San Diego!

The annual sales conference......breakout rooms, awards banquet, hotel food.....good times, good times! The weather was rather chilly with some abnormal weather to the tune of over 1 billion in loss to the citrus industry! The avocados didn't fare to well either. And actually, they will probably lose their crops for next year due to loss of flowers. Guess I will be drinking Tang instead of orange juice. Do they still make that?

Most of the conference was spent talking about our #1 customer and our struggles to survive POS or Pay On Scan. The fact that our actual scan rate is below what our customer believes we should be scanning based on their calculations. In other words, we get a certain cost based on a scan rate that they think we should scan. Although, reality is a few points lower which turned out to be a few million in losses. Good thing we know how to cut expenses, such as my salary.

Anyways, we are surviving and we actually found some risky investors that want to give us money for acquisitions. I guess we need more volume to survive and according to our CEO, "If you aren't growing, you are dying!"

God bless my company and yours as well.....because its going to be tough in the future w/o "W"!

tc

20 Weeks and Counting!

Joshua Phillip Carver is just over 20 weeks old now, or about 4 1/2 months. Can you believe he has lived 0.5% of his life based on an average life expectancy of 77 1/2 years. My how time flies. I guess that means I have lived over 45% of my life. Wow, I still have more than half my life left! Of course, I could have a better than average life expectancy. I am going to need it because I will be 50 years old when he starts high school. It is going to be tough playing him one on one basketball at that age.

Joshua weighed in at 16lbs 11ozs and stretched to just above 25in at his last doctor visit. He is in the 75th percentile on his weight gain (that is why he is nicknamed "Fat Tony") and average on his length. According to the Doctor's chart, based on mine and the wife's height, he should end up around 5'10".

Joshua had his first tast of snow the last week of December when 5 foot of snow fell in 3 days while we were vacationing at Angel Fire New Mexico. Needless to say, he spent most of his time indoors and hopefully will get his chance to snow ski in the future.

Joshua is also going to get a new home. We purchased 2.5 acres and plan on building our own house. The plans are done and we are waiting approval of the construction loan as well as approval from the dreaded ACC (Architectural Control Committee).

Here are recent pics!