Spring Concert for Sammy and the Hole in One that was, then wasn't, but was (I'll explain).

Samantha was adorable at her Pre-school's Spring Concert on Friday. Jennifer said that Samantha got a little lost in the performance as she is so short. I asked Jennifer where she thinks the short gene came from? Just asking. Samantha was playing a butterfly in case you couldn't tell. I think she could have been a Swan, but that would have made too much sense. She loves being in school and having friends and is learning so much. Certainly the smartest three year old that I know.

The incessant and horrid rain that has plagued our area is finally moving north to the great Moss Capital of the United States (Washington state) and our forecast is for Spring-like temperatures up into the mid seventies and low eighties by mid week. Today was overcast and windy, but devoid of rain. I played at Diamond Oaks today and the course is as wet as I've ever seen it. The mowers haven't been able to get on the course for a week and the fairways and rough are wet and long and the ball goes nowhere. The greens have been mowed everyday and are fast and in good shape (all of the greens have been reconfigured to drain well). I was up to almost the top of my shoes in several spots on the course and we lost one ball to the dreaded plug, when we couldn't find Boyd on number 10 when he hit into a particularly deep and wet part of the rough. I shot my routine 41+42=83 and Boyd had a 79. My handicap has creeped back up over the Winter as it tends to every year and I am at 11.6 which gives me a 13 on Diamond's 123 slope course.

As to the Hole in One. It was, but it wasn't mine. I hit a nine iron on the 133 yard fifth hole that was all over the pin. It was tucked behind a bunker and we couldn't see the hole from the tee box. Boyd hit a big fade with an 8 iron that started left of the green and was also tracking to the hole. I thought I was a little short, but when we got to the green there were two balls off the green (our playing partners) and only one ball on the green. My heart was racing figuring FINALLY!, my first ace. Sure enough there was a ball in the cup and when I pulled it out, it was Boyd's Titleist. My Bridgestone was about ten feet from the pin and short as I'd guessed. I celebrated with Boyd, and only after remembering that it was his seventh ace, did I call him a "Pig". My time will come. You can see one of the large oak trees that was felled in the recent storm. It bent over and pulled up the ground around the roots and the tree service will be out this week to cut it up and haul it off. It is covering about half of the seventh fairway right now.

The boys are both back to school after their Spring break. Darla and I took them out to dinner last night at Lorenzo's Mexican Cafe. We had a nice time visiting and getting caught up on their lives. David is off to a home in Berkeley that he will share with some friends of friends. He got a room for $399 a month. He will take BART into the city for his classes and when he starts interning at the architecture firm. After dinner I paid the bill while Darla and the boys were finishing up and then went to the restroom. When I came out, I was trailing some toilet paper on my shoe. No discretion from my wife as she hooted her Betty Rubble laugh and pointed out to all the other patrons what a boob her husband was. Jeesh.

Work is going well, we weathered a storm of visitors this last week and will have the President of our largest company (Colony) in with the senior VP of the Scottsdale branch on Wednesday. Pete, Anthony, Harvey and I will go to lunch with them. It is unusual for a President of one of our companies to come out and visit a branch, but we are their largest producing office in the entire company and he wants to visit us and see what we are doing right with them. It is a feather in my cap and Harvey was shocked when I told him they were coming in. It should be fun, we are going to Rudy's Hideaway, the lobster house not far from my office. We surpassed $200,000 in income on Friday and our lunch goal this month is $225,500 so we will be close. I will have everyone keeping their eye on the ball until Thursday afternoon.

This is somewhat short, but I stopped to wash and vacuum my car (it hadn't been done in three weeks and I was breaking out in a cold sweat). Darla is calling me to put the tri tip on the barbecue, so I will close this for another week and bid all of you Adieu. Ciao.

Vancouver rains come to Northern California

Yep. We are feeling like people of England after five straight days of rain and over 3 inches of precipitation. It is supposed to rain the next week into Friday and we should get another 2 inches of rain. Needless to say, my golf tournament was rained out this weekend. We had winds upwards of 50 MPH last night and trees were down and power out all over Sacramento. Roseville seemed to escape most of the brunt of the winds, but I still spent over an hour today cleaning up downed branches, leaves and mess from the wind and rain. I also made another application of crabgrass preventer and fertilizer, following up on the aeration that was performed on Friday by a yard service. The ground is saturated in the area and the winds were knocking huge trees over. We watched last night's news as they extracted a woman from a car in a parking lot downtown where a fifty foot tree fell on it trapping her inside and damaging seven other cars. It was a mess, but the winds have moved on leaving my pool a mess and everything wet and soggy.

The aeration service hit one of my solar yard lights in the front of the house Friday and trashed it. The company is supposed to send someone out to replace the light this week. I'll hold off on paying them until that happens.

The pictures above are from Michael and Jennifer's trip to Fremont Street on St Patty's Day as Samantha ran about the mall area and enjoyed herself. I particularly like the first picture of Sam grabbing her Mom's leg and Jennifer taking the picture down at her as she hangs on and smiles. Very Cute. We also have a couple of pictures from our dinner out last night at Sienna in El Dorado Hills. We had a great meal with two of my agents who live in Serrano. We had drinks beforehand and they brought a nice bottle of champagne to celebrate with. The restaurant had an employee trained in "saber opening" of champagne bottles. She took our bottle outside the door by our table and used her saber to cut off the top of the bottle cork and all. Her knife is extremely sharp and she slides it along the bottle and turns it at the end of the cork and makes a clean cut through the glass. The explosion of the cork blows out all of the glass fragments along with the cork and you end up with a bottle cut clean across to enjoy your champagne. Linda, the female half of my agency team (husband and wife) took the severed end of the bottle with the cork intact home as a souvenir. We also had a very nice red wine blend called Siena, that was very nice. I've been enjoying the blends recently and particularly like "Trilogy" and "Menage Au Trois" blends. We got to the restaurant at 6:45 and left at almost 10:30 PM. It was quite a night for us and Burns and Wilcox picked up the $300 tab.

It will be a busy week at work this week. I just finished my reviews of all of the employees and have to go over the compensation review with Harvey on Monday. We also have our two largest carrier partners in this week in Colony and Scottsdale. Colony will be here for dinner tomorrow night and Scottsdale comes in on Wednesday for lunch. I also have carriers in Tuesday and Thursday and am scheduled for some sports marketing with two agents and Matt in the office on Friday if this infernal rain ever moves back up to Washington and Vancouver where it belongs.

We have a slight break in the rain and Darla and I will take a walk up to the shops and return a movie and pick up some condensed milk. Linda gave us a secret on how to make homemade caramel, heating the sweetened condensed milk for an hour on a rolling boil. We are anxious to try it and have some ice cream with caramel sauce for dessert tonight. I will be making barbecued chicken. As the light has changed with Daylight Savings Time, we have incorporated the barbecue back into our cooking plans. Barbecued chicken sounds like a treat tonight.

Darla and I got a smoking deal from Southwest Airlines on a trip to Vegas. We fly out Wednesday April 20th and return on Saturday April 23rd. For $524.77 before taxes, the deal includes round trip tickets for both of us to Vegas, 3 nights at the Luxor Casino and two tickets to the Circus Soleil ELVIS show for Thursday night. The tickets that we received at center row of the arena sell for $139 a seat. Vegas is hurting and we are happy to take advantage of the deals that are out there. The Elvis show is the newest Circus Soleil show and it is at the new Aria casino, the casino that Jennifer worked on for two years. It has been awhile since Darla and I treated ourselves to a show in Vegas and we both love Elvis, so this will be a treat. We will also spend Mike and Jennifer's Wednesday and Thursday off with them and then take Samantha on Friday while they work. We look forward to the trip.

I took the gang out for lunch on St Patty's Day on Thursday at work to celebrate our budget busting in February. We went to the Elephant Bar and had a great time. One of the ladies in my office dresses up for all of the holidays and she had a green wig and green eye shadow. Quite a sight.

Well, not much news here. The boys are both on Spring break and then David starts working as an intern at an architecture firm in San Francisco a week from Monday. He is renting a room in the city and will be home most weekends. Daniel is with Becky in San Jose helping her buy a new car as hers is on its last legs. He will be home mid week. I hope you are all well and healthy and happy. Ciao.

Springing into Spring

Spring has been thrust upon us with the annual pushing ahead of the clocks to save daylight. I'll wonder about the value of this whole exercise tomorrow when i get up for work, but will revel in it when I get home and still have an hour of sunlight before the darkness sneaks back in like a teenager into the house after midnight. Michael, Jennifer's beau, was complaining about it on FB today and I told him that no one works Sundays. Of course he and Jennifer were struggling at work after a night on the Vegas strip last night.

Spring also brings us Spring Training and we were able to make it out to the Giant's game against Texas on Monday night. The World Series champs won (AGAIN) 4-1. Both Texas and SF are having very good success in the desert this year and I expect to see both of them back in the playoffs this year. I put the Giants shirt picture above on FB and Randy commented that the Giants should just worry about repeating and not the team they beat, but at $25 a pop, the Giants are making some money selling these shirts. I didn't buy one, instead buying a faux jersey of Tim Lincecum (The Freak) and a World Series Champions shirt that lists all of the players on the winning team last year. We had a blast at the game.

We flew out Sunday morning, got our luggage and a Ford Edge from Thrifty and drove out to The Legacy Resort in Western Phoenix. We met two of our underwriters from Scottsdale and played the course after a nice breakfast on the deck overlooking the first tee and 18th green. I played okay continuing my good drives and average wedge play for an 86. The weather was awesome, about 75 degrees with high thin clouds and a slight breeze. Sunday night we met our contract underwriter and the Regional Manager from Scottsdale a=fro dinner at Don and Charlies Steakhouse, a Scottsdale institution and a bar and restaurant with some of the best sports memorabilia around. The walls are covered with jerseys, signed photos, golf equipment, baseballs, footballs, basketballs, etc. All signed and stored in glass cases. It reminded me of a Hard Rock Cafe for sports junkies. Very nice and the prime rib was outstanding.

Pete and I stayed in the Colony Insurance corporate apartment and they had a nice bottle of Merlot awaiting us. The apartment is two bedrooms with large walk in closets and two large bathrooms. The apartment is stocked with sheets, towels, blankets, toiletries, food and drink, books, movies and plenty of wine and beer. Very nice. it was a comfortable stay for our three days and we really appreciated the hospitality. As I said before, we write $4,000,000 with the company and are one of the largest agencies for them on the west coast. The VP that runs the Scottsdale branch was back in home office in Virginia when we visited and he called to apologize. He and the company President are coming out to visit us the end of this month. We got back to the apartment about 8:30 and I went in to call Darla and when I came out after 9:00 PM, Pete had already gone to bed. Quite the party animal.

Monday we met our Markel underwriter and Manager for breakfast at a little place called the Breakfast Place and it was excellent. We sat out in the sun waiting for them to get there and watched the Giants fans all starting to get up and greet the day. The downtown area of Scottsdale is Giants country this time of year as they train and play at Scottsdale Stadium in downtown Scottsdale. The Diamondbacks who used to train in Tuscon moved into a brand new facility in North Scottsdale this year, but hat stadium is probably 20 minutes from downtown Scottsdale. Pete and I then went into Colony, visited all of our underwriters and had a meeting with the Underwriting Director and then headed to lunch. We ate witht he Colony gang at Zipps, a local hamburger restaurant that was also amazing. Good food and large drinks (iced tea) which is nice. We went from there over to Scottsdale Insurance to see our underwriters. Susan, our Colony underwriter, told her they'd pick us up at 4:30 at the apartment. We spent about 90 minutes at Scottsdale, although our Underwriting Director wasn't there and had made a trip to Hawaii to visit agents. She will be in my office on the 24th of this month. We saw Emery who was my boss at Republic Western. He has been moved to a Special Assistant position and is working on special projects for the management team and planning his retirement. Emery was the Underwriting Director for 6 years.

We had dinner with Susan and another underwriter at 5:00 PM at Bandera's , a steakhouse in the downtown area of Scottsdale and another excellent choice. Scottsdale has some great restaurants. Both Pete and I were stuffed from eating so much, but put on a happy face and I ate a stuffed chicken breast and some homemade cornbread. It was excellent. We then went off to the game which started at 7 PM.

Wednesday, we checked out of the apartment and dropped the keys off back at Colony and then rushed up to North Scottsdale to meet Patti, my underwriter from RepWest, that is now working for Seneca. We met at the Breakfast Joynt, another tremendous restaurant and a specialist in breakfast items. I had a ham and cheese omelet and Pete and I got caught up on what is going on in Patti's life and also on what is hot at Seneca. From there, we used Pete's Android to direct us to Burlington, where we had a 9:30 meeting. After several wrong turns, we found the office. The meeting went well and we agreed on several issues that have been impeding our efforts to write business with them. From there we headed over to Orange Tree Resort for golf with Mike, our Underwriter and Mike, the Branch Manager from Burns' Scottsdale office. We had a great time and I shot 85 and had a lot of laughs with the group.

We finished up at 3:30 and headed over to turn the rental back in and get to the airport for our 6:05 flight. Pete's Android took us the wrong way on Highway 51 and we had to call Patti to get directions to the airport. We made it in record time using the car pool lanes, but found out that we had been bumped to a 6:30 flight heading to San Diego and changing planes to Sacramento. That got us in at 9:45, but we weren't up for flying all night. The agent got us on a 9:00 PM direct flight to Sacramento that got us in at 10:00 PM. We checked in and headed to Chili's for dinner.

It was a great trip. We got in two games of golf, a Spring Training game, too many meals to count and five carrier meetings. A whirlwind, but also a well planned marketing trip that will pay dividends for us. When we got in at 10:15 (we were late getting out of Phoenix as we were 23rd in line to take off when we got to the tarmac), my golf clubs were not on the carousel. Pete's were there, but not mine. It brought back memories of Denver and the horrible experience of losing my clubs ( I still haven't found a 3 wood I can hit with the confidence of the one I lost). I schlepped over to the baggage office for Southwest and my clubs were there. They came in on the plane we were supposed to take at 6:05 and sat there for anyone to steal before the airline brought them to their office. My luck with airlines and golf clubs is not good.

We talked to Jennifer this weekend and Samantha had a fever last night which broke and she was feeling better today. Sam was with John. Jennifer and Michael took advantage of a Maggiano's gift card we gave Mike at Christmas time and had dinner last night on the strip. They are both doing well. I added some pictures that Jennifer sent us of Sam playing with one of her stuffed animals and also playing hide and seek with Mom.

I am working on reviews this week at work, so pray for me. I tell it like it is in reviews. If you are doing well, you get praise, if you have room for improvement, you hear about it. Fun times. I'll write more next week. Thank you for the birthday wishes. I went out and played golf and shot an 81. On top of that, the pro "comped" my round and the guys bought all my drinks. You can't beat that with a stick. Be well. Ciao.

Just a Quick Update

A couple of pictures texted to me this week from Jennifer. One of Sam in PJ's with what looks like sweet potato fries and one of her new bed. Jen finally moved her out of her crib bed and into a Princess bed complete with canopy. Sam loves it.

Jennifer was offered a position with ITT over in Afghanistan and stood to make about $150,000 for a one year stint. It would have been an easy decision to take the job if she was single and childless, but she turned it down and as Jennifer said, "I need Sam as much as she needs me, maybe more!" Samantha is definitely Jennifer's greatest accomplishment in life and they are as close as a Mom and Daughter can get. Jennifer misses her as soon as they are apart and weekends feel like an eternity to her. Hopefully, Jen will get back to making more money soon and be financially more stable than she is now. At least she is working.

I leave for Scottsdale at 4:30 tomorrow morning. We have the 6 AM flight (the same flight I took on 9/11) from Sacramento to Phoenix. We arrive in AZ at 8:49 as they are an hour ahead of us for the next week (Daylight savings starts a week from Sunday!). Pete and I will grab a rental car and head over to the Legacy Resort which is ten minutes from the airport and play a round of golf with Scottsdale Insurance. We will from there check into the corporate apartment in Scottsdale, shower, change and then meet our Scottsdale underwriter, Sandra and her boss for dinner at a Steakhouse (Don and Charlie's) close to the apartment. Monday morning we meet our underwriters and managers from Markel at a restaurant in Scottsdale for breakfast and then will spend the morning and early afternoon with Colony, our hosts. Monday night we have the Spring training game between the Giants and Texas Rangers with Colony. Tuesday morning we meet again at a restaurant close to the apartment for breakfast with Patty, my old Arizona Underwriter from Rep West days. She is now the underwriter with Seneca and we just wrote a $9,000,000 account last week together. From there, we are off to Burlington for some meetings followed by golf at Orange Tree Resort in Scottsdale and then the flight home Tuesday night. It will be a jam packed trip.

The colonoscopy went off without a hitch. I highly recommend the cocktail of Valium and Morphine used in the IV sedative. I was flying high after the surgery. The worst part was the prep and trying to drink 4 litres of the salty, lemon flavored lubricant that cleans you out like a bottle brush working a Coke bottle. I found that I was so bloated, that I needed to drink some soda to make myself burp. One of the worst feelings when you are gagging down so much liquid is the dehydration that is caused by it moving through you so fast. I have two brothers over 50 and you both need to get this done. I was free of polyps and other problems and don't have to have another until I'm 60. I'm 53 years old and that was my first sedated procedure that I have had. Amazing.

I came home after the procedure flying like a kite and slept for two hours on the bed. Darla finally woke me up and we headed out for a big lunch. I was famished. Pete told me that he drove straight to Denny's and had a Grand Slam. I was loopy and didn't feel hungry although my body was craving nourishment. Darla and I had lunch at Benihana's and my meal was free for my birthday month of March.

We are actually going back to Benihana's tonight with Bob and Vicki. They have sold their home in Roseville and will be moving back to San Jose within a month. I'll miss Bob, who is a great Christian friend of mine. The nice thing is I'll have a friend in San Jose and we can plan on meeting in the Bay Area and playing golf. He will also come up here and play in some tournaments still.

Work is going well. We hit our budget number in February and have a strong start already in March. I had received two tickets from Cal Trans for toll evasion from our trip last week to SF. I used the Car Pool lanes on both bridges, but now know that the toll was changed for Car Pools from Free to $2.50 on both the Bay Bridge and Carquinez bridge. The only way you get the reduced toll is through Fast Trak, an electronic reader you keep in your car and it deducts money from your account. I ended up signing up for the system and they waived my penalty on both violations, simply charging me the $2.50 for each crossing. It is another money grab by the state in the wake of Obama's overspending on welfare and non-citizens. The sad part is the Car Pool lanes are still there and there are no signs saying a toll is in effect. I'm sure families from other states buzz through the Car Pool lanes and end up getting a $27.50 fine in the mail and just pay it. I put $25 into the Fast Trak account and can use it when I got to SF. I still have $20 in the account, but it reloads when the balance gets down to $15. Damn you, Barrack Hussein!

It is Chris Lyon's 21st birthday today and I'm glad I'm in California and not Oklahoma. There will be a LOUD party tonight. I'm sure my Godson has had more alcohol in the last 5 years than I have in the last 10 and he's just now legal. He's definitely a Texas Boy.

It is Dad's birthday on Wednesday, Cheryl's on Friday and mine next Saturday. Happy Birthday to the March babies. Darla and I are heading to Saturday church, so I have to sign off and get dressed. I hope everyone is happy and healthy. I'll bring tales of my Arizona adventures next week. Ciao.