January 22, 2009

Hey All,
Happy Anniversary today to the Wheats! No 58 today, I believe. I think their good daughter (Alice) went over and took them to lunch today. (Just kidding Mary!)

Thanks to Mary, Jay & Lucy for putting up with us last weekend. (Unfortunately John was in China) The JC Chamber retreat was at the Sheraton in Overland Park Fri & Sat so we finally had a chance to make our long-overdue trip to KC for the weekend. The kids were out of school both Friday (teacher inservice day) and Monday (MLK Day) but we still had to take two cars as my mtg Friday started at 8:30AM. (What kind of local loonies start a out-of-town meeting at 8:30am?) The possibilities of getting three teenagers out of bed at 6:00AM on an off day is also pretty low. Unfortunately a freak snow storm hit KC that morning so it took me almost 3 hours to get there. KC was the worse part of it, taking me 45 minutes to go the last 8 miles on I435 from I70 to Metcalf. It does remind me that maybe I don't miss living in the big city that much afterall. (Of course the Houstonites and Los Angelians could really school me on what real traffic is all about!)

Friday night we had a chance to get together with DeJesus's (former housemate), Jacobsons and Hoffmans (k-state sigs) for pizza & beer at Jose's new house. It was fun to catch up and amusing to see all the kids hang out together. (2 seniors, 1 jr, 2 sophs & max) Saturday after my morning session was over the Lehoczky's and we went out and played a couple games of laser tag, which was very entertaining. I admit that some days we would like to shoot our kids (& vice versa) so this worked out well. I will certainly remember next time to wear darker clothing as the combat area is black-lighted and I just happened to be wearing a white shirt that day. I think my opponents could see my "glow" coming before I even made it around the corner. After a nice dinner at Calif Pizza Kitchen Saturday night we headed home.

Sunday, we attended the open house & dedication for the $34M new addition to the Geary Community Hospital. Artist rendering & info at http://www.gchks.org/index.php?id=48 I think pretty much everyone in town was there. We couldn't even get into the room where they were doing the program and heard that tours afterwards would take 1.5 hrs (no thanks), so we decided to just venture through it on our own only. We ended up getting dragged into a small group of folks led around by our head surgeon Dr. Bollman. I'm pretty sure we saw & heard far more than the official tour groups were presented in a much shorter time. Pretty nice digs, not that I want to be there anytime soon. (or ever)

Molly's gym competition started earlier this month with a meet in Wichita. She ended up getting 4th out of the 15 girls at her level/age bracket which, considering her lack of gym prep time, is pretty remarkable. She & Alice (& maybe me?) head back to KC this weekend for the KC Coed, which is the only coed meet of the year & huge.

JC Middle School this week was the base of an article in the NY Times. I guess this NY reporter is just going across the country writing stories as he goes. He apparently stopped in JC for gas/food and asked the waitress if any of our schools had a diverse ethnic population that he could use to write an article on the inauguration and diversity and the waitress replied "In JC you could pick any of our schools and get diversity!". Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/us/politics/21barry.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Junction%20City%20Middle%20School&st=cse

Can't believe that it's 66 degrees here today. Of course, true to Kansas form it's suppose to be 20 tomorrow.

I had a Marysville Mutual board mtg & Millennium Bank's shareholder/board mtgs yesterday. (You can tell how much I got accomplished at work....nothing!) Marysville has had a really tough 2008 with a double whammy of the worst claims year on record and about a $1.6M hit on investment portfolio. Needless to say it was a tough year and a long meeting. There's frankly not a whole lot one can do about Kansas storms (including the Chapman/Manh tornado this year) nor the financial markets so we are holding steady. By state statute we are only allowed up to have up to 25% of our invmt portfolio in equities, & we thought we were being conservative at having only 10% in equities and yet, we still had this loss. Most of it was in highly regarded, highly diversified mutual funds. But in reality it's a paper loss & we'll just wait for the market to return. We did have one triple A rated bond go bad on us- Lehman Bros. (who would have guessed that that's the only invmt firm the govmt let go bankrupt!)

Millennium Bank is still doing well. With the slowdown in the overall economy we've seen the slowdown at the bank. We are still ahead of schedule and are profitable on a cash flow basis. We are definitely not part of the national "banking" problem as we have zero bad loans and are still looking for borrowers- loaning money to the deserving. I guess MB received the ultimate in confidence boost when mom changed her checking & savings over to the bank. Whew...only took me 2 years to convince her. ha

The kids are having Wii withdrawal as their Wii drive crashed a couple weeks ago. It's been mailed in for repair. It's probably just wore out...kind of like me...

Gotta get back to work.
Later
Scott