Category: adventures

Hospitality with WarmShowers.org

Cross Country StopoverThis past week I had my first experience hosting some cross-country cyclists for a night.  Quinn, Ken and Andy are biking from Portland, OR to New York, NY and came through Indiana, riding into Richmond on US-40.  I recently became the sole human occupant of a house with great space for hosting guests, and so I figured the least I could do is sign up for some opportunities to help out folks who find themselves on interesting journeys through the area.

WarmShowers.org is a resource for facilitating just that for cyclists, and it's a great way to find or offer lodging.  You can provide as much or as little information about your location and "amenities" as you want, and you're under no obligation to host anyone at any particular time.  It's similar to other resources like CouchSurfing.org or even Mennonite Your Way.

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Blog salad

P8200016Most of my blog posts are a main course dish with one primary taste.  This one is more of a salad with a bunch of different tastes thrown together.

I did eat a salad for lunch today (nice transition) - radish, green onion, and goat cheese on spring mix greens, with poppy seed dressing.  Everything but the dressing was grown/made at Abundant Acres Farm, the provider of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share that I bought this season.  Friends Kent and Dori have again done a great job making fresh, local, chemical-free food available, and I'm grateful for it.  I don't have a garden on my own land right now, but having a bag of garden-fresh stuff delivered to me every week is hard to beat.  There's still quite a gap between my ideals about where my food comes from and my actual diet.

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My political aspirations

Update March 2011: I'm currently a candidate for election to Richmond's City Council.

At a local business networking event tonight, someone noted that they'd heard a rumor I might be getting involved in politics locally.  We had a good conversation about it, and I thought I'd use it as a jumping off point to share a little more about my own political aspirations.

Sometime during my college experience, I decided that I was going to run for the Presidency of the United States of America.  I was mostly serious. I mean, I announced it on the Internet for crying out loud, so you know I wasn't just messing around.  I figured out that I would be old enough to be elected President in the 2012 elections, and I dreamed my dream from there.

I've since figured out that national politics is probably not for me, at least not anytime soon.

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10 things about my approach to business management

DIY pen construction - finishWe try to keep Summersault LLC as "flat" as possible, with minimal hierarchy and focus on authority relationships, opting instead for collaborative roles and even aspirations of a tribal staffing model.  But in my role as "Principal," I still end up taking on what would traditionally be called a "management" relationship with other staff.

Recently, as a part of getting ready for some staff training, I tried to write down 10 things that might be helpful for a new member of the team to know about how I approach this role.  For better or worse, I now present them to you.  I don’t necessarily expect you to think that they’re good practices; I offer them as self-reflection, not advice.

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5 Business Values I Learned Via Earlham College

Today I'm sitting on a panel at Earlham College where we'll talk some about the world of business and money-making in the context of an Earlham education.  As a part of preparing for it, I was thinking about how my time at Earlham, and my relationship with the College since, has informed my experience in the business world.

Here's a list of 5 business values that I think I learned via Earlham College:

  1. You can do good and still do well. While it hasn't been as black and white as Mark and I may have thought it would be when we started Summersault, we have found that it is generally possible to make ethical decisions and still make money.  When you do make ethical decisions and still make money as a result, it tends to feel better than other approaches.
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Local food issues panel today

Later today I'll be sitting on a panel put together by the Wayne County Area Chamber of Commerce, and we'll be talking about issues related to local food.  Beyond some home gardening I'm not a food producer or any sort of expert, but between my work with the Clear Creek Food Coop, my interest in food / energy issues, and my efforts around making Richmond more self-reliant, I hope I'll have something useful to offer.

It's at 3:30 PM at Ivy Tech Community College, 3421 Johnson Hall - I hope you can join us.

In case you won't be able to attend, here's a list of 12 reasons that it's a good idea to support the production and consumption of locally grown food (adopted from a list produced by The Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association):

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The Contractor Experience

(Some of my blog posts are constructive, this one is pure rant.)

There's a new amusement park ride opening up in town!  It'll take you on a thrilling journey through ups and downs of successful projects, communication failures, happy long-term partnerships, and total failures in competence.  It's called THE CONTRACTOR EXPERIENCE and you can hop on it today by opening up the phone book and calling pretty much any contractor you want to try to get some work done on your home or business!

Okay, I know that it might be a little pretentious or worse for me to sit on my high blogging horse and tell the folks who are willing to do some pretty hard, dirty work how to do their jobs when I'm not able or willing to do them myself.  But at the same time, I can't help but see it from the perspective of how poorly some of these folks are running their small local businesses, and how their customer service values take a total back seat to their own preferred ways of doing things.  Some war stories:

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Super extra friendly cable installer guy

About five years ago, it was one of those deals where the cable company gave you a nine hour window in which they would have someone out there to do the installation, and you just sat around and hoped that they showed up at all. I was apparently favored by the cable installer gods that day because the guy showed up within the first hour of the window, AND he was in a really great mood. "Hey, how ya doin, ready to get this all set up for ya..." and so on. "This will be fun," I thought.

"Hey, man, I know this is a strange request, but could I get a glass of water? I just had some really spicy wings for lunch and my mouth is really really dry."  Hmm.

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Meat Twice a Week

Sesame BurgerTwo years ago about this time I blogged about my resolution to give up soft drinks, which I'm glad to say I've successfully continued for a second bonus year, despite it having no noticeable positive effect on my health while making me an outcast at all of those cola-centered social gatherings. And despite the bottles of Dr. Pepper that people sometimes leave sitting around me, sometimes even in my own fridge.  But I digress.

For now I'll skip over last year's resolution - which failed miserably - and bring you to my 2009 resolution, which is to eat less meat. Specifically, I'm trying to eat meat at no more than two meals per week. This is a revised plan of attack from past attempts to try an all-vegetarian diet, which I eventually decided wasn't tenable for me.

Without getting too far into the food ethics involved in meat-eating (which are nonetheless important and deserving of further treatment), I thought I'd note why I'm doing this, and how it's going so far: Continue reading "Meat Twice a Week" →

The one where the plane failed to depart, twice

Chris and Mark arriving at SFOSometimes you see those weather stories on the evening news where they show a few seconds of airline passengers stranded in some airport looking like hell as they try to figure out how to cope with canceled or delayed flights, and usually you just feel a little bad for them and then move on. At the moment I'm feeling some appreciation for the misery that's displayed in those brief clips, having had a bit of a travel adventure myself:

It started with Mark and I barreling through the snow on I-70 toward the Dayton airport, wondering if planes would even be taking off at all today. But, my handy dandy text message updates from Delta.com declared the flight was on time, so we pressed on.

I should have known we were in for a special time when the guy at the ticket check-in counter (which has largely been replaced by self check-in kiosks) was delighted to point out how much cost cutting Delta has done. Me: "Do you have one of those little folders for these boarding passes?" Him: "No, they did away with those some time ago. Heck, all we've got left now are the airplanes! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Right.

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