My Budding Entrepreneur

I have to say, I'm quite proud of my son at the moment. Yesterday, he got his first royalty check as a published musician/composer. He cant quit his day job, but it wasn't peanuts either. Someone out there bought nearly 900 copies of the sheet music for a song he wrote and got published while a graduate student at Westminster Choir College. Pretty cool.

Not only that, but my budding entrepreneur also spent a couple of months of lunch hours putting together a sprite mural in Microsoft Excel. (I'm not going to pretend to know what the heck a sprite mural is, so you'll have to look it up). Anyway, essentially its a digital painting of sorts that he calls, The Great Sprite Battle. Then, he found some marketing outfit on the internet called redbubble.com  which places his digital painting on a vast array of stuff that people can purchase, everything from coffee mugs to iPhone cases to pencil skirts! It's quite amazing to think that some guy in Europe just purchased my son's art work on a poster the other day. Patrick is about to get his first check from this pursuit in a couple of weeks. If you're interested in what he has created, check it out here. If you are in your late twenties and grew up playing Nintendo video games you will completely get it. Regardless, it's a very cool project. Finally, all the hours of my son's misspent youth that he frittered away playing video games are paying off...literally! 

Me and My MRI

This morning, I'm having an MRI done on my neck. In case you're not familiar with an MRI, it's an expensive procedure whereby your entire body is slid into a giant metal tube for thirty minutes. Once you're in there, you are told to remain perfectly still, although how you could move even if you wanted to is a mystery to me since you've got maybe 3 inches of space within which to do all this moving about. Meanwhile, as you lay there some guy, (who you never see because by the time you get out he's always gone), anyway...some guy with a ball peen hammer starts beating the crap out of the metal tube right about where your head is located. It's the loudest, most obnoxious sound in the world and after thirty minutes of it, you're ready to grab that hammer and turn it on the nurse. Luckily for all of them, the dude with the hammer is long gone by the time they slide you out. Your ears are ringing so badly you can hardly hear the woman tell you that since you haven't met your yearly deductible on your health insurance..."That will be $396, Mr. Dunnevant." But at that point, you'd be willing to pay them any amount of money to get out of there.

One more thing about an MRI. I might go days, even weeks between an itchy nose outbreak, but the chances of me having a severe one are close to 100% the very second they slide me into the tube of death. But, it's not just my nose. I start developing extreme itchiness from the crown of my head all the way to my toes. Every orifice of my body feels like there is something crawling into it roughly at the exact time that the nurse with the microphone says, "Remember Mr. Dunnevant, it is extremely important that you remain completely still throughout the entire procedure!" I feel like saying, "Well, that would be easier to do if there weren't a million ants inside this thing!"

Yeah, so that's what I'm doing in about an hour. Getting old isn't for sissies.

Three Expressions I Despise

I love language, especially the written word. To read a Shakesperian sonnet or a paragraph of Pat Conroy prose is to be transported to a different place. It takes only a handful of pages of a Deen Koontz novel to be sucked in to the bizarre world of his imaginations. Of course, all of language isn't so lofty or poetic. Common discourse is anything but romantic. We take verbal shortcuts when ordering pizza that we wouldn't take delivering an eulogy. Over time, colloquialisms creep in to our everyday communication. They are not all bad, but there are a few of them that I have grown to despise over the years. For example:

1. Hang in there. 

This woeful phrase has been around for most of my life and I have always hated it. How many times have you seen that stupid picture of the kitten hanging onto a tree branch with a wild expression with hang in there at the bottom of the picture? What does it actually mean, this hang in there business? Essentially, it is a totally passive phrase that has no meaning. Hang in there is what you tell someone who has cancer, or is going through a miserable divorce, or is being audited by the IRS. It's what you tell someone to do when there's absolutely nothing to be done. As such, it is defeatist. A better way of saying hang in there would be to say, "Yeah, do nothing and hope things get better." One does not simply hang in there in life. You either do things that improve your lot or you do things that worsen your lot. Hanging in there is for people who have resigned themselves to the whims of fate. No thanks!

2. That's easier said than done.

Well...of course! Everything is easier said than done, literally everything. It's easier to talk about practically anything than it is to do most things. I can talk about hitting a 95 mph fastball for hours on end, but to pick up a bat and stand in the box against Randy Johnson is another matter altogether. There is nothing profound about stating the obvious. Yes, it is much easier to talk about balancing the budget than it is to balance the thing, wildly easier to talk about world peace than to achieve it, and amazingly easier to talk about losing those last ten pounds than to actually lose them.

3. At the end of the day.

This one kills me. It is usually employed in much the same way as someone might say, "when all is said and done," a much more artful expression. People who are fond of using this phrase do so in an attempt to escape having to articulate a more persuasive argument. When a difficult and complicated topic is being hashed out...like maybe global warming...and someone brings up the current 16 year cooling trend, the global warming enthusiast might say in a huff, "Well, at the end of the day, we will all be dead in 25 years if we don't do something about this NOW!!!" At the end of the day most often is used by someone who wants to end a discussion, not start one. It's a quick, pithy way to escape the tall grass of detail by falling back on false simplicity. Politicians love to use at the end of the day to segue away from a discussion about the massive unfounded liabilities of Social Security and Medicaid and on to more comfortable topics..."Sure, we have some financial challenges, but we're gonna figure this out because at the end of the day, we're Americans!!"

As much as these three expressions irritate me, they aren't going away anytime soon. I can try to shame you guys into not using them...but at the end of the day, that's easier said than done so I'll just hang in there!

There's Something About Carly

    " I did not run for office and win so I could manage the decline of a great nation."

                                                                                                 Margaret Thatcher

    " Every one of our problems has a solution. Every one of our wounds are self-inflicted."

                                                                                                 Carly Fiorina

There are plenty of things about Carly Fiorina that I'm uncomfortable with; her muscular view of American power being one of them, her devotion to John McCain being another. But, increasingly, I find myself drawn to her. Listening to her speak on the stump as well as in television interviews, I hear a confident, composed, highly literate woman who never seems to be caught off guard or rattled, even by the most ridiculous questions, like this one from someone at a town hall in New Hampshire:

" Do you think that a woman's hormones could prevent you, or any woman from serving as president, from acting rationally?"

Carly: Ladies, here's a test. Can any of you think of a time when a man's judgement was clouded by hormones...including in the Oval Office?

Her view of tax policy( my personal litmus test for any candidate ), is summarized in a short but powerful statement..." Lower every rate, close every loophole "

Obviously, there's much more to the job of being president than tax policy. But the more I hear of her, the more I like. If our next President must be a woman, I'd take Fiorina over Clinton every day of the week and twice on Sunday. 

Her biggest problem seems to be that she hasn't raised very much money. Although, if she manages to be included in the debates, that could change. Of the declared candidates so far, there aren't many who will do better in a debate than her, which will supercharge her fundraising. Still, she's a long shot. In addition to her lack of money, there's the problem of the party she's associated with. In all of my adult life, I have never witnessed a political party with a leadership as out of touch with the American people as today's Republicans. From Mitch McConnell to the tan-in-a-can Speaker of the House, Republican leaders seem openly hostile to issues that are very important to the members of it's party. I just can't figure it out. It baffles me. To quote that sage old political philosopher, Bugs Bunny, "What a bunch of maroons!"

Back Home

Well, my vacation is over, so that can only mean one thing...time to schedule an MRI.

Yes, the neck has spoken and declared the era of pharmaceutical remedies over. Next step is an MRI followed by cortisone shots. If that doesn't work, maybe ginseng oil and leeches.

I've never seen a dog happier to be back home than Lucy. She was practically leaping for joy. It reminded me of how Snoopy used to dance in those Peanuts specials on TV. She was thrilled at being reunited with her nice, safe house. Her appetite immediately returned, and she actually fell asleep in Pam's lap after dinner, something she never did before. For Miss Lucy, there's no place like home.

So, besides scheduling my MRI, a formidable to-do list awaits me this morning:

1. Book a cabin for our fall trip to The Smokey Mountains

2. Reconstruct my bank accounts after the carnage of last week, pick up spreadsheet of bank charges for delivery to company from the northeast responsible for carnage, demanding reimbursement.

3. Return phone calls from vacation week.

4. Plow through stack of mail on my desk.

5. Prepare for two client presentations this week.

One last thing about my week in Hatteras. I was there for seven days and never once turned on a television. I did use my cell phone, more than I should have but not nearly as much as I do when I'm home. I brought my office laptop with me, but never opened it either. I am a better person because of it. At least, I feel like a better person. I didn't talk as much as I usually do. Part of that was a result of being in pain for much of the time, but my mental metabolism slows down at the beach for some reason. I listen more carefully. The same thing happens when I go to Maine. Everything slows down. Maybe it's because unhooking from the relentless machine that is the world of business, allows the mind to rest. The first thing I did at 5:45 this morning was check the overnight markets. For seven days and nights, I never once looked at the markets! It changes a person. In my case, it slows me down. It's a good thing, a healthy thing to slow down, to disengage from the struggle, if just for a
week.

But, now the struggle is back. By the end of this day, I'll be fully up to speed on the latest happenings in the world of money. Vacations end abruptly. There's no other way to end them. So, they must be scheduled more frequently. Next up? A quick trip to Maine the first week of September.

One More Day.

The hard part about vacation is standing in the driveway at 6:00am watching the back of your son's car disappear down the street. This time, there's someone with him, which makes it easier, not quite as lonely a visual as in past years. She makes him happy. After watching them together for five days, that much is clear. They both have responsibilities on Sunday, so they had to leave a day early. Pam cried. She always does. I didn't, because I never do. But that doesn't mean it isn't difficult. It is...after 26 years, it still is.

Looks like our last day here will be the best as far as weather goes. It's glorious outside, clear and crisp, without the heavy blanket of humidity...God's judgement on the South. We will wrench every minute out of this day on the beach, around the pool and around the table. Tonight is the only night we order take-out. It will be pizza, I think. We've got to spend what's left of the yard sale proceeds on something, it might as well be pizza. We could go out for dinner somewhere, but parties of 16 are problematic at the smallish restaurants on Hatteras Island.

It's been a very relaxing week, except for last night when my wife beat me by one shot at Putt Putt. She can be a cold blooded killer when she wants to be! Last night was also a milestone of sorts for the 13th Dunnevant Beach Week Vacation. It marked the first time that my two kids were responsible for making dinner. Watching Kaitlin, Jon, Patrick and Sarah putzing around in the kitchen making, baklava, chicken cheese enchiladas, Spanish rice and tomatoe salad was something to see. It seems like only yesterday that my kids were running around on the beach at sunset with oversized t-shirts on, their little brown arms glistening in the dying light. Now they huddle together in the kitchen preparing a meal for 18, calm and confident. Amazing.

Tomorrow we will crawl out of here and make the deflating journey back home, me with an ailing neck and Lucy with what might be an urinary tract infection. But that's tomorrow. Today I'm still at the beach and intend to make the most of the day. Patrick and Sarah will never be very far from my thoughts, because I won't be able to relax until they make it back to Nashville.

Great week.

Playing Through the Pain

My neck isn't enjoying my vacation. It has gotten progressively worse each day this week. I've been trying to figure out the reason for this particular flare up, since I have been under zero stress since I got here. At first I thought maybe the posture of my beach chair might have been the culprit, but last night was by far my worse night and because of yesterday's rain I spent very little time on the beach. So much for that theory. Perhaps my neck is allergic to vast quantities of calorie-packed food? Whatever the reason, a combination of high dose anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxers and pain killers isn't doing the job. Bummer. But, I'm on vacation, so I'll just have to play through the pain.

I'm staring to think that bringing Lucy to the beach was a mistake. Even though she has enjoyed being around so many people who love her and has thoroughly enjoyed running on the beach, this great big house has proven to be a house of horrors for such a skittish puppy! Everywhere she looks there are piles of scary bags and boxes. The streets here are lined with millions of black garbage cans. Every morning before sunrise a giant and very loud truck comes to pick them up and violently shake them free of their contents, all the while with a yellow flashing light twirling above sending spooky shadows dancing across the roof of our room. Last night's violent rainstorm and rolls of thunder had the poor girl shaking like a leaf, wedging herself under our pillows to escape. It's all been too much for her. She's eaten maybe two complete meals since Sunday.

Now, on to the good news. Wednesday night was our dine around night so Pam and I took our six out to Rusty's for dinner. Fantastic meal and wonderful conversation with Miss Sarah, who is having a great time here despite being introduced to so large and potentially intimidating a gathering of personalities which the Dunnevant family can sometimes be. Tonight she will be helping Patrick, Kaitlin and Jon fix dinner, the first time that this particular generation has ever been given the task. We are all nervously optimistic!

Despite last night's horrendous storm, at 7:45 on Thursday morning, the skies are clearing, specks of blue are fighting back against the gray. Looks like another wonderful day on the beach is in my future.