Take my chair . . . please!

D: SUNDAY - Man, what a busy day! First off, Teri and I didn't get home from the concert until 2 in the morning. I had to be up by 7:45 to show a home to a couple of clients. Now when I'm only GIVEN that much sleep, I never really fall asleep because I'm afraid I'm going to oversleeep. So needless to say, I started the day out draggin'. But I showed the home and they seemed to really like it. It looks like we'll be making an offer today. Then of course I had to jam out to Yelm and set up. Setting up on the weekends takes a lot longer than the weekdays because we're allowed to put signs up in town. So I put up 14 signs, balloons, etc. After setting up, I barely had time to fill out my blog before I had a client drop in. We went over some details on her contract and then the flood gates opened! Between people coming out to see the model home and clients I had dropping by to take care of some paperwork, I didn't get a break between about 12:00 and 6:00 when it was time to close. The day sure goes quickly when it's like that! But I think I had two REALLY solid prospects, one is meeting with my lender today, so hopefully I'll get back in the game at Pennington this week! One of the books I've been reading is "Secrets to closing the sale" by Zig Ziglar. Now I know that sounds really Used Car Salesman like, but it's really not. It does have some closing techniques in it, yes, but the main focus of the book is making you a better person and stresses being ethical above all else. I think the book has really helped me with my dialog with clients. The couple of really solid prospects I had, I had a wonderful time listening to their concerns and showing them how the homes in Pennington addressed them. It was great! I felt on top of my game! Of course no one is on paper yet and I wouldn't ever PUSH for it, but I think they bought me and that's the first step. Communicating to them that you're honest and ethical. That even if they don't like Pennington, they like me and maybe I can become thier agent. Who knows? By the time I got all my signs down and out of Yelm, it was well after 6:30. I was home after 7, had some dinner and Teri and I watched an episode of Flip This House and ROME. Teri headed off for bed and I watched the Seahawks game that I had missed earlier in the day. In HDTV, in FF mode. Got through the whole 3 hour game in about 45 minutes. I headed off to bed shortly after that and don't remember much from there. I was wiped!

T: Man! I wish it was busy like this everyday at Pennington!

F: EXHAUSTED!

Weekend Update!

Wow, blogging on a weekend, what WILL happen next?

D: FRIDAY - Friday started off busy, but ended up being a VERY boring day. I got up early and headed up to Auburn to pick up keys for a client's home that was closing later in the day. I stopped by the builder's office and picked up a very nice gift basket for my client with all her keys. Nice presentation. It says a lot when the builder goes that extra mile. Leaving there, I headed to my client's office to present the keys. On the way, I called a couple stores in the Renton area to see if they had any 4GB Nano's in stock . . . no joy. I arrived at my client's office and made the presentation. Everyone gathered around to see what she was getting. Pretty cool. She is stoked about the home and I'm very happy for her! When I left, I had to jam from Renton down to Yelm (have you seen the price of gas lately?) and arrived there about 20 minutes early and got set up. As I was turning on the lights in the bathroom, I noticed that my shirt looked kind of funny . . . it was on inside out. Unbelievable! I had two meetings already that day and was wearing my shirt inside out! Real professional John! ;-) Oh well, c'est la vie. The rest of the day at Pennington was VERY un-eventful. Almost no one came through the model home BUT, the two that did seemed very interested in the homes, so I'll definitely be following up with them. I got out a little late because I was playing some jigsaw game on my laptop and had to finish it!

Teri had dinner waiting for me when I got home, vegetable lasagna. It was pretty yummy. We finished the night by watching the season finale of Stargate SG-1.

D: SATURDAY - MAN WHAT A DAY! I started off the day by heading to the local hardware store to make additional keys for a listing I have and dropping the extra off to the tenant living there. She's going to be making some repairs for my client, so she needed a key to get into the other unit. When I got home, Teri wasn't quite ready yet, so I decided to climb up on the roof and install my new HDTV antenna. (Boy, I talk about TV a lot don't I?) It took me about 30 minutes to get it installed on the mast and wired in. Easy going when you're just replacing an existing antenna. A quick check of the HDTV strength on my receiver revealed I get up to 20% better reception on some channels and even pull in some channels I wasn't able to get before. An experiment WELL worth the $59.00 investment. Teri and and I hit the Country Rose for some breakfast. Again, I skipped the hasbrowns and opted for cottage cheese instead. After breakfast we went home and got a few chores done around the house, and I scheduled meetings for Sunday morning and afternoon with clients. Around 1PM we headed for the Gorge at George for a concert that evening. It's about 180 miles from our house and we made good time taking about 2.5 hours to get there. The concert was to begin at 5 and we arrived at 4. The beauty of this concert was that we had suite passes. The suite gave us preferred parking, and access to areas of the gorge not available to General Admission patrons. So we ended up at the CliffHouse restaurant and bar for a couple of beverages and some lunch before the show. It was EXPENSIVE, but the view is breathtaking, and having your own "private" club means you're not elbowing for a place in line and there were only 50 - 70 people around at any given time.

We headed back to the suite at around 5:15. The suites are cool because you have a GREAT view of the show, AND you have people bringing your food and drink. AWESOME! The show started at about 6PM (after the opening band) and Foreigner took the stage. I'd never seen them before and they put on a pretty incredible show. For as old as they are, they can still move around and belt out the tunes pretty good. They played all their classics like: Cold as Ice, Double Vision, Head Games, etc. AND for their encore, they even played Misty Mountain Hop by Led Zepplin as a tribute to Jason Bonham's dad, John. It was awesome. Next up were REO Speedwagon . . . I'm not as much a fan of them as I am both Foreigner and Styx, but they played a decent set. Similar to what we heard at the Puyallup fair last year. Last up was STYX, they must have been pressed for time because they did a really short set. They were great though. We saw them as well at the Puyallup Fair and again, the set was similar to what they played there. Although, it was certainly nice to not be in the pouring down rain! We headed out around 11 and back home. We got there around 1:45 and hit the sack. I had to be up on Sunday to show homes, so needless to say, I'm dragging Hurlbut as I write this!

T: Nothing profound.

F: Ditto

Thursday September 15th, 2005

Morning: 2C Kashi Go Lean and 2C fat free milk
Afternoon: Banana, Large Coke, 6 16Oz Bottles of Water, 4 pieces of Pizza Hut Pizza
Evening: Baked chicken sonora pasta at Ruby Tuesday's, 2/3 of order. Salad bar. 2 Cokes

Thursday September 15th, 2005

35 minutes on the treadmill. 1.7 miles or so.
17.5 minutes on the elliptical trainer, 2,400 steps or so.

Another First!

This marks the first time since I've been blogging that I've remembered to fill out my blog every day this week! Now if only I could find a way to do it on the weekends. Since I absolutely abhor the thought of opening my laptop on my "days off" it may be a pain, but if I'm in Yelm, I'll give it a shot.

D: Yesterday I went to the gym again, that's twice this week for those of you keeping score. I didn't make it as early as I had wanted to, but I made it and that's the important part. When I got there, I was still dead tired and didn't want to do anything. But I started out on the treadmill again, and upped the intensity from Tuesday and kept plodding along. As I was plodding, I started thinking about climbing Mount Rainier again. And I started repeating to myself "I am a highly motivated individual. I set goals and I achieve them. I will go to the summit of mount Rainier. I am highly focused on my health and fitness goals and I will reach the top." As I kept repeating this, or some form of it to myself, my tiredness left and I was back to kicking ass on the treadmill. I think I'm going to print out some form of it on a page, have it laminated and stick it up on the wall in front of the treadmill while I'm working out. I may get some funny looks from people, but we'll see what happens. I'm sure you're wondering where all this has come from. Well over the past week and a half, I've been listening to a series of CD's I bought at Mastermind. The speaker is Zig Ziglar and the CD's are his series on "How to Stay Motivated". Zig is a tremendous speaker, and his advice is sound. Some of the things, like affirmations, may seem a bit weird, but I'm willing to give them a try and see what comes of it. I do know that just repeating that little phrase to myself on the treadmill DID give me a boost in energy. After the treadmill (35 minutes) I headed over the elliptical trainer. I decided another 15 minutes would be good for the day and programmed the machine for just that. I cranked the intensity up to 7 out of a possible 10 and away I went. I never really feel like I get a workout on the elliptical machine, but I certainly sweat a lot! After cooling down a bit, I grabbed my breakfast and sat down to cool off and have my morning meal. By the time I was done, I was cooled down enough to shower, which I did and headed out to the office.

I was only in the office for about 10 minutes and off again to Yelm. I grabbed a coke on the way and arrived around 11:30. I only saw two people all day and Marcus dropped by around 5:15. It was a pretty boring day, but I was able to get some administrative crap done while I was out there.

I headed out of Yelm around 6 and met some clients at 6:45 for a quick signature and was off to dinner with my friend David at 7. We had a good dinner and some laughs catching up with each other. I droned on and on about my new obsession with the iPod Nano and how badly I want one, but can't find one anywhere in western Washington. I guess I'll have to order one off the Apple website. Headed home around 8 and Teri and I had some well deserved alone time together. I thought it would be a good idea to finally get a DirecTV tuner installed in her room so if I were watching something she didn't necessarily want to watch, she could just watch something else. What I've found though is that I get home and she retreats to her room and I'm in the family room and before I know it, she's in bed. It kinda sucks. Even though we were only watching TV before, we were watching TV TOGETHER and that was much better. Drifted off to la la land around 10:30.

T: I WANT MY NANO! I WANT IT, I WANT IT, I WANT IT!!!!! Two TV's suck. Going to the gym breaks the drive-thru habit in the morning. Go to gym MORE, go to Drive-Thru LESS. Amazing!

F: Better day, feel like I'm getting motivated again! Having only a couple deals in escrow is a great motivator!

16 Sep '05 - 12:59 | John | General | No comments yet | Permalink

Wednesday, September 14th, 2005

None.

Wednesday September 14th, 2005

Morning: JITB Extreme Sausage on Criossant, hasbrown, large coke
Afternoon: 6 slices Pizza Hut pizza, 2 bottles of water
Evening: 4C Ravioli, Hagen Das Ice Cream Bar

Wednesday September 14th, 2005

D: Man, I don't think I slept a wink last night! I tossed an turned all night long and because of that I was dragging ass today. I finally rolled out of bed around 7:45 AM. I had planned to go to the gym again, but when my alarm went off at 6, it was all I could do to not throw it across the room. I showered and was out the door by about 8:15. I headed down to the office and took care of some paperwork and got some listings e-mailed off to clients. My new HDTV antenna showed up in the morning too. I'm going to try to get it installed Saturday morning. Hopefully I'll be able to get better reception with this one than with the one I currently have. I headed back out of the office around 10:15 and headed north to Renton. One of my clients was having the walk through with the builder on her new home and asked me to attend. So I met up with her around 11:30 and we walked the home and pointed out what needed to be repaired. The builder, Dreamcraft homes, did a great job! Very clean and professional walk-through. They must have had 10 - 15 people working there when I showed up at 11. I think she's pretty stoked about the home too. I get to give her the keys on Friday. That's one of the most rewarding things I get to do. Hand keys to someone for their new home! Awesome feeling!

After the walk through, I had to jam down to Yelm. I was scheduled to be there from noon - 6, but I had Marcus open for me (Thanks MH!) so I could attend the walk through. I got down there around 2. When I got there, of course Marcus had about 3 people there and I didn't see anyone the rest of the day!

After leaving Pennington, I headed out to show a couple of homes to a client of mine. She found one she really liked. Unfortunately the owners failed to tell us they already had an offer on it! That would have been a handy piece of information to have! So the search continues. I got home around 8:30 and fixed myself some dinner. I called it a night around 10:30.

T: Nothing earth shattering today, sorry. I really want my iPod Nano though!

F: Still feel kind of run down. Must have something to do with the lack of sleep!

Tuesday September 13th, 2005

35 minutes on treadmill, fast walk. HR 110 - 135 BPM, AVG 118 BPM

Tuesday September 13th, 2005

Morning: Kashi Go Lean Crunch and fat free milk. About 2C of each
Mid morning: 1/2C of Almonds lightly salted a Power Bar and an Apple Coke
Afternnoon: Prime Steak Dip sandwich at Toscanos and a coke
Evening: Pork Mole Super Burrito at Taco Del Mar with large lemonade

Shut Up!

D: I started Tuesday off by going to the gym. Steady now, don't pass out on me. It's true. I went to the gym and just did a quick 35 minutes on the treadmill working on keeping my heart rate in my optimum zone. After the workout, I had brought my breakfast to the gym and sat down to cool off and have a bowl of cereal. Kashi Go Lean Crunch. For a low cal cereal, it's not bad. I remember eating it during my Weight Watcher days. A quick shower and it was off to the office for our office meeting. The meeting as usual was pretty boring. I'm just not a meeting kind of guy. Sitting in my office talking to my co-worker Matt, we were talking about the new iPod Nano.

What a freaking cool little device. I have the iPod Shuffle and that's worked pretty well for me for working out, etc.

But I've always wanted a full function iPod as well. With the release of the Nano, I think I'm going to get one. It's about the size of 3 credit cards glued together and weighs less than 8 quarters in your pocket. The 4 GB version will hold 1,000 songs and it has a full color display. AWESOME. Matt and I had to check them out, so we headed up to Best Buy in Puyallup. They didn't have any in stock (thankfully or my checkbook would have taken a $249.00 hit) but they did have the display model. It's really awesome. I can't wait to get one. When we got back, I headed to Toscanos for some lunch. After lunch, I came back to the office and worked on Toscanos web site a bit. I finally headed home around 6 and Teri and I grabbed a bite to eat at Taco Del Mar for dinner. I ended up watching "The Biggest Loser" on NBC after I got home. Man they really work those guys while they're there. Maybe I can find a fat camp somewhere? No wonder the winner last year lost over 120 pounds. I headed off to the bath for some reading and ended up in bed around 11. Couldn't sleep much, tossed and turned all night.

T: Another lazy day, didn't nearly get the things done I wanted to do. WTF?

F: Bored.

Monday September 12th, 2005

9 minutes of cardio exercise while getting set up on the FitLinxx system at the YMCA.

Monday September 12th, 2005

Morning: JITB Ciabatta breakfast sand., Hashbrowns, Lg. Coke
Afternoon: Ayothaya Sen Yai, vegetable soup, coke
Evening: Fettucini with marinara sauce, broccoli and corn, coke
Dessert: Hagen Das Coffee almond crunch bar.

Getting Started . . .

D: Well today was not only the start to the work week, but it was the start to a couple of other things I had been meaning to do. I met with my attorney's assistant this morning at 10AM to get my will and living trust set up. It's an odd exercise. If you've never done it, it's really strange to put thought into your own mortality. Thinking about things like "What happens if I become incapacitated? If I die?", etc. We met at 10AM and by 10:05, I was on my way. I'm almost wishing it had taken a few minutes longer. You see as I was heading back to the office, I was cruising down River Road in Puyallup and was doing 63MPH . . . I know that now because the State Trooper pulled me over told me that's how fast I was going! The speed limit is only 50MPH so by all rights I should have received a ticket. However, I learned a LONG time ago that when you get pulled over that the best course of action is to simply be polite and not argue with the officer. I honestly thought there was no way I was getting out of this one because the officer was a woman. I know that sound sexist, or mysoginistic, but my experience in the past and friend's experience has lead me to believe that most women officers feel like they have something to prove. I'm glad I was mistaken. She was really nice and polite, asked for my DL, Insurance and registration, which I promptly provided. She took a look at them, didn't even run them (which I thought was kind of strange) and said "Three lashings with a wet noodle. Give me a couple minutes to turn off the lights behind you and you're free to go." I gave her an emphatic "Thank YOU!" and was on my way. Now some of you are probably thinking "lucky bastard!" but to be honest, this happens to me more often than it probably should. I've been pulled over probably 6 or 7 times in the last 10 years. I've only gotten a ticket once. One trooper gave me insight into why that may be. You see with the last name "Hurlbut" it's not too common. And when people see it, they recognize it. One trooper asked me a few years ago "Do you have an uncle or something that's a commander in the State Patrol?" I answered honestly "No, I don't think so." But I'm betting I owe this Hurlbut guy a few beers if I ever meet him! After pulling away, I returned a phone call I received earlier in the morning and ended up showing one of my listings to a nice young couple. They seemed very interested in the place, so I'll definitely be following up later this week.

I arrived at the office around 11 and got some admin stuff done before I headed off to the "Y" for my 1PM appointment with Adrian. Adrian is now my "coach" at the YMCA. We had a nice 45 minute introductory session to the FitLinxx system at the Y. Basically it's a room full of equipment, both cardio and strength training, that are all linked to a central computer. Everytime you sit down to one of the machines, you type in your code and it keeps track of what you do. Then your coach can monitor your progress and make suggestions. I only ended up working out for about 9 minutes while he showed me how to use the machines.

After my workout, I grabbed a quick lunch at Ayothaya and headed back to the office. More paperwork and before I knew it, it was 5:30. I did get another page for Toscanos put up, so that site is nearing completion now. It'll be nice to have that done!

When I got home, Teri and I headed to the store for some grocery shopping. We picked up some supplies for that evening's dinner and I bought some breakfast and snack items for the week. If I'm going to be working out, it doesn't make much sense to continue to go to JITB in the morning for breakfast! We went home and cooked a nice meal together and watched Monday Night Football in HDTV. I'm not a huge football fan unless the Seahawks are on, but I know Teri really enjoys football, so I let her have her fun. The Falcons beat the Eagles 14-10. It was a pathetic game. Both Donovon McNabb and Michael Vick looked awful. There's hope for Matt Hasslebeck yet!

I headed to the tub around 9:30 to read and hit the hay around 10:45.

T: I'm excited to get my will completed and start my workout routine. It needs to be a routine this time. A lifestyle change, not just something I do for 6 months. A CHANGE JOHN! A CHANGE!

F: Invigorated!

Weekend of September 9th - 11th, 2005

D: So Friday started out awesome. I had my coaching call, which is always a good thing to get me going and keep me on track. It was the first time my coach and I had talked since Mastermind. We discussed MM and my business. I've felt kind of slow since returning from vacation. Need to figure a way to turn it up a notch again, now that I'm back so I feel comfortable going to Mexico in November and won't have to worry about expenses while I'm gone. This whole "pay for a vacation before you go" thing is new to me. But it's certainly good. After my coaching call, I decided that I didn't need to go to the office for anything, so I headed to Pennington (Yelm) early. The plan was to get there early, get set up and just see if I couldn't make a sale while I was there. Well, on the way there, I got a call from the listing agent for the plat and he wanted to bitch about some things he didn't like being done at the plat. Well this just set me off and put me in a foul mood. When I got to Pennington, I spent 30 minutes typing him an e-mail telling him how pissed I was. Then I stewed there waiting for the read receipt and his response to come back. He finally called around 3PM and basically told me I blew things way out of proportion. He was probably right, but I was still kind of ticked. I got going again on the Toscanos website and it was finally coming together into a design I felt comfortable with. I got positive feedback from the owners of the restaurant too, so that was nice. I headed out of Yelm around 6:30 and dropped by a listing of mine to grab the key out of the keybox and headed home. Teri and I had planned on dinner and a movie, but since I was delayed in Yelm, our dinner fell right between movie times and we were both too tired to stay up and watch a movie, so we just went home and crashed.

Saturday, Teri and I got up kind of late and headed out for lunch with her Dad and sister. Her dad showed us some of the awards his vinyard had won from Chateau Ste. Michelle wineries. Pretty cool. Her sister is 18 and it seems like everyone she knows is either in jail, or on probation. I hope she can get stuff straightened out. She's a good kid and needs to realize it. After lunch, we headed back home to grab our rain coats and head down to the Puyallup Fair to meet up with our friends Rick, Annette, John and Janet. We hooked up with them and had a wonderful time exploring all the displays and checking out all the animals. The fair hasn't changed much in my 35 years on this planet, but it's nice to go every other year or so. It didn't really rain on us the whole time, so it was a pain in the butt carrying my jacket around the whole time. Of course if I had not have brought it, it would have poured the whole time!

Sunday, Teri and I got up and headed out to breakfast. I'm learning to not order hash browns with my breakfast and instead had come cottage cheese. It was GREAT cottage cheese as well. Afterward, we headed out to check out some homes we had seen the previous evening as we were on our way to the fair. The first community had a floor plan that I actually liked well enough and could probably afford. It was in a GREAT location and it backed up to a cemetary, so you knew your neighbors would be quiet. Teri wasn't thrilled with the floorplan and really not thrilled about the small . . . OK no . . . yard. It would be a great place to build some equity for the next couple of years though, so I'm still considering it. The one Teri liked was 500 square feet larger (go figure) and about $20K up in price. Certainly NOT affordable. C'est la vie. We looked at another community which I KNEW we couldn't afford and of course Teri really liked those. ;-) We headed down to my office to grab some things and then back home to chill out for the afternoon. I got to see my favorite Tennis Player in the finals of the U.S. Open AND I got to watch it in HDTV. AWESOME! Andre Agassi showed he still had some good stuff against Roger Ferderer by taking the 2nd set by winning two breaks and taking him to a tie break in the 3rd set. But alas, he finally succumbed to the deft serving and agility of his younger opponent. It was still AWESOME to watch though. Agassi is really a class player, and I'll be sad to see him retire in a few years. Later that evening, Toscanos was putting on a charity dinner for the Good Sam hospital Children's Therapy Unit. So Teri, Marcus and I headed down there to do our part. The food was wonderful (as always) and the wine was pretty good too. We ended up splitting a bottle of Solaris Pinot Noir which I hadn't had before, but it turned out to be pretty good. After dinner, Teri and I headed home and she went to bed and I watched the season premiere of the Family Guy and the 3rd episode of Rome in HDTV. I finally headed off to bed around 11:30.

T: Lazy Lazy Lazy weekend. It was good!

F: Lethargic! Need to get to the gym!

Thursday September 8th, 2005

Morning: Country Rose Cafe, Farmers Hobo hash, small order. Pepsi, one refill.
Afternoon: Cup o' noodles, two cans of Coke, 3 bottles of water
Evening: 4 pieces KFC original, Mashed, gravy, cole slaw and biscuit.

Thursday September 8th, 2005

Played 9 holes of golf today and hit a medium bucket of balls at the range.

How can it be a bad day???

When you start off by playing 9 holes?

D: So as I mentioned, I started off the day by getting up at 7, throwing on some clothes and heading to Spanaway Lake Golf Course. It's only about 2 minutes from my house, so I was there by 7:15. I met Josh there and we hit a medium bucket of balls at the driving range while we were waiting for Matt and Marcus to show up. For those of you that don't know, Matt, Marcus and I all started in Real Estate within a couple weeks of each other. We've become fast friends since then and Josh joined us in our little office about 6 months later. We've all have enjoyed giving each other shit and pushing each other to be better Real Estate agents. This was really the first time all four of us had gotten together outside of work to do something fun. We had an 8:02 tee time and of course Marcus was running late. So we ended up teeing off at about 8:20. As Marcus and Josh shanked their first tee shots, I felt right at home playing with these guys. Matt is a pretty damn good golfer, so it was cool playing with him and getting some tips here and there. I did have one par (third one ever) and a couple single bogey holes. So it was definitely a good day for me. I ended up shooting a 55 which is a full 9 strokes better than I did on Sunday. Josh shot a 55 and Matt shot a 43. Matt even had a birdie which was cool. Marcus didn't keep score, but he had some beautiful drives.

After golf, we all went to the Country Rose for some breakfast. I had to jam out of there and shower and change to be out in Yelm by noon. I made it at 12:02 . . not bad. 45 minutes to shower, change and drive out there.

I got the site opened up and sent off a couple of faxes. One was the inspection response from the marathon inspection the night before. I got a pleasant call from the listing agent later that day saying her client would likely take care of all the issues we had requested be fixed prior to closing. So that's a good sign. That should put #23 for the year into Pending status. Only two more to hit my goal. I have one listing that's currently STI which hopefully move to Pending this weekend and my seller is also buying a home, so that should be the two I needed to make my goal. AND we still have 3 months left in the year. I then looked at the fax I received from Toscanos Cafe & Wine bar. I had agreed the previous week to be the webmaster for their new web site. I don't know why I take these things on. Maybe I'm holding on to some vestige of my previous geek life. But I started playing around in GoLive and seeing if I could come up with a design I liked. SS helped me with some color selections. It helps knowing someone that TEACHES web design. I'm not very artistic at all, and she's really good at knowing what colors go well together. I dinked around on that for most of the rest of the day and headed out around 6PM.

I met a client in Tacoma and showed her two homes. She really liked one, but the yard was too small. But it's nice to see her expanding her mind and seeing that there really are nice homes out there that she can afford. Her daughter was putting on a "Lord of the Dance" routine for us while we were discussing options. I've known this client of mine for a long time and this girl is certainly HER daughter. It was really cool to see the two of them interact and see the love she obviously has for her little girl. She tries to be a tough one, but occasionally you'll see a crack in her tough exterior. I got to see that last night and it was nice.

I headed home after that and grabbed a bucket of chicken on the way. Damn fast food is too fast! Teri and I had a bite to eat at the dining room table instead of in front of the TV and got to discuss our day. I have to admint it was nice. We cleared off the TiVo and she headed to bed and I went to take a bath and read. Went to bed around 11:45PM.

T: It was a productive day. I got a lot accomplished and slept really well.

F: Happy! Motivated! Ready to go!

09 Sep '05 - 15:44 | John | General | No comments yet | Permalink

Wednesday September 8th, 2005

D: OK, today was a MUCH better day. I actually got all the stuff done I meant to do on Tuesday, so that was nice. AND I paid my quarterly taxes . . . for the 1st three quarters of the year. OOPS, sorry Uncle Sam. But I'm all caught up now. Sucks to write that big check though. I got some more flyers printed out for my south hill listing. We've still been getting good traffic on it, but just no bites on it. Weird. I hate it when everything points to "It should be selling" but it just isn't. Did get a call on it, and maybe I'll be showing it on Saturday or Sunday and I'll sell it myself! After dropping off the flyers, I headed to the YMCA (What's that? John is mentioning a gym in his blog? Is that the sweet smell of progress?) to meet with Charlie Davis. Charlie and I go WAYYYYYY back. He was my boss at the YMCA in downtown Tacoma when I was just out of high school and fitness-wise a man I deeply respect. I deeply respect him in other ways too, but as far as fitness advice, it doesn't get any better than Charlie. He has a PhD in Biochemistry-Nutrition, played hoops for Syracuse and played ball in the European pro league. I told him I was ready (again). I've been focusing a lot on my business and financial well being for the past couple of years, but not at all on my physical well being. As such I weigh more than I ever have and am in the worst shape of my life. I'm on BP meds and my cholesterol is edging ever closer to the bad zone. My doctor has told me I'm at risk for diabetes. All of this should have scared me into the gym long ago. But I'm the kind of guy that does things on his own terms. So it has to be my idea to do something or it doesn't get done. So I decided it was time. The Y has a 12 week program that I'm starting next Monday. Basically you get assigned a coach. I like coaches, my business coach, Linda, is AWESOME! So after being assigned a coach, they have a certain room for you to work out in. Each of the machines is connected to a computer and you're assigned a code. Everytime you hop on one of the machines, you type in your code and it monitors your progress. Your coach can then look and see what you've been doing and make suggestions for improvement. Sounds just like what I need. After leaving the Y, I previewed a home that I was mildly interested in buying for myself. It was nice, and seemed larger than the 2300 square feet advertised. But I just think it would need too much updating to make it what I wanted. AND the master bedroom/bath was NOT at all what I was hoping for.

I headed back to the office for a bit and got a few more things done. At 3:30 I headed off to Lakewood for an inspection. This inspection turned out to be a marathon session. 4.5 hours later, I was finally headed home. I got home around 9:00, had some dinner, watched some boob tube, took a bath, read and went to bed around midnight.

T: I was happy to have gotten myself motivated today. It felt good to actually accomplish something after the crummy start I had on Tuesday.

F: It was a good day! I felt energized and motivated all day.

Tuesday September 6th, 2005

D: MAN! I was run down on Tuesday. I just could not get motivated to do anything at work. I got into the office around 8:45 and it just went downhill from there! I kept trying to start things, but would find something I'd rather do more. Like order my new HDTV antenna. :-) Since I have my new HD TiVo now, I want to make sure I'm getting the best possible signal from all my OTA stations, so I ordered the DB4 from Antennas Direct. According to them it has about a 90 degree spread and is good up to 55 miles. So I'm hoping it's much better than my current antenna. After placing the order, I headed out with Marcus to take a look at a couple of his new listings and grab some lunch. We ended up at Rock Pasta in Lakeland for their Pizza buffet. There's a word I need to eliminate from my vocabulary. Buffet. Unless it's preceded by Jimmy, it doesn't need to be uttered anymore! We looked at a couple other new plats coming on and a re-sale home in Panorama Heights. When we got back to the office, I just packed my stuff up and headed home. What a waste of a day. I didn't do diddly at home either. Just crashed on the couch and vegged. In bed by about 10:30.

T: Today I thought I was totally counter-productive. Since I've been back from vacation and had a number of transactions close while I was gone, I've been feeling pretty useless. I have a few things still in escrow, and a few more coming up, so it's not like I'm not doing anything, it's just that it's not as busy as before. Which is ironic because when I was that busy I was bitchin' that I was TOO Busy. Happy medium. Need to find the happy medium.

F: Run Down. Lethargic. Pitiful.

Friday Sept. 2nd - Monday Sept. 5th

LONG Weekend = LONG Post . . I'll try and summarize as much as possible.

D: Friday - Friday ended up being a long boring day out at Pennington. Again, tons of workers around finishing up the landscaping on the model home. It looks REALLY nice, but not really appealing to people looking for homes when they have to dodge pallets of sod just to get to the front door. I had about 3 people through the model and most of them were Marcus' clients so nothing to really shake a stick at. After leaving Pennington, I headed home and Teri and I went out to dinner at Applebee's. The service was horrible. We had planned on seeing a movie that evening, but by the time we were done with dinner, I decided I was too tired and we just headed home and watched Sahara on DVD. The movie was OK, but definitely won't end up on AFN's top 100 movies of all time list. Having not had any caffeine since 8AM, I was asleep I think before my head ever hit the pillow.

D: Saturday - Saturday we were up and out of bed by 7:30 because I wanted to be to a golf sale by 8:45. I grossly overestimated the popularity of this sale however. I thought it would be like the REI garage sale. Not even close. I think we were the only ones there for about 15 minutes. I ended up buying some balls and tees, Teri bought a TaylorMade hybrid. From there we headed off to my office so I could grab some stuff. Then home and off to show homes for the afternoon. Took my client to 3 homes and she liked 2 of the three, so it was a good trip. After I got home, Teri and I headed to the driving range and each hit a large bucket of balls. According to the machine it was 153 balls. I was certainly tired after that! Marcus came over after Pennington and we all went out to Mexican food. Again, horrible service. Must have been a bad weekend for service. We all headed back to the house to watch Ron White's "They call me Tater Salad" on DVD. It was pretty good, but a lot of the jokes were the same ones as he did on the Blue Collar Comedy tour.

D: Sunday - Sunday again, we were up and out of bed by 7:30. We had a tee time at Lipoma First at 8:52AM and I wanted to hit a small bucket of balls before we headed out. We got to the course at 8:30 and checked in. Randy and Scott were already on the driving range and we connected there. I had a GREAT time playing golf. We were all really in a good mood and joking around the whole time. No one took the game to seriously and Teri kicked my butt. Must have been her new hybrid. I shot a 64, Randy shot a 47, Teri a 59 and I think Scott stopped counting. When he straightens out his shots, he's gonna be pretty dang good. After golf, we headed toward Ayothaya and had some thai food. GREAT service. We always have good service there. After that, it was on to Safeway to pick up supplies for the evening. We headed home and both took naps and generally vegged out for the afternoon. We headed out around 6:30 over to Pat and Kims house to play some cards and generally have a good time. We played all kinds of poker, then we moved on to Clue and then on to the hot tub. Pat and I each finished about 1/2 a fifth of something. He drank rum and I drank Jack. Then Pat put together this bucket drink that he called Hawaiian Lemonade . . . I'm not sure what all was in it, but the four of us passed the bucket around in the hot tub for a couple of hours. Pat and I had a good talk, one that was needed for awhile I think. I was glad we had it though. Teri and I crashed at their house at around 3AM.

D: Monday - After going to bed around 3, it was tough getting up by 7:30. But we had to be home for the DirecTV guy to install my new HD TiVo. My appointment was for 8:00 - 12:00. Of course the guy didn't show up until 1:00 . . . sigh . . . but it gave me time to get all my other equipment out, and install the old TiVo in Teri's room so now she has someplace to go when I'm watching something she doesn't particularly enjoy. The DirecTV guy was pretty cool. He was happy that all the cables were already ran for him and he didn't have to do much. He did fix all 3 RG-6 leads that I had ran last year when I got my 1st TiVo, so now my network closet is all dialed in. He also gave me a spare HDTV antenna he had in his truck, so I can test that out and see if I get any better reception with it. After he left around 2, Teri and I were starving (and hung over) and headed up to Quiznos for a sandwich. After eating, we headed back home and I proceeded to put the entertainment center back together. It's nice, but it's certainly a pain in the butt to add new equipment! I still need to move my D-link, but that's for a different blog. After putting the entertainment center back together, we just vegged on the couch and watched TV and recovered from the previous evening's debauchery.

T: Who knows? Too much to process.

F: GREAT weekend! Good times, good friends.

Thursday September 1st, 2005

NONE again.

Thursday September 1st, 2005

Morning: JITB Supreme Croissant, hashbrown, lg. coke
Afternoon: Quiznos Regular size Traditional, 3 bottles of water (normally would have had large sandwich)
Evening: 1/2 Papa Murphy's lasagna, 2 peanut butter cookies.

Thursday September 1st, 2005

Gawd, can you believe it's September already?

D: Yesterday I got up around 7:15 and headed into the office. I needed to get some flyers printed out for a client and get her price reduction form ready for her to initial. It's hard to tell a client that their home is over-priced, but my market analysis showed one price and she picked a price $15K above that. I told her we'd give it a shot for two weeks and see what happened, in this market you never know. Well it had been two weeks and we'd gotten plenty of showings and generated a lot of interest, but no offers. That generally tells us we're over market value. So we reduced it. I would have like to have seen a $10K price reduction, but only got $5K. I'll still bust my butt to get it sold at that price, but very soon the home will be "stale" on the market and it'll be tough to keep the interest level high.

After printing the flyers, etc. I got my paycheck ready for deposits at the bank. I love that part of my job. Unfortunately the bulk of my clients in escrow have closed now so the paychecks are going to be less frequent than they were last month. Last month was by far my best ever, I think I had 7 closings. AWESOME. If I could do that every month, I'd be on cloud nine and wouldn't feel so apprehensive about hiring an assistant.

I checked on the MLS for my buyer clients to see if any new homes had popped up for them over the evening and sent them on their way. Checked in with Doug's assistant to see if the flyers for Pennington were ready for me, they weren't, so I headed off to the bank. Another stop at Freddie's today to pick up Sahara on DVD. Hadn't seen the movie, but heard it was pretty good and the special effects were good, so thought it might be worth the $16.00 . . . if nothing else, some cheap entertainment for Teri and I this weekend.

I headed out to Pennington completely forgetting to drop off the flyers I had just printed. So I had to call my client and tell her to not stop there after work to sign the price reduction form, I wouldn't have it there until 7 at the earliest. Sucks having to admit you're a scatter brain sometimes. I touched base with a couple clients on the way out to Pennington to give them an update on their home purchase and finished listening to another of Brian Buffini's conference call CD's. When I was cleaning my office last month, I found about 6 months worth of conference call CD's that I hadn't listened to. They're always packed with good information and it's been nice to have them playing instead of talk radio or the sort during my commutes.

I got out to Pennington and there were a ton of workers running around the model, so it wasn't real easy to get set up for the day, but I managed. I got to talk to the painter out there and determine the best way to go about painting my new doors and millwork for my home. So that was positive. He mentioned something about using a 3 10 spray tip in my paint sprayer. I only mention it here so when I can't remember next week, I can look it up. :-)

I got a lot of work done on revising the Pennington Site Agent Procedures manual. Didn't think there was that much that had changed between Yelm Terra and Pennington, but there was. So I'll have that finished today.

After Pennington, I met with some clients to get their home signed around. The listing agent and I had to come up with some creative solutions to get my buyer's the home, but we got it worked out. They're totally psyched, so that's good. Then I headed over to my client's home to FINALLY drop off the flyers. Got a call about that particualr home on my way there, so I ended up showing it too! They already had an agent, but they seemed pretty excited about the home. Well he did, she wasn't as impressed. So maybe we'll have an offer coming in.

By this time I was STARVING! So I stopped by Papa Murphy's and picked up one of their lasagnas and headed home. I went to bed around 10:45. No bath, no reading. :-(

T: Well one of the big thougts I had today was that I REALLY REALLY need to figure out a way to bring snacks with me to work. Healthy snacks. I eat on my way to the office. I MIGHT get a lunch somewhere, and if I have evening appointments, my dinner isn't until REALLY late. I need to change my eating habits, that's quite clear. I need to work on keeping my thoughts clear about what I need to accomplish throughout the day. I forget to do little things. Sometimes by forgetting little things, they become BIG things.

F: It was a hectic, long day. Felt crummy for forgetting the little things.

Wednesday August 31st, 2005

NONE

01 Sep '05 - 11:57 | John | Exercise | No comments yet | Permalink

Wednesday August 31st, 2005

Morning: JITB Sausage Croissant, hashbrown, large coke. (seeing a pattern yet?)
Afternoon: Cup O' Noodles - chicken, can of mug root beer and can of coke.
Evening (Late): Gyro beef and lamb extra meat. Baklava and pink lemonade.

Number three . . .

D: Yesterday was another good day! The sun was shining here in the great northwest and there's never a better place to be when that happens. I got up around 7 and headed into the office. I really only had two objectives there. Pick up a paycheck (always a good day) and get supplies for Pennington (Yelm new construction site). I got deposit slips filled out for the bank and got the balloons and signs for Pennington and was off to the bank. After making my deposits, I stopped in to Fred Meyer to see if there were any DVD's I couldn't live without. I picked up Ron White's "They Call Me Tater Salad" comedy DVD. For those of you living under a rock the past couple of years, Ron White is 1/4 of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and is probably my favorite comedian of the bunch. Marcus and I saw him at the Moore theater and he was hysterical! Anyway, after that I was off to Apex Engineering. A couple weeks ago, I had comissioned a feasibility study on some vacant land I'm going to sell for a client of mine. The goal of the feasibility study was to determine if the land would support six 5,000 square foot building lots and what the cost would be to get the six lots building permit ready. The guys at Apex were awesome and gave me exactly what I was looking for. I can't wait to get the final report and start finding a builder for the homes. With any luck, early next year I'll have six new home listings in Parkland to sell. After meeting with Apex, I headed to Parker Paints to pick up the paint for my millwork and doors I'll be installing at home in the next couple of weeks. Done with Parker Paints, I headed for the lovely town of Yelm to open Pennington. After opening our new model (which is fully furnished, has a number of upgrades, and is ABSOLUTELY beautiful you should come see it sometime) I realized I had forgotten the power cord to my laptop at home. I had about 45 minutes of battery life and my laptop was utterly dead. So I decided to update the Pennington notebook and actually wrote my thank you cards to the folks I had met at Mastermind. (15 thank you cards going out today Linda!) I had about 4 couples come through the model, one was a builder that may contact me to list some of their homes. So that could be a positive. I walked the site and made sure trash was picked up and the signs were all where they were supposed to be. Closed the model around 6 and headed home. Teri and I headed for Home Depot, the bank and our friends Scott and Leslie's home. Scott just got his new golf clubs, so we spent a bit of time talking aobut golf and planning an outing for Sunday. Teri played with McKinlee and Jorja. We headed out to Johnnie's greek for dinner, it was kind of late but I hadn't really eaten all day and was pretty hungry. The food was not their normal quality. I guess the lesson of the day was to not go to Johnnie's 1/2 hour before closing.

T: Thought I should remember to bring my laptop power cord to work today! Thought I needed to start getting up earlier to get to the gym.

F: Good Day!