Once a year, at my wife’s office, comes the dreaded Performance Employee Appraisal System, the whole office is severely affected for the entire several weeks during this stressful time period, where a ton of paperwork has been filled out and then the employee gets pulled into the manager’s office and given the news of whether or not, and how well or not, you are doing your job, based on some type of numerical rating system that differs from company to company.

These annual reviews can play a critical role in a person’s career, like in how much money that they will hopefully continue to keep making. It helps determine the percentage of the next anticipated salary increase, if any, as well as if any additional training is needed. Maybe a promotion or another position would and/or could be factored into it as well. And of course if there is any discipline necessary, for things like attendance issues or any other negative interferences that too would be considered.

In the past, and for many years, possibly even today, a few select employees have been asked to do the task of rating themselves at this time. Something that would be a very difficult challenge to ask of anyone. My wife has been asked to do this several times thruout the years that she has worked at this company. She becomes a nervous wreck, absolutely frightful. To have to ask yourself with complete honesty, and being as modest a woman as some people like my wife tend to be,just “ What kind of employee am I? ”, is a heavy burden indeed.

Thank the people in charge because this year her company has put into place a workplace management tool from a company by the name of managerassistant.com that is programmed to ease the stress related to employee appraisal. The buzz in the office is that it is a wonderful program that will help eliminate much of pressure and prejudice that often accompanies such evaluations.

Enterprise Asset Management Software is a new program that my wife’s office is checking out and she has been put in charge of handling, for the most part, the whole kit and caboodle, which she is excited and nervous about these days.

Computers are coming into play more and more often in today’s work force and a lot of tasks that were once handled by humans are being turned over to the always changing computer’s newest technologies, but humans will always be a necessity in order to program it, run it and fix it.

Net Simplicity offers simple office administration software, that states it “allows it to run your office instead of you.” their hopes are that her company will benefit from their room scheduling and asset management software.

A couple of my buddies are coming to my place today to get together, have a few beers and play some Paintball while were at it like old times. Well, yesterday I was on the computer trying to find a good place to find BT Paintball guns and other BT equipment that were not only the best made, but also to fall somewhere in my price range. I had found a great site to check out called www.pntball.com that offers over hundreds of different paint balling equipment of all sorts, plus they offer free shipping. I had a blast just looking through all the neat things they had, I just couldn’t stop adding things to my shopping cart, it all looked so awesome! Needless to say my buddies and I are going to have an even greater time the next time we get together and play with paint balls right after I get all of my goodies, Ill be all geared up and ready to go!

I was reading an article on the Internet about how a two-thousand year old seed has been sprouted and is now growing quite steadily.  So far it has been growing for twenty six months and is now an amazing four feet tall.  It is the seed of a Judean date tree which is now extinct. 

It seems that according to this article, several seeds of this type were discovered some forty years ago and have been stored until just recently, when a group of scientists decided to try to germinate it.  I’m still not quite sure why they only tried one!  Anyway, what is good and important about this is that they think (and hope) that the tree will have some medicinal uses.  I’m all for that!

My father’s father, was an avid gun collector and totally enjoyed showing off his, always changing, and always growing, selections of weapons that were constantly seemingly taking up a large amount of the garage, side & back porch, basement, dining room, living room and his office! The only place that you wouldn’t see something gun related was the bathroom and his bedroom, that, my grandmother insisted, was to be totally gun free. (Except for the 45 that was always within easy reach, and usually was under his pillow).

One of my grandfather’s most memorable sayings was “Put the pillow under a lady and put the pistol under the pillow” . And I think of that old saying more often than I would have ever thought I would. As a kid growing up listening to this old man’s stories and sayings, you sort of tuned them out after awhile.

I miss my grandfather. He passed on several years ago, leaving my grandmother grieving and broken hearted. We do what we can to keep her busy and the whole extended family has pulled together to make what is left of her life one that isn’t full of loneliness and old memories.

My grandfather did manage to leave me a small portion of his massive assortment of weapons that were divided up between several members of our very large and extended family.  I have several really nice holsters as well and he made sure that each weapon came with an good amount of bullets and cleaning kits and all kinds of other accessories that one might eventually needed for each piece.

They just recently opened up a firing range, less than 1/2 a mile from the house, and I’m thinking that it might just be a good idea to take out some of these old pieces, give them a good going over as well as a good cleaning, and take a trip down the street and try some of them out. No sense in them just sitting around collecting dust in some dark corner of the house.