Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 3)

I visited with a good friend on Sunday. It had been too long since we’d gotten together, which is almost entirely my fault since I’m not the one with a newborn. I sent a text in the morning asking if he’d be home and made the visit in the mid-afternoon.

At one point in the conversation my friend suggested that he’d expected me to tell him I’d be moving in the new year. That was a stinging indictment, and I don’t have current plans to relocate (though in fairness to him I did leave Raleigh on January 1 a few years ago to mark an end to that chapter of my life). Instead, I just wanted to spend some time with him. That was my only agenda item. It was refreshing. We sat in the living room for about an hour and talked while the baby slept. Then I took my normal Sunday walk on the American Tobacco Trail before sunset and a nice dinner of home-cooked, farm-raised lamb chops that I’d brought from Kentucky when I visited for Thanksgiving. It was one of the better Sundays I’ve had in a while.

So if this can serve as a note, take the opportunity this Christmas season to reach out to the friend you haven’t talked to in too long. The small effort will be good for both of your souls.

I’m not one to dress up for Halloween. I haven’t in over two decades. But I do enjoy seeing children giddy with all of the sugary goodness they collect in their baskets. Even in my teenage years, my favorite part of Halloween was sitting on the porch and interacting with all of the children who came by our house to get candy. As my house was in one of those neighborhoods where people came from miles around to get the best candy, there were always a lot of children. I also grew up in a small town so I knew most of them.

With the exception of a single year back in the house where I grew up when I was clerking, I’ve lived in dorms or apartments for about fifteen years now. But that changed a few months ago when I moved into a house. And this is a house in a leafy but still fairly dense area of cul-de-sacs. There are also plenty of children, both in the larger neighborhood and in my smaller section. So this was the first year I bought candy to have in order to be ready to give out.

Overall, it just didn’t happen. Sure I didn’t decorate the exterior the way some houses in the neighborhood did, but I had the light on and parked my car in such a way to make it easier to get to the door. I only had about four groups during the evening and a total of six children, one of whom was way too old to be trick-or-treating but was also alone so I just let that go without comment. Now I have most of a bag of skittles and starburst that I will try to pawn off on people during group meetings, but that is less of an issue than the tinge of loss I felt. I had hoped that this Halloween would be more like those from my youth, but it wasn’t to be.

Last week I took my second trip to Las Vegas this year. Vegas is hardly my favorite city in the world, but at least this conference was better than my April trip that produced exactly zero results. I actually stayed just a couple of blocks down the strip from where we stayed for the first trip this year, but I did not have to walk through as many casinos this time as this event was hosted at a hotel that isn’t directly connected with a casino.

This conference was the Rhodium Summit and this year marked my fourth time attending. It is a conference for people who run digital businesses, making me something of an outlier as the only attorney in the group but I roughly fit in with the others who run agencies. It is a very different atmosphere than other conferences. For one thing, if you try to sell things to the other attendees then you won’t get invited back. And I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen it happen. Attendance was lighter this year as a lot of members have been battered by a combination of tariffs, AI upheaval, and the continuing whims of platform algorithms. That made this year’s summit more intimate than some have been, which brings some positives. This event is a chance for me to spend time with people I’ve worked with, have zoom calls with, or otherwise have known for a while and who have similar work experiences to what I have with a fully remote business. That is the true value of both the conference and the larger group for me, the community feeling that I just don’t get in my day-to-day.

There is also the opportunity for idea cross-pollination in speaking with people who are high level operators. The group also includes plenty of members who are very AI-forward so I can always pick up a few things from them. Some of those lessons are going to fill my work free time over the coming weeks. It does require some translation to take the ideas that are working in one business model and place them into my own context, but that’s part of the fun. A conference room full of attorneys talking about how to operate a law firm sounds like something lifted from Dante, and that coming from someone who is doing just that.

After two years living in downtown Durham, I decided it was time for a change. I was tired of people making noise above me and of being downtown generally. As a result, I conducted a targeted search for a house to rent in a particular neighborhood. I managed to find one that was available for rent due to its owners being relocated for work, did a walkthrough, and signed the lease in short order.

I took possession on Friday and delivered multiple carloads of things over the course of the weekend. I set aside Monday for the big move day with the heavier furniture. It turned into a longer day than I’d hoped. Traffic meant things got off to a late start. I’d forgotten how long the distance is between that apartment and the loading dock. It was into the afternoon by the time the truck arrived at the house and the stuff took another hour plus to unload. Due to my severe underestimation of how long things would take I had to reschedule multiple meetings, something I hate doing. The crew was professional and I don’t have any complaints about their level of service, but it is always disconcerting to see your things hauled by people who care infinitely less about damaging them than you do.

Once everything was finally in the house and roughly in the rooms where I wanted things, I ate a very late lunch and jumped into a few meetings to make sure nothing was on fire. Then I started adjusting some things, unpacking others, and working to make it so that I could use the kitchen as a kitchen instead of a storage room. As of the time of writing, not a single room is finished. It has been much more about minimum viable than optimal with respect to my new place thus far. That should finally change today, but only after another trip to a home goods store to pick up a few items. As for when the house will be decorated as I intend, that will not be until Saturday at the earliest. Even this morning, I woke up early to put together one of my beds. I’d forgotten just how time-consuming it is to set things up (and how much your fingers can hurt from twisting screws and using allen wrenches and the like). Typing is not the most pleasant feeling right now, but the show must go on. At least it is rainy today so I won’t be tempted to go for a walk and so will continue to chip away at my task list in setting up my new residence.

Today is the second day of the July administration of the bar examination, a test given twice per year at the same time in every state and the District of Columbia. It has been nine years since I sat through the marathon exam in a freezing convention center on the North Carolina state fairgrounds. I don’t have any memories of the contents of the test itself and have had little reason to reflect on the experience in the intervening years. I studied intensely for a few months for a pass/fail test and I passed. Onto the next thing.

This year, though, I’ve observed one of the members of my church small group go through his own preparations for the exam. He was one of two members of the group who finished law school this spring so I was also able to watch their final year of law school—it seemed more pleasant than mine with less acrimony and fewer protests. He went through a more regimented exam preparation course than I did so he spoke in terms of percentages as his studying progressed. He also took several more practice exams than I recall taking. In the final week before I took the test, I stayed in a writer’s cabin sort of place outside Boone to get away from things and be sure I’d be relaxed going into the mental marathon. He largely stayed at home for his preparation.

I asked for and received regular updates about his studying progress. It’s not that he needed any accountability from me; I just wanted to feel helpful. As the exam grew closer, I talked less about studying and more about logistics. Bring a jacket. Don’t run out of snacks. Those are the things that can move the needle after months of studying. Another quirk of the rule against perpetuities probably won’t. Yes, that rule is a real thing. No, I’ve not had to worry about it since the bar exam. And I can say the same about almost everything else I crammed into my brain that spring and early summer.

When we went all-in on M&A, I did not consider that we would become D List (C List? B List?) celebrities in our tiny niche. Yet it seems as if that is the case. In the majority of our initial conversations now, potential clients have already watched hours of our content. It makes for a strange dynamic: In some sense they already know us but we don’t know anything about them. That is the essence of a parasocial relationship, something that has really only come into existence in the wider culture in the era of YouTube and social media.

Last week in NYC, this was on another level. The majority of conversations I had with people whom I didn’t know already started the same way. Someone would approach me, tell me they’d watched some number of our webinars, and then launch into either a burning question they wanted me to answer or to tell me where they were in their process of searching for a business to buy. From one perspective, this was a great dynamic for my introverted self. From another perspective, the level of familiarity was slightly unnerving. I didn’t even have my pre-meeting call notes for these conversations so more than once I had to invert the normal order of conversation and ask someone their name only after answering their substantive question. That part didn’t bother me. It was the constancy of conversation that did that; more than once I had to sit down in a quiet corner for a quick reset. At least now I’ve reached the point where I actually take those energy breaks following the imperative to know thyself.

It is always hard to judge the success of an event in its immediate aftermath. As we quip internally, it’s all about winning the follow up. As we’ve already been in contact with almost everyone with whom I spoke, this is a slightly different task than at most conferences. Still, we added some notes to our quirky CRM setup and updated our follow-up sequences accordingly.

In addition to the work trip this week and juggling multiple closings, I spent a few days at a resort in Puerto Rico. It was not a destination I would have chosen and probably not a place I’ll return to anytime soon, but that wasn’t the point. There were red flags on the beach consistently and warning signs about rip currents anyway. I took a short walk on the beach one morning when I woke up way too early, but otherwise stayed out of the sun and returned just as pale as I’d started.

I went for a retreat through a community of entrepreneurs with online businesses. I am the only attorney as it is a group of people running content, digital agencies, ecommerce, and SaaS businesses, but the way we operate our business looks a lot like many of the digital agencies and I’m able to share a perspective on the M&A process that is otherwise absent from the group. I’m not in the group for business development (though I have assisted members of the group with transactions), but for me it’s more about exposure to cutting edge ideas and being around my people.

The event was two days of sessions, a mix of presentations and hot seats to help members with particularly pressing issues, and an excursion day where we went into Old San Juan and kayaked into a bay filled with bioluminescent plankton. I skipped out on the morning coffee tour and instead sat around talking with other people who decided not to schlep up and down hills in the sun; I don’t drink coffee anyway. The notes I took during the sessions will take weeks to fully process as I mentally turn over the ideas in my head and think about how they might translate into my own context.

I’ve attended several events with this group, both in-person and virtually. At this point, I know most of the people and even if we only see each other once or twice a year we’re able to have conversations as friends. It is the sort of community that I’ve not yet really found in any one place, a group of people who understand the business and life challenges that come with the path I’ve chosen. It’s a group of people with whom I’m able to have conversations that just aren’t possible elsewhere. It says a lot about the group that I’m willing to leave North Carolina during what is some of the best weather of the year to go to tropical humidity and that I’m willing to go to Las Vegas every year for the main conference even though Sin City is hardly my speed.

One of my cousins came to visit last weekend with her husband. The stated reason was to attend a bbq, beer, and bourbon festival, but part of me thinks that they just wanted to come see how I’m living here in Durham.

We started off Friday evening with a short walk to a very good ramen place that doubles up with some very good desserts. No, that is not a natural combination. Yes, it works. Then we finished the evening at one of the many cocktail bars within a ten minute walking radius of my apartment. Given the travel adventure they’d had on their journey, venturing much more than that was out of the question.

On Saturday morning, we strolled over to the farmer’s market and my guests got some coffee. I didn’t actually do any shopping like I normally would, but that wasn’t the point. The point was just to show them what is here (even if I was unable to provide any commentary or recommendations about the coffee). The festival was at an amphitheater in Cary that I didn’t even know existed before hearing about this event, so I took us on a meandering path to get there that saw us go past several of the new developments that are springing up everywhere and past Cary’s new downtown park that is a compact haven for young families.

At the festival, it was hot and humid. I didn’t have anything earth-shattering and the bbq sandwich I had was a bit spicy, but I did have a bourbon that incorporated some French oak staves and so had a unique profile. This wasn’t the first of this type I’d had, but I did prefer it to its more well-known competitor. There was also a Cheerwine ale that I sampled. It matched the profile of Cheerwine, but I’m not a big fan of the cherry drink so I don’t think I’ll be picking up any of that novelty beer the next time I’m at the grocery store.

We left just in advance of a large squall line of a storm and waited most of it out at what I consider to be Cary’s best brewery. Then when we got hungry we drove back to Durham and ate the very generous portions of my favorite Thai restaurant, including the mango sticky risk for dessert.

Then on Sunday morning, we had breakfast at a little restaurant in a converted gas station and I saw them off back westward. It was the sort of trip that might have given my visitors the impression that I eat out all of the time when I really only eat out for two or three meals per week. At least they should now better understand why I chose Durham instead of Raleigh when I decided to return to the Triangle a year ago. Then it was back to reality for me with grocery shopping and laundry. That reality sure can be a pesky thing sometimes.

Food is very important to me. More than once, I’ve planned large parts of vacations around meals and restaurants. My most recent such trip was to Mexico City in the spring, where things tilted a bit too heavily towards things that looked pretty online as opposed to finding the absolute best food possible (I still had some really good food though). Nonetheless, my cooking at home tends to be just a few dishes that I cook in something like a two week rotation. Slowly, I’m working to branch out and introduce new elements into my home cooking and this weekend I had some free time to do just that.

A few times per year, I visit World Market and head straight to the food section. I’ll pick up a few things I’ve encountered on my travels if they are in stock (anyone else fancy an Almdudler on occasion), but I also try to buy a few things that I’ve never had before and might make for good experiments. In this way, I’ve found a few fruit spreads that go nicely with pork chops and have picked up new snacks to sprinkle into my rotation and sauces that I can use when I choose to experiment.

One of the purchases on my most recent trip was chimichurri, a mix of herbs and oil common in parts of Latin America. I wanted an Argentinian kick for dinner on Sunday so I cooked a steak and went through the full process of cooking morrones asados, including taking the time to let the peppers steam so that I could peel them before adding the oregano. The pairing worked nicely even if I opted against adding malbec for what would have been a more complete experience.

Then I followed it up with some mango sticky rice for dessert. That was much more of an adventure as I was working with a new kind of rice and opted for a more involved cooking method than my little trusty rice cooker. I also don’t think I got the ratios spot on for the sauce, but the final result was still a good dessert even if it wasn’t restaurant quality this time. And if anyone has a problem with me mixing food from South America and Asia in the same meal, then I encourage you to try a few “crazy” combinations yourself. With AI, all you have to do is type in the ingredients you have and what sort of taste or location you want and you can get multiple recipe options in seconds.

This weekend, my curling club hosted a bonspiel (tournament) for the members. It wasn’t meant to be a true club championship as there was plenty of encouragement to mix experience levels on teams, but there was still seeding for purposes of the early stages. Though I’ve now been a member of the club for a few years, I still don’t have a deep network of connections and so got left out of the early discussions as teams formed. I put myself on the list of people who would like to join a team, but a few weeks out I just assumed that all spots were full and that I’d miss out. I then received an email from someone I didn’t recognize. Upon hearing that there was room for one more team to sign up, this person had taken the initiative to sign up a team consisting of the first four people on the availability list. And just like that, I had a team and was signed up to play in my first bonspiel.

For those who don’t know, the most common form of curling has four-person teams. Each person throws two consecutive stones. I’ve played every position now and was willing to play any position on this team. As we discovered through a bit of email conversation, I was also the only one of the four of us who had ever played skip (the one who throws last and is akin to the team captain). That meant I got the job. Mind you, I’d only played skip in two games prior to the bonspiel, so I was by far the least experienced skip in the 32-team field. We met about 15 minutes before our first game and jumped straight into it after the shortest of talks about how I planned to play defensively so that we’d stay in the game as long as possible and hopefully not get crushed.

We were the lowest seed in our section of the bracket, which gave us a little bonus power up that I successfully used to tie the game after the fifth end (ends are like innings in baseball only there are 8 in curling the way we were playing). That is not where we expected to be. I thought we’d give up 4 or 5 early and be out of it. Even my last rock had a theoretical chance of tying the game, which surprised everyone in the building. The hypothetical hero shot didn’t work and we lost, but it wasn’t a blowout. We’d exceeded my expectations and had our opponents concerned until almost the very end.

Our second game was the most painful. Both of the first two games were against people I play with or against in my regular Monday league, and I’ve actually won the Monday league playing for both of the skips I was now drawn against. In the second game, we were up by four with two ends to play. Then we narrowly missed a few shots, they made some great shots, and I missed a wide open hit at the end by aiming too wide and we lost by one. We had the game won and let it slip through our hands. Even though I’d now only known my teammates for a few hours in total, I felt terrible for having let them down. At some point I’ll watch the film to analyze the game but it’s still too raw.

The third game was more of the same—narrow misses on multiple shots that would have won the game for us and a bad break when one of the other team’s misses resulted in a tremendous outcome for them and multiple points in the end. Again I had a chance with my final rock and again the effort at a hero shot was unsuccessful. No blowouts, but 0-3 nonetheless.

I still haven’t won a game as skip, but that will change in time. Curling is a different game when you play the back end instead of the front end. I’ve now played all four positions enough to at least attest to that. I’ve gotten to the point where strategy comes into play and that makes the game so much more mentally engaging and fun. Now I’ll spend the rest of this season practicing my technique and skills in preparation for taking another step up in competition in the fall. I’ll probably go down a YouTube rabbit hole on strategy and there are even a few books on the subject too. I enjoy the grind of working to achieve more than basic competence at a skill. To go deeper is to be able to appreciate greatness, and I’d like to have more of both greatness and appreciation in my life.