Whether Goes the Weather

Whether Goes the Weather was Originally Posted on August 16, 2004 by lavarock

Florida has had its share of weather and I bet they would love to just have some sunshine for a while. My Sister was in the Daytona Beach area and experienced her first hurricane. In my life I’ve been near a few and also been way too close to a number of tornados, but Sis has not, until now.

What better place to ride out the storm (having already sold her house back there) was in a hotel room on the ocean side of the building… She saw people from the office keep going outside and looking at the cars and there were car alarms were going off. When Sis ended up going downstairs she discovered that most if not all of the car windows had been destroyed. There was sand and water in the vehicles, but I don’t know if they were sandblasted or debris got them. Signs were bent over and she saw plows plowing debris out of the roads so people could get through.

Back here in Captain Cook we have had a bit of sun and a bit of rain. Last night the outdoor temperature plummeted a few degrees lower than normal and I had to pull the blanket a bit closer to me. Gosh, it must have dropped to 65 degrees last night…

On the other “weather front”, I’m wondering WHETHER the mortgage company’s underwriter is finally going to approve the mortgage. The trust and I have done everything they have asked and this particular transaction is getting very old. It has taken a year and a half so far and I would love to start paying them some interest.

I was up island over the weekend, having someone help me with my accounting. I had to make sure that I am assigning all my expenses and income in the right columns. I have saved all of the receipts and need to sort and enter them now.

Of course, there is little income yet, but that is mainly because I have not “officially” opened the website wide open. I’m still tweaking and adjusting, getting my processes in place and making sure everything works. The site is already in some search engines, but not very high in the keyword search. That will change soon also as I submit it to all of them.

A Blog reader took advantage of my offer of coffee and should be receiving it soon!

Last night I signed up for a hotel program upgrade that will give me a cheap 25,000 frequent flier miles (almost enough for a trip to Hawaii – or FROM it and back). Even with the threat of Delta going bankrupt, most companies come out of Chapter 11 in better shape. Now that “Leo” is gone, Delta has a better chance. It was quite idiotic how they handled their business of late.

Airlines created a frequent flier program as an affinity program – that is, encourage people to fly one airline and then reward them. Subway does the same thing; buy a sub and get stickers. Collect enough stickers and you get a free meal. So Delta had such a program and it seems quite good. THEN, in some convoluted cost cutting move, they decide to change the program so drastically, that these people who were their best and most loyal customers left in droves. We were the customers who had our companies book us on Delta so that we could continue getting these perks and miles. We would fly (as I did) just for the fun of it, to get miles. People would fly “mileage runs” which were low cost routes to increase miles so we could keep status with the airline. We were “flying idiots” until the changes, when Delta got us to stop flying and we became just run of the mill “idiots”. They told the government they needed a handout and blamed 9-11 for their woes when we frequent fliers knew the REAL reason why we weren’t flying.

With companies like this, there is always an uproar when the company does poorly and the upper management is giving themselves lots of compensation.

Time will tell whether they can weather the storm!