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.