Spring Fever

 Fun times ahead the next couple of weekends. I will head to Napa next weekend on Sunday and play Silverado on Sunday and Windsor on Monday, a trip set up by Neil Thomas. Silverado is normally $179 to play and they have a $74 deal going on right now, but we needed 12  players. Neil got it set up and we will stay over Sunday night at two condos at Worldmark at the Windsor resort in Healdsburg.

 

The following weekend, Pete and I fly out on Sunday for three days in Scottsdale for Spring Training. This is our second trip for Spring Training. Last year we were supposed to go, but Pete had his heart attack. As it turns out, the two years that we will make it are both years following the Giant's World Series wins. We are staying at the Painted Mountain Resort in Mesa and will play golf there on Tuesday with Scottsdale Insurance. Monday will involve visits with three of our main carriers, lunch and dinner. We were going to play golf Sunday as well, but want to see the Giants play the Milwaukee Brewers and that game is at 1 PM on Sunday. We may end up missing the baseball all together if we get another golf game set up on Sunday. I'd really like to go to the baseball game, but my counterpart in Phoenix wants to play golf and Sunday is my only opening.

 

I had a very nice week at work. I was invited to the Leadership seminar being held at Home Office in April. All of our KAMP employees, including Matt from my office, will be there and selected Vice Presidents from around the company. It turns out that I am the only non Vice President to receive an invitation to the event. I will fly out on Sunday April 20th and fly back on Saturday April 26th. It will be an intense week of training with a motivational group that specializes in leadership dynamics. We will spend Monday thru Thursday at the Henry (it used to be the Ritz Carlton) in Dearborn where we have the Branch Manager's meetings and then head into corporate headquarters in Farmington Hills on Friday. I hope to get promoted to VP this year at the Manager's meeting and this is a good first step in that direction. The KAMP program is our Executive Leadership program and KAMP stands for Kaufman Advanced Management Program. Each of the 12 KAMPs in the company have been tagged as future leaders of the company and many will become Branch managers and Vice Presidents and direct the future of the corporation. There will be six Branch Managers at the event and all of them are Vice Presidents except me. There are 46 branches in the company. I'm pretty stoked about the recognition.

 

I had my cancer pre op appointment on Thursday and I will have the surgery this coming Friday. They will take out the rest of the growth and about a centimeter around the perimeter of the growth. They will then suture up the hole in my head and I will return about three weeks later to have the stitches removed. They will test the outer edges of the scalp removed and if it is cancer free, I'm done. If not, I will return for more surgery. I had the option of having a MOHS surgery, where they take less of the growth and keep testing it for cancer until there is none left. It is a much longer surgery because of the testing element and can last up to five or six hours. I would also have had to wait about 6 weeks to get scheduled and I opted for this. If it had been on my face or neck, I would have opted for the MOHS, but on my scalp, I'm good with this and I want to get it over with.

 

I do have a business dinner on that Friday night (the surgery is 3:15 PM). I asked Harvey, who is Jewish, if I could borrow one of his yamakas that night. I'm afraid I'll have a bandage on my head and don't want to stand out. Harvey had a good laugh over that. The dinner is a crab feed fundraiser for one of our service providers and Pete and I will take the wives to dinner with us.

 

I had the two day NCGA qualifier over Saturday and Sunday. I have really been sore lately and the weather was cold and windy (well it was 62 degrees but felt like 50 degrees with the cold wind). I shot 44+44=88 for two straight days and Steve and I shot a combined 67+68=135 for the two days. The two qualifiers were at 126 and 127 and we finished in the middle of the pack. Steve played really well on Saturday with a 38 on the front side, but he stumbled on the back with a 47 and we finished at 31+36 for 67. We never got in a groove and I had trouble with the driver and holing putts. It seemed like my putts were forever on the lip of the hole and not going in. I'm hoping to loosen up this week as that is two weekends in a row that I have struggled with tightness in my shoulders and neck. Steve said it sounds like arthritis and I'm praying that isn't the case. I felt pretty good to start both days and just tightened up in the cold wind.

 

Darla got home Thursday and I surprised her with a juicer that I bought with my casino winnings. She was planning to go on a 30 day juice fast, but after researching the diet, it is not recommended for diabetics (which she is). Her new plan is to replace two meals a day with vegetable juice. She bought kale, celery, mangoes, tomatoes, apples, beets, cilantro, bananas, pears, oranges, carrots, cabbage, and several green vegetables that I have never seen before. I got her a Cuisinart Juice extractor and it works well. I had juice for breakfast the last two mornings making a juice today with kale, celery, carrots apples, pears and a mango. It was delicious and filling. We will have turkey tacos for dinner tonight, so she is staying on some solid foods. Her motivation for this came from the movie Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, a movie by Joe Cross, an Australian who was 100 pounds overweight at 310 pounds, on steroids and suffering from an autoimmune disease. Joe decides to take his life into his own hands and goes on a 60 day juice only diet and transforms his body. Joe Cross is  a tremendously like able Australian photo journalist and he chronicles his story over those 60 days. His movie has turned into a diet craze and Darla's boss is  now on it. She will do a modified version, but Joe Cross is pretty believable as you follow him on his journey and is now an acolyte for the pro juicer crowd.

 

Jennifer is in Vegas with Sam as I write this. She was supposed to meet with a lawyer to start the process of getting Sam to California. Sam misses her Mommy and is asking to move here with her. Jennifer has a fight ahead of her. She asked John if she could bring her to California for a visit and John didn't respond. I told her to leave that up to her attorney.

 

Well, that is it for this week. I will do a blog update the next two Saturdays as I will be in Napa and Scottsdale the next two weekends on Sunday. I hope you are all doing well. Dad sent me the picture of he and Mom in Civil War outfits and I decided to add it to the blog. For giggles. Also, I'm in the process of reading a book by Eric Blehm about Adam Brown, a Seal Team Six Operator, who died in Afghanistan. He was not involved in the capture of Osama Bin Laden (he died before the raid), but his story is inspiring. His life was spinning out of control and he had a friend whose father was a Seal operative and vouched for Adam in spite of his problems with drugs and the law and the rest is history. He was a unique man and a Christian. I am enjoying it immensely. Ciao.

 

 

A late addition that Jennifer posted on Facebook. She was out bowling with Samantha. Ciao.

Just a Bachelor at Heart

A picture that Josh posted on Google of Mom and the Boys and another one that sums up my feelings on gun control. It used to be before Obama and the Dems got so busy deciding what we can and can't do, that America was the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Anymore, it is the Land of the Prius and the Home of the Ethnically Divergent. I live in California in a little Republican enclave where Prius' with Obama bumper stickers are few and far between. There are many American flags flown in my neighborhood and people work hard and keep their homes neat and tidy. It is a little like living on an island in the middle of a swamp. Darla won't like it, but I would like to retire to Nevada and live there for 6 months and one day a year and come back for Fall and Winter. I don't like my taxes going to drug addicts and illegal aliens and I don't believe in free cell phones for homeless people.

Darla flew off to Las Vegas this morning and will be there until Thursday with Silpada at the Leadership conference. I think she will be presented her check there for the incentive she qualified for last month. Two of her staff are going and will be presented with their leadership bracelets. Darla has one and has about 6 charms on it from all of the leadership conferences she has attended. She will be busy and won't get a chance to see Samantha.

I took Friday off and went to Napa to see Bob Pando with Neil and Boyd. We played golf at the Eagle Vines Golf Facility and I was terrible. My collarbone and yoke were sore and I stumbled to a 44+45=89. This is two days after joining Gary up at Serrano Country Club, a tougher track and shooting a 40+42=82. My game is completely inconsistent and I will play in a 2 day qualifier with Steve for the 4 ball NCGA event. Hopefully, I can pull it together. We play on Saturday and Sunday at Diamond Oaks.

Darla booted me out of the house yesterday and I was still sore, so actually cancelled my planned golf game at DO and I went up to the casino with $100 and high hopes. I won early hitting three Four of a Kinds in the first hour and then slowly playing all of my winnings away. I always cash out after I hit a Four of a Kind, but I got so cold that I was out of money within three hours. I went and had some lunch and then went over to Woodcreek and hit balls and then came home dejected and glum. Darla and I took a spa and as I was getting ready, I emptied my pockets and found a $67 chit from the casino that I didn't know I still had. I went back out to the casino this morning and cashed the ticket and decided to try my luck again, this time getting hot and coming home with $677 on the strength of two hands of Four Aces with a 2, 3 or 4 for 1200 coins won. Nice to come out on top for a change. the guy next to me was beside himself every time I hit a jackpot as he was playing Keno and seemed to be adding $20 bills at a pretty good clip.

I went from there back out to Woodcreek and hit balls. You hit off the grass out at Woodcreek and it better duplicates a regular round of golf. I also chipped and putted for awhile and then came home and worked on the yard for a bit and then watched the golf on TV.

The biopsy came back positive for basil cell carcinoma. I meet with the plastic surgeon on Tuesday and they will then schedule the surgery. The surgeon will take thin layers of the skin off and test them for cancer and finally stop when the sample comes out clear of cancer. It is an out patient surgery, but is done at the main hospital in Sacramento. I'm a little surprised that I had cancer on my scalp because I ALWAYS wear a hat and I now wear an Australian Bush hat on the golf course. I don't wear a hat when I'm swimming, but I do wear a hat when I'm reading on the pool or doing yard work. My hair is too thin and I have a high forehead and don't want to get burned. The dermatologist tells me that the damage was done in my youth and the basil cell carcinomas can show up at any time. I am my Dad's son as well as my Mom's, who died from complications of skin cancer.

The weather here was incredible this week and it was 72 degrees on Wednesday when I played Serrano and 70 degrees in Napa on Friday. It was great, but luckily, there is a front coming in tomorrow and we expect some significant rain on Tuesday and Thursday this week. Hopefully it is wet all week and clears up for our tournament next weekend.

I am off to Phoenix on March 10-12 for work. I have five meetings set up as well as two golf games and a World Champion San Francisco Giants exhibition baseball game in Scottsdale Stadium. I will travel with Pete and we will wear ourselves out. I get back on my birthday.

Prior to that trip, I have another trip to Napa planned on March 3rd and 4th. Neil set up a trip and we will play Silverado on Sunday and Windsor Golf Club in Healdsburg on Monday. I am looking forward to the trip with friends.

Work continues moving forward at a great clip. I will host the office to a luncheon on Thursday at Tahoe Joe's Steakhouse in Roseville to celebrate our record breaking January. I have about a half of the employee reviews done and will hopefully finish those up in the next two weeks. I have finished all of the ones that have come back to me and will get to the others as they come through to me.

Well, that is it this week I will be back at the keyboard next Sunday and let you know how Steve and I fared in the tournament. Be well and stay safe. Ciao.

Samantha Pictures

Ok. Darla does not like pictures of Samantha with makeup. I'm okay with it as long as it is just dress up at home and she doesn't go out made up like that. It was a makeover with Ashley, Jennifer's roommate's daughter. At any rate she is as cute as they come in my humble opinion.

Great Weather in Northern California

No pictures this week. We need a visit from Samantha to spice up the blog a little bit. We will Face Time with Jennifer and Sam later tonight. I'll ask Jennifer to send me some pictures and add them to the blog.

The weather has been great lately. A little cold in the morning, in fact we had a frost delay on Saturday before golf. We should be close to 70 degrees by Wednesday this week. We need a little rain and some snow in the Sierra, especially the snow pack. We did get about 9 inches of snow on Thursday and about .11 of an inch of rain here in Roseville. I took advantage of the good weather on Wednesday and Friday,taking two of my agents out golfing. I took Ron from a Rocklin Agency to lunch and then golf at Morgan Creek Country Club. Matt joined me and one of Ron's producers came out as well. The weather was great and we enjoyed ourselves. Nobody shot really good golf, but we had a good time. Matt and I both shot 87 and Ron and his producer were both in the 90's.

I also took one of my original agents who is semi-retired and has sold his business to his sons who now run the agency. Bob goes in to the office about twice a week. I played with Pete from my office and Bob. I played better, shooting 40+44=84. Pete shot 95 and Bob had a 97. We played at Bob's club, Rancho Murietta Country Club. It was good to see Bob, who i have worked with for about 30 years, starting with his first agency, then breaking off to form his own agency with 2 partners, one of whom later passed away and the other left to form an agency with his three sons to when he brought in his sons to the agency until now. We keep in touch and play golf at his club about every three months or so.

Finally, I got together with Darren, Boyd and Paul on Saturday at Woodcreek. Playing a third time in four days wore me out and I was really sore through my collarbone and chest. I never did loosen up and shot a 44+44=88. I was in the spa today and finally felt my muscles loosening up. It's a good thing because I have three days of golf again this week. My agent, Gary, has a birthday on Wednesday and we will play his course, Serrano, in the afternoon. I have Friday off and will drive down to Napa with Boyd and Neil to meet Bob and play golf at Eagle Vines. I was going to take the weekend off, but Darla has a party here on Saturday, so I will go out Saturday afternoon and play at Diamond Oaks.

My finger is much better now, but it took a turn for the worse on Monday and I called Kaiser and could not get in to see the doctor until Tuesday morning. There was so much pressure on my finger it felt like the nail was going to pop off. I talked to the advice nurse and she suggested that I lance my nail. It sounds terrible, but basically I heated up a needle to red hot and basically melted a small hole into the m=nail to let the blood out. It was an amazing release when I worked through the nail and I'm doing much better. The doctor checked my nail on Tuesday and had an x-ray done on my finger which was negative. I did talk to her about a raised area on my scalp underneath my hair and she sent me to the dermatology department to have it biopsied. The doctor cut the growth out and said that it "looks" to be Basil cell carcinoma and i should have the results this week. if it is, I have to go in and have surgery done to remove the rest of the cancerous cells. That is done in an outpatient surgery center locally. We'll see.

My DirecTV receiver in the bedroom has been on the fritz for a couple of weeks. Every time I turn it on it is "searching for a signal". The DirecTV people have been slow to replace the unit and I finally yelled enough today, that they agreed to send me a replacement unit. I miss my "Headlines" on the Tonight Show. It is the only show we look at in the bedroom. Occasionally I will watch TV in there if Darla has an event at the house and she does the same when I have poker.

I did play poker on Friday night at John's house. John is one of the two cousins that had a falling out about a year ago. John made amends in December and they are now thick as thieves. They are both retired and spend every day together. John had to stop play and tell us all how much he appreciates us as friends and how glad he is to be back in the group. He missed out playing with us for a year because of his own pride. it is good to have him back. I've been losing continually for the last three or four games and needed a good night. i won early and was up about $50 before hitting a dry spell and going down to about $10 left out of my $100 that I brought. I won big in the last hour and walked away with about $76 in quarters and an extra $20 in paper, for a small victory of about $12. Not bad, considering how bad it could have been.

Darla leaves for Vegas on Sunday and will be gone until Thursday. This is Silpada's annual Manager's meeting and Darla has to go in early for a meeting of the representative that are at the Silver Manager level or higher. This will be Darla's first meeting at the Silver Manager level, so it should be a nice perk for her. I will be batching it for a week and Darla bought extra hot dogs and pizza for me. I guess I am a caracature of an old married man to her. I'll survive.

Well, that is it for me this week. I will be working on sit down employee reviews this week. The approved reviews that I wrote up in January are slowly trickling in and I will work on them as they show up. I have until late March to complete the 22 sit downs that I have to do. I hope all is well for each of you and that some of our awesome weather makes its way to each of you. Ciao.

Super Sunday

The game has just ended. A couple of observations. Jim Harbaugh is so tightly wound, he may have a coronary on the sideline. The Niners had a tremendous comeback, but they never lead in the game and with a defense as cocky as theirs, they averaged giving up 30 points a game in the playoffs. Frankly, I'm not impressed. Another observation, if they can make it to two more Super Bowls, they'll be tied with Dallas at 8. I have a number of Niner friends that had given up on the team in the third quarter. Not cool. They are all acting like they hung in there, but I have Facebook account and can count the negative comments from these guys on their own team. Frankly, I didn't have a dog in the fight and was pleased to win $150 in pool money, all in the first half. I had 4 Ravens and 9 Niners for the Final with 11 seconds remaining  with the score 34-29 Ravens, when the Ravens gave up an intentional safety. A smart football move, but it cost me $125. Final score 34-31.

The commercials were generally lame, including the Budweiser commercial with the foal. Not impressed. The old folks breaking out of the retirement home to have a rage was kind of funny, but why was it in Spanish? Apparently Taco Bell wanted to reach Obama's voter base or something. The halftime show was excellent and Alicia Keys was so good at the National Anthem. Wow.

Again, the game was good and could have gone either way. If Alex Smith had been the QB, they wouldn't have been in the Super Bowl to begin with, but they definitely wouldn't have come back. It wouldn't have been good for me to be around Niner fans during the game, so Darla and I hung out together today and we had fried cheese, potato skins, chips and pizza. Now, back to the diet. I wanted my friends who are Niner fans to enjoy the game. There is a silver lining for them and it is this Kaepernick kid. He is the real deal, but the pistol formation causes him to take a lot of unnecessary shots. Even when he hands the ball off, he gets blasted by a defender, which is legal, especially if he is carrying out the fake well enough. Guys like RG3 and Vick are small, but this kid is 6'6" and 245 pounds. He'll be able to take the pounding for awhile, but concussions ended Steve Young's career early.It's only a matter of time. I watched the Phoenix Open from Scottsdale up until about 2:45 and then Darla and I went in the spa for about twenty minutes before watching the game.

I played golf on Saturday and it started out really cold and cloudy. The day started out wrong when I pinched my left ring finger in my golf cart when I was setting it up. You can see the damage in the picture above. I put on my Facebook that I was looking more and more like my Dad every day and he responded with something about his middle finger. My finger is swollen and really sore because the tissue can only swell so much under the nail, which causes pressure. I was really affected by it early in the round and shot 44 on the front side. I finally worked it out to take my ring finger on my left hand off the grip of the club and shot a 39 on the back side. Hopefully, my hand heals quickly because I have two marketing golf outings (sports marketing) on Wednesday and Friday and then play golf with Boyd, Darren and Matt on Saturday. The following weekend I will drive down to Napa with Neil and Boyd and we will play golf with Bob who moved to San Jose last year.

On March 3rd Neil has set up golf with three foursomes at Silverado in Napa. After that, eight of us will drive up to Healdsburg and spend the night at a resort at Windsor Country Club and play the course on Monday. I enjoy the golf trips with the guys. It is always fun. Of course, April is Jenny's wedding.Fun times ahead. Darla is off to Las Vegas in February and Kansas City in both April and May with Silpada.

You can see pictures of Darla and I out to dinner on Saturday night. We went to church and then to dinner at Suede Blue, a new restaurant in Roseville. We went to celebrate Darla's big bonus with Silpada. They had an incentive that ran for six months and Darla hit the top of the incentive and will receive $15,000 which she will use to pay off some of the credit card bills she has racked up with her business. I'm very proud of her.

My office again had a stellar month in January. We were up 15% from 2011 to 2012 and I was hoping to come in with about a 10% increase this year. We finished the month on Thursday up 26% and were number three out of 47 offices in the US and Canada for growth. I turn 56 in a month and I am absolutely riding this wave at the moment. I turn another producer loose in February and I'm hoping he can help us continue on our growth plane. Ajay is 23 years old and a graduate of UC Berkeley in Business Administration. he is of Indian descent and he plans to go after some of the over 1000 Indian insurance Agents in California. Agents from India are notoriously loyal to working with other Indian business people. Ajay will play that card and become the wholesaler of choice to those agents. I've told him to work with our companies to put together some hospitality insurance programs because many Indian businessmen own hotels and restaurants, including Ajay's own father, who is an innkeeper out of state. Good times ahead.

Well, it is a short blog entry this week, but the Super Bowl ended late due to the power outage at the Superdome. I hope everyone is doing well. Jennifer will be back in Vegas this week and beginning the process of trying to get Samantha to join her here in California. Pray for what is best for Samantha in this situation. Ciao.