Time flies

What a rough couple of days....Headed to NY/NJ early Wednesday morning for a business trip...flight at 6:30am, so that was a rough morning to say the least. Spent about 4 hours with the vendor, reviewing their response to our audit last month and their plan of corrective action in the coming months. Went very well and the company is on the right track to make the improvements needed to meet our certification requirements. Finished up around 2:30pm.

Decided to head down into NYC, as Andy (another auditor on the trip) wanted to try and pick up some gifts down in Chinatown. Now, for anyone not familiar with Chinatown, it is a collection of small ethnic shops selling all kinds of food, trinkets, etc that give it the feel of a flea market. Most of the stuff is pretty cheap...NY t-shirts, hats, etc., scarves, cheap watches, etc. However, if you're persistent, you can haggle with the vendors and get a decent deal on what you're buying...also, if you ask the right person, you may be able to find designer knock-offs of purses, clothing, watches, etc. This is what we were looking for...Andy's fiancee has a huge collection of designer purses and Andy was hoping to save some money by getting designer knock-offs of the latest fashions at a fraction of the price....so we wandered around the shops while he asked the vendors for Prada and Louis Vitton purses....we met with blank stares and negative responses for about an hour....

in the pouring rain....

and the general smell of Chinatown, which at times borders on open sewer...

anyway, we finally found someone willing to pull the purses for Andy from some back hidden closet and wheel and deal with him. And by this time, it had stopped raining, so things turned around for us. Ended up finishing the shopping and headed to a good mexican restaurant on Broadway that I know and downed a couple of margaritas and nachos......mmmmmmm.

After that, we trekked back into Chinatown to pick up the car, which was decorated witha parking ticket from NYC finest for illegal parking....which was strange, as everyone else was parked on the street, but I guess we needed a permit or something....just glad the car was still there and not towed. Ninty minutes later (8pm) we're over in NJ and at the hotel for a relaxing evening or hotel room TV and checking emails. felt REAL good to get the shoes off and unwind from the day. Contemplated playing some poker on UB, but decided against it, as there were some huge stacks sitting on the $5/10 tables ($1000 plus) that indicated some hot players (max buy-in to the $5/10 is $500) so Idecided against it, as I was pretty tired and didn't feel like poker.

Thursday found us at a distribution center that one of our vendors owns for shipping finished goods for a mini-audit. Nothing surprising, except for my growing auditor expertise and randomly walking out into a warehouse, finding a pallet and then having the vendor struggle to pull a history and status from their inventory program. I had found a pallet of body wash from 2002 that was labeled as rejected in their racks and wanted to know why it was rejected and hed been sitting there for 3 years....they looked up the location and their system showed it as an empty location....hmmmmmmmm....gotta love throwing the locals into a tizzy with a simple request. They spent the next hour trying to figure out what was going on.

Anyway, had a nice lunch at a NJ deli with outdoor seating on a tree covered patio...was very relaxing and then headed for Newark Airport for the flight home....nothing significant to report, except I hate flying commercial after getting spoiled by our corporate shuttle. I also realized that I could have been upgraded to first class if I had read my frequent flyer ticker on Continental and asked to be bumped up....oh well...next time.

Finally get back to Columbus and have to haul myself and my bags across the airport to get to the car....head out of the towards the expressway and propmtly rear-end an elderly couple that was headed home from a vacation in Hawaii.....the car in front of tham had panic braked, so they slammed on theirs and I hit mine, but slid into their bumper. Thankfully no one was injured, as i only hit them at 5-10 miles an hour I would guess...scratched their bumper and bent my license plate...we exchanged information and wnet on our way. I'm going to call and check up on them today and make sure they are ok. Last thing I need right now is a claim on the insurance and have my rates go up....first accident that was my fault since I was 16....so not bad over 20 years, but I still don't want the hassel.

Anyway, time to get some work done and try and slide through the day. Big pans for the weekend, as I have some friends coming into town for a local card tourney tomorrow and then some good times afterwards. Can't wait.