Anything for a buck (almost)

They're baaaaaaack!  Early Saturday I took the dog out for her morning dootie call and found...you guessed it...yet another 5K run being set up, complete with circus tents in the streets, loudspeakers, balloon arches, sponsor tables, and street barricades.  And a few thousand runners milling about.  I need to find a way to capitalize on all these people invading my neighborhood every other weekend.  Maybe I could sell them "Miracle Quick-Energy Bars" that I doubt many of these skinny-minnies have ever heard of....they're more commonly known as Snickers.  (It's all about the marketing.  ;)


I really hated going to work yesterday as the weather was absolutely perfect.  I would have loved to have done something fun outside instead, but I'm glad I went as I met a promising client who might want to build a new custom home.  I'm meeting them again Tuesday afternoon to provide them with some more specific info I think might help persuade them.  *Fingers crossed*  Back home later, dinner of barbecued spare ribs made me forget about having to work all afternoon.


And finally....I actually have a great deal of sympathy for some of the Occupy Wall Street grievances, specifically the one's about dislodging the banker's grip from around Congress' neck and getting our economy going again and creating jobs.  Unfortunately, many people think the protesters are just a bunch of wackos and dismiss them out of hand.  I don't think this lady, for one, is helping their image:

She needs to learn to say, "Would you like fries with that, sir?"

Have a great week, everyone.

S

  

Talk about luck!

My wife has an abundance of it.  Several months ago she was out walking the dog and she found money blowing down the street.  Then just a few weeks ago she was walking the dog one Sunday morning and found a watch.  A pin on the band had broken and apparently the guy it belonged to (drunk?) didn't feel it fall off.  This morning K was walking the dog again and she found a cell phone.  Fortunately it still works, even after the rains we had last night, so she can trace it back to it's owner.


Hmmm....it just dawned on me.  Maybe the DOG is the lucky charm here.


Anyway, the only person I know luckier than K is my daughter, Andrea.  She spent 5 years in the US Navy, and I refer to her as "the Forrest Gump of the Navy" because she could just luck into more good situations.  Once she was inspecting a helicopter and found something amiss, so she called Quality Assurance over to take a look.  Turns out it was a HUGE deal....the Navy had a 24-hour safety stand down of their entire CH-46 fleet so they could be checked out worldwide....and this got her the award for "Sailor of the Quarter, Air Wing Pacific Fleet" (or something like that).


Then later she volunteered to help bring the USS Nimitz from its old home port in Norfolk, VA to its new home port on the west coast.  Back in San Diego she was at the gym one evening wearing sweats and a "Nimitz" baseball cap when the middle-aged guy running on the treadmill next to her said, " I see you're on the Nimitz?"  She explained she was with a helo squadron and he said he'd heard they were having trouble with their very elderly helicopters.  She said, yes, everyone thought the problem was blah blah, but she thought it was a different blah blah.


The next day she reported to work and was told to go immediately to the Admiral's office (usually not a good thing).   She arrived there to find the Admiral was the guy on the treadmill from the evening before!  He put her on a conference call with the engineers at Boeing and she told them how to fix their helicopters.  Turns out she was right, something all their "experts" couldn't seem to get a handle on.  Again, another big award came her way.  Now is that Forrest Gump-like or what?


Yep, I think I've been blessed with some lucky women in my life.  Maybe I need to get them to direct some of that "luck" towards picking winning lottery numbers.  :)


S

Bazinga!

Craig's List came through for me again.  Yesterday evening I delivered to the new owner a beautiful framed signed/numbered print that used to hang over our fireplace, but for the past 2+ years has been leaning against the wall in our spare bedroom collecting dust.  We're slowly-but-surely disposing of stuff that we don't use so that when the day comes that we can move, hopefully to Colorado, moving will be a breeze and we can comfortably fit into a smaller, less expensive abode.  Read:  more money for fun activities/travels.  Fortunately I/we don't have much sentimental attachment to our "stuff", so letting it go isn't that difficult.


Speaking of Colorado, I see the first snow of the season has arrived in Denver.  That same storm will be arriving here in north Texas today, except in the form of 50 degree temps and rain.  I'm ready....let 'er rip.  Things here will be back to 70 and sunny by the weekend.  :)


In the news I see the too-big-to-fail European banks got a rude awakening.  They're being forced to write off half the value of the loans they made to Greece.  Looks like their greed bit 'em in the butt.  Whatever happened to prudent lending?  They should have known better.


Did you see where two members of the Italian Parliament got into a fistfight while "debating" the necessity of raising the retirement age to 67?  One accused the other's wife of retiring with a full pension at the ripe old age of 39, saying that's what's wrong with the system now.  Thirty nine?   Mama Mia!


S

Amazing short video....YOU'VE GOTTA SEE THIS!

If you don't do anything else today, invest 2-minutes 11-seconds and watch this short video of Michael Winslow doing Led Zeppelin.  It'll be time well spent, promise.   Turn up the sound and enjoy!


S

My plan to save the economy

Have you ever noticed that when things get a little tough for a company and they need to save a few dollars the first thing they do is lay employees off, or if things get too rough, they shutter entire facilities and "outsource" production to some foreign land with cheap labor?  Meanwhile the CEO's and their senior VP's all stay here in their ivory towers, making big bucks and living the high life.  Here's my idea....outsource THEIR jobs.


Case in point:  Craig A. Dubow, until recently the CEO of Gannett, which publishes USA Today and 81 other papers.  During his 6 years as chief executive, generally considered to be a disaster for Gannett, their stock fell to $10 from around $75 when he took over, and he pink slipped 20,000 of his 52,000 employees.  Was he fired for such a pitiful performance?  Nope, he was actually paid very well, $16 million in salary and bonuses over just the past 2 years.  The Gannett board finally wised up and allowed him to "retire for health reasons" and gave him $37.1 million in retirement, health, and disability benefits as he left the building.


Back to my plan....why not get a CEO from India or South Korea or Bangladesh, set 'em up in a little office over there with a computer, internet, and Skype, and let 'em run the company long distance?  You could probably get a sharp guy/gal for maybe $250,000 a year.  They'd probably be happy to get it, and they wouldn't even need health benefits as it's usually provided by their gubment or available for barter from their village medicine man. Same for the top 20 or so senior execs.  Imagine how much that would save the company.  Talk about happy stockholders!  What's the worst that could happen?  They run the business into the ground....just like Mr. Dubow did?


I don't have a problem with paying a CEO big bucks if he does a good job, takes a struggling company, for example, and puts it back in the black, and even starts expanding and hiring.  They deserve it.  Alan Mulally of Ford comes to mind.  But these days way too many Dubow's are paid like Mulally's.


As a backup plan, I'm available for hire for a measly million bucks or so a year.  I'll even buy my own insurance, and drive myself, too.  :)


S

A good weekend....

I got up earlier than I wanted on Saturday to take the dog out and found to my dismay that yet another charity had yet another 5K run going on, and it was being staged in MY neighborhood.  Again.  I'm all for charities making a buck, but why must I walk out my door what seems like every other Saturday to find 10,000 people milling around, PA systems blaring, and golf carts whizzing by?  Why can't they start one from some other neighborhood once in a while?  Then they had the major roads closed for the run all morning, meaning a normal 2-mile trip took me on a 4-mile runaround.  I managed to not run any of 'em over....K calls it "peaceful co-existence".  

I dumped off a car load of old records....literally, my car had 15 boxes of files in it....at the shredders later Saturday morning, and after that I had a day free of chores.  I went to REI and visited my kayak, which they are kindly holding for me until I can scrape a few more dollars together and find a place to keep it.

The highlight of my weekend was watching my alma mater Texas Tech play #1 ranked Oklahoma Saturday night on TV.  After a 2-hour delay because of a huge storm in the area (Norman, OK) Tech whipped up on them convincingly, winning 41-38.  It really wasn't as close as the final score indicates.  How was that possible?  Tech always has a great offense, but defense is usually just an abstract theory to them. Saturday they must have slipped in some ringers as our defense pretty much kept OK* in check.  They scored 2 late touchdowns to make it semi-interesting, but by then the stands were half empty.  *happy dance*  

So that was my 1-day weekend (had to work Sunday).  Didn't kill any runners, goofed off, watched Texas Tech kick ass.  Told you it was a good weekend.  ;)

S


*Why do Oklahoma's license plates say "Oklahoma is OK"?  Because they can't spell "mediocre".  (Sorry, that was mean.  Funny, but mean. ;)

We're scaling back

My brother/business partner and I have said for quite a while that we needed to scale back on the amount of "stuff" we keep at our warehouse.  You know how it goes....you have some stuff left over after building a house such a bag of grout, a few pieces of baseboard trim, maybe a couple of closet rods, so you just dump it in the warehouse and tell yourself you'll use it on the next house.  But of course you don't.  Then before you know it you've got so much stuff crammed in there you can't walk.  That's where we are now.


One morning earlier this week we cleaned out a bunch of worthless things like some signs with bent legs painted in our old color scheme.  Why in the world were we keeping those?  We filled up half a dumpster!  Now we're into old files.  We have about 15 boxes of old files, check stubs, bank statements, etc that go back before 2000.  I found a shredding company that will be at a local high school Saturday morning with their big truck shredding stuff in exchange for a donation to the school's band program.  Deal!


Next we're going to move to a closer warehouse space (now that we're building further north as our city grows that direction) and get one a bit smaller, too.  I like being organized and uncluttered.  Next I need to work on some personal stuff I've been dragging around that needs a new home.  I'm thinking Craig's List.


Have a great weekend, everyone.  ;)


S