My Excuse
Look, I'm as busy as Hell. My last post on Napoleon's Dynamite Book was great and all, but it has been in the can for weeks, waiting for such a time as I felt that I was due to post something.
I did not have the time to write this past week. That sounds like an excuse and feels like an excuse as I type these words, so it must be one.
Without boring you with all the details, I worked like a dog on Monday and Wednesday, until past 8:00 PM both nights and having started at 8:30 AM on Monday and bright and early for a 7:00 AM breakfast meeting on Wednesday. I realize that I am not the only person who worked like this over the past week, but it helps explain why I did not feel up to putting my thoughts in the blogosphere after coming home those nights.
Tuesday and Thursday nights I enjoyed myself, and I mean myself. I attended my daughter's jazz concert on Tuesday night and my son's on Thursday night in the town where he studies music in college. I took him out to the trendiest microbrewery that you can imagine Thursday night, which left me looking like something that the cat dragged in this past Friday morning.
The reason why I attended both of the concerts on my own is that my wife suffered from the flu all week, going into work like a trooper on Wednesday before relapsing on Thursday. She had to go in on Friday, so she did. But one of the many difficulties caused by her illness was me having to drive our daughter to school at 7:00 a.m. every day when I am normally getting ready myself, with the exception of Wednesday, when I left at 6:30 a.m. and my wife took her to school. I also had to provide dinner for the two of us, plus our son Friday night, as my wife was not doing well and we did not want her touching our food, anyway.
Since I accurately claim having been busy at work for about fifty hours this past week, what the Hell did I do anyway?
Yours Truly Money Mensch is a humble economic development official by day, and I have been since fall of 2000, following about eight grueling years of serving in the joke of a department known as the Cook County Adult Probation Department. For the most realistic depiction of what it was like to work in that unprofessional, politically-driven environment for those years, read
The P.O.: A Probation Officer in Chicago
.
So what does a suburban Chicago economic developer actually do during such a week that he claims to have been busy?
An Economic Developer's Week
I worked on four notable projects, each of which could potentially be a game-changer for the town that employs me. I spent a lot of time on each one, in one case spending three or more hours including a two hour tour of sites in our town.
I could write a very long post on each one, but in the interest of being respectful of your reading time and in moving on to other topics, the first is recruiting what may end up being the most popular microbrewery in the Chicago area, who wants to build a destination brewery/restaurant/banquet facility of about 30,000 square feet with outdoor acreage for outdoor dining and the banquets, weddings, etc.
Most people are at least somewhat familiar with the concept of offering financial incentives to businesses or developers to attract them to a community. We are no different, and have offered this brewery the most generous incentive package that we have offered anyone to date, possibly saving them millions over the years as well as an up-front payment made in two installments.
The second project is even bigger than the microbrewery, although we do not yet know who the company is. We have been assured that it is one of the ten largest publicly traded U.S. companies, which limits their identity to one of ten, and I have been told of one that it is most definitely not.
Like the brewery, I have conceived of an incentive package to offer the company via its site selector including, once again, a direct up-front payment as well as a county-sponsored tax abatement program and a statewide income tax credit incentive called EDGE. The program kind of sucks, but it is what Illinois offers.
The third big project is the potential sale of the oldest shopping center in our community, which has the largest vacant space in the town. It has been empty for at least six or seven years.
Guess what? Our community must once again offer a financial incentive to the potential purchaser if we want him to buy the building, renovate it and fill the former grocery store space with a new business whose primary attraction is alcohol.
We have not yet formally offered this would-be purchaser a written incentive offer, but most likely will upon my return to town on the 26th.
The fourth huge project that took up several hours of my time this past week involves the potential sale of land owned by my Village. I am the primary contact person for an eleven-acre parcel at the busiest intersection of the town and get all kinds of weird inquiries on it.
Not that anyone would explicitly state that they trust in my judgement and experience to handle such a major task, I am nonetheless the go-to person when it comes to the sale of this parcel. Because we have been promoting it very hard of late including a commercial currently running on Comcast throughout our market, I have been getting all kind of calls.
Calls for truck depots, storage facilities and from those who simply want to buy and hold the land to sell at a greater profit some future year. I even got a few crank calls about it.
What I did get are several legitimate inquiries, including a prominent builder of upscale apartment buildings, who I met with along with other key staff for nearly two hours on Thursday morning. We are expecting to receive an LOI (letter of intent) from this developer on Monday while I am out, and another LOI within the next few days from an even bigger well-known home builder whose stock is publicly traded.
So those are the big things.
Some of the small things included assisting and helping select sites for seven smaller businesses, all of whom seem quite intent to move forward and I expect will open businesses in town.
Again to save time, they are as follows:
Look, I'm as busy as Hell. My last post on Napoleon's Dynamite Book was great and all, but it has been in the can for weeks, waiting for such a time as I felt that I was due to post something.
I did not have the time to write this past week. That sounds like an excuse and feels like an excuse as I type these words, so it must be one.
Without boring you with all the details, I worked like a dog on Monday and Wednesday, until past 8:00 PM both nights and having started at 8:30 AM on Monday and bright and early for a 7:00 AM breakfast meeting on Wednesday. I realize that I am not the only person who worked like this over the past week, but it helps explain why I did not feel up to putting my thoughts in the blogosphere after coming home those nights.
Tuesday and Thursday nights I enjoyed myself, and I mean myself. I attended my daughter's jazz concert on Tuesday night and my son's on Thursday night in the town where he studies music in college. I took him out to the trendiest microbrewery that you can imagine Thursday night, which left me looking like something that the cat dragged in this past Friday morning.
The reason why I attended both of the concerts on my own is that my wife suffered from the flu all week, going into work like a trooper on Wednesday before relapsing on Thursday. She had to go in on Friday, so she did. But one of the many difficulties caused by her illness was me having to drive our daughter to school at 7:00 a.m. every day when I am normally getting ready myself, with the exception of Wednesday, when I left at 6:30 a.m. and my wife took her to school. I also had to provide dinner for the two of us, plus our son Friday night, as my wife was not doing well and we did not want her touching our food, anyway.
Since I accurately claim having been busy at work for about fifty hours this past week, what the Hell did I do anyway?
Yours Truly Money Mensch is a humble economic development official by day, and I have been since fall of 2000, following about eight grueling years of serving in the joke of a department known as the Cook County Adult Probation Department. For the most realistic depiction of what it was like to work in that unprofessional, politically-driven environment for those years, read
The P.O.: A Probation Officer in Chicago
.So what does a suburban Chicago economic developer actually do during such a week that he claims to have been busy?
An Economic Developer's Week
I worked on four notable projects, each of which could potentially be a game-changer for the town that employs me. I spent a lot of time on each one, in one case spending three or more hours including a two hour tour of sites in our town.
I could write a very long post on each one, but in the interest of being respectful of your reading time and in moving on to other topics, the first is recruiting what may end up being the most popular microbrewery in the Chicago area, who wants to build a destination brewery/restaurant/banquet facility of about 30,000 square feet with outdoor acreage for outdoor dining and the banquets, weddings, etc.
Most people are at least somewhat familiar with the concept of offering financial incentives to businesses or developers to attract them to a community. We are no different, and have offered this brewery the most generous incentive package that we have offered anyone to date, possibly saving them millions over the years as well as an up-front payment made in two installments.
The second project is even bigger than the microbrewery, although we do not yet know who the company is. We have been assured that it is one of the ten largest publicly traded U.S. companies, which limits their identity to one of ten, and I have been told of one that it is most definitely not.
Like the brewery, I have conceived of an incentive package to offer the company via its site selector including, once again, a direct up-front payment as well as a county-sponsored tax abatement program and a statewide income tax credit incentive called EDGE. The program kind of sucks, but it is what Illinois offers.
The third big project is the potential sale of the oldest shopping center in our community, which has the largest vacant space in the town. It has been empty for at least six or seven years.
Guess what? Our community must once again offer a financial incentive to the potential purchaser if we want him to buy the building, renovate it and fill the former grocery store space with a new business whose primary attraction is alcohol.
We have not yet formally offered this would-be purchaser a written incentive offer, but most likely will upon my return to town on the 26th.
The fourth huge project that took up several hours of my time this past week involves the potential sale of land owned by my Village. I am the primary contact person for an eleven-acre parcel at the busiest intersection of the town and get all kinds of weird inquiries on it.
Not that anyone would explicitly state that they trust in my judgement and experience to handle such a major task, I am nonetheless the go-to person when it comes to the sale of this parcel. Because we have been promoting it very hard of late including a commercial currently running on Comcast throughout our market, I have been getting all kind of calls.
Calls for truck depots, storage facilities and from those who simply want to buy and hold the land to sell at a greater profit some future year. I even got a few crank calls about it.
What I did get are several legitimate inquiries, including a prominent builder of upscale apartment buildings, who I met with along with other key staff for nearly two hours on Thursday morning. We are expecting to receive an LOI (letter of intent) from this developer on Monday while I am out, and another LOI within the next few days from an even bigger well-known home builder whose stock is publicly traded.
So those are the big things.
Some of the small things included assisting and helping select sites for seven smaller businesses, all of whom seem quite intent to move forward and I expect will open businesses in town.
Again to save time, they are as follows:
- A kitchen and bath showroom opening in the old shopping center that I referenced above, moving into a vacant space that had been occupied by a framing shop for about twenty years.
- A vaping store. This is a business that I loathe, but is legal and allowable by zoning, so I am helping them open in our most derelict shopping center in the roughest part of town.
- A fly-by-night auto insurance company with a Spanish name opening in the same center as the vaping business.
- A entrepreneurial local woman who will likely open a health item/vitamin store in the same strip center as the vaping and instant insurance place.
- An industrial user who is pursuing a location in our business park for demonstrating and selling manufacturing equipment and will be purchasing a 22,000 square foot facility.
- Our community's first Indian-food restaurant, opening up a small location in one of the nicer centers in town. It will be primarily carry-out, with only a few seats. As a white Jewish mensch, I really like Indian food and am a bit excited about having a place to buy samosas and Tandoori chicken near my office.
- Helped a high-end Italian restaurant continue pursuing a vacant space in our downtown, while at the same time doing my best to both legally and ethically discourage other potential businesses from pursuing the same location.
The night meetings that I referred to were my monthly Economic Development Committee meeting Monday night, at which I file reports on development-related items and answer about a dozen questions while being recorded and questioned on everything I do.
On Wednesday night, the department that I am in had its budget hearing along with four other departments. The highlight of our department's presentation was that our Council approved the creation of a new economic development incentive line item that I had requested, which may help fund the three incentives that I referenced above.
I could go on about more meetings and inquiries that I had during this past week, but you get the picture. I spent forty-plus hours in meetings, writing reports and on the phone, thus leaving me without the energy or desire to come home at night and put words into the blogosphere. I did want to spend some time with my family, after all.
Thief Apprehended!
I have not yet written about it, but my identity was stolen big time.
I thought it part of the huge hack of Equifax, since I received two letters from them effectively telling me that my identity had been stolen by that major breach of over 143 million people.
So imagine my shock and dismay last weekend when I received multiple messages to contact a police officer in a south suburb. Never having been to that suburb or being able to recall having done anything illegal, I finally got into contact with the officer, who asked if I have been the victim of identity theft.
Well, let me tell you! I have received credit card approvals and rejections in the mail for four things that I did not apply for in a short span of time. I called the major three credit agencies in mid-January to put a ninety day lock on my credit. Boy, did I feel unmenschlike reporting the hack to the very agency where my identity was stolen from in the first place.
This whole episode is worthy of a post or series of posts on its own, but suffice it to say, not only has a criminal assumed my identity, but meanwhile the real Money Mensch has not been able to apply for my own credit, which I actually want to do.
Not that my credit was ever poor, but it was typically always a shade under 800. Ironically, the score is now over 800 despite the recent breach and flurry of activity by the thief. He even had a driver's license with my name, date of birth, and address on it in addition to carrying a credit card in my name.
The officer asked me if I am a male white, which I verified, and then informed me that my identity thief is a male black, for what it's worth. Might as well be truthful and state that most of the criminal element in the Chicago area has been, is and always will be black. For the eight years that I served as a P.O., that was overwhelmingly the case by a very wide margin.
I will not post the photo of the license that the officer sent me, both because it has my name, D.O.B. and address on it and also because I do not want to compromise any criminal prosecution of the case. I have already volunteered to testify against this piece of shit, but my hope is that he and his co-thieves will plead guilty, since I was not the only victim of identity theft in this case.
I only share this in reference to my busy-as-Hell week insofar as that the lead officer on the case emailed to me four times. Not twice and not three times. Four times.
So what qualified as late to me Wednesday night, around 10:30 p.m. when I would rather be reading in bed, I instead dug through my files to find communications regarding the credit card applications, the card that showed up in the mail, etc., scanned them in and sent them to the officer who had requested the information. I copied my brother on it, too, in case it ever comes down to me needing legal representation or advice on the matter.
But chalk it up as part of my long and stressful week.
Speaking of Reading...
When I frequently have posted and will post much more of what I have read from a particular book, it is because I am a total book addict. I am a lover of books, a very avid reader and, to my wife's dismay, a hoarder of books.
During 2015 and 2016, I must have purchased two hundred books. I could not physically pass a book sale or used book store without walking out with two or three. By the time I realized I could not fit any more on our bookshelves, in the trunk of my car or in boxes under my desk, I had to purchase storage bins to keep several hundred of them in our garage.
Although my moniker on this is the Money Mensch, it could just as easily be The Book Maven or the Avid Reader or the Book Addict or what not. It just so happens that many of the books that I read are related to money, and the topic of money is something that interests me and millions if not billions of others.
Considering that, I did not stop reading this past week. To the contrary. I somehow got myself in the middle of five different books, each of which could spark multiple blog posts on its own, save Sort of Rich, a book that I had difficulty keeping interested in and seem to have abandoned.
The two that I find extremely fascinating include one that has spurred hundreds of blog posts and articles on its own, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. I have read dozens of references to the 10,000 hour rule, but had never read it for myself. For both those of you who have read this fascinating book and for those of you who haven't, the 10,000 hour rule is but one of many interesting ideas in this book.
The other book that I am in the middle of is Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
by Dan Ariely, a great book about how we misthink money and how to spend smarter, which has also provided many ideas that I will reference in a future post.
While having a great title, I do not find The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On with Your Life
nearly up to par with the other two books that I am reading. Add a third, since a book that I reserved Entrepreneurial You: Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams, and Thrive
came available and I have just started reading that, too.
I want to mention that I have paid a grand total of two bucks for these books, having purchased Sort of Rich and Outliers for a buck each and the other three are from two libraries that I frequent.
I read about a dozen blog posts this past week, ten of them money-related and the other two who knows what. One that I particularly liked was "you don't need any more financial advice" by Steve of ThinkSaveRetire, a blog that I came across and subscribed to this week.
My goal is not to get you to read other blogs, but this post almost makes all other posts and books and articles moot by stating that we already know what we need to know about money without reading this or anyone else's words about it:
I read several magazines throughout the week, mostly money-related but also Better Homes & Gardens, which I say is for my wife but you and I know the truth. I read every page of it and my wife never cracks it open, only looking at the things that I point out to her. I am now wanting to grow hops in my back yard, like Kyle Hagerty does in an article about how he and his lovely wife, Morgan, make use of every square inch of their tiny yard in Sacremento. I do not want to make my own beer, I just want to grow hops for further fence coverage and to gain additional privacy from our nosy neighbors.
See You in a Week
My son and I are heading toward our highly anticipated trip to NOLA tomorrow.
Since the blog is called Money Mensch and, to me, nearly everything is at least tangentially tied to this means of exchange, I report that I am bringing $880 in cash for the two of us to cover much of our spending, including treating our hosts a time or two, from Monday night through Saturday morning.
I know that I will make purchases on my credit card, but for those purchases of fifty bucks and below, I plan on using cash. Because we will be getting a ride to the airport tomorrow, but will most likely be taking a cab back home in a week, I hope to have sixty or seventy bucks left to pay the cabdriver upon our return. I know that I could charge that, too, but I have some type of mental block about charging cab rides, preferring not to have to relive the high cost of it a month later.
We will be staying at my sister's house with her and her husband and their two daughters, my nieces. I have previously mentioned, but will again for those of you who have not read it, that my sister and her family are decidedly upper middle class and own a lovely home in the Uptown neighborhood, just a few blocks away from the truly wealthy area of multi-million dollar homes in the Garden District.
I am extremely proud of what my sister and her husband have accomplished and of their healthy and active lifestyle. As much as I could preach the benefits of a healthy diet, exercise, spending quality family time and valuing hard work and education, they live it three hundred and sixty-five days per year. As an added bonus, my sister travels with her daughters about ten weeks every summer, escaping the heat, humidity and crime of New Orleans to visit friends and family throughout the Midwest and also takes a vacation with her husband somewhere nicer while their daughters are away at a summer camp in Wisconsin.
Besides how well they have done, they are such gracious hosts that it makes me feel like a total asshole because we are not able to reciprocate due to our smaller home, our decidedly un-gourmet cooking and our coming and going so often that we would not have much quality time to spend with them if they did stay nearby.
Anyway, my son and I love jazz music, we love Cajun and Creole cuisine, we love the tourist attractions, we love beignets at the Cafe du Monde and we love the history of the city.
My sister, being far more organized than I am, has already laid out plans of where we should go and has things planned for us most days, but in a very nice way. One concert venue per day or night, with a jazz brunch at Ellis Marsalis's venue, Snug Harbor, on Friday. They will provide dinner, I am told, though I have offered to treat everybody on Tuesday night.
Our flights in and out of Chicago Midway airport via Southwest cost about $660, which I already paid. If we booked ourselves into a nice place for those five nights, that would be at least another grand.
The subject of another post, I am also excited because I will be taking five consecutive vacation days, which does not seem a major accomplishment in itself, but I did not do so once in 2017. The entire year, I only took fourteen vacation days which is pitiful considering how long I have worked and how many vacation days I have on the books. I would actually exceed the forty vacation days that I am allowed to accumulate (twice as many as I earn per year) if I did not take the next five work days off.
I also want to take a week off with my family this summer and really, really want to visit my father-in-law and his wife this Christmas week in Arizona.
I will be going to Vegas in May, but it will be mostly business attending RECon, the biggest retail trade show in the world, with over 40,000 attendees. My new boss and I will be going specifically to promote the Village-owned property that I referenced earlier that could quite possibly go under contract sooner than that. I will be gearing up for RECon big-time upon my return.
So...
With a grand total of zero subscribers, I do not feel as if I have a lot of followers eagerly awaiting my next post. But more posts I do have lined up. I have learned so much just in the past few weeks from the books that I have been reading and have also regained some of the confidence that I had previously lost when it comes to work. I am on top of my economic development game and even if I lost my current job for some reason, another town would be very lucky to land someone with my skills, talents, knowledge, work ethic and experience.
But that is not what I dream of; landing another similar position in a similar town. I dream of minding my own business, making money off of my writing and speaking skills, helping my children achieve everything that they can, and having some fun while doing it.
And if you happen to be walking around the French Quarter or City Park or at the Whole Foods in Uptown or at Kermit's Mother In Law Lounge tomorrow night or at Chickie Wah Wah's or at the Maple Leaf Bar late Tuesday night when Rebirth plays or at Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro next Friday and you see a smiling middle aged guy with a super handsome bearded nineteen-year-old, you would have spotted the Money Mensch.
I thought it part of the huge hack of Equifax, since I received two letters from them effectively telling me that my identity had been stolen by that major breach of over 143 million people.
So imagine my shock and dismay last weekend when I received multiple messages to contact a police officer in a south suburb. Never having been to that suburb or being able to recall having done anything illegal, I finally got into contact with the officer, who asked if I have been the victim of identity theft.
Well, let me tell you! I have received credit card approvals and rejections in the mail for four things that I did not apply for in a short span of time. I called the major three credit agencies in mid-January to put a ninety day lock on my credit. Boy, did I feel unmenschlike reporting the hack to the very agency where my identity was stolen from in the first place.
This whole episode is worthy of a post or series of posts on its own, but suffice it to say, not only has a criminal assumed my identity, but meanwhile the real Money Mensch has not been able to apply for my own credit, which I actually want to do.
The officer asked me if I am a male white, which I verified, and then informed me that my identity thief is a male black, for what it's worth. Might as well be truthful and state that most of the criminal element in the Chicago area has been, is and always will be black. For the eight years that I served as a P.O., that was overwhelmingly the case by a very wide margin.
I will not post the photo of the license that the officer sent me, both because it has my name, D.O.B. and address on it and also because I do not want to compromise any criminal prosecution of the case. I have already volunteered to testify against this piece of shit, but my hope is that he and his co-thieves will plead guilty, since I was not the only victim of identity theft in this case.
I only share this in reference to my busy-as-Hell week insofar as that the lead officer on the case emailed to me four times. Not twice and not three times. Four times.
So what qualified as late to me Wednesday night, around 10:30 p.m. when I would rather be reading in bed, I instead dug through my files to find communications regarding the credit card applications, the card that showed up in the mail, etc., scanned them in and sent them to the officer who had requested the information. I copied my brother on it, too, in case it ever comes down to me needing legal representation or advice on the matter.
But chalk it up as part of my long and stressful week.
Speaking of Reading...
When I frequently have posted and will post much more of what I have read from a particular book, it is because I am a total book addict. I am a lover of books, a very avid reader and, to my wife's dismay, a hoarder of books.
During 2015 and 2016, I must have purchased two hundred books. I could not physically pass a book sale or used book store without walking out with two or three. By the time I realized I could not fit any more on our bookshelves, in the trunk of my car or in boxes under my desk, I had to purchase storage bins to keep several hundred of them in our garage.
Although my moniker on this is the Money Mensch, it could just as easily be The Book Maven or the Avid Reader or the Book Addict or what not. It just so happens that many of the books that I read are related to money, and the topic of money is something that interests me and millions if not billions of others.
Considering that, I did not stop reading this past week. To the contrary. I somehow got myself in the middle of five different books, each of which could spark multiple blog posts on its own, save Sort of Rich, a book that I had difficulty keeping interested in and seem to have abandoned.
The other book that I am in the middle of is Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
by Dan Ariely, a great book about how we misthink money and how to spend smarter, which has also provided many ideas that I will reference in a future post.While having a great title, I do not find The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On with Your Life
nearly up to par with the other two books that I am reading. Add a third, since a book that I reserved Entrepreneurial You: Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams, and Thrive
came available and I have just started reading that, too.I want to mention that I have paid a grand total of two bucks for these books, having purchased Sort of Rich and Outliers for a buck each and the other three are from two libraries that I frequent.
I read about a dozen blog posts this past week, ten of them money-related and the other two who knows what. One that I particularly liked was "you don't need any more financial advice" by Steve of ThinkSaveRetire, a blog that I came across and subscribed to this week.
My goal is not to get you to read other blogs, but this post almost makes all other posts and books and articles moot by stating that we already know what we need to know about money without reading this or anyone else's words about it:
We know that dropping $50,000 on a brand new car when we’re 25 and earning $60k a year is a one-way street to a long career working stressful jobs just to maintain our lifestyles. But, so many of us do it anyway.
We know that our $5,000 vacations every year are murdering our chances at calling it quits early and living a different life. A life of happiness and, well, maybe a little satisfaction. But again, we still do it.
We know credit card debt destroys our life. We know huge homes require time-consuming cleaning, expensive utilities, and monstrous mortgages. We know that living an hour away from work adds hundreds of hours to our grind every year, maneuvering through mountains of traffic and getting pissed at the guy in front of us who toooootally let that dude in who just cut in line (we’ve all been there!).
This isn’t rocket science. We don’t need yet another listicle article offering more ways to save money. Coupons. Cook at home. Rent a movie instead of going to the theater. Drink water instead of soda or alcohol at restaurants. Yada, yada, yada.
We know this shit, folks.How right Steve is. We know this shit already, don't we?
See You in a Week
My son and I are heading toward our highly anticipated trip to NOLA tomorrow.
Since the blog is called Money Mensch and, to me, nearly everything is at least tangentially tied to this means of exchange, I report that I am bringing $880 in cash for the two of us to cover much of our spending, including treating our hosts a time or two, from Monday night through Saturday morning.
I know that I will make purchases on my credit card, but for those purchases of fifty bucks and below, I plan on using cash. Because we will be getting a ride to the airport tomorrow, but will most likely be taking a cab back home in a week, I hope to have sixty or seventy bucks left to pay the cabdriver upon our return. I know that I could charge that, too, but I have some type of mental block about charging cab rides, preferring not to have to relive the high cost of it a month later.
 |
| The $880 that I'm ready to blow in NOLA this coming week. |
I am extremely proud of what my sister and her husband have accomplished and of their healthy and active lifestyle. As much as I could preach the benefits of a healthy diet, exercise, spending quality family time and valuing hard work and education, they live it three hundred and sixty-five days per year. As an added bonus, my sister travels with her daughters about ten weeks every summer, escaping the heat, humidity and crime of New Orleans to visit friends and family throughout the Midwest and also takes a vacation with her husband somewhere nicer while their daughters are away at a summer camp in Wisconsin.
Besides how well they have done, they are such gracious hosts that it makes me feel like a total asshole because we are not able to reciprocate due to our smaller home, our decidedly un-gourmet cooking and our coming and going so often that we would not have much quality time to spend with them if they did stay nearby.
 |
| My son and I love beignets and I will drink chickory. |
My sister, being far more organized than I am, has already laid out plans of where we should go and has things planned for us most days, but in a very nice way. One concert venue per day or night, with a jazz brunch at Ellis Marsalis's venue, Snug Harbor, on Friday. They will provide dinner, I am told, though I have offered to treat everybody on Tuesday night.
Our flights in and out of Chicago Midway airport via Southwest cost about $660, which I already paid. If we booked ourselves into a nice place for those five nights, that would be at least another grand.
The subject of another post, I am also excited because I will be taking five consecutive vacation days, which does not seem a major accomplishment in itself, but I did not do so once in 2017. The entire year, I only took fourteen vacation days which is pitiful considering how long I have worked and how many vacation days I have on the books. I would actually exceed the forty vacation days that I am allowed to accumulate (twice as many as I earn per year) if I did not take the next five work days off.
I also want to take a week off with my family this summer and really, really want to visit my father-in-law and his wife this Christmas week in Arizona.
So...
With a grand total of zero subscribers, I do not feel as if I have a lot of followers eagerly awaiting my next post. But more posts I do have lined up. I have learned so much just in the past few weeks from the books that I have been reading and have also regained some of the confidence that I had previously lost when it comes to work. I am on top of my economic development game and even if I lost my current job for some reason, another town would be very lucky to land someone with my skills, talents, knowledge, work ethic and experience.
But that is not what I dream of; landing another similar position in a similar town. I dream of minding my own business, making money off of my writing and speaking skills, helping my children achieve everything that they can, and having some fun while doing it.
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