electric mist

waitin' for Ivan

With Ivan moving a little more to the west each time I turn on the news, we've gone into hurricane prep mode. It's a bit insane here with the traffic and the rushing to and fro to get groceries, water, money. We have two big generators we use for our business, so if we lose electricity, we can keep the refrigerator / freezer and other essentials running. Carl also had a very large propane tank filled -- it fuels the new propane bar-b-que I just got him (which is another story, but he loves it), so we'll have it decently easy to cook. We'll have lots of water stored, so that should be fine.

I am mostly worried about the wind and falling trees. Even if Ivan doesn't move any closer to us than the current path indicated, the winds will gust pretty high and we'll get a lot of downed limbs / trees, which can do a lot of damage. When we went through Andrew so many years ago, we had so many downed trees, it felt like there were more down than up. Lots of people have a hard time imagining the problem here until they travel in this area, but our landscape is so full of trees, that when you cross the Mississippi River bridge and look towards Baton Rouge, towards LSU, you see mostly green and only a few buildings piercing above the treeline.

~*~

Meanwhile, I don't think the business big-buy-out thing is going to happen or work. There are some legal wranglings going on, and frankly, we think the partner guy bit off more than he can actually chew. We've watched other friends do big business deals in unorthodox ways and sail through it and pull off rather shocking accomplishments, so as absolutely crazy as the original deal sounded here (and truly, I'm certain it did sound insane since I can't give details without the people who own the business being able to google themselves and finding my entries), it wasn't as impossible as it may have sounded. But some of the unorthodox cowboy ways of the business partner are coming back to bite him, so to speak, and we doubt very seriously there will be any sort of deal. Which, frankly, is actually a relief at this point. I haven't really been able to talk about it here because I can't explain with real details, but we have been very uncomfortable with how fast he moved without consulting us and without giving us the level of approval we should have had to do the very things he was wanting us to do. We started feeling very weird about the whole thing, and we've consulted quite a lot of friends (attorneys, other CEO friends of big companies that have moved fast like this -- one in particular we've done a lot of work for -- and other good advisors), and while they agreed that cowboy partner probably could pull it all off, they were bothered by the same things that bothered us. When we heard about the attorneys wrangling for the partner, we pushed for more information, and we feel that it's just not going to happen, and that's probably for the best.

Thing is, we've known this guy for three years. We've seen him do a lot of impressive things, and he's actually done quite a lot of things with us and has always lived up to expectations, until now. So maybe we were incredibly naive that he could pull off what he said? I dunno. Probably so. But the very nice thing about all of this is that we didn't invest a single penny, it's not going to cost us anything for him to have tried, and we've still got more work construction-wise anyway, so no harm, no foul.

(And me... I'm really relieved. Because I would have been glad to have a secondary income that made us not wholly dependent on our own business to make all the ends meet, but at the same time, our business is growing and doing better so taking attention away from it right now... probably not so smart a move. And like Daisy said in a comment... no writing time! That would have really gotten to me after a while.)

Posted by toni at September 14, 2004 07:19 PM