Lunch with my old boss, Bill Murray, Seth Godin & Horizontal Elevators

Fairly often I'll have what I think is a bright idea for a blog post and I'll pound out the title or something close.  I've been distracted for all of 2015 and very remiss in working my keyboard.

Thought-resistant keyboard...cable mess...paper mess

Eleven days into 2015 I finally sat down at a desktop PC.  For the past week and a half I've been working on correcting the damage done by the burglars at the small business.  The damage was done in early OCT.  It took six weeks to get the plate glass replacement.  I used a company that was recommended.  Who knows how long it would have taken if I simply did a Google/Yahoo search.  

Break-In Damage

The estimate was $7500 for repairs.  It's a small business.  We don't make a lot of money.  As a former executive I made an executive decision.  "That's too much money!"  It's three months later and I'm finally doing the work myself.  There was a certain amount of sheet rocking ('rocking' as they say in the trades) that needed to be done.  Right next to the recommendation to not put your tongue on the metal railing when it's -15F is the recommendation "just hire someone to do the sheet rocking and taping."




I did the sheet rock and taping work myself.  The last work like that that I did was in my first house purchased in 1978.  Thirty-six years later and I've forgotten how much fun it is.  Actually it went quite well.  At sixty-four I've decided that I'm not going to die from too much dust, Ben & Jerry's ice cream or tobacco smoke.  It's not that I'm casual about it, I do mast up and goggle up, etc., but I know something else will get me.

Almost Repaired Wall

Every day is a learning opportunity.  I'd not ever done any tiling.  With a few YouTube videos under my belt I headed to Lowe's and Menard's to get materials.  In my head I did the calculation of how much tile was required.  The clerk had a special handheld 'tile estimator' which gave a different and smaller answer.  "Are you sure that's enough?  Don't I have to consider some factor for waste?"  She entered all the info again and confirmed her earlier estimate.



On day two of the tiling project I used the last tile with about thirty percent of the wall untiled.  That is my fault.  Never trust anyone working in a "Answer Booth" or in "Customer Service."  A round trip to Lowe's added thirty miles to the odometer and took almost two hours.  The good thing was that the previous layed (laid?) up tile was well set and I could re-set my supports and finish.  This was a repair job.  Walls are never plumb and floors are never level.  For that reason I started in the middle and worked up with the intent of meeting the appropriate pattern of the undamaged walls.  The fun part of that was that I worked downward at the end of the project.  I left the more difficult integration at the bottom where I also was attempting to save the molding tile surrounding the room.  

Monday or Tuesday I'll do the grouting and then call it a wrap.  As a former executive I might just throw a small party for the laborers on this project, put on a symbolic hard hat and pretend to eat a slice of bad pizza in lieu of my executive lunch of a lettuce wedge and a small portion of grilled salmon.

Distraction from the title...
Lunch with my former boss was fine.  We ate at Matt's Bar in South Minneapolis which is famous for their Jucy Lucy burger which contains cheese in between a couple of  patties.  It's impossible to eat without squirting hot greasy cheese on yourself.  They warn you with "have you had one of these before?"  The warning is worthless.

Bill Murray  was on Charlie Rose on New Year's Eve.  The full 1.5 hour interview is available on the web.  Murray talking of his career on stage and in movies, mentioned his friend, John, now dead for decades and responded with "this is a not a dress rehearsal" when Charlie Rose repeatedly pressed him with sharing his plans for the rest of his life.  I'm going to re-visit my list of things I really enjoy and make sure I address those every day (this blog is now on that list).

I do follow Seth Godin who apparently writes short blog posts every day...most of them worthwhile (it seems like this entire blog post might be a re-post...it seems that I've already said all of this before), but I cannot recall which piece of wisdom I intended to share when I wrote the title to this blog.

Bloomberg Business Week has an 'innovation' section that recently contained an article about a new company that has developed horizontal elevators that ride on magnetic rails, much like high speed trains.  This replaces the cable elevators which are standard in high rise buildings.  The plus to the magnetic elevator is that it moves more quickly and can also move horizontally on floors delivering passengers much closer to their intended destination.  Elevators take up valuable rentable floor space and this new innovation could pay for itself quickly.

Those four topics in their completeness and incompleteness cover in a much shorter version what I intended to cover on the last day of 2014.

Job(s)...
I did exchange email with my LHH coach.  I'm going to wrap that experience up NLT JUN.

Misc...
The following image has nothing to do with anything.  It's simply part of a label design I did for some products we sell in the small business.   Actually the products are for gluten-free, salt-free dry soup mixes.