Spring HEAT is on in Northern California!

 

The Heat is on in Roseville. It was 92 degrees today and we are on our way to 100 degrees next weekend. April is definitely leaving us with a taste of Summer. The average temperature for this time of year is 75 degrees, but there is nothing average about this weather.

 

It was HOT on the golf course today and I haven't played much in the last month. I finally got back out on Thursday night for the start of the Twilight league. I hadn't played in three and a half weeks and hadn't even practiced during my layoff. My hope was that I could forget all of the bad habits and put into play the tips that I got from the pro at Diamond, dale. I shot 42, but my partner, Steve, was off fishing somewhere in Oregon and I had Neil as a sub and he is just coming off his stroke and surgery, so we lost the match 12.5 to 7.5, but I had a good time and was hitting the ball pretty crisply. In fact I was on the Par 5 number two hole in two and made birdie.

 

Today was better from a golf perspective, but the heat was oppressive. I worked on the stamped concrete yesterday, prepping and re staining the concrete for the new pool year. The problem was that I didn't put lotion on my back and I burned it pretty badly. Darla was going to put lotion on, but got a call from her salon and her nail appointment for Sunday could be had Saturday afternoon, so she jumped on it. She did put lotion on my back when she got home, but by then I'd spent three hours hunched over the deck spreading stain and it was too little, too late. It was uncomfortable today, but I managed a 42+39=81, for a net 70. My 81 was tied for low gross in my flight and my 39 on the back beat his 40. This is the first day of a three day individual stroke play event and I am tied for first in my flight. I managed to get on the par 5 number 16 in two today and again settled for a birdie. My drives are long and straight and I just need to work on my short game which is the first thing to go when you take time off. The greens were aerated last week at Diamond and are still slow and bumpy and I left three putts right on the lip of the hole today and a half dozen others short, so it could have been so much better. Next weekend is expected to be in the 100's, so I better acclimate in a hurry.

 

Darla and I did spend a nice week and weekend together. We went to the show on Tuesday night and saw "42", which I highly recommend. Friday night we rented "This is 40", which I don't recommend. It is far too long and full of references to the husband wanting to kill the wife and vice versa. As you watch the movie, you wonder what these two people ever saw in each other. Saturday, we started the day with breakfast at the Black Bear Diner in Roseville and then a trip to Home Depot, before a day working on the deck and pool. I worked from home on Friday afternoon and had the carpets cleaned in the house. They were really in need of some serious cleaning and look really good now. I will be home again Monday afternoon to meet a handyman who will work on the fan and lights I talked about last week.

 

I will also be taking out the cabinets in the garage. The prior owner spent $1500 having the cabinets installed, but he was a typical California homeowner and parked his cars outside. We like both of our cars parked inside and it has always been tight in our garage. Darla managed to hit one of the cabinets today as she was pulling our her Explorer and pulled one of the cupboard doors off. We have a shed and attic to store stuff and need the room in our garage. I'm going to ask David to do the demolition next weekend. His dad may want the cabinets as he has room in his garage as he only stores an old El Camino in there and leaves his cars parked all over the street and property. The cabinets are bolted to the garage wall/ There was no damage that we can see to the Explorer as it appears that her front tire caught the door and pulled it off it's hinges. She has to pull in both of her side mirrors in order to get the car into the garage. That will be over next weekend and we'll have the appropriate room in our two car garage

 

There are screaming kids in the pool behind us as the outside temperature is still 86 degrees at 8 o'clock on Sunday night. Our pool water is at 78 degrees and will be going up this week as the temperatures continue to soar.

 

Darla and I went to church yesterday afternoon and then out to dinner last night and enjoyed a nice salad and pizza. It was a great weekend and another HOT week ahead.

 

Work continues to go extremely well. We are up 35% this month with two days left to go. I was really pleased to work with upper level management and reward both of my top producers this Spring. Both of them are happy and hopefully we will continue to have record months every month this year. Both Pete and Matt are averaging  about $80,000 a month in income this year and Pete is on track for a $1,000,000 year and Matt is tracking to $900,000. They will both be in the top 40 of all producers and Pete will be in the top 20. Life is good at work right now.

 

Jennifer was in Vegas this weekend with Samantha, but I haven't talked to her in two weeks. I've called and left messages, but for some reason I'm on the deep freeze with her. I communicated with Diane this past week and she does the same thing with her. Who raised this girl? Oh, yeah.

 

Darla and I will be in Vegas to see Miss Samantha at the end of May. We will fly in Thursday morning the 30th and stay until Sunday night at Circus Circus. We haven't seen Samantha since August and need to spend some time with her. We are hoping that she will make it to Almanor this year.

 

Well, that is it for this week. I need to spend some time with my bride. I hope you all have a good week and that our Good Lord continues to bless you immeasurably. Ciao.

Back from Detroit and 32 degrees to 90 degrees!!

 

It was a busy 7 days with Monday through Friday equaling 15 hour days from 8 AM breakfast to the Hospitality suite after dinner until 11 PM. Some of the participants were up much later than 11 PM, but they are much younger than me. The course itself was lead by a former EST practitioner, who is now a business expert specializing in Leadership. Given his background, some of the content was pretty out there, but the basics were pretty good and the outcome for myself and for the other participants was pretty positive. We ended up by the end of the week in teams and each team has taken on a change initiative for the company that will make our company a better player in our Industry. Some of the initiatives are Bonuses for Non-Producers, working to get our company on the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work list by 2015, and developing a Corporate Recruiting team, among others. The team that I'm on is developing a template for a company-wide Employee development Plan that will be implemented for every employee of the company to include educational directives, sales and marketing and training.

 

Some of the principals that we explored during the week were affirmation for our teams and those we work with, complete listening (including turning off our inner voice when communicating with others), each person having three inner strengths that are developed in childhood, teenage years and adulthood (x, y and z), and the concept of our present actions being influenced by our future desires and not from our past actions. It was all pretty zen, but it made a lot of sense in the long term.

 

I finally got out of Detroit on Saturday at 1:30 and had a flight to Dallas at 3:15PM.  I had only 45 minutes between flights and came in to Dallas at terminal D and my flight was Terminal A. Luckily, the flight was in twenty minutes early and I was able to grab a Subway before catching my plane. The guy working the counter at Subway was foreign and I ended up with a dry sandwich, because I couldn't understand what he was saying. Something about sauces, but I wanted mayo and mustard. He never understood me and it was a dry mess. The irritation to me was that the guy was middle eastern and probably Chechian and after what happened in Boston, I just didn't need the hassle.

 

I got home about 8 PM and my garment bag came through trashed. The latch on the bottom was broken and the zipper on the side was the only thing holding it together. I will be buying a new garment bag before the next trip.

 

Darla and I spent a nice day today with breakfast at the Original Pancake house in Roseville. We then stopped at the Used Bookstore in Roseville and loaded up on Stuart Wood's Stone Barrington novels and then headed home. I mowed and we both worked on the backyard, trimming and cleaning up in the flowerbeds and around the pool. We then relaxed in the sun with our books and Darla even ventured out onto the pool for awhile. the first time this year. It was 90 degrees today and supposed to be a small heatwave that runs through Wednesday.

 

I have not played golf in four weeks and will get back in the saddle on Thursday which is the start of our Summer long twilight league. I will try to get out and hit balls a couple of times between now and then. Sunday is the start of the 54 hole individual championship and I will play Sunday-Saturday and Sunday. This is the longest medal play tournament of the year and our championship for individual medal play. My game is iffy right now, but I'm hoping the layoff helped me lose some of the bad habits I had developed. I will work on the concepts that were shown to me when I had the lesson a month ago.

 

Well, short and sweet, but I have been in a conference since last Sunday and don't have much to report. I hope everyone is well. Be good. Ciao.

 

Matt and I arrived in Detroit about 7:30 tonight, an hour late after getting delayed in Minneapolis because of SNOW. It's Spring for God's sake. We were able to sit and watch a good piece of the Masters, but our flight left Minnesota at 4:25 and the playoff started closer to 7 PM. It was going on when we landed in Detroit, but we had to get our bags and meet the limo driver, so missed all of the fun. The buffet dinner (salad, lasagna, chicken breasts and fruit) was supposed to end at 8:00, but they extended it to 8:30 because so many of the guys were watching the Masters. We made it in under the wire and the dinner was somewhat underwhelming. I had a quick drink with the Birmingham, AL Branch Manager, Matt, a broker from Tampa and two guys from our Canadian arm, who flew into Windsor from Toronto and missed dinner. True to their British form (both are ex patriots from England), they were drinking their dinner. I left Matt, the Branch Manager and the two Canadians at the bar and repaired back to my room to prepare for tomorrow and to work on the Blog. Yes, I am a little anal, what's your problem?

 

You can see pictures from Burns and Wilcox's in service day with Habitat for Humanity on Saturday. We had ten people show up and donate their Saturday to helping others. Our work site was the remains of a home in South Sacramento that had been burned down in a fire last year. The Habitat crews had knocked the structure down and they had us breaking up concrete and loading all of the debris into bins for haul away to the dump. When we arrived, there was a huge pile of rubble and by the time we left at 2:45 PM, we had completely cleaned up all of the wood and debris and had about 75% of the sidewalk and driveways broken up and stored into the dumpsters to be hauled away Monday. There was a large piece of heavy equipment that had an operator picking the piles of debris up and depositing them into three large bins that were on site.  I took the gang out to pizza at Round Table for lunch for helping out.

 

We had to remove a tongue-in-groove kitchen floor and remove all of the nails and stack them up for use on another project. The home was built in the sixties and the place had been combed over pretty good before we got there. We did manage to find a television remote and quite a few black widow spiders hiding in the sub floor of the structure. The site looked scrubbed pretty clean by the time we finished. It was hard work and I ran out of gas about 2:00. The site foreman wasn't much better than me as we hung out talking and he took refuge in a wheelbarrow (see the top picture). I told him I was going to post the picture on the Habitat for Humanity website. He wasn't amused. David was there and worked concrete virtually the whole day working with sledgehammers and pry bears to break up the cement, loaded it into wheelbarrows and then hand delivered it to the containers. I'm sure he was sore and tired last night. David, Ajay and Jeff (my assistant Shawna's husband) were all really hard workers and ended up working together. They didn't know each other at the beginning of the day, but workers tend to gravitate together and they ended up working concrete almost exclusively. Jeff works for Home depot in the Contractor's Service department where Daniel hopes to get moved eventually. Right now, he is working the garden department at the Home Depot in Woodland Hills.

 

David got a job in his field and not a moment too soon. He turns 26 in May and will be off of our insurance. His old firm, Halston Engineering (he interned there in high school), had offered him a position as a purchasing agent and he turned that down as he wants to work as an architect. One of the designers was burned out and decided to move to the purchasing agent position and they called David back and he starts tomorrow as a design engineer and will also be assisting in the estimating process when they get to bid on new jobs. It's not his dream job, but he is very happy to have full time work and full time benefits.

 

Darla, coincidentally, is off to Kansas City tomorrow and her Leadership conference with Silpada. My visit this week is for the Kaufman Financial Group's Executive Leadership training. We will spend the first four days immersed in leadership training and working with Steve Zaffron, the CEO of the Vanta Group. He will be working with us on principles from his book, "The Three Laws of Performance, rewriting the future of your organization and your life." Interestingly, a lot of the principals and ideas of his study is on changing the culture of your workplace from one of apathy and complacency to one of forward thinking, positive change. To be honest, my office would be a test case for this training as it was an office DOA when I took over, with a lot of infighting and negativity. There were 13 employees when I took over and I have three left from that group and 20 new faces that work for me. Many of my employees have never faced poor results or negative performance in their time with me. They have only experienced a vibrant office with winning teammates and record profits. The idea of this seminar is to create the kind of positive vibe that is part of my office already. I guess I should just go sight seeing in Detroit, as I've seen little of this town outside of the Ritz Carlton here in Dearborn. I'm just kidding. It will be a positive week of forward thinking and goals and objectives for the future of Burns and Wilcox. I look forward to spending a week with the future leaders of this company and helping them plan for our future.

 

The agenda is pretty aggressive with the day starting at 8:00AM and the dinners each night offsite at 7:00PM. We will get back to the hotel after 9 PM most nights and later on a few of them.

 

Well, this is inarguably short, but it is almost 11:00 PM. I need to check in with my bride and then get some sleep as the coming days will be long and, at times, trying. BTW, look closely at the last picture above and you can see I snapped it just as Ajay was about to lose his load of bricks and cement. Timing is everything, eh. Have a great week. Ciao!

Jennifer Lyon got Married

 

Well, she did. It just happens to be my brother's daughter, Jenny, that  tied the knot. I'm not holding my breath that my daughter will follow on that path any time soon. I'd turn blue and fall over if I did. We had a GREAT time in Texas and Randy and Cake proved to be tremendous hosts as they put on a party for the ages. Jenny and Alex had a great time at their wedding and start off their lives as husband and wife in Thailand, where they flew off to the day after their big day. 

 

Darla and I flew in on Friday, arriving about 11:20 AM after a 6 AM flight out of Sacramento. Randy picked us up and we were checked into the Worthington by a little after noon. Strangely, Randy was busy that afternoon and Dad and Shirley were off on an outing to Fort Worth. Darla and I ended up having lunch together at the Cabo Grande Restaurant across the street from the hotel. We finished lunch and ended up taking a walk around the stores and shops in the area. We got back to the hotel about 2 PM and were unpacking when Dad came by and we visited for a few minutes. We made plans to go to the wedding rehearsal at 3:30. From there, we met for drinks at Dad's room at 6 PM.

The rehearsal dinner was fun and they had it as Joe T. Garcia's, a Forth Worth institution that was absolutely packed with people. It took Dad and I about twenty minutes to find parking. The dinner was beef and chicken fajitas with all the fixings and pitchers of margaritas. 

 

Saturday, we were up about 8 o'clock and had breakfast with Dad and Shirley at a little diner across the street from the hotel. From there we drove out to see Billy Bob's, the 6500 square foot honky tonk that features four dance floors and seven separate bars. They also have a bull riding pen that beats Gilley's, only because their ring features professional bull riders and real bulls. From there, we wandered the streets of Fort Worth in and around the Stockyards in Fort Worth. We had lunch at Riskey's Barbecue after Darla spent a small fortune of black cowboy boots with silver inlays and a western blouse. The area was filled with restaurants, bars and shops and included a cowboy museum, daily cattle drives and the unrelenting smell of animal feces.

 

The wedding itself was first class with good drink, good food, good company and a great time was had by all. Jenny asked me to do a blessing before they were pronounced husband and wife and I was happy to bring our Lord and Saviour into the discussion. I had a great time with family and friends and I could tell that Alex and Jenny were having the times of their lives, as they should have been. The venue was a three story restaurant and bar, the Reata and Randy had reserved the top two floors for the wedding. It was an outdoor venue and the weather was tremendous, with highs in the 70's and high sixties throughout the night.

 

Alex and Jenny stayed until almost midnight and then caught a  limousine from the venue to the airport hotel. When they got there, Alex realized that his bag was missing and Randy had to run up to Alex's hotel room at the Worthington and grab his bag. He drove the forty minutes to the airport and realized that the bag seemed too light. It turns out it was one of Alex's grooms man's bag and he had to turn around and drive back to Fort Worth and then to the airport. he didn't get to bed until almost 4 AM. He was so tired that he dropped the grooms man's bag at the front desk and went to bed.

 

Randy and Cake hosted a breakfast on Sunday and the groomsman whose bag was at the front desk ended up showing up in his suit and tie from the night before and looking like he'd been up all night partying. Randy had an "egg guy" and they had an omelet station set up along with breads, fruit, potatoes, scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage. It was a nice touch for the guests who had traveled to the Dallas area and were able to meet up, have breakfast and visit with each other before all heading off to our own lives.

 

Randy asked me to drive Jenny's Chevy Cruz back to Dallas and when I collected the vehicle from the valet, it was on fumes from a gas perspective. I followed dad to the closest gas station, gassed up and then we drove on to dad and Shirley's hotel in Allen, Tx. We went over to Jesse and Lori's house in Richardson and had dinner of left over fajitas from the rehearsal dinner, before saying our goodbyes to everyone and heading to the airport.

 

We got into Sacramento at 11:30 and there was a huge crowd at the tram shuttle to baggage claim. one of the trains was shut down and people were crowding to one side of the train station. Then people started pouring through to the exit only side of the station and forcing their way on. It was  basic pack mentality and I had a good laugh when the controller stopped opening the exit doors because there was no one traveling to the gates from ticketing. The other train finally got back on line and we got out of there about midnight. We arrived home about 12:30 and slipped into the spa to try and relax. Today was a little tough because we were tired. The 1 AM bed time was 3 AM in Dallas.

 

So, now, the wedding is over and next week on Sunday I leave for Detroit and the Leadership conference with my company. Darla leaves for Kansas City on Monday and her Management conference. The only good that will come from that is that we are both busy that week. I get back on Saturday and Darla gets back on Thursday.

 

Saturday David and I will work at Habitat for Humanity building a house for the underprivileged. This is a community outreach put together by one of my management trainees. It is a good use of our time and resources at Burns and Wilcox and the right way to give back to the community. There will be eleven employees from my office as well as a few spouses and children involved.

 

I will try to update this next week before I leave, but we are going to a dinner on Saturday night in Linden where Darla's high school girl's basketball team will be inducted into the high school hall of fame. They won three state championships in softball, but are being inducted for winning the state championship in basketball. We will drive to Linden for the 6:30 dinner and then home that night.

 

Well, that is the news to the moment. congratulations to Jenny and Alex and nice job, Randy and Cake. Be well. Ciao.