DISCLAIMER: I wasn’t ready to add another entry today, but sometimes you don’t have control over the path in front of you. So I am writing on the tails of the last entry.

Intensely emotional moments happen to you at the most inconvenient yet poignant times through out your life. I consider them waypoints of growth and realization. I’ve been beginning the story board on Son #2’s 1st birthday music video. As I was looking for the appropriate music to tell the story I wanted to tell, I created a spreadsheet categorizing songs, artists, emotions, genres, and etc. that would aid the creative process and help me converge on a solution. During the research, I stumbled across an irregularly insignificant song only to be rediscovered today.

The interesting point is this: I downloaded the song well over a month ago, listened to it, and thought ‘yup, that’s a pretty good song.’ But it didn’t resonate with me. Partially because I was consumed in other projects and because you have to ‘be there’ at that moment to get it. This was just passing research to stay proactive on a project that I would normally wait until the last minute to start. So fast forward to today: I am at work, in my office, working for the Man, and trying to find new ways to get the mundane work day to pass with greater speed so I can get home to start packing for our vacation (or at least have a beer). As usual, my MP3 player is belting out the regularly scheduled music. Punk. Until that one moment.

That song came on that I initially dismissed and forgot. It was that song from a month ago. It’s not a Grammy winner, introspective, or even musically challenging. As the earphones were stuck in my ears, I turned the volume up, and was drenched in the music and the lyrics. The corporate world faded out of view for that almost four minute song. There was nothing but the message at that point. Love.

I need to find composure and strength as I write this because I’m sitting in my office literally balling over this song. I encourage all of you to listen and reflect on your lost loved ones. While I am a father and have not lost my own, I'm very fortunate to still have my hero in my life. But this song is dedicated to any father out there. Whether you have lost your own or look at your children as the next wave after you leave this Earth. Even more importantly, I really believe that anyone out there who has ever lost a piece of their heart when a loved one left suddenly will truly relate and connect with this song. It's the emotional shockwave that rocks the essence of your core.

I don’t care if you don’t like rock music, listen to the first track of this playlist here at the highest volume possible and tell your family you fucking love them before they are gone and you can’t say goodbye.

That’s all I have to say today. An intense emotional moment at an inappropriate time. It’s strangely inconvenient to cry in the office at a Fortune 500 company. Oh well. To my brother and my father, just like the song says, “I hope you always know the car that we built will always roll.”

In more ways than one.....

By nature, I have a limited tolerance for people. This makes it challenging to be a father of two radically different, yet defiant boys. Considering that, at times I have been unreasonably hard on Son #1. It’s hard to look at him and not see a youthful, passionate version of myself glaring right back at me. So much of his personality and behavior are identical to my own. My wife says I am horribly impatient with him and alternately, I am all goo-goo-ga-ga with Son #2. She may be right on with this assessment. Son #2 doesn’t talk back to me. I think it’s hard at times when you are aware of your own deficiencies and see those in your child. You want with every fiber of your being to shake them and explain to them that those attributes will get them no where. But you can’t. For one, the ‘authorities’ seem to think that shaking your kid is inappropriate. Second, nature has to run its course and evolve in your own offspring.


I suppose I’m writing this entry because of my guilt and pride in an ever conflicting combat to find balance. Son #1 is a daredevil, a go-getter, and an exhibitionist. But he is also impatient, introverted, and in fear of failure. He wants so bad to impress, succeed, and be considered great. This is nothing like me (sarcasm). It’s easy to take for granted how special he is in our life. He’s a product of the pain and suffering of the past and the fortune and the future for a family that needs stabilization and a something to gravitate its last remaining positive energy. The pressure of this on his soul is unfair.

“I never tell you how much I think about you. I have so many hopes and dreams for you. But there are two things that scare me. The first is like any young father, I live with a fear that I’ll never be able to provide an environment where you can extend yourself and attain your dreams. I scratch and claw at everything to enable you to have a peaceful childhood. The second fear is much more difficult to explain. My expectations are so high for everything and get easily disappointed when they are not met. I have this vision for you that is fairly nebulous with no hard boundaries or distinct outcomes. It worries me how hard I could push you to push yourself to reach these levels and alienate our relationship.

I don’t want any elements of intolerance to morph into resentment. I really worry that I could be the oppression in your life that I have always fought against. In an effort to get the feeling out there, I want to simply explain how proud I am of you right now. It’s pretty easy to lose focus on the aspects of life that are most important. Cars, bikes, evenings out with friends, jobs, and vacations are just a couple of things that distract us. I don’t want to lose that focus on you. I am trying to do my best at taking stock in every moment with you because our days together are finite. For over five years, the vision of you and what you mean to me has carried me through some of my darker thoughts. You’ve given me a lot of hope.

My mornings are rough before work, and everyone who knows me knows that I am not a morning person. Some people need coffee, I need punk rock. But each morning, I wake you up and take you to the bathroom to pee so you don’t have an accident. It has been months, and I could probably stop this routine in my before-I-go-to-work procedure, but I find that there’s something peaceful about being annoyed by waking you up EVERY morning. Here’s why: I woke you up this morning and things were no different than normal. You rolled over, rubbed your eyes, and sat up on you knees throwing your arms out signaling me to lift you up and carry you to the bathroom. You went about your business and walked under your own power back to your bed. I pulled the covers over you and gently rubbed your shoulder and told you ‘good job’ as always. Then, like one million times before, you smiled at me. And that’s it. That never gets old.

Moments like that remind me that no matter the setback or the accomplishment, I’ll always love you for everything you are and everything you are not. I may not always want to hear you ramble about the toys in the sandbox or the fact that your one billion Lightning McQueen toys are building a trail in my living room. But I’ll always want to see your smile and will always take stock in you being my son. I am hard on you because I know you are every bit of me inside that little body and behind those blue eyes.”

Son #1 is on to his next activity. Soccer. I’ve always felt it was the sport for the paraplegic because you didn’t need arms to play. But I have a new appreciation for the sport with the Sounders being in town. I’ve been watching the games, asking questions, and even attended a match. So I’m learning. My wife has been explaining to me that soccer is a great sport for learning teamwork and camaraderie. So is the Hitler Youth Brigade. I just see a lot of running and I have one rule about that. Only run when you are being chased by the cops. September 19th I will be a soccer dad. I’m kind of stoked about this and I’m now wondering what it would take to be a coach. Probably knowledge of the game, more patience, and less tattoos. I can work on the first of those. So maybe I set my sights a little lower and volunteer to assist the ‘real’ coach. No worries, I can still work with the players to carry a swagger. I’ll even supply some temporary tattoos for the kids (since they are not of age) so we can give them all sleeves. They’ll look like hooligans and we can scare the opposition into pissing themselves.

When I started this blog, I had four cardinal rules to follow. The first, never to name names. I didn’t want to single out people or draw attention to those who didn’t like the spotlight. The second rule was to ‘try’ to keep my entries less than 1000 words. Not doing so well with this one. The third was to use music to compliment the blog entry and capture the theme. The final rule was to never discuss work on this platform. This was basically for the same reason as the first rule. Furthermore, my current employer believes that its disjointed and damaged reputation is a function of its underlings blogging and Tweeting the company news to the outside world thus influencing the media to slant its opinions in a less than favorable direction. Yes, that MUST be it and not the blatantly obvious planning and execution dilemmas plaguing the company or the obvious avoidance of full disclosure of information to the news media within an appropriate time frame.

I decided that while my employer struggles to right itself and threatens the employment of the hardworking underpinnings holding this rickety mess together, I would buy a new automobile. A wiseman might ask ‘Why would you buy a new car with the potential of job loss?’ Ironically, it’s the one element in all of the chaos that I can control. It would be an understatement to say that I’m obsessive about decisions I make in life. My wife would probably characterize me as being a tangled neurotic mess of nerves and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. That’s not too far from the truth. So this thread is more about how I make my uniquely insane, yet educated, decisions and less about the purchased vehicle.

Interestingly enough, it started with an internal dialogue where I convince myself that I need something new. I was driving somewhere for some reason and was annoyed with traffic and the fact that I wanted to drive in a faster/slower/louder/quieter/lower/higher/your attribute here/ vehicle. Once I get to this point, it’s useless to consider any other responsibilities. I end up becoming so consumed by my current vehicular dilemma I generally forget about birthdays, anniversaries, and changing Son #2’s excrement-laden diaper. For this purchase, there were approximately seven unique prospects in different categories and segments that fell in and out of favor over the last two years.

Before I even drove any of the prospects, I began the careful assembly of the greatest financial analysis toolset to support my decision. I like to create spreadsheets to analyze and review stuff. I have spreadsheets for everything from the NPV of household expenses, to ROI on electronics, to long-term investment analysis on family financial status, to bike jump trajectory sensitivity analysis, to Son #2 name/meaning decision trees. I think you get the picture. The latest exercise started with a simple worksheet that outlined financing terms of an auto loan. Then it grew.

I added pull down menus for decisions. Then, fair market value sensitivity for the trade-in vehicles was added. I added dynamic real-time credit terms. The list of vehicles was expanded to include the seven vehicles but with various trim levels, configurations, and respective pricing. This data fed right back into the financial model through the menu driven system. Next was a sensitivity analysis piece which was driven off of the user decision matrix to illustrate the various lending scenarios paired with trade-in/down payment scenarios. All of this was controlled by a simple front end that accessed all of the decision variables on the back end. The goal here was to simulate as many financial scenarios possible for each vehicle.

Time to drive the vehicles and build in a performance metric to help influence decision making. The experience driving the cars is outside the scope of this post. Just know that I may now be on Johnny Law’s radar for neurological harassment of local automotive sellers. I went back and ‘refined’ (read: obsessed over) the spreadsheet. The driving experience and the spreadsheet narrowed the search to a two-vehicle race. Based on my value-indicating, financial-prognosticating, penny-pinching, performance-evaluating, number-obsessing spreadsheet, I finally decided on a vehicle.

The dealership provided eight different options of this vehicle because of my option configuration was impossible to satisfy. I had to make a sacrifice. I needed to build a second financial model spreadsheet for these eight versions. Each one had its own worksheet with its own financial model in the image of my first evaluation tool. This version then factored in manufacturer rebates and refined the trade-in scenario based on the current administration sales tax incentives. On this spreadsheet, I had a summary page which evaluated and scored all of the performance metrics of the vehicles, the positives and negatives of each, the dollars spent per positive and negative attribute, and every other metric I could think of to attach some sort of ‘score’ to. At the end of it all, all eight vehicles had a normalized ‘score’ based on all of the metrics. The top three scores became my three choices.

A deeper evaluation had to be done. Three different vehicles with three different prices and option compromises. Stay with me now, in the second spreadsheet, on each worksheet for my three final choices, I created one more sensitivity analysis based on trade-in and down payment. At this point, I knew my financing and potential cost of ownership. Now I just needed to determine how much the dealer ‘will’ give me for my trade-in. Financially, (trust me here) it made the most sense to trade-in a vehicle and receive the economic tax benefit rather than sell the vehicle outright and put a larger payment down. There was a ’tipping’ point and I had to make sure the dealer gave me a fair market value where I would get the best trade-in assessment.

Long story even longer, I’m the proud owner of a new family mode of transport. Gone is my motorized partner of the last eight years. Am I any more relaxed now that this is behind me? Who knows. But I will say this: at least I can commute to my potentially terminal place of employment in style and not-so-eagerly await the notification of the lack of need of my marketing services. If I am out of work in the future and you are in need of a 10GB spreadsheet that will thoroughly calculate your weekly Starbuck’s bill, I’m your guy.