Day 362 – Loudest boos come from the cheapest seats.

I heard a Babe Ruth quote yesterday that really made me think.

“The loudest boos always come from the cheapest seats.” – Babe Ruth

Of course he was talking about baseball fans. We remember Babe Ruth as the King of Swing or the Sultan of Swat. We remember him as I guy that just got up and swung for the fence every single time he got up to bat. Yet there were people that boo’d the Great Bambino.

I am sure they boo’d when he struck out and mostly just wanted to see another ball fly out of the park. Some, I am sure truly did not like him the same way we still do not like some of the Yankee players. (that is because hey are Yankees). In any case he got boo’d. The fact that he called out the people in the cheap seats is what struck me and I got to thinking about the people that boo me and where they sit in my life.

Do people actually boo me? Well, not so much in the literal sense but, there are certainly those that do and say things that are the equivalent of booing in my life. People who shake their heads at my latest idea. People who laugh and think they have me all figured out. The people who take more pleasure in seeing what TV producers can do to entertain than what it took to stand face to face with 5 multimillionaires and pitch an idea. The people who talk behind my back then want something for free, and I could go on.

These people sit in the cheap seats. They sit in the comfort of the lives that they have settled for and would rather not see anyone they know succeed. If they did actually know of someone who did, it would just prove to them that it could be done and take away one more excuse for why they are unhappy.

Think about the people who truly encourage you in life. Are they the people in your everyday life or are they someone else? I would be willing to bet that the most encouragement that most get comes from the expensive seats. Those are the seats in the stadium of your life that are occupied (or should be occupied) by the people you really trust and want you to succeed.

The people in those seats are the ones you should be listening to. You think that Babe Ruth listened to the loudmouth booing him and let it affect the way he swung the next time at bat? I don’t think so. We do seem to listen to those people most of the time in our lives.

We get excited about an idea and somehow Larry at the water cooler shoots it down and deflates your balloon. Larry is broke, unhappy, and on his third marriage! Why are you listening to him! He is in the cheap seats and not worth listening to I guarantee it.

Your life is your stadium and the name on the back of your shirt is yours. There will always be people in the cheap seats but, you make the decision to listen to them or not. I would pay more attention to the people you let sit in the suites, they are the ones that will ultimately help you.

 

Day 360 – Make a resolution and keep it.

So one of the rituals of this week of holiday purgatory is to decide on a New Years Resolution.

In 2012 at least 45% of all American committed to some kind of resolution. The top 10 resolutions are :

1) lose weight

2) getting organized

3) spend less, save more

4) enjoy life to the fullest

5) staying fit and healthy

6) learn something exciting

7) quit smoking

8) help others in their dreams

9) fall in love and

10) spend more time with family.

The University of Scranton did a study that showed surprisingly, that 75% of all resolutions make it through the first week. Only 46% make it past the six month mark. Oddly the study also revealed that 39% of people in their 20’s will actually achieve their goals this year as compared to only 14% of people over 50 will achieve what they set out to do.

Making a resolution is not hard and there is no secret to it. The latter is also true for sticking to them and actually achieving your resolutions.

Make your resolution tangible – make sure your resolution is something that you can see and measure. Things that are ambiguous like being happier need an anchor to give you some stick of measurability to see if you are on track.

Be specific – it is not enough to simply say I am going to lose weight. Be bold and choose a number! It is hard to hit your target when you really do not know what it is.

Come up with a plan – break your goal down into manageable steps. 50 lbs of weight loss may seem like a huge number but it really is only 1lb a week. One pound is equivalent to 3500 more calories burned than consumed. 3500 calories a week is only 500 calories a day which can be easily done by walking half an hour and not going back for seconds one meal a day.

Write it down –  I cannot express how important this one is. There is something magical about writing down your goal. Write it down and put it somewhere you will see it every day. I suggest the bathroom mirror, Every morning and every night you will see what you have written down and there is some cool stuff that will go to work in your sub conscious. Do not skip this step.

Share your resolution –  this is where accountability comes in. If you do not tell anyone what your resolution is it is easy to let something slide and then it just disappears with echos of, “I will try again next year” or some other kind of negative talk.

If you have never embarked on this journey of a New Years resolution I encourage you to do so. None of our lives are so perfect that we cannot find an area to improve in. Follow these simple steps and look back as one of the proud in a year and be grateful for how much better your life is. Share your resolutions with me and lets make 2015 awesome together!

Day 358 – Merry Christmas!

Funny thing about this morning.

We woke up and came downstairs to quiet. This was our first do nothing Christmas morning. No stressful night with little sleep. No alarm waking us up to be sure we were up and had everything ready for the boys. Just a nice nights sleep and a relaxing morning.

Somehow we are still having people over but like I mentioned it was more of a plan to not go anywhere today. So we will end up here with pulled pork sliders!

If you are taking time to read this blog this morning I wanted to thank you and give you a very special Christmas gift that you can share immediately with everyone important in your life. This is a present that will pay untold rewards.

The best present you can give is to “be” present today. Spend some effort to really be in the moment today and really spend time with your loved ones. I challenge you to put away the laptop, stay off of Facebook and leave your cell phone on your nightstand or in your car.

Trust me, there is nothing else so important that it should be distracting you on this day. We have become a society of people that just do not engage anymore. We cannot hold a conversation without looking at our phone afraid we missed something more important than what is happening around us. Show the people in your life that they are more important to you than your phone.

Make a game of it if you have to and confiscate everyone’s phone as they come into your house today and make Christmas 2014 a cell free Christmas. Engage the people around you and “be” present.

Thank you for being a part of my day. May you be blessed today and into the coming year. Now turn off that computer and hug someone!

Day 355 – With 4 kids, it could only be put off so long.

What a weekend!

This was a bit of an emotional weekend for me. Besides it being our family Christmas and besides me turning 45, there was even more.

As an adult there are a few times in you life when you are so overcome with raw emotion that all you can do is cry. It is like something just wells up inside you and just like Old Faithful, it comes bursting out. Not in cool steam and hot water of course but tears. That would be way more manly. I am unfortunately the sap of the family. For me, those moments were when Amy was walking down the aisle to marry me and the birth of each one of our children. I was in those moments that it just took more effort to hold back the tears than to let them go.

Saturday morning was another one of those moments. I received news that our family is growing again! My oldest told Amy and I that we are going to be grandparents!

Well he didn’t really tell us, they gave us a present of a baby outfit with “July 2015” on it and we had to figure it out, which I admit took me several seconds. I’m sure the video of the reveal is something the kids will talk about for a long time it is priceless.

One of the things that add to the emotions is that we are not just gaining a grandchild, we are gaining a daughter as well.

As parents of adult children you hope and pray for their future spouse and family. When they get into serious relationships you begin to make bonds with the girlfriend as she attends family functions and holidays. What you do not count on is when they break up. We had that happen a while back and it is something you don’t think about but that break up affects us as parents as well. After the last one Amy and I decided that we were only going to go so far emotionally with the girlfriends to protect ourselves.

With news of a baby, Emily has become a permanent part of our lives and we could not be happier! She is the perfect fit for Andy and we are so happy to have her as part of our family. I guess we will actually have to put her name on a Christmas stocking next year!

Welcome to the family Emily, we really do love you!

Day 352 – Felling better and just in time!

I am certainly feeling better.

Yesterday I was coming around but by the end of the day I learned what my mother meant all of those years ago by warning me to not “over do it”. I just had too many things piling up and had to get some things done. I am grateful for the held I had from Amy & Cort last night to get a huge task done that would have taken me 4 hours alone but we knocked it out in 1 1/2!

The absolute best part of my day yesterday was coming home to see the tree finally decorated. I have had a really hard time getting into the Christmas spirit this year and the season is almost over and I feel like I have missed out on so much. Normally lights are up and tree is gotten on the 1st Saturday of December. I put up “some” lights and got the tree last Sunday. Finally got the tree into the house on Tuesday and decorated yesterday.

Last night on the way home we passed a tree lot that had free on the gate! That is how late we are people!

I walked in the door sick and exhausted to see the tree decorated, presents under it, stockings stuffed and my festive, beautiful wife working away wrapping presents. Christmas music was playing and it may have been the first time this season that it felt like Christmas.

I know you may be thinking that it is still a week away and that it is normal to see cars going down the street this late with trees hanging on them. It is late for us because we are starting a new tradition this year.

With four boys we understand that the holidays can be stressful. As they get older and married with children (no hurry). There will be in laws to visit as well as them trying to establish their own things. Amy and I had no illusions that we would be able to get everyone together on Christmas Day or Eve for that matter. What we have decided to do, is to make the Saturday before Christmas, our Sullivan Christmas. That way they do not have to worry about where they did thanksgiving or who’s house they did Christmas morning at last year. The Saturday before Christmas is ours.

That is tomorrow! Yeah, today is my Christmas Eve people! This has not been the week to get sick. It came so fast that I am barely having time to enjoy it. Tomorrow morning all the boys and their girlfriends will be over. We will have eggs Benedict, mimosas and open presents! I feel like a little kid just writing that!

Today is going to go pretty fast! Glad I am feeling better.

Day 350 – Nobody got time to be sick!

You know how you are getting close to a goal?

It gets really hard. There seem to be a million things that are crying for your attention to distract you from what you are trying to accomplish. The urgent begins to outweigh the important.

Right now I am in one of those seasons. I feel like I have a million things to do and not enough time to do them. On top of all of that I am sick. My evenings are cut short because I need my rest and so I have had to seriously prioritize what really needs to be done. I have had to delegate several things and let others help me. I have things that are looming in the future that I am not sure yet how I will get accomplished but, for now I am having to focus on what can get done now. I am trying to take care of the stuff that I need to do, even though there may be no immediate result and let the others help me.

I have learned in the past year that checking things off my list is good and makes me feel accomplished. What I am learning now is that I do not have to be the guy to actually do the task. I can let someone else take care of things on my list and I still get to check them off!

It is good for me because I am actually learning to let go of a few things and ask for help. Being sick is temporary and while it sucks tremendously, It will not last. Now there are still things that I have to do myself, or at least do not have the right person on my team to help with certain tasks yet but we will get there.

Right now I am mostly focused on not being the dying sick husband and instead trying to be the cupcake that sucks it up and gets things done!

Day 349 – Soooooo close!

Wouldn’t you know that as soon as I get a job things are starting to get some real traction with Eve’s.

In the last 48 hours, our infused vodka recipes have been approved, we have finally gotten a hold of someone who knows what they are talking about at Walmart. We are being presented to Albertsons and Costco, and Whole Foods in California is getting closer! It is like the fuse has been burning forever and it is getting close to the powderkeg!

I’m not sure what happened but it is AWESOME!!!

While these are all very great things, they are still just potential and will take a lot of work to make them happen. This is one of the reasons that it is nice to be partnered up and have other people you can rely on to help get the ball across the finish line.

Thinking ahead we will need to be making some serious Apple Pie if these deals go down! We are already planning on Walmart starting with a 25 case per month order just in the Western Washington market. add in those other accounts and we could be at 150 – 200 cases a month with just one product.

We have two other moonshines we are just about to launch and then the vodkas in the Spring. With a good foothold of an anchor product like our Apple Pie we could be moving close to a 1000 cases a month by this summer!

Its all blue sky right now but, why not? I mean we are in a couple other states and we have a great product. We just have to figure out how to keep up with the demand and the growth and we should be good. We also have to hope that we can get our local distribution under control.

In the mean time we just keep keepin on and trying to move forward. Keep your eyes open for bottling parties because we are going to be needing a lot of help!

 

Day 348 – It’s starting to feel like Christmas . . . finally!

I will admit this has not really felt like Christmas to me this year at all. Like I mentioned I think it is just parental growing pains. As older traditions seem to fade in the light of boys becoming men, it is time for Amy and I to start defining our own new traditions and things we can do together.

Instead of going and hunting a tree with the kids taking hours driving to a farm, walking around in the cold and cutting down a wet tree after everyone has argued over which one is best, we can simply go down and get a nice pre-cut tree and come home quickly.  I have to admit that last night I actually went to a tree lot for the first time in a long time and it was very nice. I drove about 8 miles and came home with a really nice tree in about 40 minutes. I did not get cold, I did not get wet, and there was no mud or arguing.

We got home and unloaded the tree in the garage to sit for a while and I can tell you that when I went in the garage about 1/2 later, it certainly smelled like Christmas! That moment, last night when that smell hit me, it became Christmas.

The inside of the house has actually been decorated (except for the tree) for almost a week. Amy has had the garlands hung, snowmen out, and the stockings all on the fireplace. The little advent tree with Santa has been hung and Cort has been moving Santa from day to day. I hung lights and wrapped the poles by the front door. I even ordered car parts, which seems to be an obligatory Sullivan Christmas item every year. This year it is brakes and tires for the Bimmer.

All of those things and it still did not seem like Christmas. It was like something was broken and I could not quite put my finger on it, until I smelled that tree in our house. Normally we do that in the first Saturday of December but, we were all busy helping Wes with his new house and just life. Little did I know that skipping getting the tree would be the thing that would truly hinder me feeling the Christmas season.

What about shopping you ask? Well Amy, and I have always waited for the last minute to do our shopping. It is entertainment for us to go out on the 23rd and watch the panic on everyone else’s faces as they scramble at the last minute to get everything done. The best is the man walking around like a zombie with absolutely no clue on what he needs to buy. Amy made things even more simple this year and put all of the little Amazon droned to work.

So it is Christmas time! Tree in the house, car parts ordered, lights hung . . . wait. There is still something missing. . .

We have this little ceramic cookie jar in our Christmas decorations that only holds pistachio nuts around Christmas. Come to think about it, it has been out for a week with no nuts in it. I guess Christmas is still on hold but, this one is all on Amy.

Merry Christmas!

Day 345 – Next Level Gingerbread Houses

Yesterday morning I sat down with my Spark and watched my daily dose with Darren Hardy. My computer prompted me to restart because, it had been a week since my last restart. I know, I know. I should turn it off more but, it just does not happen. So upon accepting the prompt, my computer started to go through about a million updates and my time was slipping away. I made my lunch and got dressed but, it was still updating. Eventually it came back on but, it was too late for me to write my blog.

I could have of course written it when I got home but we were already in prep mode for the 2nd annual Sullivan ginger bread house contest. Smack talking had started about 3 weeks ago when Emily asked if she could use the oven for making some extra things. We had no idea what she had planned but she was clearly already planning. Thursday dinner was tacos and we ate quickly. Hayey and Wes were the first to get into the package. We really only have one rule for this contest and it is that you have to use the store bought kit. You can add to it or use it in any way you want but the kit has to be used in the house somehow.

Last year we cut the walls and made a shanty crime scene house with trash, police tape and even the outline of a dead gingerbread person. We knew that this year the kids were going to take this to the next level and they did not disappoint. Amy and I had our show stopper planned when the judging started.

All of the houses got lined up and they were AWESOME!

Emily won for the one everyone most wanted to eat! Her Chocolate shingles were delicious!

Next was Big Cat’s. He finished first and it was able to mock the rest of us.

Then there was Cort, who’s house fell apart but he made the best of it.

Wes & Hayley went all Breaking Bad and decided it was time to cook!

Andy was happy his house stayed together and was able to get Part of his roof decorated. It looks good from only one angle hahah.

Finally there was ours. It is worth two pictures as there can not be any more. Our show stopper this year was devastating.

Unfortunately the Fire Department was not able to save it.

Not sure how we will top these next year but it is sure to be fun. Add a comment and vote for your favorite!

Day 343 –

Funny, I thought this blog was going somewhere else to day but, I just never really know until I start typing.

Whenever I see the combination of 343 it makes me think of 9/11. It is a trigger for me to remind me of that horrible day in American history. 343 is the number of firefighters who lost their lives that day, running into buildings to help everyone run out. On that day 2.977 victims lost their lives for no good reason. It was an act of terrorism.

I do not want this to get political at all I just want to share what may be an unpopular opinion but, it is mine and well, I am the guy up typing at 530 in the morning.

Yesterday a 500 report was released that basically said that the CIA coersively interrogated suspected terrorists to get information on other terrorists that resulted in the safety of thousands of saved American lives.

Are you ready for my reaction on this report?

. . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is the CIA people! What do you think they do over there? Knock on doors? “Excuse me, Mr Terrorist? I was hoping you would tell me what your plans are for that dirty bomb it looks like you are making?” “No? Okay then you have a great day!”

Are we out of our minds? Do we not remember that radicals in the middle east chop of the heads of innocents just because they have an American passport? They flew planes into buildings? They blow up cars and subways and whatever else they can trying to take as many lives as they can.

Here is where I may get unpopular and may even be called stupid or sheepish . . . bahhhhh!

I like the fact that there are people in my government willing to do things that I am not to keep me safe. I like, and am very thankful for people that stand on walls, carry guns, and may even “coersively” interrogate someone to get information that will keep me as a citizen safe.

I like being a sheep. It has worked for the American public for a couple hundred years. It has not really been until the last couple decades when information is so readily available, that somewhere we decided that we need to know everything. We decided it was our right to know everything and then pass judgement on it from the comfort of our suburban life.

The fact of the matter is while people sit at home with peace signs painted on the curb, there are real dangers out there. Dangers I am sure that thankfully someone is keeping from us because they would scare the hell out of us on a daily basis and we may never want to leave our homes.

I am perfectly happy knowing that there are things that go on to protect my freedoms, that I probably should not know about. I believe the world is a very scary place and I am happy that there are people to deal with that scaryness.

That being said, I am going to enjoy my day, knowing that I live in America and enjoy being in probably the safest country in the world because of people doing things that I don’t know about to keep it that way.