Autumn is in the Air

Sure, it's still 94 degrees during the day, but signs of Fall abound. First all, it is dark in the morning when I leave the house before 6:30 and it is getting down into the low 50's overnight. The pool water is down to 70 degrees, still swimmable, but it is a shock to the system when you get in. The leaves are already starting to pile up in the front yard and our municipal water district has let us know that we are further restricted to one day a week to water lawns starting on October 5th. Currently, we can water twice a week.

 

I had the water district out on Thursday and they took a look at my property for their Cash for Grass program. He gave me a laundry list of rules and requirements that I read through while he measured the lawn. I figured I had about 1500 square feet of lawn and would receive $2,000 based on $2 a square foot and a maximum of $2k for the rebate. The rules were I had to put in a 100% drip water sprinkler system and must install a filtered control box and a maximum 1 gallon per minute flow for each station. The cost to install the system myself would run about $380 and I would have to cut out the grass, add topsoil, build a retaining wall around the side yard and buy all of the ground cover, trees and plants. For that I would receive $561. What?  The tech calculated 1122 square feet of coverage and you only get $1 per square foot, BUT the calculation is halved. The maximum allowed statewide is $2 a square foot, but Roseville allows half of that and cuts the square footage in half. See ya! I still plan to put in the retaining wall and building up the lawn on the side yard by adding about 4 yards of topsoil and reseed a new drought tolerant lawn. The liquid ambers on the side yard have their roots growing up out of the lawn and the grass itself has never been very sturdy. It thins out during the heat of the Summer because of the root situation. I'm going to talk to David tonight about helping me this Fall putting in the retaining wall. I'll put in the topsoil myself and seed the lawn.

 

David will be over for dinner tonight. Darla is fixing Honey Garlic chicken and it smells heavenly as it cooks. David has been busy lately working on a special project that was used at the TBD Fest in downtown West Sacramento (The Bridge District). The project was a large pyramid with a stage built into it for the music festival. I've included a picture of it below. The pyramid had built in lighting and David was both the architect and was one of the builders. The materials were donated by his firm and the stage was used during the three day festival last weekend.

 

He enjoyed the process and was very busy as he got ready for the event. He is really enjoying living downtown and is very involved in the night life and arts district in his neighborhood. He showed up a few minutes ago and is visiting with Darla and I right now as I work on this. He was over watching the Niner game with his Dad. Dallas lost this morning after taking a big lead on the strength of their running game. They were then outscored 25-0 in the second half as they ran the ball 5 times in the second half. Uh. Wake up. The Niners were blown out for the second week in a row and are struggling with a weakened defense and the same problems at quarterback. It will be a long season for them and a tough go for Dallas until they can get Dez back and Romo back in week 12.

 

I played poker Friday night and won a nice tidy $50. I took off by 11 as I had early golf on Saturday. Paul, Jessie and I played over at Woodcreek and teed off at 6:50 AM. I had a freebie courtesy of John Parola and enjoyed a great front nine, shooting 40, but cratered on the back nine as I shot 46 for 86. I play a sports marketing event on Thursday afternoon at Cameron Park with one of my agents and Paul, who she met when we played a practice round before our Association golf event at Serrano. She is inviting us to her Country Club and I'm buying everyone lunch before the game.

 

Saturday, I will play in the qualifier for the Rose Cup. It is our annual tournament that pit the four clubs from Roseville against each other in a Ryder Cup style event. I played in the first three Rose cups, but have missed qualifying the last six years. This will be year ten of the even and we have only won the event twice.

 

Work is going well and we actually have an outside chance of hitting budget this month. We are beginning to hit our stride with all of the new pieces. We had fallen off pace and had a huge day on Friday, placing $150,000 worth of premium and over $22,000 in net retained income. We will have to have three really good days to hit our number, but we will actually blow out our numbers from 2014 and that is the first time we've done that since Matt left. I had a Human Resources audit in the office Tuesday and Wednesday and really liked the HR Manager that came in from our Dallas office. She had some great ideas for us from a hiring standpoint and took a lot of my feedback on retention of high earning employees. I know the company holds me responsible for the exodus from my office, but Pete refers to me having the keys to the car, but I have two managers in the backseat telling me where to go and where to turn. I don't have control over raises and that really hurts me on retention. These young employees will move for just about any amount of money and have very little loyalty. The millenials are a tough nut to crack.

 

Well, dinner approaches soon, the Sunday night football game is on and we have company, so I will bring this diatribe to a close. I hope you have a great week. Be well. Ciao.

 

I left my car in San Francisco

 

As ALWAYS, a fabulous time was had by all in San Francisco. We traveled to the city with John and Camille Parola this year and Camille is a Manager with PG&E and got us parking in the city. My headline refers to the fact that we parked the car the minute we got in and left it in the lot all weekend until we left. You don't need a car in SF.

 

The first picture above is of the 16th green and the view of the Castle at Castle Oaks Golf Course in Ione. I played in the NCGA Net Amateur qualifier on Thursday. Jesse Sierra and I drove up together Thursday morning and he played in a group a half hour in front of me. I had a rough day and it started with my first shot pulled dead left into the pond and then my re-tee being pulled left over the fairway and into another hazard. I limped to the par 5 green and scored a 9, four over on the first hole. I shot 47+43=90. I got an "Attaboy", but the scores overall were high with one net 74 actually qualifying for the finals in late October. Jesse struggled as well and shot a 90 as well with his 11 handicap. We picked the course as our qualifying site because it is unique and is in the foothills where it is not so HOT.

 

Friday we were up early and picked John and Camille up at 7:15 for the drive to Napa, California. I had a 10:30 tee time at the course and we were able to get a screaming deal at $25 a man for golf. The girls dropped us off at the course, had a drink with us and then headed off to spend copious amounts of money at the Outlet shops in Napa (Shirley knows what I'm talking about). I've got a couple of pictures of the Napa course. It is definitely a muni course, but it was in such an awesome place that we had a blast. None of us played particularly well and I struggled the most on the front nine shooting a 47, but I did come back with a 42 on the back for 89. Neil shot 92, Charlie an 86 and John an 89 as well. It was tremendous.

 

We finished up about 3 PM and were on our way to San Francisco right afterward. I had talked to Angela in our SF office to see if she could get us into an upscale Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. She is Chinese and called around and all of the venues were booked for Friday night. We ended up making a reservation at Palomino's, an Italian place about four blocks down Embarcadero from our hotel. We got to the hotel a little after 4 and John and Camille got checked in within minutes. For some reason the front desk clerk had computer issue with our reservation and had to reboot her computer. I was kidding with her and asked her if it was her first day. She said, no, she'd worked there for ten years. She finally got it booted back up and upgraded us to a "VIEW" room, which was a king room on the bay side of the hotel overlooking Pier 12 and the Bay Bridge. You can see some pictures that Darla took above. We had another issue with the maid at the hotel. We were taking a nap about 4PM on Saturday ad she knocked on the door. It woke us up and when I asked what she needed, she said. "Oh, I didn't think anyone was there." The room had already been cleaned, so what business did she have coming into our room? We complained to the front desk and they asked what they could do. We told them we just wanted them to know that the maid was re-entering rooms randomly for no apparent reason. They ended up giving us a 15% discount on an already upgraded room. The room for two nights ended up just over $400 and was supposed to cost $540 with taxes.

 

We had a great time at dinner Friday night at Palominos. Great food and the view of the bay was incredible. The only real issue we had all weekend was that Neil and Lilly stayed at a different hotel bout 4 miles from ours. They were at Union Square and we were at Embarcadero trying to coordinate with them. They had to cab over to our hotel to join up with us each time we got together.

 

Saturday we went to the Giant game. Our World Champion Giants are out of the playoffs this year. We buy the tickets in April and you never know. They were flat and got clobbered 6-0. We had a nice two mile hike to the park from our hotel. We have a couple of pictures from our walk to the park and at the park itself. It was fun, but we left in the 8th inning as they were getting hammered. We rested up after the game and ended up meeting the gang in the lobby for wine and beer on the happy hour perquisite. We met Neil and Lilly over at Fog Harbour at Pier 39 at 7 PM for dinner. We all walked to the Ferry Building and then caught the Metro light rail to Pier 39. The mass transit in the city is excellent and your ticket at $2.50 is good all day. We got a great table overlooking the bay and out to the Golden Gate Bridge. You can see a picture o the sunset over the Golden Gate and a few pictures of the couples at dinner. I told John that if you looked the other way across the restaurant you could see the Bay Bridge. He turned around and was marveling at the two bridges, when I stood up and waved and he could see my reflection in the large mirror on the far wall. I got him.

 

This morning we all met in the lobby (Neil and Lilly bailed as they had to check out of their hotel). We all walked down to a place that the front desk recommended, Red's Java House, that turned out to be a small diner that offered about four choices for dinner. We opted to keep walking and went to Delaney's restaurant a little closer to the ballpark. They had a great menu and Darla had French toast and I had a bacon and Tillamook cheddar omelet for breakfast. We have the final picture from our group breakfast this morning.

 

We checked out, got on the road and were in Roseville by a little after 1 PM. I watched the Dallas game and was horrified to see Tony Romo sacked and he broke his clavicle for the second time in his career and will miss 6-8 weeks. Our stud receiver, Dez Bryant, is out for up to ten weeks after being injured last week. It could be a tough year, but I think the team will hang in there and be there when both Dez and Tony get back.

 

Well, that is it for this week. I have an HR audit in the office this week which is a first for me. I asked the HR Manager what she was auditing and she said Best Practices. OK. She'll be here Tuesday and Wednesday. She's in SF tonight and will audit there tomorrow and then head on to San Diego for a similar audit. I hope you are all well. Ciao.

California Wildfires are Intense

 

Smoke gets in your eyes. Especially now with fires burning in six different areas of California. The largest is up in the foothills and is over 100,000 acres. This one affects us locally not only with air quality, but many of our friends and acquaintances have been evacuated. My underwriter, Gail, has 18 family members that have been evacuated and, as of Friday, were all staying together in a 2 bedroom home. Gail and her husband live in a 3000 square foot home up outside of Placerville and she was going to reach out to them and offer her home for some of them to stay. Many of their homes have not yet been burned, but they are in the path of the fire and may be allowed to reenter their home if the fire turns to another direction. We had fairly calm conditions yesterday, but the winds were up today. The odd thing about a fire of this size and intensity is that it creates its own winds. With the sever drought in California there are so many areas that are bone dry and these fires are popping up all over. We are supposed to enjoy the effects of a Super El Nino Winter this year and it is supposed to be WET. We had flooding in 1986, 1996, 2006 and are poised for more here in 2016. We all hope to see the El Nino effect to be in snow rather than rain, but at this point we will take what we can get.

 

I was up in Lake Tahoe this week for the Annual Meeting of the Western Independent Agents Association and was installed to the board. We played golf on Wednesday afternoon up at the Championship course at Incline Village. The course is in amazing shape and they get a fair amount of Summer thunderstorms up in the area and the conditions are fantastic. I had a tough time getting used to the altitude, in fact I was over the green on three of the four par threes. The only one I wasn't, I hit a tree and the ball landed in the front bunker. I struggled and shot 48+43=91. I definitely played better on the back side as I started to figure out the change n distance on my clubs, but had several long drives that actually flew too far as there was a creek that meandered throughout the property and my drives would find their way into the water. Frustrating.

 

The dinner we had Wednesday night was simply amazing. We stayed at the Hyatt Lake Tahoe resort and had dinner on the water at the Eagle's Nest. We had drinks before hand overlooking the water and then a sumptuous meal. I had an 18 ounce bone in rib eye, macaroni and cheese, a Caesar salad and some nice wine. After dinner our table decided to share a $190 glass of Louie XIII Cognac. I was the new guy and thought, "Wow, what about fiscal responsibility"? They ended up pouring us six shots of the Cognac and we likely ended up with at least two servings of the $190 drink and only got charged for one. Additionally, the restaurant comped our desserts and one of the bottles of wine.

 

The meeting on Thursday was really impressive to me. I've sat on these boards many times and this is one of the most information packed meetings I've ever sat in on. They have quarterly phone meetings and much of the meat of the job is disseminated during the annual meeting. We worked on plans to have my company set up several educational seminars for their agents. The association is comprised of 7 western states and they have 442 agencies as members. It is a great partnership for me as we are the sole E&S carrier for them. Funny, as one of the board members is the founding owner of one of my competitors. She was understandably upset when it was announced that Burns would be the sole wholesaler that the retail arm would work with. Alan, the CEO of WIAA, told me that her firm is now run by her children and they only work in California. We represent all of the states. Anyhow, I'm thrilled to be associated with this group and look forward to Jeff taking over as Chairman next year.  

 

Friday Darla and I drove up to Yuba City and met her parents for dinner at Cool Hand Luke's. They had prime rib and Darla had shrimp. I settled for a chicken sandwich as I had steak on Wednesday and have to keep a close eye on my cholesterol. It is her Dad's birthday on the 16th and we wanted to visit with them. We will be gone next weekend on our San Francisco trip so couldn't see them next week so decided to head up on Friday.

 

Saturday, Darla had a jewelry event at the house. Her event was 1 to 3 and she hadn't coordinated ahead of time with me. I had a 7 AM tee time and would be home by 11:30. Darla had a Women's event at church in the morning and I decided to come home and work on the yard while she was having her party. She wasn't thrilled with that idea. I played with John, Neil and Paul and shot  44+40=84. We were sitting around having an early lunch afterward and Paul asked if I wanted to do a "replay"? I called Darla and she didn't answer and I left a message that I was playing another 18 and would see her after three. John decided to join us. John had given me a free round that day and we were able to get a replay for $10, so I played 36 holes and only paid $10, plus Paul owed me $5 in skins after the round. I shot 41+44=85 on the second 18 and ran out of gas late in the round. Paul and I did take a cart the second 18. It wasn't something that I'd want to do every weekend, but the sun was hidden behind the smoke and it was relatively comfortable and I did enjoy myself.

 

As mentioned, we are off to San Francisco on Friday. I have a tee time at the Napa golf course on Friday at 10:30. We usually play the Presidio course in the city, but they have a tournament on Friday. Steve wanted to play a course in Burlingame, but the ladies pooh poohed that idea. They were all on board with hitting up the town of Napa while the boys play golf. I got us a $99 foursome through Groupon.

 

We will stay at the Harbor Court hotel in the Embarcadero in SF across from the Ferry Building where we usually stay. Parking is another $50 a night, but Camille (John's wife) can get us parking at the PG&E building in SF, which is two blocks from the hotel for free. I told her if she got us free parking, we would pick them up and drive them. We pick them up Friday morning. We will see the Giants play Saturday afternoon against the Diamondbacks and then do a city bus tour on Sunday before heading home. It should be a fun weekend. 

 

Well, the Dallas Sunday night football game is about to start. Darla has chicken and rice cooking in the oven and life is good. I hope you are all well and I'll bring stories and pictures from our weekend to the blog next Sunday night. Ciao.

Is Labor Day the end of Summer?

 

 

The answer, at least in Sacramento is an emphatic "No!". The temperature this week: 102 tomorrow, 108 Wednesday and Thursday, 109 on Friday an cooling off to 106 over the upcoming weekend. This won't be our last spate of 100 degree days this year. We usually get a couple in late September and even in to October.

 

The sketches of Darla and Sam and the color sketch of Sam are from an iphone app that I have and I like both of these. The app takes a picture and converts it to a sketch format.

 

I will escape the heat Wednesday and Thursday with a trip up to Lake Tahoe and Incline Village for the Western Insurance Agent's Association Annual board meeting. I was elected to the board on a three year term this year and will be sworn in on Thursday morning. Wednesday afternoon we will play golf at the Incline Village Golf Course, a course that I have seen many times over the years as I drove through Incline Village on Highway 28. I will serve with Jeff Barnett, my friend and agent who owns the agency in El Dorado Hills with his wife. Jeff and I were both underwriters at my first insurance job, the Sacramento office of Commercial Union. It should be fun.

 

Darla and I were in Sacramento today for an early lunch with Pete and Vicki Morrison and we ate well at the Spaghetti Factory in the old train depot in downtown Sacramento. We had tickets to the last game for the River Cats, the San Francisco Giants triple A club here in town. We had a great day and left in the 7th inning with the home team leading 10-0. Pete filled me in on the wedding of my old number one underwriter and Associate Manager, Matt. They were married up in Georgetown on Connie's (who also worked for me) parent's property. Her Dad walked her down the aisle with a shotgun tucked under his arm and announced to Matt, "No givebacks!" Pete is still very close with Matt and it concerns me going forward. It was about 97 degrees this afternoon and our seats were blessedly in the shade. You can see the picture of the lawn area at the stadium and the large group of people congregated in the shade under the trees. We called them the "shade people".

 

I had a jack installed into my car on Friday that attaches my iphone to my car stereo. I have a nice Boston Acoustics stereo system in the car but it is circa 2006 and didn't have Bluetooth set up in it. I didn't want to change out the stereo, because it is a quality system, but wanted to access my music. Harvey has asked that I take on more of a marketing role in the office and with that I will be in the car more and wanted access to my tunes.  

 

Jennifer, McKenny and Sam all got together last night with Darryl and Cheryl. They are in Vegas on a family reunion with Cheryl's family. I haven't talked to Jennifer since that trip, but I'm sure they had fun.

 

I did play golf this weekend in our Labor Day event. It was our first stroke play event in awhile and I played well, shooting 39 on the front and hanging on for a 42 on the back and a n 81, net 66 to win low net in my flight and $59. I also won the Invitational Event and got some well deserved harassment from the guys. If they aren't ribbing you, you aren't playing well. My year long eclectic score is down to a 63, net 48 and I should win some money when that is all said and done. We have three more events to go before that wraps up, the Past President's event, the Turkey Shoot and the Eclectic Final in November.

 

Darla and I hosted the gang for a Labor Day barbecue on Sunday. Steve and Brenda, Charlie and Frieda, John and Camille and Neil and Lil all joined us to help wrap up the Summer. We are all going to San Francisco in two weeks. It is an event that Steve sets up every year, but this year he is in a cast and has t miss. He brought all of the info with him (tickets to the Giants game and tickets to the San Francisco city bus tour). Presidio has a golf tournament on September 18th and we have to pick another venue for golf. Steve had in mind a course in Burlingame and unbeknownst to me, John and Camille were planning to skip the golf. I had no interest in a course in Burlingame and set up a round at Napa Golf Club in Napa, CA. Camille thought I was setting up the Burlingame golf and didn't want to complain. When she found out that we were going Friday to Napa, she was thrilled. Shopping in Burlingame and lunch with the girls can't compare to wandering the shops of Napa and having lunch in the wine country. As is my wont, I found us a deal whereby I got us a foursome through Groupon for $99. We will drive into San Francisco that night and have dinner in Chinatown. Saturday is the Giants versus Diamondbacks day game and the bus tour on Sunday. One of the big expenses of our San Francisco trip is parking. It costs $50 a day to park at the hotel. This year we will drive in with John and Camille ad we can park at the PG&E lot about two blocks from our hotel. Camille is a manager in the Sacramento call center for PG&E.

 

I plan to talk to Steve about picking a new getaway for next year. He enjoys the Giants game, but I will propose a trip to Solvang or Bodega Bay. There are more golf choices in both cities and cheaper accommodations, restaurants AND no pay for parking.

 

Well, it has been a fun and full holiday weekend and I'm ready for a good week of work as well. I hope you each have a good week and I will be back at the keyboard next Sunday night. Ciao.