As many of you know, I finished a degree in Hospitality Studies last year. My actual degree is as follows: Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with a Concentration in Hospitality Studies. Whew! I also have a minor in Travel & Tourism with a concentration in event management. After graduating in May 2006, I took off the summer because I had gone to school 3 solid years. I started seriously looking for a job using my degree in December of last year. I looked.......for.......9..........long.............................months before landing a job. On October 1, 2007 I started work as a Corporate Travel Coordinator for North American Stainless (NAS)located in Ghent, Kentucky. I didn't think I would actually enjoy working in travel, but I do. I make all the travel arrangements for those at NAS who travel, all the way from the President and down. I also audit expense reports and see that those get paid, make cash advances for travelers who need it, negotiate rates with hotels, car rental companies, and, eventually, airlines; and they tell me I will be doing some event planning as well. I really enjoy the work, and I really enjoy the people I work with.

When I started at NAS we had 2 weeks of orientation to complete. I know a littile bit more about certain chemicals and acids than I did before, but one really cool thing we got to do was put out a fuel fire with two different kinds of fire extinguishers. What a rush! That was so fun. We got to take a tour of the entire plant, too. Now let me explain something here. The building where they conducted the orientation is called the cold mill. This is the building where the stainless steel is finished off and packaged for shipment. Everything here is done with a cold process, hence the cold mill. Once I entered the building I would have to walk at least a quarter of a mile to get to the room where orientation was held, and this was not the end of the building. They are really huge. We saw the process for making stainless steel from start (scrap metal) to finish. The Melt Shop was the most amazing. Have you seen the photographs of hot liquid metal being poured out of ginormous buckets? I actually got to see that with my own two eyes! I didn't know this, but to get different grades of stainless they add different kinds of ores and metals to it when it is in the furnace. The Melt Shop was like walking through varying degrees of hell, let me tell you. It was hot hot hot! We saw billets of steel 12 inches thick, 4 feet wide and 20 feet long red hot. This went through a machine that flattened it to 2 inches thick and made it more like 60-80 feet long. Then this was rolled up into a red hot coil of metal. It was truly amazing to see.

As for the rest of the process, we learned how they "wash" the steel in acids to remove the carbon, and this helps make it shiny. The stainless is finished off according to customer specs, and then shipped out. I have always been interested in manufacturing, and never dreamed in my wildest dreams that I would ever get to see stainless made. I appreciate it that NAS makes that a part of the orientation process.

NAS is part of a Spanish-owned company called Acerinox. They have world-wide distribution of stainless steel, and I believe they are the number one producers of it in the USA.
I have been working there for about 6 weeks now, and feel I am finally getting the hang of things. I'm learning a lot and I am looking forward to learning more. It's such a breath of fresh air to be doing something different at this point in my life, and I'm so happy that I took the time, as hard as it was sometimes, to get a degree. I have worked in administration all my life, and I was ready for a change. Change is good!

Toby (left) and Rudy (right)

Here are our two wethers (aka weed eaters). Toby and Rudy help me feed them every night. They follow me into the barn and make sure I get the right food, and then run over to their buckets to be sure I put in enough! Nubian goats really like to eat weeds, which is why I bought them. This past summer they were out in the yard and followed me over to the garden. I wondered what they would do. They walked up and sniffed the corn, no, not good....walked over and sniffed the beans, no good either, sniffed the tomatoes, same...no good. Wait! Here's a weed! Yummy! It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?!