Working until the last minute!

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day!  Most years, i deliver flowers the day before, the day of, and bat clean up on the day after.  This year, because we are leaving town today, i can only deliver this morning, and i hope to get a couple of good routes in before we leave.

Those who've read my blog for a while will recognize these, but i hope you will all pass them around.
 
So, once again, from the point of view of the person who just might be delivering your flowers, comes a few hints for how to make my job easier and assure that you will get those flowers there.

1.  Order early.  Earlier than that.  Yes, that early.

     Here's the thing.  The florists order lots and lots of flowers, and some are going to be in better shape than others.  The nicest ones get used first.  By midday on Valentine's Day, they are using the ones they would have passed over earlier.  Ordering ahead, and ordering for early delivery, gets you the nicest selection.

Ordering early also means that if we can't find your location or have trouble, we have time for a redelivery.

One other thing.  Order to have them delivered the day before, and then give your sweetheart the card and candy and date on the actual day, and s/he will know you weren't just throwing something together last minute, you planned it out and made the occasion last a bit longer.  Points for you!

2.  Mark your home well!  This is for your benefit as well as ours.  After all, if we can't find you, what makes you think the EMTs can find you in the middle of the night?

3.   Delivery drivers know the town in general, but not every single side street, business, nook and cranny.  Give us your whole, complete address.  This means include:

     Avenue, Street, Boulevard, Drive, Circle, Lane, or whatever is in the actual title of your street.

     Your apartment complex name and apartment number
     or the nursing home name and room number
     or the business name and office number/division of the business where your sweetheart works.

     You know where it is, but we don't, and it's no fun having to guess.

4.  If you live in a gated community, please tell us, and give us a way to get in.  It's frustrating not to be able to get to your home because we need a code.  Give us a phone number, and i'll talk more about that later.

5.  The same goes for if you are having flowers delivered to a limited access work place.  Make sure we can get in there to it.  More than once i've had to wait until someone was leaving the building to beg to be brought in, and had to register, and all of that. Again, a phone number helps.

6.  If you and your recipient are both at work all day, give us permission, when you place the order, to leave the flowers in a safe place by your back door, under a patio, or with a neighbor.

7.  Tell us what time your recipeint gets off work, if you really want us to go there.  It's frustrating to get there a half hour after s/he got off for the day.

8.  About phone numbers:  tell your recipient to answer the phone!  Yes, you usually don't answer if you don't recognize the number.  Tell him/her to answer anyway, on this day, because there is a surprise coming.  Give us your number as well, and answer it.  If we can get in touch with you, or your recipient, we can work out most delivery complications easily, and we don't get a call an hour later after you've listend to the voicemail and i have to tell you that i'm sorry, your item is no longer with me, it's been sent back for redelivery when they can get to it again..

Yes, i know, you want it to be a surprise.  So, if we have to call the recipient, the surprise comes over the phone.  That's better than the nasty surprise of us not being able to get it delivered at all.

9.  Please if you ask us to deliver to the school, make sure you let us know it's a school, and order early enough that we can get there before the carpool line starts.  The people in the carpool lane get very upset with us, as they think we are cutting in line.  Tell us if the person is in the office, a teacher, or someone in the cafeteria or on the janitorial staff, too.  One year it took the office people 20 minutes to figure out who the person was and in which department.

10.  Remember your driver is paid only for completed deliveries.  Time is of the essence for us, we want to successfully deliver as many items as we can, for the joy it brings you and the money it brings us.  There's no shame in earning some extra cash by doing this service, so help us serve you better by following the tips above!

 

Today is:

Blame Someone Else Day -- always on the first Friday the 13th of the year, you get a free pass to blame someone else!

Break-Up Day -- if you are over him/her, don't go through tomorrow pledging love falsely, get out today

Dream of Your Sweetheart Day -- a reminder that if you aren't ready for Valentine's Day tomorrow, you'd better get cracking

Employee Legal Awareness Day -- Australia

Get a Different Name Day -- for those who hate their name; sponsored by Wellcat Holidays

Great Back Yard Bird Count begins -- birdsource.org; a four day project for anyone from across North America; count birds for a few minutes a day today, or every day for the next four days, giving a real time idea of where the birds are now

Ides of February -- Ancient Roman Calendar; also
     Parentalia begins -- through the 21st (honoring divi parentes -- the deified ancestors)
     Lupercalia begins -- through the 15th (to rid the city of evil spirits)
     Orgiastic festival of Juno Februa begins -- through tomorrow

I Value Your Friendship Day -- because you don't want to neglect your friends while we are remembering love this week

Madly in Love With Me Day -- because you have to love "me" before you can love "we"

National Date Festival -- Indio, CA, US (a most exotic county fair, the date comes from the land of the Arabian Nights and this festival celebrates all aspects of the theme; through the 22nd)

National Tortellini Day

Nice Carnival -- Nice, France (dating back to the 14th century, this celebration is one of France's best; through Mar. 1)

Reenactment of the Battle of Olustee -- Olustee, FL, US (largest Civil War battle in Florida; through Sunday)

St. Catherine dei Ricci's Day (Patron of the ill)

Ta-asobi -- Akatsuka Suwa Shrine, Itabashi-ku, Japan (ceremony to pray for a good harvest)

Trndez or Tearnandarach -- Armenian Christian Church (fire celebration, begins in the evening and goes through tomorrow; originally a pagan sun worship celebration, it is now a Candlemas celebration by the OS Calendar)

Weiberfastnach -- Cologne, Germany (Women's Carnival, the day the women run the pre-Lent celebration)

Wings Over the Platte Spring Migration Celebration -- Grand Island, NE, US (the world's largest concentration of sandhill cranes is celebrated through mid-April)

Yuma Square and Round Dance Festival -- Yuma, AZ, US (for square and round dance enthusiasts; through Sunday)



Birthdays Today:

Mena Suvari, 1979
Robbie Williams, 1974
Kelly Hu, 1968
David Naughton, 1951
Peter Gabriel, 1950
Stockard Channing, 1944
Jerry Springer, 1944
Carol Lynley, 1942
Peter Tork, 1942
Bo Svenson, 1941
George Segal, 1934
Kim Novak, 1933
Chuck Yeager, 1923
Eileen Farrell, 1920
Tennessee Ernie Ford, 1919
Eddie Robinson, 1919
Grant Wood, 1892
Alvin York, 1887
Elizabeth "Bess" Virginia Wallace Truman, 1885
Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, 1849
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, 1754
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, 1682


Debuting/Premiering Today:

"Merlin"(Musical), 1983
"Prince Valiant"(Comic strip), 1937


Today in History:

Baghdad falls to the Mongols, and the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed, 1258
Jews are expelled from Burgsordf, Switzerland, 1349
The Disfida di Barletta (Challenge of Barletta); Frenchman Charles de la Motte accused Italians of cowardice, and thirteen Italians proceeded to rout 13 Frenchmen in a chivalrous horseback tourney, 1503
St. Augustine, Florida, is founded, becoming the oldest continuously occupied European established city, and the oldest port, in the continental United States, 1566
Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome for trial before the Inquisition for professing belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, 1633
Treaty of Lisbon:  Spain recognizes Portugal, 1668
The Massacre of Glencoe: 78 members of the clan Macdonald are murdered for not promptly pledging allegiance to the new king, William of Orange (William III), 1692
Cholera appears in London, 1832
Work begins on the covering of the Zenne, burying Brussels's primary river and creating the modern central boulevards, 1867
The feminist newspaper La Citoyenne is first published in Paris by the activist Hubertine Auclert, 1881
Painter Thomas Eakins resigns from Philadelphia Academy of Art after controversial over use of male nudes in a coed art class, 1886
Auguste and Louis Lumière patent the Cinematographe, a combination movie camera and projector, 1894
English suffragettes storm British Parliament and 60 women are arrested, 1907
The Negro National League is formed, 1920
A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, 1935
France tests its first atomic bomb, 1960
Black Sabbath, arguably the very first heavy metal album, is released, 1970
A series of sewer explosions destroys more than two miles of streets in Louisville, Kentucky, 1981
An agreement is reached on a two-stage plan to reunite Germany, 1990
The last original "Peanuts" comic strip appears in newspapers one day after Charles M. Schulz dies, 2000
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces the discovery of the universe's largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093. Astronomers named this star "Lucy" after The Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", 2004
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations, 2008
At 23:31:30 UTC the Unix system time (time_t) number reaches 1234567890 seconds, 2009
For the first time in more than 100 years the Umatilla, an American Indian tribe, were able to hunt and harvest a bison just outside Yellowstone National Park, restoring a centuries-old tradition guaranteed by a treaty signed in 1855, 2011