Sunday, March 27, 2011

Welcome to Spring

We hit 60 for the time this year today AND it didn't rain! The neighbors celebrated by bbq'ing this evening. It smelled wonderful. I had a colonoscopy Wednesday. My last solid food meal was Sunday evening. I was empty from stem to stern. The doc found 4 small polyps, nothing serious. Now I'm working on refilling my system. So many choices. That bbq made me hungry all over again even though I'd eaten an hour earlier. This weekend I'll crank up ours: burgers, maybe a pork tenderloin. Yum!

The SSQA audit it over. We hit our goal of 5.0 according to the auditors. They've turned their report into Applied Materials who have to review it, approve it and flip the switch in their database changing us from "Conditional" to "Approved". Only then do I get to stop filling out first article reports on a sampling of every shipment we send them. I've had to do it so often that it's almost routine. A routine Chinese fire drill every couple of weeks, more often towards the end of the month. Lots of extra paperwork.

And the fun never stops: we have another customer audit the beginning of May. This is the one that hit us shortly after the last SSQA audit in August. He ended up writing us up saying in effect "what ever they have to do for SSQA, that goes for us too". He was happy with the copy of the roadmap we were using to track all the things we were doing for SSQA. He should be happy with the state of our Quality Systems too. All we have to do is keep all the things we started going strong. It gets me up in the mornings and makes the days go quick.

On the weekends I've been giving driving lessons to the grandson. He's moved from practicing in my truck (an automatic) to learning to drive a stick shift in the Rav4. It's surprisingly forgiving. He's got the basics down. Now it's a matter of practice, practice and more practice. He's a freshman in high school and made the baseball team as a "swing" player between the varsity and the Freshman or "B" teams. That means he get's to travel and suit up for the varsity games and even play some if and when they get 20 runs ahead. Don't laugh, it happened this week. He got to play a little first base. I'll hear all about it when we're out on the road Saturday morning. Troy visits with P while we're out driving around. It's a good time to hash out the problems of the world.

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