week #4 almost over

We are almost done with our fourth week working as "packers' at Amazon, hard to believe we are almost 1/2 done. The week started out really cold with temperatures dropping into the lower 20's at night. We have been using our LP furnace as little as possible. Since Amazon is paying for the electricity it only makes sense to use our electric space heaters but when it gets this cold we have to make sure the furnace kicks on occasionally to heat our "wet bays" where are water hose hooks into the motorhome. We use an "extend a stay"  which I connected to our on board LP tank and this allows us to use a portable LP tank versus running the big tank low and having to tear everything down and drive the rig to town to refill. The downside to the portable tank is there is no gauge so when it's out you get cold and that is what happened to us sometimeTuesday night. When I woke up Wednesday morning the thermometer said it was only 60 degrees inside the coach. BRRRRR! I had to go outside and turn the small tank off, turn the big tank on then run back inside (the outside temperature was 22!) and reset the furnace so it would fire up again. Rudee stayed snuggled in bed. :-)
I found a place just outside of town to refill our portable tank and got that chore taken care of. Their prices were very reasonable at $20 for our 30lb tank, "see ya again in a couple of weeks guys".

Work this week has been more of a struggle. We are both sore and I am really feeling it in my hands. They are swollen and starting to ache from all the hand movements I do building and packing boxes. I have been taking Ibuprofen thinking that may help some with the swelling as well as the pain, time will tell if it works or not.
We are still a little slow with work. They have offered voluntary time off the last couple of shifts and last night they came around before our first break asking for people to clock out and if they wanted to stay home tomorrow (Saturday night) they would really appreciate it. We had already decided to stay as long as possible and losing an entire shift on Saturday just seemed to contradict why we are here in the first place, so we told them we wanted to stay. Only a couple of people left at 8 pm and they took about half of the remaining folks and shipped them out to a different department (Rudee and I stayed packing). Shortly after midnight they came around and asked if we wanted to leave at 2 am if they offered VTO to us and we said we would, next thing I know the supervisor came back over to us and said "log out and have a good night". We ended up clocking out at 1 am instead of 2 am and were a little confused about the sudden change but I guess, technically, we did volunteer to leave early but are not sure why they moved the time up on us.
The supervisor did share with us that they had 23 new trainees that would be packing boxes Saturday night so if we came to work it would not be packing. Sounds like we will be putting more tape on the floor or just doing "busy work" and it may end up being a long night. Maybe they will send us to a different department like they did the group last night. They worked in ICQA which (I think) stands for Inventory Control Quality Assurance. What that entails is they go to all the different cubby holes that hold all the millions of products and count how much "stuff" is in each hole and enter it into a hand scanner. The scanner tells them which "cubby hole" to go to and how many items should be there. The downside is there are cubby holes all the way to the floor so knee pads are provided.
I'm not sure I would like all the bending and stooping but it would be nice to learn something different while we are here. I'll keep you posted.