10/29/14 thru 11/14/14 - She Works Hard for the Money!

We've worked 1 eight hour day (orientation/training), 7 5 hour days ("work hardening"), and, so far, 2 10 hour days.  Our shift is Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday from 5:30pm until 4:00 am and, if required, our overtime day is Wednesday.  We are working in single toys but it's actually all single items so we've seen everything from ugly sweater cakepans to barbie dolls to vibrators (hmmmm)  to gun accessories.  Anything you can imagine goes thru our department which makes it interesting.  We stand for the whole 10 hours packing items into the appropriate size box, filling it with those wonderful airbags, taping it, scanning a label on it and sending it down the line and then we start all over - imagine Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory episode :).   Amazon is very good about ergonomics and we do stretches at the start of our shift and when we come back from lunch.  We also rotate stations after every break so that both sides of our bodies get equally abused.   The time goes fast but when we're done we walk out at 4:00 am doing the "Amazon Zombie Walk".  

The first few days my legs and feet hurt so bad that it was hard to sleep  but I got used to that. The next few days my arms and shoulders were aching but I got used to that.  Next it was my back screaming but we've had three days off and now everything is fine and tonight we get to start all over.  Hopefully these next four days of 10 hours don't break me.  I'm living on Advil and it does help as does soaking my feet in epsom salts (Thanks, Sue!). 

Since we are so tired and are working nights and the weather has been cold and rainy, when we're off we've watched a ton of movies.  Marty is almost done with 4 seasons of Boardwalk Empire!  That's a lot of TV.

Have you wondered what we do with Maddie while we're gone for over 10 hours a day?  Wonder no more, we have a very nice lady in the park who sends her husband off to work at Amazon while she stays home and walks dogs (smart lady!).  

When we're not watching TV/Movies we have done a little bit of sightseeing.  We are camped right next to Green River State Park and we hiked in there one day.  It's a very pretty park and was one of our options to stay at while working at Amazon but they don't have full hook-ups so we chose Green River Stables and have been very happy here.

We are not too far from the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln so on one of our days off we took a drive to Hodgenville, KY to check it out.  A replica of the Lincoln Cabin is inside this marble and granite memorial.  There are 56 steps leading to the memorial, one for every year of Lincoln's life. 

We also took a drive up north (95 miles) to Louisville to visit the Louisville Slugger Museum/Factory.  It was awesome - we saw bats being made, saw all the players signature plates on the wall, and at the end of the tour, they even gave us a miniature bat.  While in the museum, one of the docents saw my Cubs shirt and startled me with his Harry Caray imitation, he was pretty good.

The bat model most popular with today's players is Jose Cardenal's model #C271 - Cub fans always knew he was #1!

My favorite part of the day was being able to hold game-used bats of Mickey Mantle, Derek Jeter, and Cal Ripken - how cool is that?

Cal Ripken, Jr. Game Used Bat

My all time favorite - Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks!

That's all for now, it's off to work we go for the next four days.  It's very strange starting our work week on Friday.