Carrie is here and getting a car has been an ordeal. We decided to rent one last week and will have it two weeks or more while we look for a vehicle.

I took last Friday off so I could spend the three-day weekend with her while she rested from the trip.

Carrie slept most of the day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. She didn’t get up till almost 1pm on Sunday.

We have had the most spectacular time together though. Time to find a car.

Terribly busy the last week. With the Kaizen happening last week and thank God I was not involved but my interns have been doing fantastically.

Starting to clean things up around the apartment. Not a lot to do but just pick things up and get organized.

I sent things to Kitty at P&W last week for the corrective action on our audit and she was happy, but I have a lot to do by the end of the year.

That is correct, 17 days and counting!

Last week was not so good. A lot of scrap, new routers needed at the last minute again. Alternate routers needed for GE.

Then the weekend came, and it was not so good. Drank too much did not complete my tasks but I did order my 3D printer.

Getting things and the apartment ready.

I purchased a blower this week for cleaning off the deck.

This was another fantastic week. All week our scrap rate was low until we hit Friday. Holy crap. Our totals for Pratt Canada two 306 parts, one in which the cutter fell out of the tool holder. The set screw was over torqued or not set tight enough or the cutter shattered. I heard all three scenarios, and I don’t know which happened. The other was an over aggressive polisher that had not been trained on polishing Pratt Canada parts. The possibility of more exists because they gave her a cart of 24 parts.

We had another 40 F100x1’s scrapped at the broach. I have spent all weekend trying to figure out how to prevent that from happening. I don’t know.

A toilet was leaking in the master bathroom and when they came to fix it on Thursday, they fixed the wrong bathroom. I had to place another work order for them to fix on Friday. They got the correct one this time but I’m not sure if they fixed it or just caulked around it, hiding the leak.

I used the blower on Friday, cleaning the deck and it worked great.

On Friday I did my annual quality training and it spoke of the four fundamentals of quality. The first fundamental is ‘Training’ and this is what it said.

“I Will:

Only perform work for which I have been specifically trained and approved to perform. (if unsure, ask your supervisor)

Not ask or direct someone to perform work in which they have not been trained”

Amazing, this is precisely what happened with the Prat Canada 306 parts on Friday.

Until next week…..

Carrie arrives in one month. I can’t wait.

Yep, one month.

This past week was outstanding. Hans took Monday off and I spent most of the day updating all my spreadsheets for our budget and then started working on the Supernote and organizing everything.

Wednesday I also thought someone took my small notebook and pen, but it turns out I left it in another place. I looked there but someone had already picked it up. I ended up ordering another one that night and the next day it was returned to me. I felt pretty bad about assuming I worked with a bunch of thieves.

I asked Carrie if she would like a Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner and she said yes. The next thing I did was purchase one. $961.63 and a couple days later it arrived. I purchased the J7+ combo with vacuum and mopping features including the charging base which will dump the bin when full. I worked on setting it up on Sunday but need to give it more time for the mapping feature and make sure I’m around to get things out of the way. The Christmas village was in the way, but it was able to work around it.

I had a few movies I wanted to watch this weekend including, North by Northwest, Us, I know who killed me and The Happening. I did not watch any of them and instead watched Dungeons & Dragons Honour Among Thieves. That movie was pretty good.

Friday Joe Ritter messaged me and was hinting at something I had told him I would do but forgot about. I told him if he needed help, I would help out with $1000.00. I had forgot so I sent it right away. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I was going to be short in that account. After checking things out, I’ll be fine.

All in all it was a great week.

That is when Carrie will be back in Georgia! Yep, one month and a week.

I was not able to get anything done on Carrie’s desk this week because this is not much of an excuse, but the week was one from hell.

I had the audit check up with Kitty on Thursday. Wednesday turned out to be another great until the last hour.

The end of the week was all planned out, meeting with Kitty from Pratt on Thursday and finishing the F100 tooling manifest on Friday, Enter Hans an Pat (from now on will be referred to as knucklehead. I now have to complete all F100 tooling manifest items as well as the paperwork Hans told me he would complete. I had all the information I needed to complete the database and clipped my encrypted USB to my badge. I was good to go. Boy was I wrong. I unclipped the USB, loaded all the files I would need to complete the next tasks and left. I left WITHOUT MY USB! Arrrrggggghhhh!

All will be ok. I changed the location of the new freezer door and have it all installed.

When I got to work on Thursday, I had an email from Hans telling us we had to do manifests for FB2C, 2037 for Cleveland as well as the F100 things I was going to do Friday. I had to have it all complete before I left. It I had my free agency I would have walked out right then. What made things worse, I had to wait for pictures from Cleveland and I never received them.

When I came in on Friday, I still did not have the pictures. After talking with Hans, Cleveland was going to complete all the paperwork and all we had to do was check for errors. This made things much better and a nice finish to the week. I was able to get out at 3:30 and the weekend was looking good.

The weekend was great, no more drinking during the weekend and had plenty of time on my hands to work on Carrie’s desk but that did not happen because my right arm is hurting very badly today. I think it may be when I was working on the new freezer.

Another great weekend in the books. Three in a row now.

I bought Carrie’s tickets last week, first class both ways. I will still get her a wheelchair in Seattle and Atlanta.

This entire week was good. I was up before 4:30am every day and yes that includes Monday.

Friday, I subscribed to Finders Seekers Mysteries for me and Carrie. It is a monthly mystery game for you to solve. I think it will be great fun for me and Carrie to do together. The first one should arrive shortly, and it will be a mystery centered around Macho Pichu.

I wanted to work on Carrie’s desk this weekend as well as the wall hangings in the master bedroom that fell just after she left. I finished the wall hangings but have only separated the desk pieces so far. I put together the two couch tables we received and ordered a lot of other things this week.

• Five 128 gig memory cards
• Two E-Ink notebooks I’m going to try to get organized with, a Supernote A5X and a Boox Tab Ultra.
• A small 3 Cu ft Freezer
• Air Fryer attachment for our Instant Pot
• A Sim Card
• A flexible screw bit holder

That is one hell of a list and I’ll stop purchasing stuff until Carrie arrives on the 8th of June.

Chris stopped by to see Carrie on Saturday and brought Elnora along. This is the first time Elnora has been to the house.

Next week I will try to concentrate each day on putting something together on her desk.

That was a great week and look forward to another fantastic week coming up.

Most of the tooling was for parts we do not build anymore and they are very difficult to locate but below is the audit results. We still have until the 27th to sort things out.

Thanks again for all the time and energy you put into yesterday’s visit. And special thanks to Sam too, for all his time and work. Here is the current status and the next steps as I remember them. Please let me know if I need to correct anything or if I have forgotten anything…

1. Sample Set 1: We viewed 9 of 25 items from Sample Set 1. You will need to provide date-stamped pictures of the remaining 16 tools (7 of which are located at your alternate site).
2. Sample Set 2: We viewed 13 of 25 items from Sample Set 2. You will need to provide date-stamped pictures of the remaining 12 tools (5 of which are located at your alternate site).
3. We uncovered an issue with multiples of the same tool which are not serialized, and which don’t have their own records. In most cases, only 1 of the tools is USG owned, so the USG owned tool (or tool set) will need to have it’s own record, and will need to be serialized (both in the tool marking and in the record). In some cases, you will need to remove the USG marking from the non-USG owned ones. This was identified as an issue in the following tools (so far):
   1. TJ-20245 (2 sets of 2 viewed, only 1 owned by USG) – The 1 owned by USG should say “set of 2” in the descriptions in our records and yours.
   2. TJ-20234 (2 sets of 2 viewed, only 1 owned by USG) – The 1 owned by USG should say “set of 2” in the descriptions in our records and yours.
   3. TJ-20287 (2 sets of 2 viewed, only 1 owned by USG) – The 1 owned by USG should say “set of 2” in the descriptions in our records and yours.
   4. TJ-20244 (2 sets of 2 viewed, only 1 owned by USG) – The 1 owned by USG should say “set of 2” in the descriptions in our records and yours.
   5. OT-3909 (you have multiples, at least 2 are marked USG. PW records only show 1 USG owned OT-3909. You only have 1 record for all of them.
   6. ET-13124 (you have multiples. The one we viewed was not marked USG, but you may have 1 marked USG that we didn’t find. You believe you have at least 5 of this tool, although only record of 1)
   7. TJ-20222 (This was located in the Broach shelves. I have a note that it may be a set of 2. Please confirm before I update the description to say “Set of 2”.
4. Floor-to-Record items. All 7 items that I pulled had records in your database. This is an improvement from last year.
   1. TJ-20221 needs updated description to say “set of 2”.
5. Records: Last year it was noted that required elements were missing, and tools were missing from the database. You have added all of those elements, with the exception of location data (which you now have a column for, but which is not populated.
   1. As we discussed, the lack of location data is problematic, as evidenced by the fact that we spent many hours looking for tools today and were still missing many. You currently have no record of where tools are.
   2. You still need to add all the tools which are located at alternate locations into your database. You currently have no records for those tools.
6. Policies and Procedures: Last year it was noted that your policies and procedures did not address all required outcomes sufficiently. The plan was to adopt WP-500 for the Thomasville site. This still had not been implemented, but you are taking the action to get a version of WP-500 accepted, distributed and implemented.
7. Marking: Only 1 items of the 24 we have viewed so far was missing marking (and it is possible that was one of the multiples, not the USG one). This shows some improvement from last year when 3 of 25 items were missing USG marking.
8. Utilization: Last year a USG tool was being utilized inappropriately, on a Rolls Royce part. There was no evidence of continued issues there. You believe it has been addressed by training the operators on the requirements for tools marked as USG owned. This should be further corrected when you adopt your updated procedures which address utilization. Hopefully it will also be further protected against when you serialize the tools which are multiples to clearly identify which is the USG owned tool. Hopefully, going forward, tooling which is not specialized will not be billed to the government. I believe you said it was the jigs which really are not specialized.
9. Storage: Your storage areas will likely need to be organized, especially in Plant 2, where it appears that most of the tooling from the closed Smith Ave. was put rather haphazardly. This is related to your need to begin tracking location, as you will have to have identified locations (aisle, shelf, rack, bin…) that the tooling is put in.

To summarize much of our discussion, the issues with Records, Multiples of tools which are not accounted for in records, and Storage will probably need to be addressed hand in hand. Using the annual inventory which we send you, you will need to ensure you have 1 serialized record for each USG owned tool, that it is marked accordingly, and put in a location that is added to the database. You will then need to figure out how the locations get updated when tools are moved.

Actions:

1. I have set up a Zoom meeting for 4/27/23 to view the date-stamped pictures of the remaining tools from Sample Set 1 and 2. Any pictures not obtained by the 27^th, will be considered missing. I won’t be able to offer any additional time for them, as that will be a full month from when you were first sent the listing.
2. You are going to work on filling out the Extra-Surveillance Form and return it to me (hopefully this week). We will then set up a call to discuss procedures in more detail.
3. Once you confirm that my notes above are correct for the tools which we believe are sets of 2, both you and I will update our record descriptions to say “set of 2”.
4. You are working on adapting WI-500 to your site and are applying for an official Work Instruction number. Your target date for getting them accepted and to the distribution/implementation phase is 5/11/23.

That is a lot of stuff but it was actually marginally better than last year.