New Shoes in the Rain

Greetings to all.  I hope that you had a great weekend, whether you celebrate Easter or Passover or neither. My wife and I went on a somewhat unusual (for us) trip over the weekend.  We went to Chicago, but had a very good reason. Our eldest granddaughter is a volleyball player, and she's pretty good, we hear.  Played initially for her school team but was invited to try out for a more select team, made up of kids from her entire geographic area.  This is her second year on this club team, and we'd never had the chance to see her play in person. Until this weekend. Through a quirk in scheduling her team participated in the Windy City National Qualifier, which was a massive event staged in the Chicago convention center known as McCormick Place.  Try to imagine, if you can, an indoor space approximately a football field and a third in size.  Volleyball courts as far as you can see in all directions.  Each team of about ten players (all teenaged girls, of course) and a coac

Good morning, all.  Our temperatures have been, well, all over the place in the past few days.  Yesterday we reached the high 70s here in Lexington and this morning it's in the 30s, with a high projected in the upper 50s.  Welcome to springtime in Kentucky! Are you a sports fan?  Even a casual one?  Then you most likely know that Tiger Woods completed something that was so improbable not long ago by winning the 2019 Masters golf tournament yesterday. Yes, he made mistakes, and, yes, he had some help by having some of his fellow competitors run into problems.  If you watch the Masters annually as I generally do, you know that most of the time the player who wins is the one who avoids problems.  Tiger Woods was that player yesterday. But if you've forgotten or never knew this, Woods has had a pretty large amount of adversity to deal with, and some of it was pretty severe. Woods kept his distance from his fellow golf pros for a long time, having only a few friendships amon

It's Friday, everyone!  Hope you're not battling through a knee-deep snow drift at your house! We're getting some severe weather here in central Kentucky this morning.  Shouldn't last too long, but we're seeing some heavy rain and thunder.  Should see more of the same sometime this weekend. I hope not too much of it, as two of our grandchildren have games today.  In fact, we have a conflict for the first time in a while--granddaughter is playing soccer while grandson is playing baseball, and the locations are not close together.  So we'll sort that out later. Went to Nashville for a two-plus day training class.  I am in a management role, so I went and was assigned the task of being a "table leader," which meant I did more facilitating that learning.  The subject matter was already pretty familiar to me all the same. But what I enjoy about an occasion like this is meeting so many different people.  We had folks from Florida, Oklahoma, Missouri,

Wow, is this year unfolding more quickly than usual, or what? Hard (for me, anyway) to believe that it's already April 3.  Lots and lots of things happening recently, both in the news and here at home. In the interest of equal time, let me share a couple of customer service stories, as I often do.  We finally "joined" one of the local HVAC sales and repair organizations, as we now pay them a small monthly fee to pre-pay for twice-a-year service calls.  Apparently this puts us higher on the list if we have a sudden equipment failure. Anyway, in our case the only variable for us was that I committed to buying my own filters for our heating and cooling units, as I can get them cheaper than they were prepared to sell them to me.  They have my cellphone number and I had set up yesterday's six-month check a couple of weeks ago.  I was finishing lunch with a friend and my phone rang, and it was the service tech calling to ask if I would mind meeting him a little early,