afternoon which was at the owner's offices in Chevy Chase MD so we were there from about 1pm until 5pm and then it was an hour ride home to go the 15 miles, have I told you how much I really dislike 495? And in preparation of the meeting we practiced for most of the day on Thursday and did find one part of our plan that we couldn't explain and of course they called us on it right away. But in the end they didn't end up making any changes to either budgets for either hotels so I guess that it's put to bed - and now I can take some vacation time off now that that's out of the way. But the whole process was exhausting and I came home and dealt with trick or treaters but I would have rather taken a nap as I wasn't really in the mood for it.

And my next project is to get ready for the installation of TLPe at the Westin which is Starwood's computerized revenue management system which will require me to put together a bunch of historical reports and all that good stuff. Then we are having a three day meeting with them in mid-November and the we go live around the first of the year ...... there always seems to be something going on. At least once we do have it it will make my life a little bit easier as the system monitors demand and opens and closes rates based on it and right now we are doing it all manually so once it's live at least it should have some benefit to me.

So I guess that's all that goes on this day with me. I hope that everything is going well for you and that you have a great week. Talk with you soon and take care until then!

posted by Scott @ 9:01 PM