Well we have the basement all painted except for the ceiling. We’ll try to get to that maybe tomorrow as I can’t have it smelling like paint when I’m down there working during the day. In any case, it looks good. We used the same color that Lori chose for the office.

Next up down there is the carpet. After that we need to paint the ceiling in our breakfast area and our bedroom. Then we’ll be touching up some in the kitchen and probably the boys rooms.

Harry should be here in a week so we need to start going through the house and make our list of what we want him to do. Lori is thinking of distressing all the cabinets in the living room.

Mojo ate another pillow of ours again last night while sleeping on the couch. He’s eating me out of house and pillows!

Today the kids are off again before going back to school tomorrow. Then it’s April 1st Wednesday, Wow! They say snow for Thursday and Friday and Easter is Sunday. I think we’ll go to brunch so we don’t have to cook. I remember going to brunch in Scottsdale with Mom and Dad when we were kids. Church is at 10am and then we’re open.

Guess I’ll run, it’s 6:50 and the kids are still sleeping. Ty had a friend spend the night and they stayed up pretty late I’m sure. We have baseball practice today at 3 and then I have a conference call at 5. I’ll need to move that back 15 minutes which will give me time to get home.

Hope all’s well, take care and God Bless.

p.s. Can you believe the family farm thing yesterday? We’re still astonished!

So yesterday we bought the paint and other supplies for the basement. Lori filled all the holes in the walls, washed and caulked the baseboards and taped everything off.  Then the painting began. She’ll do most of it today but at least has a start on it. Meanwhile I was upstairs cleaning out some cabinets that hadn’t been cleaned for 14 years. I boxed up two large boxes of cd’s, two of dvd’s and threw out a bunch of trash. This in itself took two hours! I did find some fun stuff like baby pictures including ones of Dixie, Don, Scotty and Julie and Bob all holding Jagger when he was a baby. There were lots more fun memento’s like that as well.

Before that Jagger and I had baseball and Ty came along to play at the park. We have another practice today as our first game is next Friday. I think Jag will be the starting pitcher which is a big deal. He’ll also play first base mostly and a little bit at third base too.

Wisconsin won their basketball game and is now in the college Final Four which is great. They’ll play Kentucky next who are 38-0 but almost (should have) lost to Notre Dame yesterday. I only mention this as my Mom’s a big fan so you all better cheer for the Badgers. (that’s the name of Wisconsin’s team)

Lori and I did make it to Red Rocks yesterday after I went to the gym. I think she’s going on a walk today with a friend so maybe I’ll drag the boys up there again to hike the 60 rows of benches with me a few times.

That’s it, time to run, lots to do as usual. It feels really good to be getting things done around here whether we move or not. We’re going to be pricing our home high, really high, and if it doesn’t sell, well, it doesn’t sell. In any case, we’ll have fixed everything up around here. We just wish we had another 1000 square feet!

In closing, a little bit of a warning for you all. The Fed Reserve is out of touch and control. Most people don’t understand this much less anything at all as they all have the “it won’t affect me” attitude. Well, it’s getting really really close to affecting all of us. To give you a snapshot, read the is.

1. Europe’s banks now have negative interest rates. That means it costs you money to keep your money in the bank! Get your money out of the bank now and buy some gold or silver!

2. Taylor Swift was just voted as a more influential leader than Barack Obama. Nice!

3. Minimum wage in 1963 was five silver quarters. About 17 dollars in today’s value. And those 5 quarters would buy you goods that would cost $17 dollars today. It was actually possible for a soda-jerk to raise a family back then, if he scrimped and saved. Today one hour of minimum wage will buy you goods worth $0.27 in 1963!

and last, any really unbelievable,

Image from Friends of West Wind Acres Facebook Page

 

Schenectady County, New York – Earlier this month, a family farm in rural New York was raided by police after the owners were cited on a number of trumped up regulatory violations. Joshua Rockwood, the owner of the farm, is being accused of mistreating his animals, and the local government has began confiscating some of them.

Police initially visited Rockwood’s property on February 25th to investigate reports of unlicensed working dogs, weeks before the raid. Unfortunately, Rockwood voluntarily showed local police around his property, which he had not yet tended to that day because of their unexpected interruption.  After showing them around, they began to critically assess every aspect of the farm, writing a number of citations for arbitrary offenses.

The very next day, Rockwood had a veterinarian visit the farm to check on the animals to confirm that they were well taken care of and in good health. According to numerous reports, the vet said that the animals were just fine, and did not seem to share the concerns that the officers alleged during their walk-through.

A second veterinarian was also called in to verify the health of the animals and they also found them to be in perfect health.

A week later, police returned again to notify Rockwood that he was to appear in court the next Thursday on a number of charges relating to the animal’s food and shelter. In total, 12 different charges were brought against Rockwood, but he has posted a number of photos to a Facebook support page, which shows the animals with sufficient housing, and plenty of food.

 

Rockwood has been charged with 12 counts of animal neglect and abuse – some of the charges relating to frozen water bowls and tanks – despite the animals still having access to water. His dogs and horses have been seized and taken away. Rockwood treats his animals better than most factory farms do, but since he uses traditional farming methods, his farm will fail regulatory inspections, while factory farms will pass.

Meanwhile, New York is one of many states that are currently considering “ag-gag” laws, which place criminal penalties on activists who expose animal abuse at factory farms.

The controversial ag-gag laws prohibit “recording an image or sound without the operator’s permission; gaining ‘access to an agricultural operation under false pretenses;’ asking for a job at a place for the purpose of making recordings; and making a recording while trespassing.”

The irony here is that the state will lock you in a cage for filming the horrific atrocities at a factory farm while simultaneously trumping up ridiculous and petty violations if you aren’t a factory farm. Just who does the state “protect” by doing these things?

 

Rockwood has launched a $50,000 gofundme campaign to raise money to post bond for his horses and to pay for the disrupted legal fees and lost business he has incurred and will incur due to the publicity and effort involved in defending himself. He means to go to court to try to fight the charges and to win back his reputation, his rescue dog, and his horses.

Because of his caring and generous customers and supporters they are almost halfway to that goal.

All I can say it what the F__K!

God Bless us help us all!

Take care, God Bless.

Whoo hoo, it’ll be warm today. We need to somehow spend time outside. First up I’m heading to the gym and then we’re getting the pitchers from our baseball team together for a quick hour or so of practice from 10:30 to noon and then I think we’re painting the basement. Hopefully we can then get outside around 2pm when it’ll be getting the warmest.

Yesterday I had to run to Boulder and then we were off to baseball from 4 until about 6:30. Lori beat us boys home and was working on dinner when we walked through the door. The kids are off until Tuesday which sure seems like a long break.

Lori’s work is going good and Dr R called and apologized to Lori and said she wants to take her to lunch when she gets back. Guess she was being super nice according to the misses. Hopefully she had an epiphany and things will be different. If not, I told Lori she has to quit. It’s not worth it for her to have that negativity in her life as she’s just not been as happy as she should and then also brings it home. So one way or another, things are going to change.

Time to run as we’re going to try to get to Red Rocks for a hike before baseball so I need to get to the gym. Hope you all are well, take care, have a great weekend (Easter is a week from Sunday) and God Bless.

Let’s see, Spring Break, the week and the month are all winding down. Soon the kids will be be back in school and April will be here, but first up, yea, is the weekend! We need to stay on task and get something done this weekend. We’re thinking of painting the basement but it’s going to be in the mid 70’s tomorrow which will be the nicest day of the next seven.

Yesterday I had a successful day up north while the kids hung out at home. I need to do something fun with them today as like I said, they’re back in school starting next Tuesday.

Dr R is still on vacation and all is good at work. Lori said all weeks should be two day work weeks. Makes sense to me! Wisconsin won their basketball game last night which was a good one. They sure seem to have a pretty good sports program as their football and basketball teams always seem to be in it. Why can’t we have that here in Colorado?

It’s a bit after 6am and I just returned from the store and Starbucks. Guess I’ll run as Lori is sitting here watching the news with me and the boys are sleeping. Take care and God Bless.

Today Lori is off to the office and I have a lunch for 14 important buyers in Ft Collins around 1pm. Yesterday we picked up some sushi to go from our favorite restaurant for our anniversary dinner. Ty came home about 4pm from his sleep over at Vinnys and that was about it for the day. I did make it to the gym which was much needed and also ran a few errands with Jagger.

This morning I have about 8 large trash bags and an old dresser, without the drawers, that need to be picked up by the trash guy. I give him $10 every now and then and he takes whatever I have.

Last night we watched the movie Interstellar which was about time and space and multiple dimensions. It was kind of long but interesting. One thing is it sure made you think about not wasting any of your time on Earth. In the movie, a character played by Michael Caine recited the famous Dylan Thomas poem below. Read it a few times and then get out there, no matter your age, and starting today, live your life to the fullest, before it’s too late!  God Bless.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Today is our 15th anniversary. I was lucky enough to meet and marry the love of my life, Lori, 15 years ago today in Scottsdale Arizona. If you think about it, we’ve done a lot in 15 years! I think we’ll just hang out at home tonight and skip the dinner thing as well as buying each other any kind of gifts. In any case, it’s a day to celebrate as the best years of my life have been the last 15! Love you honey!

Now onto the day. Have you ever had an old computer that you needed to dispose of but didn’t know how? Well yesterday we had three that needed to go away. The problem here is that all the information on your computer is virtually “on there” forever. In case you don’t know, simply deleting something doesn’t really “delete” it. That’s why Hillary won’t turn over the infamous email server she used when she was supposed to use govt email. Anyhow to eliminate all of our information, forever, to prevent things from falling into the wrong hands, we had to go through an extensive process yesterday to finally throw out our old computers.

First up you have to dismantle the computer itself. This is easier with a desk top than a laptop but in both cases, it can be done. You just start removing the layers and layers of screws taking everything that you can apart. Your main goal here is to find your hard drive. If you don’t know what a hard drive looks like, well, that’s a problem. Once you find the hard drives (that stores all information ever put on the computer), you need to extract it and then figure out a way to destroy it. There are different options here but we opted for a sledge hammer to break it apart and destroy the actual disc. This isn’t as easy as it sounds as it took Jagger and I a good 30 minutes and a lot of muscle outside to finally smash the smithereens out of the 3 drives. I had to really hit it hard, multiple times before I could pull out the shinny sliver disc that’s inside and then destroy that as well. I’m sure some geek somewhere could probably even salvage that but it would take a whole lot of work. So after all that, we put all the parts in several trash bags (we split stuff up) and will now dispose of them. There you have it, hopefully we did a good enough job.

As for the rest of the day, Ty went to Vinny’s and spent the night, Lori and I ran to the grocery store and Lowes and earlier in the day and she also took the kids to the movies.

Today is Lori’s last day off as tomorrow she’s back to work. I have a big event in Ft Collins tomorrow too so the boys will be hanging out alone for part of the day. I think today we’re going to try to pick out the paint and carpet for the basement. Jagger finished cleaning his room and I have to say, did a really good job. Now all we need is Ty to follow suit.

That’s about it, time to hit the gym. Hope all’s well, God Bless.

It’s 7:50 and that’s late for all of us, but we must have needed it. Today we need to order shutters for the outside of the house, pick the paint and carpet for the basement and do some more work on Ty and Jag’s room. We haven’t even started in our room and of course I have the wine cellar which is full of hunting gear, to also clean out.

But first, we’re going to go to Red Rocks for some exercise. Yesterday I finished up the basement and James came over and took our old tube tv that must have weighed 80 pounds. We akso Luisa’s old desk (man was it heavy) and another 3 bags of trash I filled up and finally it’s ready for paint and then carpet.

The big steel table and grandpa’s desk are all that’s left except my work desk and the cart holding my two printers. I took two steel racks out to the garage after I took 60 pounds of paper to Office Depot to have them shredded. You can’t throw away anything anymore that has any account numbers on it or you’ll for sure get your identity stolen.

That’s about it, hope all’s well, God Bless.

Upstairs it’s a little harder to see the progress than in the basement but both places are looking much cleaner. The basement is almost transformed into a barren blue space (the floors are blue right now) with just a few desks remaining. Meanwhile Jag’s and Ty’s rooms are both starting to look like bedrooms instead of places where 10 years worth of stuff had been stashed, thrown, hid, or dumped. Both boys were pleased as they each found a few things they’ve been missing for years.

Today I’m going to try to get one desk out (which I’m giving to James) and then this all steel table which must weight 150 pounds. Then I’ll just have my grandpa’s desk and my desk which we’ll have the carpet installers work around. Now all that’s left downstairs is to paint the walls and then pick the carpet, find an installer, and figure out how to pay for it.

Harry, my lifelong friend, called last night and he’s coming out around April 3rd or 4th to do about a weeks worth of work fixing up some odds and ends. Then if we have the wine cellar cleaned and the rest of the rooms upstairs, we might be ready to put the house on the market. Lori joked if we fix everything, we might just want to stay! Could be but we need the equity to pay off our remaining bills and also need a new neighborhood as the kids have outgrown the street and we just need more room. Plus the interest rates will go up sometime within the next 12 months, hopefully after we can figure out how to get a new place. We need to stick to our mater plan!

So with a little luck, well really be going through some changes in the next 90 days. We could end up as close as a few blocks away or 5 miles but are staying in the area. More to come on this.

Jagger went to church group last night while Ty rode his bike over to Vinny’s mid afternoon. Today is the first official day of Spring Break. We have baseball practice tonight and it’s supposed to be close to 70 degrees again today before cooling down mid week. I have an event in Ft Collins this Thursday which is about an hour north but that’s about it for the week. We might go down to the Broadmoor Resort for a night so I can see some accounts in Colorado Springs.

Other than that, not much going on. Hope everyone is well, wish you could see the basement! I’m quite impressed with myself. I must have given James 10 larger boxes of food yesterday that he was going to donate to some homeless families. I’ll bet it was well over 1000 pounds. Most were canned goods but there was a case of pasta, all kinds of sauces, boxes of pancake mixes, vinegar, even chocolate bars and bleach. He was sure that he could put it to good use and that it would be much appreciated and well used. Most people think (as he usually is) that he’s always grumpy but I like him and get along with him just fine. Glad he could put it to good use. We still have just about as much as we gave away downstairs in boxes all sealed up and labeled. You sure can acquire a bunch of stuff in 14 years.

Take care, God Bless.

We pulled into Aspen and although the snow is melting everywhere, the slopes were pretty groomed and the wealthy people were out. The airport was full of private jets with people from other states visiting Colorado. At the base of the mountain there was a champagne party at the Little Nell with music and people dancing and across the walkway a female bartender over at Zino (another bar) standing on the bar pouring Jack Daniels into customers mouths from above. Ah apres ski in Aspen! Lori and I obviously abstained.

Later in the day after skiing was wrapping up, Jag and Ty took off around town on their own while Lori and I visited 3 or 4 stops where I had meetings to line things up for the upcoming Food and Wine Festival in June. As I said before, Aspen is the only place where we’ll let the boys take off on their own. They know the town as well as any local and I think the clerks at Carl’s Pharmacy (the local 5 and dime) and Asi (their favorite Japanese restaurant) know them both by name! After that we headed over to Billie and Greg’s for some dinner.

Billie had given us her condo to stay in which was a nice 3 story place right in town but we decided on a whim, after dinner, (since I finished up my Food and Wine appointments,) to just jump in the car and drive down the hill to home. We left around 9:20pm and pulled into home at 12:20am. A long drive but good to be home so we can today continue the big purge.

We’ll head back up for skiing probably tomorrow after hopefully transforming both boys rooms today. We have a mad master plan on the house that culminates with carpet going in the basement in a week or so and my friend Harry arriving from California around April 3rd to put the finishing touches on things that need to be fixed up around here.

We slept in late (for us) to 8:20 and I just picked up some McDonalds for the boys and coffee for us. Mojo thought we had left him so when we walked in at 12:20am, he had just eaten a pillow and had stuffing everywhere! He knew he was busted and had his tail between his legs when Lori opened the door. He was mad to be left alone but surprised when we walked in, hopefully he’ll learn his lesson or otherwise we’re breaking the crate back out.

That’s it, time to purge, God Bless

Sometime this morning we’ll head for the hills but first we need to do a few things around here. We really should be staying home cleaning but need to get away for some fun for Spring Break.

Jag and I and baseball practice last night and then Ty went to Kids Night Out.

After Lori arrived home, Dr R texted saying Lori needed to call right away. So Lori called thinking something was wrong with a patient and the doc started ranting about something little like a painting hanging in the wrong place and then, Lori finally lost it and let her have it. Lori was so upset she didn’t even remember what all she said but the gist of it was that she told her she was basically just a mean, unappreciative person, which she is. She’s a good person overall and a great surgeon but is condescending and talks rudely to the employees almost daily. Lori must have told her 10 times how mean and unappreciative she was before politely hanging up on her. We’re not sure if Lori still has a job or not but someone had to put a stop to this ongoing abusive treatment. Oh well, no matter what happens, we’ll be ok. This week alone, 3 of the 4 other girls were about to quit so good for Lori for finally stepping up and telling her she can’t treat people like she does. You all know it takes a lot to push Lori over the edge so that’s how bad it was. I’ll leave it at that rather than go into specifics but it was something to hear and see, and should have been done a long time ago. The other girls were so appreciative of Lori finally saying something and I’m sure if Lori is gone, some of them will quit too, drama, drama, drama. I told Lori she should start her own Company consulting medical practices showing them how to re-tool, cut expenses and become more profitable.

Well that’s it for today as I need to wash and gas up the car and go buy some dog food so time to run. Hope all’s well, take care and God Bless.