DONE!!

It's official.  As of Thursday April 30, at 4:00 PM central time, we are done with ten hour shifts!  Thank goodness!

One day last week, I was at work, just a working away, when I had to answer nature's call.  Upon coming out of the reading room, I noticed it was just after 1:00.  I went back to my department and announced to my coworkers, "Just think, this time next week, it'll be almost time to go home!"

We got to talking about how nice it will be to get off at 2:00 instead of 4:00.

"We can make doctor's appointments!" said one coworker.
"We can go to the dentist!" said I.
"We can run errands!" said another.
"We can pay bills without flying down the road at breakneck speed trying to get to the bank before it closes!"

From now on, when I work a ten hour shift, two of those will count as overtime.  The bad news is, they've cut out all the overtime.  They've also cut out all bonuses -- attendance and incentives.  And they laid off the last of the temps.  Not only that, all salaried employees have taken a reduction in pay, all the way up to the CEO, whose pay was cut 50%.  You think only small businesses are affected by this shut down, but they're not.  Lennox International is one of the largest HVAC companies in the U.S. and they are teetering on the edge.

But there is hope.  Many -- if not most-- states are beginning to gradually open their economies back up.  If we can hang on a little longer...I have to keep hoping, because I can't afford another 10 years of 24 and 32 hour work weeks.  I'm still paying off the last time we had to do that.

Because of all this that's going on, I've dropped all my streaming services except Prime and Hulu, and I'm seriously considering pausing my Hulu until it's all over.  I still have Curiosity Stream until the end of the year, and there's always plenty to watch on YouTube.

It's been ages since I've placed an order on Amazon as well.  I'm being pretty tight with my funds, because I'm determined not to run up a bunch of debt this time around.  However, I did make one last splurge and bought some new piano books, since I'll actually have time to practice now.  One thing I really need to work on is sight reading, so I got these two.

Last fall, I'd bought a book with finger technique exercises.

I've been trying to work on these a lot more lately.  I'd kind of let them slip back when work started picking it up.  However, the thing I really don't like about this book is that it isn't spiral bound and won't lay flat on my music stand.  To do the exercises, I was having to make copies of each page, just so I could read the music.  I kept saying I was going to take it down to the local office supply place and get it spiral bound, but I never did.

However, when looking for those sight reading books, I saw this one:

It was only a dollar or two more than what I would have paid to get the other one spiral bound, and best of all, it lays flat!  I might actually make progress now, instead of playing the first three exercises over and over and over.

I've ordered one more book, but it won't get here until next weekend.

Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to go read some sights.