brass Blog

The recent Hurricane Katrina tragedy has left many of our readers and credit union partners in need of dire help. Please assist by donating to the Red Cross here: https://secure2.convio.net/arc/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=1161

We received the following email this afternoon from a credit union in Louisiana. They need our help.

“Thanks for the thoughts. We are well. Fortunately, we are on the southwest end of I-10. However, the devastation is unbelievable. TV just doesn’t show the horror. There are dead bodies everywhere, that can float. Snakes, ants, alligators, and even sharks have been reported. Start topping off your gas tanks. My understanding is there is some difficulty in pipelines. We were told gasoline will rise $0.50 at midnight tonight. The whole city of New Orleans is without… Food, water, shelter. They are starting to bus Superdome to Astrodome. The phone lines are busy. People are still stranded in attics, trees, rooftops. The stench is starting. When the water goes down the shock will begin all over again. Our Civic Centre is housing over 2000 people. Residents of NO are strung all the way to Dallas. Our Credit Union will be accepting donations of basic necessities and money. New Orleans housed our Louisiana Credit Union League, they have set up temporary offices in Baton Rouge, Along with many Credit Unions such as Greater New Orleans FCU. Many credit union members are trying to access their funds. Please post the following information: If your Credit Union belongs to a Shared-Branch Network you can contact Shared Branch Information Center ? 1-888-871-2690, Option 4 to find out how to access your account. Local shared branch Networks are Northrupp-Grumman Credit Union 4400 J. Bennett Johnston St. Lake Charles, LA Ph. 337-421-2320 and Lafayette District Telephone C.U. South College St. Ph. 337-233-8833. Keep our beautiful state in your prayers.”

What a week. Between last Sunday to this Sunday I probably put in about 80-100 hours of work this week. Right now I?m on a flight between Cincinnati and Salt Lake City on the way home from spending the weekend at a conference in Lake Placid with Greg and Julia. All great stuff. We?ve got a ton of credit unions who are budgeting for 2006, so right now is probably the busiest time of the year making sure we get proposals in for planning.

When we first got out to New York, we met up with a gentlemen from the New York State Department of Education, about an initiative in New York we?re working on to get 20,000+ copies of brass out to high school students. We put together some plans on how we are going to go about doing that, and then how we?ll get the sponsors. I have a feeling in my gut that tells me this feels right and could be very huge. I don?t know how else to describe it.

After meeting with him we headed out to Lake Placid. On the way out we saw a massive structure in the middle of the forest which we discovered was where the 1980 Olympic ski jumping event was held. I?ve included a picture below. We went to this site, and found an Olympic training facility with ski/snowboard jumps that launched into pools. Some of these skiers would go off the jumps and get as high as 30 or 40 feet in the air before landing in the pool. See a picture below.

We proceeded to check into our hotel, which was very nice and had an amazing view overlooking the lake. On two of the days I decided to go for a run around the lake and got a couple of good pictures out of it. After speaking at the conference we had a very favorable response about our initiative with the teachers, and I believe that within a couple months we may have the program in full swing after discussions for over a year. Very exciting!

The last thing, and probably the coolest about Lake Placid is the history and culture of the town. Lake Placid was where the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Russians back in 1980, which was the base of the movie Miracle with Kurt Russell. When you come into the town, it is a one lane highway, and when the Olympics were hosted, there were hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. Every store, hotel, room and closet were packed to the brim, in this tiny, remote, middle of nowhere town where the entire world watched as this hockey game went on. We listened to people from the town talk about all of the partying and celebrating that took place after the win. The intensity of an event like that, with that many people in a town that small, must have been an absolutely amazing experience. It gives me chills just thinking about it. I would highly recommend that if anyone ever has the chance to visit Lake Placid that they do so because it is an experience that you won’t shortly forget.

Skier Gets Huge Air

Huge Ski Jumps

Lake Placid

Lake Placid

I realize it may be difficult for some of you to handle such a monumental change, but I want to make note that this posting is officially just one week after my last one which probably has never happened before.

There are two interesting things worth noting in this blog. The first, and probably a little more exciting was that me and some buddies went paintballing this weekend out near Salem, OR. After driving over the hills and through the fields (literally) we finally came across the outdoor paintball facility. To prove I’m not lying, I included a picture of the fields on the way to the paintball place.

Once we got there we had a blast. Each one of us had a couple of good rounds. One of my buddies, Wade, is basically crazy. In one round I was crouching in a ditch, tagged his teammate, so he runs at me, jumps in the ditch with me, as we shoot each other the entire time. In another round I snuck up behind him from 10 feet away and yelled ‘Surrender!’ because I would have lit him up. At first he turned around to see if he could fight (never one to surrender) but after he realized my superior positioning, called it good.

Of course that’s not to say Wade didn’t get some revenge of his own. In one round I took someone out, but when the other team discovered my position in a ditch, I decided it wise to vacate immediately. Problem being my old tennis shoes didn’t have the greatest traction, and I tripped on the ditch wall, falling face flat against the ground. Wade then proceeded to shoot my overly exposed rear-end several times. What goes around comes around…

Lastly, I gotta give a shout out to Spencer, who went for the first time (at least real paintballing), wore a white shirt and khakis in the forest, didn’t get the satisfaction of hitting anyone, and managed to break his toe on a hidden rock during one of the matches. Hope it didn’t ruin your first paintball experience. Here’s a picture from the crew, you can see Spencer in the back propping his broken body up against two other people.

The second bloggable point I thought was interesting was several weeks back I was on a plane with someone who works at Starbucks, who told me about how these two guys had gone and met with the CEO of Starbucks about some water company they started, and that Howard (the CEO) liked it so much, bought the company on the spot and was going to distribute the water through Starbucks. When I walked into Starbucks, I saw the bottled water, called Ethos Water, which donates 5% of profits to children around the world to improve clean water. Amazing how socially conscious bottled water can influence people. It just tastes so much better when you’re helping people doesn’t it…check out their site at www.ethoswater.com to read more about their story.

This week I’m headed out to Lake Placid with Greg and his wife Julia, the former location of the Olympic Games…tight!

Field on the Way to Paintball

Paintball Crew

For those of you who may not have noticed, we switched our blogging system over to Blogger.com, which is pretty sweet. Before I’d have to write the blog, send it to Greg, and then have him post it. Now with blogger it will be much easier, so my goal is to increase the frequency I’ll be posting, and you can now post comments on the blog!

To recap the past couple week:

July 31st-August 2nd
Flew out to Madison, WI to speak at a 2-day conference. It went pretty well and had good feedback, but there is always a few who don’t get it. At the end of the conference one person asked me a question, and made a comment about “my generation’s terrible work ethic” to which everyone in the audience under 30 was highly offended. I then asked everyone who was under 30 who disagreed with her comment, and every single person raised their hand. What I would have preferred to have said was, “Funny how we have terrible work ethics when you’re listening to me speak instead of the other way around.” Ah the things we think but do not say! On the way back I ran into someone in Minneapolis airport who had belonged to the investment club I started a while back. Random.

August 4th August 9th
Went to a family reunion in San Diego. My mom has 10 other brothers and sisters, and everyone was there, so you can imagine it was one big group. I included a picture below from the San Diego docks, and another from my family reunion of my Grandparents, and just the grandkids (I have a lot of cousins). I also did some wakeboarding and sun burning while I was down there. Then we headed up to my Grandparents house (on my Dad’s side) to help them pack up, since they’re moving up to Oregon three blocks from us.

August 9th-12th
Spoke at a conference out in Missouri. The problem was that when I was originally told about the conference I was told I flew into St. Louis. Turns out after landing in St. Louis there was a 3 hour drive through the middle of nowhere to the Lake of the Ozarks. Moral of the story, find out the final destination first, not just the airport. On the way back, afraid I’d miss my flight, I got pulled over and was given a speeding ticket. Luckily the officer subtracted one mile from how fast I was going, otherwise I’d have to fly back to Missouri to pay my speeding ticket in court. That would have made my day. Then I got to the airport and had a middle seat on the plane. On the positive side, I did include a picture of me on a dam at the lakes that is pretty cool. I’m really stretching for something positive, I know.

Think you’ve got a worse travel story that can top mine? Post it here and let me know (this one really wasn?t that bad compared to some others, so it shouldn’t be hard).

Dam

Family Reunion in San Diego

San Diego Docks