Year of the Startup

Sick… near death.  If I don’t make it through tomorrow, tell my family I love them.

Oh ya, and happy Veteran’s Day.

Blah, still sick.  Today I felt worse and didn’t make it through my stay-at-home work day.  I lasted until lunchtime.  I’m trying to save enough energy for band practice tonight, but I imagine I’ll be sitting on a stool while playing, barely conscious.

Well, that didn’t work – I got back on the computer at 3PM (to type this), and was simply inundated with work calls and emails.  I’ll probably be working right up ‘til band practice.

So much for rest.

Bery and I independently sent out some “policy” advice today regarding how to handle missions at church while we are without a full-time, called Pastor.  Both of us are in agreement, which is good (me in my role as the head of missions, Bery in his role of newly-installed president of our congregation).  I was quite pleased with my email, and was impressed with Bery’s as well.  I do hope some good comes out of this.  Sometimes, people simply need to be reminded where the boundaries are.  They’ll then have one of those “oh, ya – of course!” kinds of moments.  Basically, we want to run as much activity as we can through the mission team so they can make a recommendation to the staff, but the final call as to what the church does or does not do must come from the staff for as long as we lack a full-time pastor.  It can’t come from me.  I’m simply a humble volunteer, not a called, paid staff member.

Sick today; still, I got a lot accomplished – more than any day I go to the office.  Working at home rocks!  I’m still debating if I should go in tomorrow or not.  I guess I’ll see how I feel.  I don’t want to infect the office if I can help it.

Today, I start practicing Christmas music in earnest.  ‘Tis the season!

A couple of weeks ago, we had major fumes in our office.  That wasn’t fun.  Starting last week, and continuing this week, we’ve had major construction going on upstairs.  It’s getting louder all the time.  Yesterday, they started dropping things – hammers, bodies, large canisters that I can only assume contain highly flammable or explosive liquids; that sort of thing – and today, they were hammering directly over me… for hours.  I thought they might fall through the ceiling and on to me!  At least the hammering was a consistent drone.  It all but drowned-out the extremely loud Filipino gal who sits in the office near us.

Ever since she moved into the office, about a month now, I’ve been listening to really loud music to drown out her voice.  It doesn’t work.  At least she comes in late, so typically, I have 2-3 hours of peace.  Yesterday, she came to the office early – the two of us were alone for hours – and I wanted to strangle her much of that time.  So much noise, so inconsiderate!  When she wasn’t on the phone (and always speakerphone), she was listening to “squeaky”-sounding Filipino music with absolutely no bass, and she was singing to it… off key!  This was some special kind of torture for me, being a musician and all.  At least she doesn’t play bagpipes.  She has a real “downer” personality as well – angry, selfish, opinionated – so it makes it hard to listen to her rants.  She yells at the customers she calls, talks down to them as though they are idiots, and then complains about them after she hangs up to the only somewhat loud secretary guy who is just outside her office (and just over the cubicle from me).  She is a seriously sad and lonely gal.  If she was working for me, I would have fired her long ago – no matter how good she is, you can’t have a “cancer” like her in the office because it begins to affect everybody.  She needs Jesus, but has rejected Him.  She now makes all her decisions by reading the daily horoscope – seriously!

I just need to bite my tongue, pray for her, and be as nice to her as possible.  She is an “unlovable” person who needs love.  I want her to know Jesus (again?) before somebody kills her.

Tomorrow, I shall be absolutely giddy to be working at home in absolute peace; no hammers, no phones, no loud voices.

The weekend went fast.  I did a little personal finance on Saturday, and mostly did church stuff on Sunday (though I also did enjoy watching a football game, and I did go to that birthday party).  Ten months into the year – ten months since my departure from my former company – and I’m still up for the year financially.  How did that happen?  Well… to this point, I’ve still made more through consulting than I have spent.  That will change this month, since I am no longer pursuing consulting opportunities.  November will be my breakeven month, and not in a good way.  By the end of December, I should be down a significant amount for the year.  That trend will continue well into next year until my new company can either get funded or we can start selling like crazy.  Our Sales & Marketing guys are in China and Korea right now.  I’m praying that they can find both funding AND sales.

Not much going on today.  I’m looking forward to the weekend.  It starts tonight with “school sponsored” Panda Express (basically, we help the school by buying dinner).  Tomorrow, I get to help a friend move into a new place and that evening, I’m attending a sweet 16 party with my son.  Sunday is a teacher’s meeting, so I guess I’ll need to get prepared for that – I’m leading it!

Got home today and saw an email from our electric guitarist for this week.  He’s sick, and practice is tonight.  I immediately began practicing electric guitar, since it appeared to me that I was the only one who could fill in on such short notice (I knew all the songs and I was already on/available this week).  I asked my son if he wanted to play bass in place of me.  He said yes, so we practiced very briefly then headed off to practice.

I’m so glad that my son volunteered.  The group was too.  It’s just so nice to see him step up.  It makes me proud.

The highlight of the day was driving to Palo Alto with my wife in the Porsche so we could sign our house refinance documents.  3.375% is a great rate, and we were able to cut five years off the house loan.  Yeah!  Afterwards, we went to a wonderful Thai restaurant less than a block from the Chicago Title Company.

Work today was cut a bit short – some kids had vandalized our church overnight with a can of red spray paint, so we put together a painting task force.  These kids obviously had a limited vocabulary, and their main goal seemed to be to attempt to piss us off.  It did not work.  We prayed for them instead.  At 2PM, our group got out the paint supplies and painted over their graffiti.   The buildings needed a new coat of paint anyway.

I was so happy that my son decided to join us (the kids were off from school today for a teacher in-service.  The teachers went to the Apple store for “education”).  It only took us an hour to get everything covered over, and another half an hour for me and my son to wash all the rollers.  Tonight’s youth group kids will never know that any of this occurred.

There is little to write about today (so far), but the weekend was pretty busy.  Over the weekend, my son had two of his friends over.  Both their parents (two different sets of parents) went away for the weekend, leaving these two boys behind.  For part of Sunday, we gained another boy as well.  At nighttime, we had bodies all over the house.  These kids would play video games until 1AM, then fall asleep in the living room.

Saturday evening, we went to a haunted house that was sponsored by a church (and yes, that seems incongruous to me too).  The thing is; this was the best haunted house I have ever been to.  It was an “insane asylum” theme, and these folks pulled it off brilliantly.

Also that evening, we went to a Mexican Restaurant.  One of our two weekend kids is here from China and he said that he liked Mexican food, so off we went.  When we got there, we asked him what he liked best about Mexican food.  He said he liked the noodles the best, and that pizza wasn’t bad either.  This might explain why he didn’t recognize anything on the menu!

On Sunday, our church put on our annual Harvest Faire.  It was a huge success as always, though I still wonder why we had it on Sunday rather than tonight (Halloween).  The original intent of the Harvest Faire was to give the community a safe place for trick or treating.  I think the message/purpose has been lost on our staff.  I think this is because our staff has young kids and those kids want to go trick or treating around their house.  My (selfish) goal for the Harvest Faire has always been to not be home on Halloween.