Preparing to go back to work

 Today is my final day of vacation. Limiting stress is one of my goals for the year (for health reasons: my BP is up, I'm having frequent episodes of insomnia, and at the beginning of the year I had some scary anxiety attacks that I do NOT want to have come back) and to that end I want to be all prepared for tomorrow. On Friday I sat down with the lunch payments I received at the end of the day on the 19th as well as all of the lunch and drink tickets for January. I entered the payments into the excel spreadsheet that I use to track these. Then I sorted tickets into the individual  classes and entered these numbers into the daily lunch and daily drink spreadsheets that I use to help me figure out how much food/milk to order and how many lunches I may be looking at making on any given day. Of course these numbers fluctuate depending on who decides that morning to order lunch or to buy milk at the lunch window that day. Three hours of work and I had all my numbers before me. I then went online and put in a food order at my food service providers website (food for tomorrow had been ordered based on numbers from the previous time I'd served this), went to my milk provider and placed my weekly order there as well. I then got on the phone and made arrangements for a special milk delivery to arrive on Monday to get us through until our regular delivery day. I figured this was enough work for a vacation day.
This morning I got out all those lunch and drink tickets and trimmed them to a size to fit the plastic protective sleeves they go into (the paper cutter in the school office can only get them so small), separated the tickets out into ordered lunches and non-ordered lunches for tomorrow and placed the tickets I am using tomorrow into the class pouches. We are very low tech at my little school. Still using paper tickets. No fancy scanners and ID badges here. This means tomorrow morning I will be copying each and every ticket in the school office before any of them go to the classrooms. Inevitably someone will lose their ticket before they reach the cafeteria. LOL. I also know that I will be dealing with parents who 'forgot' our first day back was a new lunch month and that means more payments and tickets to process. Processing the ones who were returned promptly Friday and today means my stress level is WAY lower. After all in addition to all this paperwork at the beginning of the day I have to cook lunch for what looks like close to 100 people. By myself. :-)
In any case although I've given up some precious hours of vacation time I am feeling good. I checked my work email this morning and returned an email that needed my prompt attention. As I've mentioned before this year I am one of the three people planning and running the parish fish fry events and this was connected to that. Early planning and prompt attention to my portion of the responsibilities means that I can keep a  handle on that stress thing yet again. And to that end I am going to make sure my February and March lunch menus are in place by the middle of this month. I just do not want to be dealing with those while dealing with the extra fry stuff.
Lastly GF and I will be going out to run a couple of errands. We will hit Target so that I can buy sponges for my cafeteria, then to GFS so that I can pick up fresh produce for salads for the days before my delivery arrives. And lastly gassing  up my SUV for the week.
I am feeling very productive and getting into that work state of mind!