Monday, March 20, 2006

SPRING?

I see that the calendar claims that Spring begins today. Once again, after a relatively dry weekend, the rains are coming back tonight and tomorrow. I'm worried that the Spring might rust if this rain doesn't subside at some point.

This will be a busy week and I'll only spend two days of it here in the office. I have a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona that begins on Wednesday afternoon. It is the kind of conference that I like in that we will have a brief opening session (5:00PM-5:30PM) on Wednesday afternoon, followed by buses that will take us all out to dinner at Buffalo Chip Saloon and Steakhouse. The next day has breakfast at 8:00 AM followed by a trade show with the various underwriting departments and then golf from noon to 5:00PM followed by a catered dinner at the resort and then Casino night with slot machines, blackjack, roulette, craps and Texas Hold'em. The next day breakfast at 8:00AM followed by speakers from 8:30-10:00 AM and meetings with individual underwriters. They offered tickets to the Giants Spring training game in the afternoon, but I wanted to get back home, so I fly out 2:07 PM and arrive back in Sac at 3:05PM. There is a one hour time difference in Phoenix.

I'm traveling with one of the underwriters out of Modesto and we will visit with Emery Jensen, my old boss at Republic Western, who is now the Pacific Region Manager for Scottsdale Insurance. We will meet with Emery and his luietenant, Greg Buckley, who is the Underwriting Manager for our territory. Scott Epstein from our San Francisco office will piggyback that meeting with us. It should be a good trip. The conference is being hosted by Colony Insurance, our third largest carrier. I have yet to visit them and hope to make it over to the office on Friday morning. It will be a busy week, but it should be fun as well.

I did play golf over the weekend and in fact played both Saturday and Sunday. I played Saturday with Boyd and Mel in my regular foursome and then had an old friend from the golf club in town on Saturday. Mark Forbes was our webmaster and works for Sharp Electronics in their computer disk division in Portland. He moved to Washington State in 2004 and we keep in touch mostly through fantasy sports. Randy actually has been in touch with Mark through our football fantasy league. Mark sent me a note and said that he'd like to play golf on Sunday, but that he couldn't get out until 1;30 PM. I got a 1:35 tee time and arranged for two of his other friends (Gary Krohn and Neil Thomas) to play. We about finished in the dark last night, getting off the course at 6:30 in heavy shadows. The last two holes were played in the darkening skies of late twilight. I managed to string together two good rounds of golf over the weekend and shot 42+39 on Saturday followed by 39+42 on Sunday, for a pair of 81s. Sunday was more of a challenge as we had winds of 20-25 MPH blowing and I played with golfers with indexes of 24, 19 and 18. We met up with Greg Wanee and his wife as well as Liz, Lily and Darla afterward and all went to dinner. We had margaritas and toasted Mark's new bride, who was waiting for him in Washington. Mark was in town working on his business, Ventana, an antenna business for CB enthusiasts. She knew that he'd be busy building antennas and then playing golf. We hope to meet her next trip. It was fun and a nice end to the weekend.

Saturday night we hosted one of our friends from church, Marilyn, and her husband, Dennis for dinner. Marilyn has been going to church for thirty years and Dennis has not. We have been praying for him for years and decided to invite them both to dinner. We had never met Dennis as he is a non-church goer. He is a golfer and we are both about 12 handicappers. We had a great time. Dennis is the president of his golf club, Peach Tree Country Club in Linda, California. I will play with him some weekday up at his club. It is one of the jewels of the area, a 6400 yard track in Linda that was formed in 1965 by a group of peach farmers in Marysville. It has grown to 455 members, but the initiation is only $1000 and the dues $265 a month. We saw Marilyn at church on Sunday and she said that Dennis had a great time and wants to invite us over. He was surprised that we didn't give him the "bum's rush" about going to church. It was his biggest fear when Marilyn told him that they were going to some friends from church. I will encourage him to come to church eventually, but want to get to know him, play some golf and become friends first.

Jackson Sonyanga, the African minister from a church in Kampala, Uganda was back speaking at our church yesterday. Jackson brought some video and news about the 21 orphanage homes that have been built thanks to the support of Adventure Chrisitian church. AIDS is still an epidemic in Uganda and there are tens of thousands of orphans due to the epidemic. The homes are all clustered together in a park area and called Adventure Village. There are about twelve children in each home and they are separated boys and girls. It was amazing to see the work that is being done a world away because of our friendship with Jackson. He gave another very convicting sermon on evangelism. He talked about the new converts to Christianity in Uganda and how they go door-to-door preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ and how here in America we isolate the new Christians and don't let them get involved until they have been properly indoctrinated into the body. He always brings a "slap you upside the head" message with him from Uganda when he visits and it was great to see him. Rick will be back from his sabattical on Easter Sunday and we are all anxious to see his return. He wanted to come back sooner, but the Elders made him take his full four months off and wouldn't let him return.

Darla and I went to see a movie Friday night. We've been so busy the past few weeks that we needed a date night and went to see the new movie "Failure to Launch" It was hilarious and Terry Bradshaw steals the show. Darla has four jewelry shows over the next week and our time together is limited, especially with me leaving town.

Well, that is the news that is fit to share with you all. I hope you are all well. You will never stand so tall as when you kneel to PRAY. Take care. Ciao.

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