November Means...

Ah, November.

With each November come the official holiday season, weird rain-snows, and one step closer to graduating…again.  Yup, midterm exams and projects are all behind me leaving only 3 assignments, one final exam (Finance), and one final project (Global Strategy).  My last class is scheduled for December 17^th; the countdown is so on!  …seriously, there’s an 8 ½ x 11 sized countdown on our fridge.

Securitization has been in the dumps for the past year, but bankruptcy has been keeping the legal industry very busy.  Fiancée’s been ultra busy with one specific bankruptcy…you can guess (but I’ll never tell who it is)...which has left me with a handful of stories that no one can substantiate.  For example, the dingo and I ran into a wolf at our local hang out spot, the Paine Estate.  Yeah, a wolf.  But what’s the point of telling the story?  …I have no proof.

Paine estate has been the sight of some interesting recent activity.  While there have been numerous Cameron Diaz sightings in Boston, our tiny town is often overlooked by Hollywood.  Until now (maybe).  During one recent trip to Paine, I was ordered away from the house and back toward the parking lots.  Why?  I’ll let you be the judge:

The Man vs Food show was in Baltimore last week.  They went to Chaps Charcoal Restaurant and sampled some of the sandwiches and raved about the Chaps Pit Beef Sandwich.  Chaps is on Polaski Highway – if anyone’s been, tell me if it’s as good as they made it look on TV.  They also said that the best crabs in town were at OBrycki’s and encouraged viewers to try the Great Steak Challenge at Steak & Main.

Update: We can’t take this one horse town anymore, so we’re leaving!  We just signed a new lease in Somerville (atleast a 7 horse town).

Random Thought:  The Motorola Droid commercials start cool and quickly change into an expensive advertising mistake.

Random Update: The temperature in Rio de Janeiro is 77 degrees.

Running in the Rain

I learned how to do this photo effect last week.  It’s called selective desaturation and is really quite simple.  You don’t even need PhotoShop to pull this off…just a $.99 iPhone App called ColorSplash or perhaps less.  But, to be fair, using a real camera and PhotoShop yields much better quality and flexibility.

Fiancée and I partook in a road race this past weekend.  The Somerville 5k is our favorite race of the year.  Why?  Because this t-shirt is consistently better than any other race’s.  Oh yeah, it’s THAT good: long sleeve, good logo, cool sponsors, and always a new color (it was red this year). 

We’ve signed up (and paid) for this race for the past 3 years but only participated twice.  Due to a minor scheduling error, we missed last year’s race by exactly 24 hours.  We showed up on Sunday instead of Saturday.  To make matters worse, we learned of our mistake when we inquired to some lady who was wearing the ’08 race t-shirt on her way to breakfast.  She thought it was funny.  …I guess that’s what you get when you choose which non-profit to support based on their t-shirt.  Karma!

This year went much smoother.  When race registration opened some 6 weeks prior, fiancée signed us up immediately.  After all, the first 400 registrants get free t-shirts.  Little did we know at the time that we were the first 2 out of ~1000 racers to register!  In addition to free t-shirts, this guaranteed us the #1 and #2 bibs.  This may not be important to most, but we were ecstatic.  In our minds, we had already won.

The weather was terrible.  After we signed in and got the t-shirts, we debated whether or not to stay.  We ultimately opted to go for it.  My ‘conditioning’ must be paying off.  Here’s a picture of me after the ’07 race (top - landscape) and a picture of me as I finish this year’s ’09 race (bottom - portrait).

One of the shows that we watch is called Man vs Food.  It’s classy.  We gathered a new burger idea from last week’s show; instead of a bun, use a crispy cream donut!  The assembly would go something like this:

½ of Crispy Cream Donut

Bacon

Cheese

Patty

½ of Crispy Cream Donut

How awesome does that sound!?

On a slightly more frustrating note.  It’s very difficult to get Redskins coverage up here…unless they’re about ready to lose to the Lions.  Awesome.  Oh well, it’s not the first time that Washington has bailed out Detroit… 

To do, or not to do?

How do you manage your to-do list? 

On any given weekend, I like to have 3 things on my list.    These are usually things that are significant enough for me to require me to block out some time.  Alternately, it’s something that should be done to give myself a fighting chance in the upcoming week.  For example, this weekend a wanted to:

1.    Head to the orchard to formally kick-off the Fall season

2.    Finish reading for Global Strategy and make a dent in the reading for Short Term Finance

3.    Laundry

Funny thing about my lists…they have a mind of their own.  Numbers 1 and 3 were crossed-off by Saturday afternoon leaving only the reading.  I’ve been watching fiancée read her book (‘Unless’ by Carol Shields) for the past day and a half…but I’m yet to make significant progress.  Argh.  Instead, I’ve resorted to mental strategies that make me feel better about the state of my list.  My favorite strategy is to concentrate on the completion percentage:

completion percentage = completed to-do list items / total to-do list items

By Saturday afternoon, my completion percentage was 2 / 3 = 66%.  I knew that I didn’t really feel like reading case studies right now…SO…I added a new item to the list (e.g. vacuum), completed it, and crossed it off.  Once I completed that task, my completion percentage moved from 66% to 3 / 4 = 75%!  PROGRESS!!  If you’re not careful, this strategy can get the better of you.  For example, I am not above adding an item to the list (e.g. exercise) that I’ve ALREADY completed: 4 / 5 = MORE PROGRESS!  By the way, this same technique can be loosely applied to pad investment portfolios at the end of a quarter.

In other news, I really thought Luke was going to pick Malissa in the last episode of More to Love.  Ah, c’est la vie. 

Fiancée has had two favorite things this week: 1) the E*Trade commercial where the baby calls his golf buddy  a shank-a-potamus and 2) Miley Cirus’s Party in the USA.  In her honor, I’ve added it to the ‘Give it Listen’ section on the left.  Be forewarned… like it or not, it’s really difficult to get out of your head.  It was a hot weekend in New England: NASCAR was in New Hampshire; U2 was in Boston; youth hockey season started; and we had two neighbors move out (yeah!).

…tough weekend for USC, BYU, and the Pats.  On the other hand, hail to the Redskins.

Fiancée just finished her book.  It smells like she's making apple crisp.  ...I better go check it out.

Dear Desk Job

Ah, Labor Day. 

It’s the one day all year when America collectively exalts, “Dear Desk Job, go screw.”  We spent the long weekend in mountain tops of PA quietly nestled at 2000ft above sea level.  You’ve heard of places where the sun don’t shine, right?  Well we had plenty of sun shine, but this is the kind of place that even MapQuest is yet to locate.  It’s awesome up there; cell phones are just video games, XM is a waste of money, and you can forget about GPS.  OK, it’s not THAT Oregon Trail but my point is still valid: it’s great to disconnect and be in a place where the sound of a passing car is infrequent at best.

We brought the dingo with us so we had to stop every 90 minutes to let him decompress.  But once we got there, the yard was all his.  Life is good.  Food plays a major role in our Pennsylvacations.  Check out this diet:

Friday

• Panera: Toasted Cinnamon Crunch Bagel w/ Hazelnut Cream Cheese
• McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger
• Pepperoni and Mushroom Pizza
• Chicken Parm on a bed of rice
• Caramel Cashew ice cream on a waffle cone

Saturday

• Éclairs from Wegman’s
• toast & cheese
• sausage & pepper sub
• fries
• hot dogs & hamburgers

Sunday

• toast & cheese
• éclairs
• mozzarella & portabella sub
• Burger King

…and then wash it all down with coffee, a Heineken, and more Weis’s Black Cherry Soda than any individual should consume.  …It’s probably obvious that the fast food happened on the way to/from PA.  Needless to say, I’m still not functioning properly.

I’m getting back into the swing of things at the office.  I kinda have to because Fall Semester also started up this week.  Global Strategy should be a straight forward class: do the reading, form an opinion, defend your position.  Naturally, Short Term Financial Management will require a bit more work.  The STFM teacher reminds me of Carol Bartz (a lot)…so she’s OK in my book.  It’ll take some serious discipline to keep my motivation ‘up’ for the entire semester.  Interestingly enough, I’m less anxious to conclude the Master’s than I was the Bachelor’s.  

Mmmmm...Millsey-burgers

Random Question: Is it easier to wake up on days that you have to head into the office?  Or days that you don’t have to head into the office?

Hello Millsey-burgers!  I’ve been cooking dinner this week because I’ve got all the time in the world.  I stick to grill food and by that standard, tonight was no different.  However, by every other standard, tonight was the big dance in Cinderella’s castle.  I promised fiancée the meal of her choice tonight and she picked Millsey-burgers.  If you haven’t had opportunity, then you haven’t quite lived yet.  I believe it was Papa John who said, “better ingredients, better pizza, Papa John’s.”  I think he’s onto something, and that’s why I take a similar approach with my burgers.  Only the freshest or best ground beef, garlic, blue cheese, teriyaki glaze, spices, and herbs for these burgers!

I imagine today is the closest that I’ll ever get to a three-a-day again (and I’m OK with that). Comparatively, today’s three-a-day was far more enjoyable than the ones that I recall from college.  I ran a gentle 6k in the morning, hiked with the dingo in the afternoon, and played indoor this evening.  Having run around a competitive soccer field for the majority of my life, I’m surprised that I still have the tolerance to run for exercise.  I always thought that I would graduate to swimming, cycling, or nothing (the later being the most likely result).  To this day, I still like the idea of running 5k’s as long as they have t-shirts and/or chasing a little ball around field with 11 or 21 other aptly conditioned futballers.

Tonight’s soccer game was a big deal because it’s the last game of the regular season AND the last game that I can play this season.  Once school starts, I can’t fit-in the indoor league (bummer).  15 minutes into the game we’re down 3-1 but by half we’ve evened the score.  We ended up winning, 8-4, and I recorded three goals and one assist.  Fortunately, I went out on a positive note.  I haven’t quite grasped that this is my last semester of the Masters.  If all goes well, I will have finished the program in 3.5 years.

More Randomness: At the park today, Jake and I saw a snake and a toad.  He totally ignored both.  What is it about squirrels and rabbits that drive him crazy?

Exercise: The Golf Way

Considering I’m on StayCation, I got a really early start to the day.  Secretly, I think that my fiancée found pleasure in my 6a alarm.  Sr. Honda was required at the dealership by 7a to have the breaks replaced.  The repairs went as smooth as can be expected.  Unfortunately for Honda Village, I’ve concluded that   dealer maintenance may be one of the biggest legal scams.  Oh well, such is life.

However!  The #1 legal scam in America is the entire wedding industry!  Double you oh double you.  Every vendor tries to take advantage of every customer.  Today, we received a digital proof of our save-the-dates.  We like them but wanted to try out a different set of colors.  Well, there’s a fee for that.  Apparently, the incremental cost of changing a PageMaker file (or whatever) and producing a PDF is worth $25.  …instead, I brought the mock-ups into Photoshop and changed the colors on my own in about 4 minutes.  At that pace, I could’ve altered 15 mock-ups in 1 hour which equates to an hourly rate of $375.  Not too shabby.  By the way, don’t abbreviate save-the-dates; you’ll end up with something wholly unexpected.

While the car was getting repaired, I managed to fit in a round of golf with Kyle.  I think this is the second full round that I’ve been able to fit in all summer.  Disappointing?  Yes, but not as disappointing as my scores.  For 16 holes my scores kept to a slow boil.  And then there was #17; the second most difficult hole on the course and host to a truly classic melt down.  It was a near perfect reenactment of Tin Cup.  3 balls in swamp…but I knew I could clear it if I just hit one more.  Golf is a difficult mental challenge…just take the drop.

The agony of #17 was somewhat mitigated by my purchase of Golfshot GPS.  I heard about this from one of the iPhone TV commercials.  Very cool.  Look for it the next time an iPhone commercial comes on (you shouldn’t have to wait too long).

Solar Power

OK, it’s no surprise that I burn like California during the dry season.  A David-sunburn may be the eighth wonder of the world.  They’re great for the electricity bill – instead of turning on the lights; I simply roll up my sleeve.

If this sunburn could talk, it would tell of the couple of hours that I spent at the concrete beach today.  There were four other folks in attendance at the pool.  No one talked to each other and it was great!  I finished a chapter in my finance book (The Role of Working Capital) and listened to a Darius Rucker album.  Sitting at the pool conjured memories of the Damascus pool: swim meets, pulling on the lane rope to make backstroke more fun, no breath 25’s, the high dive, cow tails from the store, the kiddy pool, the honey suckle, the frustrations of adult swim, and Speedos.  Ugh, Speedo-fitting-day was the official low point of the whole season.    And how could I forget the welcome to our OOL sign.  No matter how many times I try to explain the humor behind this sign, no one ever reciprocates.

  

After the pool, I headed over to the driving range for a bucket of balls.  Ain’t life grand?  The range is definitely the place to be this week – I imagine it has something to do with the Deutsche Bank Championship.  The guy that was hitting next to me had several dozen drivers all lined up on the fence behind us.  I had no idea what was doing or if it worth it.  My instinct told me to hurry up and place the face.  After all, what average golfer would bring a spread like that to a public range?  My imagination ran wild until I heard him take a step back onto the concrete behind us; the dummy was wearing metal spikes.  Obviously not a pro…right?

As a side note, the Celtics training facility is just down the road from here and has turned town into a hot spot for pro athletes.  

On the way home, I saw a car accident happen.  I was one lane over and two cars behind the car that got hit.  Fortunately, no one was hurt.  In fact, there was only minor damage done.  The car in front of me took off and, suddenly, it was my move.  So, what do you do?

a)       You’re a witness to a car accident.  Park your car and give your contact information to both parties involved.

b)       You’ve got things to do.  Check one more time to make sure everyone’s OK and then head on down the road.

I started pulling away.  Through the intersection.  Past the Papa Gino’s.  And that’s as far as I could go.  I couldn’t drive another hundred feet.  I felt this overwhelming responsibility to go back to the scene o’ the crime.  So I did and probably made my sunburn a lot worse.

Moral of the story: apply sun screen before taking an active role in society.