Community Differences

We knew that there would be some differences in the way the other Communities performed their daily tasks. It was no surprise when the differences became obvious yesterday. First of all, El Cajon doesn't start work until 7:30 AM vs 7 AM at Arcadia. They also end their day at 7 PM instead of 8 PM that we are used to. We like those changes. Other differences are more subtle and really are a result of the managers' personal preference. An example is the record keeping they have at the meals. A log book is kept at the table where the managers sit that keeps track of the meal count, service end times and number of paid guests at each meal. We haven't seen any of that so far.

One of the managers here, Larry, is a trainer and the person who visited us at Arcadia early on to give us a couple days of training. He sat with us yesterday for about an hour to review some other areas that we needed some exposure to, such as budget and P & L considerations. He told us that we are on the radar screen for the Region and are probably the next co-manager couple to be placed in a Community as Managers somewhere. Randy, our Regional Director, has indicated to us on several occasions that he wanted to move us into a Community as Managers as quickly as possible. I guess that time is nearing reality.

I spent most of the rest of the time making calls to the prospect base that they have here and Josie did some inventory for Housekeeping and worked on other operations duties. It was an interesting day. We had ecall duty during the night last night and, fortunately, there were no calls. We were told that ecalls are rare here and we can see that the resident population here seems to be healthier and younger than the residents at Arcadia Place.

We won't be able to take our fifth wheel out of storage a day early this week because we are too far south to make the trip to Menifee, set up and get back to Arcadia by our 11 AM start time on Wednesday. So, we will have to set up on Thursday afternoon when we get off at 3 PM to begin our 2 days off. The only real problem with doing it that way is we don't get a chance to turn on the refrigerator a day early so that it is nice and cold when we arrive for our regular time off. Otherwise, there is no real difference.

We're getting close to the end of another month which means the temperature gets turned up at the communities to close more sales. We're prepared to handle that extra pressure but it doesn't make for very pleasant work environments during that time. We just take it one day at a time...