finite speck

Yes, today I'm having a meeting this afternoon about meetings. It's one that sounds like a meeting you might not be very excited about going to. Like it could be a waste of time. But, I'd argue that a meeting like this might be the type of meeting many teams ought to have. My boss and I were talking about the topic a couple weeks ago and I encouraged him to discuss it as a team. The goal would be to decide to have meetings on two days and two days only every week. The rest of the week would be blocked off so you could get focused work done without being interrupted by meetings. So, for example, we may say that we are going to have our meetings on Monday and Tuesday every week and then the rest of the week would be blocked off so no more meetings could be scheduled for the rest of the week. If someone wanted to have a meeting with you or someone from your team they would set it up for a Monday or Tuesday. I'm excited about the idea and look forward to the thought of maki

We all know there have been shortages on toilet paper this year as well as personal protective equipment and sanitization. There have also been surpluses of food due to COVID-19 and shortages of some foods as well. The supply chains have gotten royally screwed up with production facilities not operating at their normal capacities. My neighbor was telling me yesterday that there has been a shortage in treated lumber and there's a shortage in white electrical wall plate covers. This all has made me think about how interconnected everything is at this point in history. A virus that is easily spread and decisions that our government has made in the attempt to keep people safe has shut down entire businesses. It has made large companies find new suppliers. It has made suppliers not be able to fulfill requests. It's put all kinds of pressure on different businesses to provide services at levels they never have before.

One thing that I hope to never get tired of is writing is posts of thankfulness. I'm thankful for a wife that takes care of our kids almost every day, week after week. I'm thankful for the home that we have. I'm thankful for the town that we live in. I'm thankful for our three kids that make me smile every day. I'm thankful to have both my parents, my wife's parents, and my grandparents all living within less than a mile of our house. I'm thankful for a job. I'm also thankful for the employees that manage the company that I work at. I'm thankful for the solid group of co-workers that I get to labor alongside. I'm thankful for a country where we have many freedoms. It's easy to complain about how things are. It's easy to be discontent. But, there are always things to be thankful for and it's good to go through the exercise expressing thankfulness.

Sometimes there are things that seem to have little or no value because they don't work anymore for you. Does that mean that they have no value? Sometimes. Other times it just means that you have to find the right buyer and sometimes you have to be patient. Enter VarageSale and my lawnmower that stopped working this summer. It was a great used mower that I got from someone who had fixed it up. It was a TORO self-propelled mower, but it stopped working and I'm not that mechanical so I didn't know how to fix it. I also knew if I got it fixed it would probably cost me about $80 at least to get it working again. So I put it on VarageSale and asked $25 for a nonworking mower. Did I sell it? You bet. I didn't end up getting $25 for it... I only got $15, but I was able to get something for it. 7 years ago I bought it for $50. I did put some money into it with oil changes and upkeep, but I was happy to find a buyer versus throwing it away. The guy who bought it had the same one

Last weekend my older son got a hand-me-down plastic toy sword from his great aunt and uncle. He loves it. He's slept with it for the whole week and carries it around with him wherever he goes pretty much unless we tell it can't go with him somewhere like to the store.  Imagine carrying a long plastic toy sword around with wherever you go for a week. It makes it hard to carry much else. But he also has a toy fish that's become a new favorite toy, mostly because his cousin left it here last weekend. So, not only is he carrying around a toy sword, but also a plastic fish as well. He's also sleeping with the plastic fish too. When something is new we want it with us all the time. Maybe it's in our thoughts and we don't physically carry it around like my son, but it still dominates our lives for a while. Eventually, it loses its newness though and we move on to something else. We're wired to always want and we become discontent very quickly. There is one that ca

Yesterday evening I just needed to get the kids out of the house. They were whiny and so was I. It was one of those evenings where I wanted things to be a certain way and it wasn't and when things are like that I like to go into task mode and just have alone time, but when you have 3 little kids and a wife you can't just do that. So I took them to an open field and we all just ran around outside for a while. Kicking soccer balls, throwing footballs, playing follow-the-leader, and tag. We needed to get outside to run off some energy. We all needed it. Sometimes all we need is just to get outside.

I have four brother-in-laws and no brothers. Each one of them is unique and I'm thankful for each one. One is extremely entrepreneurial and knows a ton about construction. One is one of the best cooks I've ever eaten a meal from. One is very mechanically minded and isn't afraid to tackle a project. And one is probably one of the most knowledgeable people I know that can remember just about anything. There you have it, my brother-in-laws in four sentences. It's been a while since I've written a thankful post and it's always a good exercise for me. It makes me think of how many good things God has given me. I'll never forget when my sister and brother-in-law took me into their home when I needed it. I know it probably wasn't easy with two little kids and I was a mess at the time too. That was about ten years ago and since then they've lived in California, back to Illinois, and now Alabama. I'm extremely thankful for them.

I think anyone with a phone has done it at some point. You're around other people, but your face is in a phone. Maybe you're pushing your kid on a swing or your walking with someone. Maybe you're at a restaurant or a park. Maybe you're at home and it's the evening and your kids are around you or you're in bed at night with your spouse and you're both just scrolling on your phone. Stop it. Engage with people and limit your screen time. Use it when you have downtime. Use it as a reward. But don't use it for the times when you're just bored and you need a dopamine hit.

Yesterday I got about 90% done on a project we've been wanting to do for a while. We had a bunch of areas around our master bath shower where the grout was cracked and water was settling. It's been that way since we moved in about a year and a half ago.  About half of the day was just removing the grout mainly using my multi-tool with a grout attachment. Thank you Andy Slotter for the multi-tool you gave me about 5 years ago. Side note, but I would say if you don't have one, get one. It's a tool you'll use a lot. Back to getting the grout out. It's just a lot of work and slow. If you're going to do it make sure you have water on hand to keep the blade cool as you're cutting the grout out. Once you're done removing the grout, regrouting is fairly easy. It's just a laborious project. The last couple of things you need to do before being done is sealing the grout which I think you can spray on wipe one. Then lastly if you have glass like we do own o

We are into late August and I'm finally getting a start on exercise. I ran three days this week for about 20 minutes each time. About 2 miles. It feels good for sure. But getting myself to a consistent time that I run in the morning may be more of a challenge. Each day was a little different, but they were all before 7.

Communication. This has been a theme for me this week. I'm sure working in marketing is part of why it comes up so often, but it's huge. What if we just communicate with a part of the company we work with? But other parts of the company we say very little too or maybe nothing at all? What if then they start working on a project that we're also working on? There's a positive there. It means that we're focusing on something that we both believe should be addressed, but there's also a negative. The negative there's probably one team that's more suited to solve the issue or parts of the project best. If we communicate what we're working on this doesn't happen and we're able to be more efficient. Is there value in not communicating everything? Sure. Not everyone needs to know everything. But, there are areas where there's cross-over and those areas need to be communicated. Teams can help each other out and bring more ideas to the table IF they

How many times in a day do I say "don't do that" or "stop that" or "get off"? I have no clue, but I think I do it a lot. Not at the office, but at home with my kids. I think my kids need to hear it, but then again sometimes maybe they don't. All the comments above are negative. Sometimes they're not even doing anything that bad, but it's just something I don't want them to do.  What if instead, I would say "do this..." or "let's go..." or "what about..."? I many times want the easy stop to what they're doing that I don't want them to do, but it's just using my parental authority to get them to stop instead of getting to their heart and teaching them to do something else instead. As a parent of little ones, 5 and under, I have so many opportunities to teach, and many times I use excuses like I'm tired or I want to just do something else. What something I could "do" today with th

Do you ever wonder what makes certain people so good at presenting? Why are others so bad at it? Some people you could listen to and never have your mind wander and others can't hold your attention at all. Like in most things I believe there can be some natural gifting, but the biggest part is practice. For some, it might not be that they practice presenting itself, but they're just always presenting. I think of my boss, he's just naturally good, but he's also in that frame of mind all the time. Get together in a group and he will eventually give a little "presentation". I also listened to a guy named Vinh Giang talk on presenting yesterday that talks about vocal image along with your visual image. He makes the argument that the way your voice sounds is just as important as your visual image in a presentation. Your vocal image consists of 5 things. They are rate, volume, pitch/melody, tonality, and pause. I'll encourage you to look him up to learn more.

When you go for a run before 5AM in August it's a different way to see your town. I didn't see one other person out walking or running. I think I only saw 2 cars. I could actually see the stars because the sky was totally clear. It probably would have been really quiet, but I was jamming out to some music. I ran just under 2 miles and it felt so good to just get out and get some exercise before everything else gets going. This is really tough for me to get up and get going and decide to do this. I'm lazy. I'd prefer to get up, grab a coffee, read, take my time, write, and then get off to work.  Today, I'm thankful I got my butt out of bed and into some running clothes and out on the road before 5AM. Feeling good right now.

We got a hammock a couple years ago for Christmas and I finally got it out and put it up in the backyard. After I did I thought why did I wait so long to put this thing up? Especially on a nice day, this thing is so relaxing. It was easy to install too. Two straps go around the trees and then there are carabiners that clip onto the straps that around the tree(s). That's it.  When the weather's nice it's a perfect spot to relax and read. Our kids loved it too, but they can't sit still in it.

What if you knocked out one project every weekend for a year? They wouldn't have to be big, just something. That's probably more projects than you even can think of right now. You end up accomplishing 52 projects in a year's time. My wife made the comment to me yesterday, "If we could just get one thing accomplished each weekend." This came after we got some cabinets hung in the basement. It just felt good to get them off the floor in the basement and somewhere we can use them. It didn't even take us that long to do. We probably spent 2 hours on it. So, this coming weekend what you are going to do? Do you have a project?

He was sitting on the side of his bed. Opening up books and turning the pages from the back to the front. Looking at every picture. When he was done he would toss the book on the floor. I just sat in the doorway of his room and watched. He had no idea I was there.  My son is 3 and a half. In that little brief moment in time, I really felt compassion for him. I thought to myself, even though he can be a real stinker he's also so little yet. He has no idea what's going on in our world right now. I went to my room and just spent a little time in prayer for our kids. Praying that they would come to know the gospel. That they would trust in Christ. That God would protect them from evil as they grow up. That I would lead them well during the little time that I have with them.

It's been good working with my family on our rental property because it just again reminds me that we're all different. Just like when you get married you realize that your spouse doesn't think exactly the same way you do, this group of family that owns our rental property doesn't think exactly the same way I do on everything either. But we're able to work together to get the jobs done. There are certain things that some of us care more about than others and then there are other things that are are the same way. I think I've mentioned before here that I've been working on the lodging tax for our property and it's not as complicated as I thought, but yet I just had to figure it out because none of us knew anything about it before. In figuring it out I really needed to get it into a spreadsheet and I had no clue the best way to do it... I still don't know if I did it the best way, but it makes sense to me and I'm the one reporting/paying it so I gu

You went to a trade show or a conference in person before and now you can't, but there's still this virtual event in its place. So you attend it, but it's nothing like the real thing. Why even call it a virtual trade show or a virtual conference? It's not really the same thing at all from what I've experienced. It's not very interactive, but more passive. You can watch sessions and sometimes interact in person via Zoom or some other kind of conferencing software. One of the benefits is you can do it when you want whether you want to get in on it live or watch it later at your convenience. But why not call it something totally different and not try to replicate it in the same way? Maybe instead you make it like what people that are doing things online typically experience. Make it last just as long, but space it out during times when people have free time. Those attending the conference during a full day are free for the full day because they're away from eve

For the second year in a row now we've received first place at the National Agri-Marketing Association's annual conference. This year it was supposed to be in San Diego, which then got moved to Kansas City, which then moved to a virtual conference. I have to say virtual is way less fun than a real conference. We actually watched it as a family while eating dinner yesterday and it was all over in an hour. We won first place for our 3 consecutive page ad campaign that was also targeted based on what we knew about our customers. It's a good feeling to be recognized by the agriculture advertising community and win at that level, especially when the work you do is mostly in-house. We also won a second-place for a  video we produced about our farm in Pontiac as well.

I'm learning more and more that taxes are complicated. As a small business owner now it's even more obvious. We're trying to do what's right in paying our sales tax on a monthly basis, but I'm having a hard time figuring out for sure what all needs to be included in our reported income.  Do we pay our sales tax on our full gross number? That's what I've been told. But then we have cleaning fees, linens, etc. that our guests currently aren't paying sales tax on through VRBO. Then the service fee that we pay to VRBO do we pay sales tax on that as well? When I look at the numbers for VRBO it seems like our guests are paying sales tax only on their nightly stay number. There's no tax collected on cleaning or service fees. Airbnb pays the sales tax on our behalf so we don't have to do anything for that service. Then we have our private bookings that I have similar questions to VRBO except we don't have the service fees. I thought I had it all figu

I don't take advantage of the teaching moments that there are as often I could with our kids. Especially the whiny moments. In those times I typically want to try and shut the whining down as quickly as possible by either giving in or threatening with a consequence. Last night as we were leaving my sister's place my kids started complaining that they didn't get to have a s'more but their cousins were going to have some. At that moment we were ready to just tell them that they need to stop complaining and I could see there might be a tantrum coming from one of our kids too. I told my wife let's try to teach during this time. I can't remember all that I said, but I know I asked our kids what whining is. They responded that it's sin. I briefly talked about how they need to have a thankful heart for all they got to do with their cousins today. They did stop complaining and we didn't have a meltdown. As I'm trying to retell this I honestly can't remem

This time in life is very different from anything I've experienced before. There's so much uncertainty. It's a little like the weather. You never know for sure what it's gonna be like, but you have a little bit of an idea.  We're heading to church today and we were planning on being inside, but then I checked my email this morning and it looks like now we are having outside services again. Earlier in the week, it was planned to be outside, but then I received an email that it was going to be inside. Anything that substantiates a lot of people gathering is extremely uncertain. One place you need to wear masks in one place you don't. One place can remain open one place can't. One place people are willing to work in another they aren't. People are all over the board too. Some people aren't willing to get together at all for one reason or another and others have very little concerns at all.

How many audiences do you personally have? You have your address book on your phone. You have your email application. You have your social media followers. You have your neighbors. You have your physical social groups (church, activities, school, etc.). You have your family. Maybe you have other things like a website or a podcast or a channel as well. My point is that there are a lot of people that we all have access to in different ways. I was thinking about this as I'm thinking about different ways to let people know about our rental property in Gulf Shores, Alabama. When you sit down and think about it we all have a lot of different ways to reach out to people. Some are better than others depending on what you're wanting to do, but there's plenty of tools out there.

Yes. I gave away everything in the title of this post today. I ran. I got up this morning a little before 5 AM and I went for a run. It was cool out. The sun wasn't up yet. Everything about it felt so good. To those that have never found running good this may sound awful, but I enjoyed it this morning. Now the challenge is to keep this going. The other challenge is to not push to hard right at the beginning and injure myself. We'll see how this goes.

One average I quickly found said restaurant owners make an average of $60,000 a year salary. Multiply that by 15,000 restaurants and you have $900,000,000 million... almost a billion in dollars that are now gone as roughly that many small business restaurants have closed their doors in the United States and most of them probably aren't going to be able to open back up. That's just the salary number of restaurant owners.  Let's just say each of these restaurants do 1 million in business in a year. That's 15 billion in business that's gone in the restaurant industry due to all that's going on with the COVID-19 pandemic. Don't quote me on any of this, just running some really rough numbers to put things in perspective in my head. A quick Google search says nearly 16,000 restaurants have closed permanently due to the pandemic according to Yelp data. 26,160 total restaurants had closed in the United States as of July 24th. 

Today is going to be productive. I'm going to do what I can. It's a new day. As I sit here and wake up on the couch with a computer and a cup of coffee my thoughts are all over the place. I should connect with that person on LinkedIn. I need to fill out that form for taxes. I need to report our income for the month. I should check off the daily boxes for health insurance money back. Oh, I should check my personal email. I need to really clean up my email inbox. The things that go through my head go on and on. There's a ton of things I could do. But, what should I do? What does it mean to be productive today or any day? I continue to go back to some advice I remember from earlier this year on having 3 main goals max for the day and that's it. You can have more things you get done, but they might be just filler... like cleaning up your email inbox or filling out some paperwork or making phone calls. Today. I'm going to make it a good day. I'm going to work hard. I

Today is a Monday and I just don't want to get going. I had a hard time getting up. I had intentions of running but didn't. I have about 5 more minutes and I need to start getting ready to head to work. I scrolled on Twitter for a while, briefly checked my email, procrastinated, then read my Bible reading for the morning. I'm sure none of this motivating for anyone to read, but it's the reality of the beginning of today. I've had a little coffee and now it's blog time. I wish I could say every morning I'm just ready to go and I'm motivated. Today is not that morning. My wife made the comment to me yesterday that it just doesn't feel like we ever really get ahead of things to do. There's always more and then there are the daily things that just have to get done too. I sound like a major complainer. I like to blame it on having little kids, but I think some of it I just need to set some goals for myself.

When someone compliments you on your shirt or on how you look or something that you've done what do you do? Do you downplay it like it's not that big of a deal in an attempt to be humble? Or do you receive it? I don't know why many people like to act like it's not something that's really meant to be said to them. I say take it. Receive it. Why would you withhold from someone the joy of being thanked for a compliment that they meant to be received by you?