Early start and a good one.

3/11/06 Saturday
I was up at 4:00 this morning. Looked at things on the web for a bit and then went back to bed. Told Cherie to roll on her side cause that stops the sleep apnea or whatever it’s called where her sinuses kind of shut off her breathing. This results in a snore that is loud and will abruptly stop as the sinuses close up. I then sit there waiting to hear the snore again because it signals she is breathing. Kinda disturbing to wait to hear if your wife will breath. Being on her side generally stops this. Really didn’t go back to sleep, just dozed.

Now we are both up. I am making Cherie laugh and telling her how beautiful she is as I do every morning. Life is good and we will make sure it stays that way. They ran more about Chris Reeves and his wife Dana. One of the things they showed Dana saying, back when Chris was still alive and she was caring for him, was that they had learned to enjoy every moment.

This is one of the philosophies I developed after the coma and one Cherie and I both adhere to. We lost so many years together with the divorce twenty years ago but now are making up for lost time. Actually I think it would be more accurate to say we make the most of every moment. Not everything is enjoyable but that is life. We live our lives in a way that there is nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. The time we have we spend doing things that are positive and will help others improve their lives. It doesn’t always work with others but when all is said and done we can look back and say “At least we tried”. To look back and see a disaster you could have perhaps stopped and realize you sat there and did nothing is a hard thing. I won’t allow that, I will always be able to say “I did my best”. I understand there will be times that my best wasn’t good enough but that is life. I might not do to good but my motives will always be right.

We are getting ready for our day. First will be the Direct Buy sales pitch. We will look at that carefully. After all we have a house and home to create in Texas but I will have to see beyond the hype and examine if their prices and quality are truly as cheap as they purport in the infomercials. Come to think of it I’ll go online now and see what comes up there.

I love the internet. You can find anything you need, with limits but not many. It seems that Direct Buy is a franchise operation with franchises covering different geographical areas. There are very few complaints registered with the BBB and most of those were resolved. There is a noticeable difference between franchises, which is a reflection in the management of each entity. I’m not sure but the buy in for this purchasing club may be as much as $4000. That is not clearly indicated anywhere. The organization here will not help us in Texas so we are just going for the money today. I always love dealing with professional salesmen cause I used to teach whole companies how to do this. I have too much fun saying things to the salesperson like “Oh, an alternate choice would have worked well there. I love it, you did the Ben Franklin close really good.” Throws them right off their game. Yeah, I can be mean but I do respect professionalism. Try to strong arm me you better watch out.

I’ve been in sales all my life and started out with the street hustle, where we would blow into a business carrying several cheap laser prints. Just walk into the showroom filled with the business’s customers and start laying out the pictures and laying out a spiel. It would go like this. “We just remodeled the hotel down the road and we’ve got all these left over. My boss told me to get rid of these. You know they are laser developed photographs. Some of them were taken by XXX. You heard of him right? He’s the guy that took pictures for National Geographic. Hey! Macy’s sells these for $300 but you’d like it if I said you could get one for only $45 wouldn’t you”. Then we would close. Basically anything we got over ten dollars we put in our pocket.

I’ll talk more about this later. We just got back from the Direct Buy thing and I am tired. Need to lay down for a bit.