Takin' A Break

Wife and I are heading out tomorrow for a short trip to Lake Tahoe where our friends Steve and Lady Di have a timeshare. We haven't seen them in over a year and we always have a great time. We've heard that Di has been planning her menu for weeks. She also emailed me that she is planning a 'survivor' level hike. This is a good thing?

On other notes our weather has been a bit weird this spring. Normally at this time of year it is very, very dry and hot. But it has been cool with afternoon showers - almost like when the monsoon hits.

My new grill is taking a lot of getting used to including using the charcoal chimney to get things started. But in general I'm please with the results.

Yesterday was a demonstration to me that I still have a long way to go in my spiritual development. I've been working on this very difficult work out of a native american owned company. Short story is years and years of mismanagement with the Tribal Council having refused numerous times to face the facts of the problems. The current Board of Directors - three of us - were basically sold a bill of goods and not given all the information we should have about how bad things were. The economic crisis this fall and winter was the last straw. We started in January telling the Council the company was insolvent. This has now dragged on for almost 5 months. We managed to find a way to bailout the Pueblo by leasing out most of our assets. But there are a couple of people on the council who were ex-employees who essentially were interested in getting revenge by totally disrupting anything we recommended. So we had the meeting hoping to get approval. Instead we endured 3 hours of people essentially telling us we were incompetent, that we were self-dealing, that we didn't have the Pueblo's interest at heart. Now understand, we were offering a way to bail out a company that has lost millions over the last three years and give them $3 million of positive cash flow, keep employment, and without them having to fund it. I kept my mouth shut for most of the 3 hours but finally just tore into our prime torementor. I shouldn't have let him get to me. It certainly didn't do any good.

Net result by the way? They turned down our proposal and have decided to shut down the company with a probable $4 million capital infusion necessary to clean everything up. Go figure.