Busy Week, Business Thoughts, and Media Exposure

Here are some things going on with me personally this week.

I may be the most busy person in the world this week. What makes me so busy:

• I’m trying to square away things on my rental property. I’ve got a new tenant coming in for July. It turns out there was disconnect on part of the agreement, probably mine and the renter’s fault. I had to scramble to find someone available to fix it on very short notice. Just when I think I have that solved, I need to get the condo board’s permission before they can do their job. This alone has taken me quite a bit of time, but three things are frustrating me. 1) There’s nothing I can do here, I’m dependent on the policies of all the other parties. 2) The responsibility falls on my shoulders as the landlord and 3) Each time I think I solve the issue, another one appears.
• That rental property needed a new water heater. It cost me $1,150, but I at least talked them out of the $150 1-minute diagnosis service call they originally wanted me to pay.
• I’m getting married in less than two weeks. That’s a full-time job in itself. My future in-laws are divorced (not amicably either) which creates many additional problems.
• I’ve gotten unpreceidented attention from this blog. Two national newspapers have contacted me for interviews this week. Two writers have sent me pre-release copies of their books. I’ve been corresponding with the sponsors of yesterday’s contest to pull it off. I’m not saying this because I want to impress you guys, I’m just mentioning that there’s a lot of behind the scenes work that goes on into making this blog work.
• I’m starting to think about looking for a new job. I went as far as feeling out an old contact to see if they are hiring. Nothing like adding a job search to the whole list. However, I flip-flop each day and I’m curently really enjoying my job.

Here are the two random business thoughts…

• Fox always cancels my favorite shows (Andy Richter probably being my all-time favorite cancelation). I particularly loved the show The Loop before it went on a year hiatus or so. It’s back now, but it’s simply not the same show that it was. One might imagine that a show that was borderline in the ratings (I’m assuming since it was on hiatus) would come back improved in some way. They’ve made a couple of odd decisions that I can’t just figure out. They eliminated the main character’s two attractive, fun, female roommates. One was a love interest of the main character, so there’s now a whole plotline disconnect. They’ve added an annoying guy who appears in the elevator and belts out a series of cliches and quips. The show is like a zombie – it should have just stayed dead, instead of coming back in weird nearly unrecognizable form.
• I’m impressed by a Mini Cooper billboard on the 101. It’s basically an old school sports stadium display – lots of light bulbs which can be turned on to display a message. The awesome idea is that it seems to have new content every day. Yesterday I drove by and it read that Bruce Lee only weighed 135 pounds. That obviously have nothing with a Mini Cooper, but they’ve made me look at it every day, which is so much more than I can say for all the other billboards. And of course, they’ve got me writing about it right now, so they are getting some residual advertisement towards people who may not never drive by it. Very smart move, Mini.

And lastly, here’s the media exposure, I mentioned:

• A newsletter interviewed me awhile back on my Prosper thoughts. Read the article here.
• More recently Canada’s Globe and Mail included the Lazy Man in an article yesterday. I’m hesitant to link to them since they weren’t kind enough to link to me. Given that, I’m pretty glad that I gave them a pseudonym.