More Side-by-Side Phantoms: When Sherri meets Owens.

The Ultimate in Side-by-Side Phantoming:



Drool.

That is (left to right) Anthony Warlow, John Owen Jones, Colm Wilkinson &....Peter Joback? (I was immediately disturbed I did not know Peter Joback. I thought -somehow- in my Phantom wanderings I had missed a classic Phantom. Say it ain't so! No, he's actually new this past year to the role and picking up the tour this year in London. Relief.)

Okay, so it gets a little creepy when the five Phantoms are surrounding Christine (Sarah Brightman) and demanding she sing for each of them at the end, but eh.

The man who actually comes out in the Phantom mask halfway through is Ramin Karmiloo, who was playing him that evening. Michael Crawford doesn't sing, although he does show up at the beginning and end of the video.

If nothing else, you should at least flip forward to 9:30 in the video to see John Owen Jones sing the choicest note in "Music Of the Night" absolutely perfect. It's just gorgeous. I'm so torn on whether Jones or Warlow really shines best in this video. They're equally lovely in voice. I've always heard beautiful things about Jones' performance, but this is just total knockout. I actually admitted tonight he may be better than Warlow. (Gasp! That's so hard for me to say!) I can't tell if it's because Owens gets the really stellar lines or what. But either way, hearing them duet a few lines - and seeing Colm Wilkinson back onstage as well - is beautiful. This was a really awesome tribute for the fans. Especially since we have NO OFFICIAL RECORDINGS OF THESE TWO. NONE, WEBBER.  Out of ALL the Phantom recordings that exist - and there are a lot - somehow we have managed to miss two of the greatest and most classic Phantoms in its history. Sigh.

We still demand an Australian Cast Recording.

Chronicling Vday: All over. One more time.

Official Countdown: Done. The end.
Official Weather Occurrence: Despite freezing fog in the state that caused major traffic problems in the city, we were great and already had a trucks going out as soon as they were loaded. Awesome. 

Hm.... do you remember our rose cooler at the beginning?

By the end of today, it looked like this: 

This is actually the best we've ever done on roses - we were sold out of red by...11:00? Certainly by noon. In fact, we almost completely sold out of roses entirely by the end of the day.

And this isn't only the best we've ever done on roses. Somehow, all deliveries except one were made (and that one was made and they just weren't home) which is a new record beating last year's two. That's really outstanding.
And we were still taking in-town deliveries up until 3:00 which is also unheard of for us. Until that point, we never cut them off once. (Sometimes we're overloaded and have to stop accepting them for awhile and can do more once that's been lessened.) And it certainly wasn't because we sold less. We checked the numbers and they came out the same as last year. So who knows why it all went so well - maybe this year it just all fell into place, maybe we were somehow more organized, maybe it was all the early orders, maybe God was just gracious, etc. 

Of course, we'll know more tomorrow when the aftermath hits. That's the day you know how well you did. People call in with complaints, concerns, etc. You live in terror of answering the phone. You take a few normal phone calls, feel safe and then one hits you sideways. And its okay because we really do want to fix it, and things will happen when you have that many go out. We do want to know and solve the problem. But its still hard. The day after is just as much a part of the whole experience as the whole week.

But....I'm off tomorrow.




Did you hear it? The Hallelujah chorus? The heavens opening?

I told my boss today that I'm actually glad this didn't happen my first or second VDay because I certainly wouldn't have appreciated it like I do now. This is the best possible Valentine's gift.

Also, according to the News Star website tonight, the Sports Park proposition was soundly voted down with not any of the possibilities even reaching a 25% yes. Considering I still believe it was too inflated and ridiculously large & expensive for our town I'm glad. I'm sure they'll try again, but maybe - just maybe - they'll have taken another look at it and made it more feasible.

Eh. Or probably not. But we'll see.

Chroncling Vday: Catch up.

Official Countdown: 0 days. 
Final Weather Conclusion: It snowed in our area, but miraculously the roads & driveways were incredibly clear! Not an ounce of ice or slick spots. It was such a blessing. We are incredibly thankful. As for tonight, the snow has already almost completely melted and we're in good shape for tomorrow. Praise God.  

Sure, I'll say I didn't blog yesterday because it was my one day off and I intentionally planned that, buuuut it was really because I hadn't written by 11:00 PM and it no longer mattered. Getting a full nights rest was much more important.
(And I did sleep very well. A day of rest, indeed.)

Sleep is still high on the list for tonight, so this will be brief.

From the picture it doesn't look like much, but consider that all those shelves and everything on the floor is at least three deep, and at times four. And a significant amount of other arrangements have lapsed over into parts of our two other coolers as well. This is just so we can actually walk in.

We stayed until 9:00 tonight, which is an hour earlier than our usual cut off time. So our head start did indeed help. Plus, while there are parts of today that were very busy, there were also lapses of almost eerie silence. So we were at least able to keep working on Tuesdays throughout the day which is unusual.

Despite that though, we're doing great on orders it seems. Except for a few dozens pre-arranged there are no red roses left, and almost no roses left period. Awesome.

Valentine's morning is always rough - we immediately begin work on blowing up balloons for orders, adding plush, making sure everything is right on all these small school orders and then getting those school orders out as quickly and as soon as possible. Once those are over we can concentrate on everything else.

Sing it with me now: Ahem. "Oooooone day moooooooooooore!"



(I make that joke at work all the time and I think they assume I'm just randomly bursting into song.)



(Which, of course, I guess I am.)



(....but it is random if there's a reason? bah! must...not...think....)

Chronicling Vday: A brief headstart.

Official Countdown: 2 days.
Current Weather Forecast: The weathermen all agree that we will get some sort of precipitation, but they're bewildered as to what. It's pretty funny.

It was 19 degrees outside this morning when I arrived at work, so we didn't have that many incoming orders because most people were at home sleeping. :)

Thankfully, we did manage to get a jumpstart on Tuesday's orders since we completely finished out Monday's (for now.) So we'll be able to go in with a clean slate Monday morning, even if we didn't get any extra customs built. It'll work.

The jumpstart won't last long though as we anticipate Monday being all hands on deck to complete incoming orders as well as taking new ones.... eh.

I slept about eight hours last night. It was fabulous and I felt much better today, even if I didn't really wake up until 11:45ish mentally.

But my boss brought in sausage biscuits for breakfast and cookies two days in a row, which was wonderful. (My bosses, in general, are pretty amazing. Not just because of breakfast or the cookies. Although they were indeed delicious cookies.)

On a related note, if you ever need cookies (or cupcakes), may I highly recommend DC Cake Appeal.

Yum.

Chronicling Vday: When this starts to seem like a dumb idea.

Official Countdown: 3 days. 
Current Weather Forecast: The weathermen are essentially shrugging their shoulders. According to them it'll either be rain, sleet, freezing rain or snow. Ha. Good to know.

I'm tired.

I'm now up to 43 or so of my 50 dozens and we're calling it quits there, leaving the rest greened and ready to make up with ordered colors. I finished out the day completing all the orders for Saturday (which was only about.....three?) so far. My coworker and I have also finished most of Monday's in advance. We spent an hour extra tonight and plan to work a few hours extra tomorrow where we will finish any extra Monday orders that come in, build plenty of extra arrangements to sell out of the front cooler and, in general, prepare for the onslaught.

The wind chill tomorrow morning will be 1 with an actual temperature of 15.

But in good news, I can assure you the Muppets movie is somehow even better the second time around. Which is pretty phenemonal, considering it was incredibly fun and lovely the first round.

I also learned the one good thing about freezing temperatures: you can leave your Dr. Pepper in the car filled with ice for two hours and it doesn't melt.

Tonight I drove up to a stop sign and waited for the light to turn green. 

I'm going to bed. Goodnight.

Chronicling VDay: Flowers, flowers everywhere.

Official Countdown: 4 days.
Current Weather Report: Either rain or 2-4" of snow arriving Sunday night into Monday. 

So this is the current state of our rose cooler:

Roses, roses everywhere.

Yay! It's still semi-organized!

We were busier today with regular orders, and since I was on daily orders I was only able to finish five more of my dozens. If you're keeping track, that puts me at thirty leaving twenty more to go. You can see all our dozens lining the shelves in that pic. All our loose roses are on the floor below.

And in this corner...

Another coworker spent all day doing these. Since she was able to finish her set, she's moving on to another design tomorrow and will just keep duplicating those. We've also started bud vases ahead of time in yet another, albeit smaller, cooler. 

So much prep work. But so grateful this much can be done in advance.

Finishing our sets or quotes sounds confusing. I'm trying to figure out how to explain it. Let's take, for example, my trying to complete 50 sets of red dozen roses.  That's what I mean. We have some pictures up of arrangements that we're specially selling and we have the flowers and vases for to reproduce that arrangement for you. We have enough vases to complete, say, 12 of them or 25. We'll complete all those in advance.
Also, we know we'll sell dozen roses. We know we'll sell bud vases. So we complete a certain number of those advance as well. That's what I mean by quota.


Tomorrow the plan is to stay an hour late to finish up some of those quotas, and then we'll be ready to move on into Saturday. That should be our big design day completing all of Monday's orders and getting them ready to go, plus mostly finishing our quotas for dozens, mixed, bud vases, specials, etc. And reorganizing Tuesday's orders so we know what's not sold out, how much we have left of each, what has to be delivered first, how many orders we have, etc, etc.

In other news, I would say our last shipment of Valentine's flowers came in today but that's no longer true. We learned today that our container of white lilies will no longer be arriving due to a mistake in shipment, so we'll be receiving those from another wholesaler tomorrow.

Sure, it's really upsetting that we weren't even notified that this pretty crucial and traditional flower would not be arriving, but with a holiday this large in the industry you do have to go with the flow. It would be more upsetting if our other wholesaler had not saved the day. We love her. (We loved her anyway.)

That being said, today's shipment of flowers was lovely! My boss bought a box of fresh bulb flowers this year to give us something different to play with and I've been so excited. Its rare we have these.

Okay, so the iris we always have, but the raunculus (center) and hyancith (front) is really rare.

 

 I looooove the raunculus.

The shape, the colors, the GORGEOUS GREEN CENTERS IN THE YELLOW ONES. Swoon.

Speaking of gorgeous product, we've been so lucky this year. Usually at a major holiday the flower quality tends to go down since a) the demand becomes incredibly high therefore b) they're pulled from the fields faster bringing us back to c) sadder looking flowers. However this year that has (somehow) not been the case. Not only have our flowers been nice, most of them have been downright beautiful. It's a total blessing. We're grateful, we're excited and I'm having so much fun with them.

Notably, however, this is where you start getting tired.

Chronicling V-Day: Of course they're calling for a snowstorm.

Official Countdown: 5 days.

Since we were able to green all of our vases yesterday, today we were able to begin production on roses, more roses and even more roses. My boss and I were both working on different heights of dozens, 50 of each. I was able to finish off 25, which is less than I was hoping for, but I'm satisfied that its my halfway point. It feels like it takes sooo long.

Just surround yourself with everything you need and make, make, make.

 

 

After finishing off a dozen, we wrap them up with plastic that we start saving back in November. This keeps the roses tight and lets us have more cooler space. 

Squish the roses....as gently as possible...

 Mm....25 more to go.

And since there's not enough drama surrounding Valentines to begin with, we all arrived home yesterday to the news announcing a winter storm may be coming our way and arriving Monday.

.....

At that particular point they were predicting 2-5", which I thought sounded crazy (and admittedly this was the channel that tends to exaggerate). Today at noon it was looking more like a winter mix, and then tonight all the stations are back to calling for the likelihood of snow.

Sigh. Well. At least its not a blizzard?

Chronicling V-Day: Starting Production.

Official Countdown: 6 days left. 

Today I greened over 70 vases.

54 vases of greening to go, 54 vases to green....you take one down, spin it around, 53 vases of greening to go....

Which means I did this all.day. (Look, its my knife! Aw, the things you get attached to....)

After processing in your flowers, greening vases is the next step and an awesome time saver. As long as they're in the cooler, it makes no different to your flowers (and even less so to greens) whether they're sitting in water in a bucket or sitting in a vase arranged. So we can begin arranging dozens this far in advance without doing them any harm. Since today was (thankfully) so quiet we were actually able to get all our dozen vases filled with greens, water & flower food in one day (plus a few others.) That's about 100 bouquets already halfway complete. It's fantastic. 

And then, since sometime in the summer we removed our machine that dethorns our roses in bulk, we began dethorning them by hand. 

Um...

That's a lot of roses to dethorn by hand, folks. I'm thinking we're not even gonna make it through all the red.  

Chroniciling Valentine's Week: Day 1

And so it begins...

Hm....do you think I can post a blog every night of Valentine's week chronicling a small town florists experience of it?

No, I'm sensing epic failure.

Nonetheless! Epic Challenge!

"Valentine's Week" here not necessarily literally meaning "the week of Valentine's Day." For most florists (at least, the few I know of, ha), V-Day starts about a week out. (For those unaware of the date, the holiday is this next Tuesday.) About a week out we start receiving our largest shipments of flowers. There may be one or two shipments a few days earlier, but no, a week out is really when it all begins. We actually make our floral order about six weeks beforehand. As for orders coming in early, it entirely depends on the year. The past two years we've had almost no orders up until days before the big day. This year (and in other previous years I've worked) we've had a nice steady stream of incoming orders weeks beforehand. The latter is always encouraging.

Anyway, this morning I had to order our standard order for the week - in addition to the Valentine's order already on its way - when my boss alerted me he thought our wholesaler had already left for our way. Um... Immediately I mentally scanned through the list - if we could not get any additional flowers, we would be fine since we had called in our must-have's this past Friday. But I called our wholesaler anyway. Apparently they had already left because they had an entire vanful coming our way and they would make a second trip back mid-morning.

Now, this isn't really unusual since my bosses reminded me normally they go themselves and pick it up, filling up their own van. Nonetheless, it still bemused me that they were sending an entire van our way.  

This is the bulk of that first vanful- but even this doesn't include the greenery that came on it as well.

This is the part of Valentine's I love - I love that sense of beginning, that "we're all in this together" comradery as we load out boxes, process flowers, organize and get back into that holiday mindset. I love seeing the vast amount of flowers and being able to enjoy all the different kinds and colors and dreaming up bouquets. I love the anticipation even if I dread what it will be.

Unfortunately with V-Day, even though you have all these pretty flowers, there's less design and more recipe work. That's mostly because you have to bang out so many arrangements so quickly and you need solid pieces that people enjoy that you can have prepared in advance. However we do customize each piece that requests it (which is a lot) and I really enjoy that. (And sometimes all that means is we're told "pick whatever's prettiest." Okay! I can do that!) 

I guess that isn't entirely true. We actually do a lot of customization on pieces that allow for it. But we also have a website that people can choose their bouquet from as well. And since most people (understandably) want to see a picture of what they're going to receive, we do more standard arrangements. That's equally as much the reason why. 

As for tomorrow we will be receiving our second bulk shipment and then we'll get in smaller orders on Wednesday & Thursday. More roses come in tomorrow - I'm personally hoping for some Sweetness as they're gorgeous and they don't come in often, but I'll always take orange too since they're still my favorite. :)

Sweetness - Pic from Sun King. Drool.

Let the games begin.

Starting All Over Again: Genesis & Exodus

Not long ago I began rereading through Genesis on a whim. I originally planned just to read through the original creation story for a night, but then suddenly the book really opened itself up to me and I was very drawn in by what I was reading. I have no doubt that that is by the grace of God alone, but I also know another part of it is I've finally developed enough knowledge of the Jewish culture to began to connect some of the dots. I also worked harder this time at following the generational lines and therefore able to make better connections in how the stories develop into and relate to one another.

For example, this is really the first time I've even begun to grasp why circumcision is so vastly important to the Jewish culture and why its such a huge deal when its rebuffed in the New Testament. The fact that after the flood God not only makes a covenant with man (which by itself sounds like such a crazy idea), but specifically "with all living things." And then God makes another covenant with a man! Also, the first time I've realized that the Israelites end up in Egypt because of the famine that occurred during Joseph's time. The first time I've noticed God choosing to bless & carry the covenant through the younger sons rather than the traditional firstborns. (Jacob, Joseph's son....? I believe I read that right.) The whole thing has been really good and really fascinating. And really beautiful! There were so many times I started to tear up during Joseph's story. So much heartbreak, so much redemption. Such deep family ties by the end.
And that by Genesis 6 there's already a reference to "the heroes of old." This is Genesis 6. This is still the beginning. And there are already heroes of old in the land? I think I was just able to begin to develop such a larger scope for the timeline of the Bible and, how true (and incredible) the Name Ancient of Days really is.

Then - after my super exciting revelation of how the Jews came to Egypt in the first place - I decided to jump on in to Exodus hoping to carry on my eye opening streak. I've actually probably read Exodus the most in variations. For some reason the story of Moses fascinated me in particular as a kid and I read it over and over and over in my children's book. I loved the story of Moses being "drawn out of the water." I still do. I love the image. You hear the stories a lot as a kid. I've completed a study on the temple that I really enjoyed. In a lot of ways, I really love this book.

But somehow I've apparently always missed that during the plagues the river actually turned to blood. BLOOD. Not just red water, as I guess was the image my childhood imagination conjured up in its place. Blood. Blood. (As you can tell, I just finished the passage and I'm still coming to terms with this.) I immediately recoiled on the bed and all I could think of was "God, this is so weird. THIS IS SO WEIRD. WEIRD." 
And then I noticed it never says when the river fixed itself. I mean, obviously at some point it did, but... *shudder* Ugh.

But I also thought it was interesting that though the magician's could replicate the staff to snake and the plague of blood and frogs....but they obviously couldn't get rid of the frogs? That was something Moses could only ask of the Lord. (I can only assume this was the same case with the river since it never says otherwise and the Egyptians were forced to dig for water nearby.)

I think next we start the plague of locusts. Or hail.

Any favorite parts of these two ancient books? Anything you particular remember suddenly striking you as incredible or bizarre or even gross? (Like a river of blood, people. BLOOD. Good luck sleeping well tonight, Sherri....)