Memorial Day 2013

The weather today is a full 20 degrees less than what is normal for this date. We are at 65 degrees after a high of 83 yesterday. The sky is cloudy and earlier there was an incessant rain that was never hard, but a constant drizzle. Darla and I had planned to go up to Hidden Falls Park up in Auburn yesterday, but when we saw the forecast for today, decided to relax by the pool yesterday.  We were up early today and off to breakfast in downtown Roseville this morning. We ate at Pacific Street Café and then went over to The Linen Outlet where Darla bought some chair pads and some sheets, from there we went over to Home depot and bought some new rugs for the kitchen and a set of solar lights for out by the pool (the old ones were worn out and the metal was flaking off from the pool chemicals). We drove form there up to Auburn and went to the park. We didn't quite make it to the falls as it was raining and Darla failed to make a bathroom stop before we left the parking lot. We got about half way to the falls and she had to go. We backtracked after a stop by the river and made it back before any accidents happened. we will go back up and make the hike to the falls at another time as the trails are nice and the area rustic and tree filled. Very nice.

Yesterday, we decided to make a pool day and relaxed by the pool after I put a second coat of "Wet Look" sealer on the pool deck. Darla relaxed on the pool and I slept on a chaise lounge by the pool.

Saturday we went to a wedding for one of my employees at the Blessed cathedral in downtown Sacramento. The church is pretty incredible and reminds me of many of the Catholic Churches that we have seen in Mexico. It was quite an event with about half of the ceremony in Spanish and the other half in English. The ceremony itself was at 11:30 PM, but the reception wasn't until 2 PM. I am not a big fan of the gap that so many couples have so they can take a bunch of staged pictures. They did have a bar close by that had Happy Hour prices and we went over and visited with my Assistant, Shawna and her family as well as Pete, my Underwriting manager. I was able to get four margaritas, a beer and a diet Coke for $14. I think the guy undercharged me and I gave him $20 for the six drinks. From there it was a short walk to the Masonic Temple, where the reception was held. The groom finally showed up at 2:30 and the bride made her appearance at 3 PM?? It was a nice venue, but quite spread out and Darla and I only got a few appetizers as they ran out of food before dinner was served to our table.  It was 4:15 when we finally left and they hadn't started any of the dances or toasts or anything. Darla and I wanted to get to church at 5 PM.

After church, we went to McCormick and Schmick's. I had a $50 gift card from Christmas and we were both dressed up so decided to go have a nice meal and we did. We got home and relaxed and watched a movie.

Darla and I leave for Vegas on Thursday morning and will spend four fun days with Samantha. We are staying at Circus Circus in Vegas and will have Jennifer and Sammy stay over with us. Sammy graduates from her Day Care on Friday night and we will go to that. She also has her Karate class on Saturday and we will go see her at that as well.

The forecast is that we will reach the triple digits for the first time over the weekend and Darla and I will be in Las Vegas. Monday we have the Insurance Association's golf tournament at Serrano Country Club. We are coming off of three straight years of rain on our tournament that is always on the first Monday in June. It looks like we will finally have some warm and dry weather. My company will sponsor the Putting Contest this year and I have Shawna running it with one of our newer employees.

Thursday of next week I leave for Eureka and the Humboldt County Insurance golf event. Matt and I will drive up at 6 AM and we tee off at 1 PM. We will stay over Thursday night and hit a few agent's offices on Friday on our way back. I will host poker that night.

Well, that is it. The blog will be quite late next week as I will get home late Sunday night and then have the golf event on Monday. It will likely be Tuesday night before I update the blog, but it will have lots of pictures of my granddaughter. Hey, the good with the bad. I hope you are all remembering those that have served and gave the ultimate sacrifice. Just remember: Freedom is not Free. Ciao.

May Birthdays

 

The busy birthday month has hit. Mother's day, Darla's birthday and David's birthday all seem to hit in a 10 day period. Darla and I got together with David on Darla's birthday and went to dinner at TGI Fridays. I gave her carte blanche on where to go and with her evolving dietary restrictions, she chose TGI Fridays because it has a more American menu, with less carbs. She ended up with soup and salad and you can see her look in the picture with her birthday dessert that she watched David and I eat. She is really serious about her diet and watching her sugar and carb intake. It was like the ice cream could impact her blood sugar just by proximity.

 

I don't know what's up with David and his beard. I'm not sure if he is David or Orville Redencbacher. His job is going well and he is doing some estimating and bid work as well as CAD work and design work. He is very comfortable at his old firm, but will eventually move into something a bit closer to the architecture field. It is a great first job out of college and they appreciate him. 

 

Daniel, on the other hand, is sort of caught between paying his bills and finding a job in his field. He just passed a civil engineering test that will give him some credibility in his job hunt. He works for Home Depot and would like to take on some temp jobs from an engineering perspective, but is torn between paying his rent in Southern California and getting started in his career. Hopefully, he can get hooked into the Engineering temp firm and work Home Depot on the weekends. It is nothing but fun for recent college graduates in the land of Obama.

 

I played golf at 6:12 AM on Saturday. Despite the hour and the difficulty rolling out of bed, the course was pristine at that time of day and we were able to play for $39 with a cart in the Power Hour promotion at Woodcreek, which is the first hour of tee times in the morning. I played with Darren, Neil and Matt and shot a 44+39=83, finally waking up on the back nine and playing some golf. Matt shot 80, Neil 84 and Darren 90. We will try the Power Hour again as we had a twosome in front of us that were gone with the wind after about four holes and nobody behind us. We finished a little after 10 AM and had the whole day ahead of us.

 

I got back home and put the cabinet doors back on the lone cabinet we have lining the wall by Darla's car. She pulls her car straight in and then angles toward the wall. Unfortunately, with the doors on, it adds about six inches to the distance she has to travel around the cabinet and left her car too close to mine at the rear end. I struggled getting the heavy doors back up and ended up with a blister on the palm of  my right hand. I took the doors back down Saturday night when we got home from Alicia's.

 

We did go over to Don and Alicia's Saturday night  to celebrate Darla, Alicia and David's birthdays and Don fixed ribs and tri tip for dinner. He smoked them both in his smoker. The food is good and the sauce he uses (from Kansas City) is excellent. The flavor is of apple wood, which is just a little strong for me. I think you either like the flavor of smoked wood or you don't. It has a little bit of an ash flavor for me and I prefer a straight barbecue. We ended up playing cards and relaxing during the evening. We were home by 7:30 and I took the doors back off the cabinet. I may eventually take that cabinet down altogether and give her the entire room that she needs for her Explorer.

 

The reason that the blog is late is that we met Bob and Vicky Pando for dinner last night. They were in Roseville to see family and we had dinner with them and Neil and Lilly. The Pando's will join us in Reno next month for our two day tournament at Lake Ridge and Grizzly Ranch. I secured a two bedroom condo at The Wyndham Resort at Lake Ridge for $151 per night and we will share that with Bob and Vicky and have time to get caught up on their lives. We still haven't seen their new house in San Jose and have to get a trip planned to visit with them soon.

 

Next weekend I will miss the Memorial Day tournament as one of my employees is getting married on Saturday in the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento. It is one of the oldest buildings in Sacramento and certainly one of the mort historical. It will be a full on Hispanic Catholic wedding. Wendy was born in San Salvador and her fiancé in Mexico. The service will be in English and Spanish and the reception following will have traditional Mexican dances, like El Mandillon,  the apron dance and El Meuertito (Dead man) where the groom's friends pick him up and carry him around the room as if he were dead. This symbolizes the death of his freedom and bachelor status. They will also perform the La vibora de la mar (The snake of the sea) where the crowd forms a barrier and the couple run up against it, symbolizing the couple's union even against all of life's adversities. It should be interesting and something neither Darla nor I have ever experienced. Pete and Vicki will be there as well as Shawna and Jeff, so we will have some other non Hispanics to drink this in with. It should be fun.

 

Well, this is short, but the work day has started and I must get to it. I will likely add my next entry on Memorial Day next week. It is Victoria Day in Canada today and they are all off enjoying a three day weekend. I also heard that Darryl is working again and I'm happy to hear that he is off the roles of unemployment. I was afraid that he would turn Democrat if he stayed unemployed much longer. J/K. I hope all are well and living life to the fullest. Ciao.

 

 

Mother's Day 2013

Happy Mother's Day to Alice Lorraine Lyon. I still miss you every day and mourn the time that we lost together. I wish that you had a chance to meet Samantha and see how all of our lives have turned out. We lost you way too soon and I'm guessing you were needed in Heaven more than we needed you.

Darla had a nice day today with David joining us for church this morning and then coming back to the house and fixing us omelets for breakfast. His style is just a little different than Darla's and it was nice to have olive oil and basil and fresh vegetables. Darla's breakfast is excellent, but this was different and it was nice to see her served for a change. I'll make breakfast occasionally, but for the most part Darla is pretty territorial when it comes to her kitchen. I enjoyed watching her hover over David as he prepared breakfast. David also cleaned up the dishes and I just had to sit and watch the Players Championship on TV. In fact, I fell asleep for about an hour while Darla and David visited on the couch and woke up in time to join them outside by the pool. It was 94 degrees today, but we have a little cool down coming during the work week.

David also joined us after my golf yesterday and we tore out the cabinets in the garage to give us more room or the cars. We kept two of the four cabinets and realized that the stuff we had stored in there was mostly junk. I saved a couple of boxes, one consisting of a slide projector and slides from when Jennifer was little. I thought she would get a kick out of them, so I stored them in the attic. Much of the computer peripherals (ISDN boxes, manuals and saved floppy discs) were sent packing to the dump along with tons of rags and camping silverware and camp stoves. Things we haven't used in years and likely won't use any time in the future. David took one of the newer camp stoves and some mason jars that we stored for some reason (Darla doesn't do canning). We started at 2 PM and barely made it to the dump before they closed. We took the two cabinets and doors, assorted junk from the side yard (old furniture, lamps and metal) that had been siting waiting for a dump run for years. David brought Daniel's old truck over and we packed it to the gills. We would have been on time, but had a couple of empty boxes and an old ski vest fly out for the back as we were driving. I could see someone stopping to grab the vest thinking it flew out of some one's boat.

I had played golf on Wednesday in the Senior Invitational at Serrano Country Club. We played 9 holes of best ball, 9 holes of alternate shot and 9 holes of two man scramble. I played well, but Gary had a rough day. in fact, I parred the first five holes and he went 6 over par over the same holes. Gary was really struggling early on and when we were even par approaching the sixth hole, he turned to me and said, "this par golf isn't going to cut it, Ken." I looked at him and started to laugh. Give me a break. We finished fifth in our flight and they paid the first three places.

I played poker Friday night and Darla went to see Lucas' Day Care's Spring concert in the park. I had a good time and about broke even which is a nice change. I'd been losing money the past three or four outings. I will host the next game in June.

 

 

I took Darla's Explorer in on Friday and had a hitch and slide installed so that we can tow the jet ski. I need to get it into Yamaha to have the rig Summerized. We will be in Almanor in July for our annual trip. We have several trips planned over the next couple of months with Vegas at the end of this month, a Reno golf trip in June and Almanor in July. I booked us into a two bedroom condo in Reno at the Lakeridge golf course, which we will play on Saturday. I told a few of the guys about it and they all wanted to know if it included a casino. Funny, the fact that it doesn't is one of the things that attracted me to the resort. Bob and Vicki Pando will stay with us and it will be good to see them and spend some time together.

 

Saturday I played with Darren, Paul and Boyd and had one of my better recent rounds with a 41+40=81. Boyd shot 73, one off his age and Paul shot 78. Darren hasn't played a lot lately and struggled with a 100. I had Darren meet me at Firestone at 7:30 on Saturday morning and had some new Falken tires put on my 300. The size of the tires made it kind of hard to find as the size is P285- 35R-22. In other words they are a very wide and tall tire and a low profile to boot. Add to that the fact that the 300 has the tire inflation monitor on them and I walked out of there with a bill of over $900 for tires. It is nice to have some new kicks on the car. The Michelin's that I had on the car had over 60,000 miles on them. Darren had been out to see the Miranda Lambert concert the night before and had a designated driver along. He and Marissa had enjoyed themselves quite a bit and Darren was struggling on Saturday. He was sweating beer out of his pores for the first six holes, but I was proud of him that he showed up and remembered to pick me up at Firestone.

 

Darla has started on insulin and she is still pretty shook up with all of the physical changes she is going through. She really wanted to control her blood sugar through diet and exercise, but her numbers were so elevated that her doctor insisted that she start on an insulin protocol. I'm proud of her, she's lost 17 pounds since Jenny's wedding and her diet has changed considerably. She is still having trouble sleeping and I'm looking forward to getting my carefree wife back soon. Pray for her as she is really struggling.

 

Well, happy Mother's Day to Shirley and Darla and Jennifer and to all of the Mother's in my life, including Alice Lorraine Lyon. I miss you, mom, and I love you.

 

 

Nice weekend...and a blessed cooldown.

The heat has come and now it has gone. We hit 98 degrees on Friday and it was down to 91 degrees Saturday and cloudy and 81 degrees today. We expect some thunderstorm and a chance of rain tomorrow and then back to more seasonable weather with mid to upper 70's thru Wednesday and back up to 90 degrees by Friday and the weekend.

I have been invited to play in the Serrano Country Club Senior championship on Wednesday with Gary. This is a one day 27 hole event that starts with breakfast at 7:30 and a shotgun start at 9 AM. We will play 9 holes of best ball, 9 holes of 2 man scramble and 9 holes of alternate shot. We'll have a barbecue at the 19th hole and then a nice dinner at 6 PM. Darla and Kelly will meet us at the course for cocktails and dinner.

My game went downhill this weekend and I continue to struggle with the driver. I may switch back to my Exotics driver for awhile and put the Callaway on time out. I shot an 85 on Saturday and remained tied for first net with a 144, which was even par.  I struggled today and shot 46+45=91, net 80 and tumbled down the leader board, finishing fifth right behind Neil. The only good thing I did today was put up a couple of birdies on the back side to help my Eclectic score and win some skin money. The Eclectic is our year long tournament where I track the best scores on each hole for the participants in all stroke play events. I picked up 5 strokes last week and another two today and now stand at a 71 for the five play dates we have had so far this year. The leader is at 66, but is a four handicap. My net at an 11 handicap is a 60 to his 62.

I played with our club secretary yesterday and he stopped at number 14 to use the restroom and when he came out someone had grabbed his driver that he left leaning against the wall outside the men's room. It was a little weird, because he called me last night and asked if I remembered when he hit into the cart girls. He seemed to think that he pissed them off and they stole his club. It was a little out there, but he was upset, just having bought the new Cobra driver. As of today, it had not been returned to him and my guess is that one of the greens keepers probably saw it and grabbed it as they were driving by in a cart. I feel bad for him. He had just spent all of the money he had on the books on that club.

Darla and I were able to get out for breakfast on Saturday before I teed off. She even went over with me when I got my haircut. We hung out on the pool when I got home and then went to church before going to dinner Saturday night. We slept in a bit this morning and she sent me off with a nice breakfast before I left for golf. We worked on the pool when I got back today.  The pool is still a little cloudy and I cleaned out all of the filters and rebalanced the water. I then washed my car and sprayed down all of the leaves and dust from the front of the house.

I heard from my prodigal daughter on Friday night. She has been kind of down and out lately with how things are going with trying to get Samantha to California. She met with an attorney and it looks pretty bleak as far as any opportunity to make a move. She is hoping to get Sam for part of the Summer this year in California and her thought now is that she will move back to Vegas next Fall. She loves her job, but knows that her daughter comes first. It was nice to talk and I let her know that Dad and Shirley will be in Vegas over the same weekend that we are there at the end of this month.

Darla and I booked our trip to Nuevo Vallarta for December 14-21st. We will head to SF on Friday night the 20th and stay over and fly out at 9:15 Saturday morning with a direct flight to PV. I shared our plans with Neil and Lilly and invited them along and Neil told me yesterday that they are IN. It will be a fun trip. Dad and Shirley have booked into the Grand Luxxe from December 7th through the 21st, so we will join them for their second week at the resort.

Work continues to really set some new records as we had our largest premium month ever in Sacramento and had our second straight month with over $2,000,000 in premium and $300,000 in net retained income. I have responded to the continued growth by putting in a requisition for two more employees which will bring my office up to 26 people. I've also ordered three more desks and two more computers for the office and we will expand into the last three spots in my current office configuration. I had one of our consultants who is in charge of growing the companies' brokerage presence call me this week and told me that there is a broker in Stockton that is an auto expert and is looking to make a move. It is a mother-son team and she grew the auto book at her current employer from zero to $12,000,000 in four years. Harvey and I will likely interview her for a position in my office in the next month. I have one of the candidates for the typing position coming back on Monday to meet with my Personal Lines Underwriters as a potential candidate as a new Assistant Underwriter.

Well, that is the news that is fit to print. I took the doors off of the storage closets in the garage to give Darla more room and will likely dismantle them this coming Saturday. I'm going to ask David if he'd be willing to help and borrow Daniel's old pickup truck so that we can make a dump run. I hope you all have a great week and I'll check in again next weekend. Ciao.