If nothing else, I can make me some Bitmoji graphics. Obviously I’m not an artist.

Hello readers!

We used the recent US holiday to take a much-needed breather. We all have “things” going on, too. Like, I have a puppy. They take up time.

What’s going on

Russell and Carol are selling his mom’s house (she didn’t want to buy from us, but we did try!). Russ had to take a breather from our stuff to train a lot of people at his full-time job, but he’s back now.

Carol has been training her daughter, Sierra, to help us out over the summer. That’s going to be really good! We also have my sister, Canova, helping out with writing postcards for one of Lee’s campaigns, so we are actively doing the house searching.

Today she is at the Austin FortuneBuilders event going on this week. Lee had intended tospend a few days at the FortuneBuilders event, too. But, a closing and a lease signing for our Hermits’ Rest Enterprises business have come up. So, he is in Cameron.

I feel bad that I can’t be at the FortuneBuilders thing, too, but my OTHER job is in crunch time week this week. I have to write me up some training materials as fast as humanly possible. So, hello to all the FB family out there! They even had a gathering that we missed (Lee isn’t on Facebook anymore, so he doesn’t see things, and I was ranching).

Lee has been doing a giant audit of all our finances, which means he hasn’t blogged recently (plus writer’s block, that thing writers get, which makes me not a writer, but a typist, because I don’t get to have writer’s block in my job!).

This is how Mandi and I looked in her back yard until it finally got mowed.

There’s been another thing Lee has dealt with lately but has been unable to discus. Now that it’s over I’m hoping he will write something up. It will be an important cautionary tale, but I would rather he tell it (ooh, foreshadowing). AND we have yet another really interesting new business project lined up that we can’t talk about yet. No wonder I haven’t been blogging; it’s like the CIA around here.

Our other frequent contributor, Mandi, has been working away on the renovation project (dealing directly with Lowe’s) and Lee’s finance stuff, too, plus going through the drama of a child graduating from high school, which is hard on a mom. But we are all proud of Seth!

Grassy Issues

I’d say our BIGGEST news that I am authorized to discuss is that the lawns finally got mowed at the Cameron office. The amount of trouble it took to achieve that seemingly simple task boggled my mind. But we did what we should have done all along, which was to stop trying to get the cheapest person possible and instead find someone with a billing system and a staff.

It’s hard to know what’s the right thing to do, though, because we have team members who strongly believe in finding the least expensive option, no matter what, and others who focus on quality over all, while others are looking for what takes the least amount of our expensive effort. There has to be a middle ground!