Up at 4:00 a.m.; parked in front of the computer by 4:30; worked on a client’s manuscript till 6:00. Wrote a to-do list. Then walked away from the desk and into a lovely little nanovacation.
What a beautiful, beautiful morning! Jumped in the pool and swam around for awhile, all the while tossing the ball that Cassie kept throwing into the drink. Put on some clean clothes, fixed a light breakfast, and came to light in a rocking chair on the deck. Smugly dipped a strawberry into a pile of crunchy sugar while reading about Nanny Bloomberg’s scheme to ban New Yorkers from slurping down a Big Gulp.
Ah! This is the life. Taking an hour or so away from the contract work and the blogging work and the housework and the yardwork is like going on a tiny vacation: a nanovacation. By the time I came to the end of my second cup of coffee, I felt nice and relaxed.
Things are going well just now. A spate of business has been pouring across the minicorporate threshold, and incredibly, when I cite our new hourly rate, people agree to pay it! Crystal, the ad agent extraordinaire, recently came up with another plug of money for FaM, which is always good. If this keeps up, we may very well have enough income from the work we know we can do for both Tina and me to knock off the menial work—waiting tables on her part, teaching freshman comp on mine.
I’ve been invited to join a new networking group, something called WOAMTEC, and the energetic proprietor of K&J Windows and Doors proposes to get me invited as a guest (and maybe as a member) to the chapter of BNI he belongs to. The guy is an effervescent businessman and networker, and when he found out what we do, he expressed interest in possibly hiring us, but more to the point, he started to dispense advice on how to get leads and how to generate business by developing lots and lots of business contacts. He pretty much confirmed what Tina and I had already come to realize: One of us needs to function as the rainmaker and one needs to run the actual work and supervise the subcontractors.
Ultimately I did decide to go with K&J, much as I like the estimable Chip of Freelite. The product he’s selling, Simonton, seems to be very good—in the same quality range as Milgard (in some respects somewhat better)—and the price is a little lower. He ended up underpricing Chip by about $2,000 on the three doors I decided to install. Instead of cheapying down with only two doors, I decided to select the narrow rails instead of the more expensive wide “French” rails and go for all three, rather than end up with two in white vinyl and one in black aluminum.
These doors should be marginally more secure (they’ll still need to be shored up with a stick in the runner) and much more energy efficient. They’re low-E, EnergyStar windows, and they come with tempered glass, which is a little harder to break. Unlike Milgard, Simonton also will provide a supplemental barrel-type lock, which can go into either the floor or the frame above the door—believe I’ll outfit each door with both. The cost of lead abatement magically dropped from the $150/door that I thought was being quoted to only $50 per door. That may have been what his manager was saying in the first place, and I may have misunderstood. Anyway, a total of $150 is a big improvement on what I expected would be a $450 hit. The total cost is a little over $4,000, which is about what I had privately budgeted for the job.
So, I think these will amount to a desirable improvement to the house for (objectively speaking) not all that much money. They’ll not only look a lot better, they’ll be safer and much more energy-efficient.
The pool is so lovely at this time of year, as the weather starts to get warm. Yesterday it was 112, but the water is still cool enough to refresh. Dropping into a clear pond of cool water is a perfect way to start a hot day…and an even more perfect way to end one.
Getting rid of the hated devil-pod tree was the best thing I’ve done, where that pool is concerned. We’ve had a few days that were breezy enough to blow junk into the pool, but I haven’t had to spend an hour at a time shoveling bushels of long, strappy leaves and pots off the bottom and unclogging the cleaning system. It’s now safe to let the system go for several days at a time, without having to hover over it and check several times a day to be sure it’s not choking. That makes pool care really very easy.
Sure is better than having to mow a lawn! 🙂
The arborist was right, though, that the devil-pod tree would try to resuscitate itself by shooting up runners from the roots. The other day I found one sticking up between the flagstones, 35 feet away from the trunk! And several keep struggling back to life on the far side of the east wall. The only thing that will beat these things back is undiluted Roundup concentrate. Yuck!
Updated my Linked-In profile and invited a whole bunch of people to “connect,” many of whom I’d almost forgotten about. Built a contacts list in Google and realized that Google Contacts can be made to work, in a crude way, like a bare-bones database. It will do what I need it to do, anyway, which is sort contacts by category and build mailing lists of clients, to whom I intend, very soon, to start sending a quarterly e-newsletter. Realized I’d forgotten to file this year’s annual report with the Corporation Commission, which turns out to be just as well, because this will provide an opportunity to add Tina as a director, giving us more credibility with our application to the AAAME program.
And so, I think, to brew another pot of coffee and enjoy the last few moments of moderate temperatures this morning, and then to work…