The Latest in Building & Traveling

I'm sorry I let February slip away without a post. I started the month off with a trip to Salt Lake City for business. My goal was to entertain a couple of customers while helping them to learn all about one of our products. For dinner one night we made our way to Park City which is apparently a well known ski town. If you're like me and don't ski, it is pretty much a tourist trap. We did, however, eat at a restaurant owned by Robert Redford if that matters to anyone. Checking out the people there and the stuff they sale in the boutiques (for the two guys that read this, that's a small shop with a very small selection of over-priced merchandise) helped me realize there is a whole culture to the ski town that is far, far from life in middle Tennessee. Here are a couple of pictures to prove I actually went there and am not making this stuff up.

From there I spent some oh-so-precious free time finishing out a room in the back portion of my workshop. Noah calls it "Daddy's House". Electrical outlets, insulation, siding, ceiling, lights, insulated sub-floor, carpet, and trim. Yeah, that pretty much took up February. I still have shelving to go and a little bit of trim and I'll be ready to move in. The picture is old, but you get the idea of where I'm working.

Business has been slowing this month so I found myself making cold calls for the first time. Think of me in a tie like a door-to-door salesman except that I'm going to schools instead of houses. Yeah, yuck is right. I found that low expectations are the key in this game. If my goal is to say hello and drop off some information I'm much less likely to be disappointed than if I expect to actually sell something. My favorite bit of info came from a poor little rural school where they informed me they get their computers from donations in the community and that the teachers just started using email this school year and would not welcome additional technology just yet. I refrained from volunteering to show myself the door.

And just because you actually read to the end of the post, here are a couple of bonus pics for you.