Uh huh.

It has been a week, once again, that I am glad is over and I am proud to have survived. I think I am going to have to go back to the fall jobsite in order to rest. Don't ask me why but 24/7 seems to afford me more rest that I have been getting, or maybe it is my mind that rests more easily.

I do know it is sometimes frustrating here having very little or no control over what goes on. At least in the office I had some influence about what was happening, now it seems that I am along for the ride.

My buddy keeps asking me what they need to do to make things better. He wants to be more organized, in fact, he tells me that the new prospective customer is going to require them to be more organized.

Many people are born with organizational minds, it is almost second nature to them. For others of us, organization is a learned discipline. My nickname at the family business used to be "king of sticky notes". (3M loved me!) I also had a stack of legal pads, dated with info from meetings, conversations, research, whatever! My definition of organization would probably be simple, Attention to detail.

Earlier in the week I was working on a narrow time line. I had been to the Permian Basin and was coming back to Abilene before making a mad dash for Lubbock. I needed to pick up some parts that needed to be returned to a business in Lubbock and all throughout the day I had been subtly hinting, to make sure the parts would be at their designated pickup point. I called from twelve miles out of town and asked directly and was told they would make a call to be sure and would call me back if the parts were not there for me to pick up. No call and when I arrived, no parts. Needless to say I did not go to Lubbock that day. In fact if I could have arranged for someone to pick me up I would have turned in the company equipment I had. This is one of the reasons I have doubts about whether or not my friends business can go to the next level. He keeps talking about where he fits and how his wife wants to back away from it some and just be a mother. While this is admirable, I don't believe that their business is where it needs to be for less of their attention, also I know that they are not, and the business is not, ready to part with the kind of money that a GM or COO would demand.

While my week was spent on the road with the exception of Tuesday (I was doing a websearch for truck parts for 222, it was successful by the way. Parts will be here tomorrow at substantial savings!), I spent yesterday working on 222's air conditioning. It had sheared a shaft internally or something and that had been reason for it to be in the shop which lead to the discovery of more serious problems. I am hopeful that by Wednesday at the latest, 222 will be road worthy once again.

It would appear that we may have a preamble to the fall work. Our final destination from the fall work has inventory stashed all over the country, any where that had a facility that would meet government regulations and insurance requirements. Now with a projected short harvest they are talking about moving it all back to the Rolling Plains plant. And that is fine with me.

On Thursday I happened by my friends office (where I worked last year) and he asked me to look over some papers. He has been trying to acquire newer, better, trailers than what he currently has in his fleet. He had told me he had pulled the preliminary trigger on ten or twelve brand new trailers, zero down and that the payments were only minimally higher than his current payments. I nearly choked when I saw the paperwork, it was a Trac lease and with every sentence I read I became more repulsed. He had told me it was a lease purchase and at the end of the lease he could buy the trailers for about fifteen percent of the new cost. When I looked things over I found he was mistaken and the buy agreement would cost him forty percent of the new costs and then we got into other things like "trac support %", and "trac support amount". If I have figured correctly, this would have inflated the buy at the end to in excess of fifty percent of orginal capitalized cost. Further investigation revealed it to be a variable rate trac lease tied to the T-bill market. Wow! The table was tilted and all the money ran towards the leasing company on that one! I figure my brief stop in saved my friend a minimum one-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars!

When I left Lubbock Friday I had pricing and such for a conventional purchase of a group of trailers for my friend.

Some quick detales:
Krl and I had an e-mail this week from a former classmate in the now defunct Sunday School class we attended. Neither one of us wants to answer it because we will be tempted to "tell it like it is".

I had received a jury summons for Monday. I was primed to tell the judge and the lawyers "to heck with the law, to heck with the evidence. In this courtroom I am the law!" I received notice that my summons has been cancelled. Darn!

No word from my fall employee about his trial. I had talked with him Wednesday night and he was going to call me back and never did. They were expecting to complete his trial Thursday or Friday. Now his cell phone just goes to voice mail. Hmmmm.

Talked to the burr contractor Friday. His health is doing well. They were loading up to go to South Texas for the abbreviated ginning season down there. I am so thankful I am not going this year. Actually if the opportunity presented itself I would probably have taken it just to get my foot in the door! The gin the burr contractor is working with is a new double gin (O. K., half of it is new, added to the half they already had) that is supposed to gin one hundred bales and hour twenty-two hundred bales in twenty-four hours. They are only going to gin about eighteen-thousand bales this year so I jokingly told the burr man they would be home in two weeks. He laughed but we both know that short crops usually are long and drawn out harvests!

FATHER, I don't even know where to begin. Heal me, make me whole, give me YOUR perfect peace!