The little guy is now in 4th grade. The summer passed a lot faster than I expected... but then, the years are going by faster too. It's time to be thinking about Halloween... don't know if we'll do much of anything scary or ambitious this year.
But overall - it's been a good year so far. 4th grade - school is still 'fun'. The kids are still friendly to each other, and the stresses of middle and high school are still quite a ways off. We'll see what happens... I'd like to keep him in this sort of environment until he graduates high school, but I don't know whether it's going to be possible or practical.
On the work front... we had a meeting today. Our site lead... in my observation he's stretched himself too thin. We have a trouble call queue that needs to be managed, and we've got one guy who does a great job at doing that and handling other things around the shop - but he's been put to work elsewhere. (It ain't me, by the way.) Instead, our site lead's trying to multitask - handle all the fires and concerns our shop has to deal with on a daily basis, AND try to handle the call queue, which takes a lot of concentration and attention to do it right. With a hundred and one things to handle and pulling him every which way, he's trying to juggle too much and stuff is dropping. When it does, he gets yelled at by the overall boss... and you know what flows downhill. Minor stuff becomes very large problems - and anything you do is likely to be wrong.
Delegation isn't his strong point. Don't know if I'm trusted enough to suggest he get Richard back in to handle the call queue - or make him see that he's chosen to overwork himself. He needs to shed some of his load, or we'll all suffer for it.
I've been thinking it may be time to move on. Don't really want to - I LIKE the folks out at the plant I have to take care of, and I can't hardly beat the schedule, but the atmosphere in the shop is not good... not good at all.
J.