Valentine

This is an interesting day. All the way around.

After checking Wikipedia, as I thought this might be a thoroughly modern way to drive economics, I found that Valentine's Day, or the Feast of St Valentine has been celebrated since early times, with the holiday taking on its association with romantic love in the 14th century. But leave it to the capitalists and business owners to make this day really big.

Several years ago, I was invited to a Drake University event in Kansas City. I went because the person who invited me is someone I have a great deal of respect for. Don Adams  was my VP when I worked at Drake. It was a social/networking gathering, but the speaker was the CEO for Hallmark. Obviously, this is a big time of the year for them. I remember him telling us his Board of Directors was no different than the ones we were working with. They wanted a double digit net income growth year over year. That's all. The interesting thing is when you are talking about a company the size of Toybox Woodworking, a ten percent increase is easy to achieve. However, if you are talking about a multi-billion dollar company, ten percent feels different. And it is different. At that level it takes more people, more facilities, more everything.

At the level of my little venture, it takes one new project, a little more time. Now, the interesting thing is that the thought process is really not a great deal different. It still takes the leap where you say you are going to grow and change. Interestingly, I have one person I have a great deal of respect for and his first question in situations like this is always, "Are you sure growth is good?"  If you answer positively, you can be on your way to growth.

So if I set aside the look at economics, and just think about what this holiday, it strikes me that we should tell those we love and care about how we feel every day. It shouldn't take a day on the calendar to make the time to tell someone they are important. I know I try to make sure those in my life who are important to me know it, but I also know time is so fleeting. Sometimes it gets away from us and months or years go by without us saying anything. For that reason, Valentine's Day does serve a useful purpose. It is a stake in the ground telling us to let those we love know it. It is easy to get caught up in the consumerism of the day, but I need to let that cynical attitude go and concentrate on those important to me.

On a separate note,  a little over a month ago, I was responsible for hosting a meeting. We had the meeting at a restaurant in downtown Des Moines and part of the morning was a tour of American Dream Machines. If you haven't spent time on their website, I recommend you fix that.   We were fortunate enough to have a top to bottom, front to back, personal tour of the entire place and all of their inventory. I landed on the 1949 Chevrolet pickup like the one in the picture. I have never been a Chevy guy, in fact I have never owned a Chevy, but I have a memory of my Uncle Norm's pickup. It's a good memory.

Anyway, given the day, and the color of the truck, if any of you have hit the lottery, or had your money tree bloom, and you are looking for a tangible way to tell me how much you care, I will make a place in the garage for this truck.

Wow, in a few hundred words, I went from cynical non-commercial to the most self-serving person ever. Truly though, I had been looking for a way to show you this truck and the opportunity presented itself. If you are interested in muscle cars, particularly from the 1960s and 1970s, go check out the website.

On a final note today, I wanted to let you know that last Saturday one of the gentlemen who teaches the welding class I've been taking told me that at this point, I can weld. I can knock that one off the DIY list. This weekend I will start putting veneer and epoxy on the Teardrop trailer. We will see how that goes. Additionally, I have another project I am starting for YESS. I love doing things for them.

We traveled a long way today and talked about a lot of things. I hope you have enjoyed it. Drop me a note or comment if you did.