Weekend Update

Morton’s
Doug and I went to Morton’s on Saturday night for our annual Chuckay Dinner celebration.

We had hoped that Amy would be working last night. Unfortunately, she was not there again. We had a new server Lily and we both liked her. Lily has a good sense of humor and that is always a winner. We decided that Amy would be our Bartolo Colon as a starting server and that Lily could be the Frankie Rodriguez coming out of the bullpen as the relief server. You have to understand that Doug is a big Los Angeles Angles [of Anaheim] fan.

Anyway.

Doug had his usual sliced tomato salad. I tried something new; I had a chopped salad and it was excellent. Lily said it was larger than most of the other salads and that was fine with me since I had planned to have leftovers for my dinner on Sunday. Now, I had my salad.

I had a large filet mignon and a large west Australian lobster tail. That left plenty of food for Sunday night. Doug always makes a point that it is a west Australian lobster tail and not from Botany Bay where all of the transported English and Irish criminals landed in the early 19th century. Doug went with a Porterhouse steak and a small lobster tail.

Epic meals.

We finished off our dinners with the Morton’s signature hot chocolate Godiva cake with vanilla ice cream; always a perfect end to an excellent meal. Since it was my birthday and getting invited to join the business school honors society, I had two scoops of vanilla ice cream.

Nice Guy Chuck
I also ordered a Morton’s prime rib dinner to go for Doug’s mother since she was not there. It will last her for two or possibly three meals.

Happy Birthday to Me
Happy Birthday to Me.

Today is my birthday and I celebrated by sleeping in and then going about the day like always. I did break my personal best record for consecutive days alive this morning and I felt mighty good about that.

Visitors to the Blog both Foreign and Domestic
We only had four foreign visitors to the blog in the past week. They were from the United Kingdom, Egypt, South Korea, and Australia. I am guessing that the visitor from Egypt was probably lost and surfaced here by accident.

I took another look at the April visitor count totals and it seems you did better than I had originally thought. We had about 235 or so visitors and that was a few more than we had in March even though March had one extra day. We had one visitor from last week stop by for an astounding ten minutes of page viewings on Monday and, on last Tuesday, one visitor checked out thirteen pages of my scribblings.

I wonder what was so interesting in Monday’s blog or my rantings for that matter.

Donut Friday and Office Birthday Celebration
The first Friday of the month is Donut Friday. This is where I buy donuts for the staff in the office where I am working. I have been doing this since 1988 and it has become a habit for me. I picked up a dozen donuts on my way into the office this morning just like usual and thought nothing of it.

For the record, I had a chocolate bar and it was yummy.

The office staff celebrated my birthday as a surprise. They decorated the donut box with candles because they couldn’t tell me to not bring donuts in since that would have been a celebration dead give away. Some of the candles were the kind that you can’t blow so that was a joy to deal with.

The company president thanked me for bringing in the birthday donuts. Everyone laughed except those who were eating their donut.

At my age, I am well past the point of celebrating birthdays with all of the fuss and stuff.

Excitement at the Office
We had a moment of excitement at the office on Friday morning. Someone had been out flying a radio controlled toy plane and subsequently lost control of it. It flew into our building and crashed to the courtyard floor below just outside of where I work.

I think it made more noise than cause any damage. I couldn’t see any broken windows on any of the upper floors. It appeared to be made of plastic. I do suppose whoever was sitting near the window where the plane hit probably was scared and mostly likely upset.

The building security guard took his leisurely time to go investigate fallen plane. I think it took him maybe seven or eight minutes to walk the five yards / meters through the building door and investigate what had struck the building.

I was certainly glad that it was nothing serious.

Friday Evening Grumblings
Everyone once in a while I need to get my grumblings off of my chest. This is a short ranting about things that have upset me lately.

I drive a small car almost all of the time. A Honda Prelude is barely large enough for two adults and maybe two small children with very short legs. It is a compact car, no doubt about it.

There is absolutely no way on God’s green earth that a gas guzzling Ford Explorer could ever be considered a compact car; unless of course it had just been recycled and was now a very compact cube of steel and other metals.

So why then does [pick you own favorite pejorative adjective or adjectives] driver park his monster truck in a compact space? Could the driver not see that letters on the pavement that said “COMPACT”? The driver, of course, could have been a product of the Los Angeles City School system. Did the driver not understand that the truck was not now nor would it ever be a compact vehicle? Could the driver not see that the whale of a truck could not fit within the painted lines on the pavement?

And people wonder why they find their vehicles vandalized in parking lots. Maybe if you exercise care and a little thought your car might not be vandalized by having the car scratched.

My other grip tonight is with the evil trolls and gnomes of Redmond, Washington. You may know these people as Microsoft workers.

I downloaded the latest version of MSN Messenger 7.5X tonight. It was a featured download on my weekly email from Microsquash about new downloads and program updates.

Foolish me, I thought I was getting a newer and better version of Messenger.

Surprise. Surprise.

It screwed up my laptop. I played with fixing it and finally decided after thirty minutes that the prior version would work just fine and dandy for me.

True, I would not have all of benefits of being able to watch movie trailers on it. I have Windows Media Player and it shows movie trailers just fine. My Quick Time from Apple also does an excellent job of showing movie trailers.

So, tomorrow morning after I read the paper and have my breakfast, I will go back to an earlier Restore Point and reset the laptop. That seems like a simple and more elegant solution than tearing my hair out in frustration.

All of this goes to prove what one of my mentors said thirty years ago, there is not much benefit in being an early adapter of any new technology. Being third or fourth is sometimes a better place to be. Let someone else be the guinea pig or laboratory test rat.

I did run a restore point operation on Saturday morning. This reset the software and it seems to have solved my troubles with MSN Messenger.

Job Searching & Interviewing
I was talking with the president of the company where I am currently working about some of my current projects when he wandered off track and talked about the search for his replacement.

He said things were not moving along as fast as he would prefer and he observed that his final day was still approaching at the same speed. He gave his retirement notice a month ago and said the selection committee for his replacement was going to get organized next week and maybe select a search firm to help them with the selection process.

I thanked him for the update and asked him how many days did he have until he retired. He immediately gave me the number so I guess he is ready to retire. I think I will probably be that way when I do decide to stop working a full schedule, whenever that is.

I got an email from the chair of a credit union where I applied for their vacant president’s position. It was nice to be told, eventually, that they had selected someone else. It was nice to get a close out.

I will send the chair an email asking if I could submit a proposal for a job to facilitate a planning session for them. They need an independent facilitator to help smooth out the rough edges and move the “vision thing” building process along. I know their new president is going to want to change things; every new president does that. Some changes can be minor and some can be major.

I was like that when I first became a credit union president.

Of course, once you help to create the plan, it is very good to be brought the next year to help with the plan reviews and discussions of the future. Soon enough, it becomes an annuity with the third weekend in October being devoted to a full planning session with the client credit union in a very nice Southern California resort area.

Sigma Beta Delta
This is the international business, management, and administration honors society that I joined on Sunday. Actually, there were about thirty of the students who were eligible; this includes students who are undergraduates, in the master’s, or doctoral degree programs.

We are the initial membership group of the society at the school. I think that is a modest distinction for me.

The Dean of the school was there for the installation proceedings. It was nice that they were short and semi-informal. I was just not in the mood for something long winded and drawn out on a Sunday morning after a big dinner at Morton’s.

The Dean also asked for the students to form their own slate of officers and organize the chapter at the school. I decided that I did not need any more leadership experience under my belt. I have served as an officer of Marines in the Marine Corps Reserves. I have worked at the C-level in corporations for almost fifteen years now. I told the Dean that I would be a strong supporter of the program but I did not want to serve in a leadership role.

I did tell the Dean that I would be willing to server on an editorial board for an online, peer reviewed, business student publication. This would be something that I could do from home and would not entail too many meetings at school.

The Blog
I am making a few changes to the blog as you have probably noticed. I think the use of the photos will help make Balancing Checkbooks a little more readable.


That was my weekend. I know I am older but I do not feel any older.

Be well and stay happy.