Month: September 2021

September 30, 2021 – Blood, Bones and Butter

September 30, 2021 /

It’s been a long time coming, but today I am going to review the Left Coast Cellars’ Culinary Book Club August 2021 selection. The book was “Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef” by Gabrielle Hamilton.

I think that I have been pretty clear that it has been a challenging period in my life. Most nights, I am hitting the pillow and passing out to be up at 4AM the next day. So, while this book is short, it took me probably ten weeks to read. I was reading concurrently with 1984 as well, that is how long this has taken me.

If you are like me, then you have never heard of Gabrielle Hamilton. She is the owner and chef at a New York Restaurant called Prune. Again, this is another establishment that I don’t know anything about. But, I trust that companions at the book club to make choices that are interesting and worthy.

I am going to be blunt, I thought that this book was a train wreck. The writing style was neurotic and the story ends on a cliffhanger. Gabrielle obtained a MFA in Fiction and is an accomplished columnist and non-fiction writer as well as being a chef. However, I found the sentence structure overly flowery; like every noun needed two or three adjectives.

I have no reason to believe that the memoir was not truthful, it is the way she went about her life that was bothersome. For instance, she married an Italian because he needed help with his green card. There was never any real love in the relationship and in fact they lived apart for a number of years. Yet, much of the later part of the book was angled at the tortuous relationship and regret that it wasn’t better.

Prior to marrying the Italian, she was a lesbian for several years whom she abruptly left to get married after having a short, secret affair. I am not into judging lifestyles but the ‘in your face’ decision making definitely makes me think that there is no plan, no thought and no self reflection. What I am ultimately saying is that is just because you make a lifetime of poor decisions, I don’t think that is necessarily worthy of celebration. I think I would have liked it better if there was some sort of lessons learned from these things.

What I took from this was Gabrielle was trying to impart that hard work supersedes all of the missteps and misfortune in her life. I do believe that there is a large component of success that requires hard work. I do not believe that is the only ingredient. Another theme I can endorse is that relative career success does not translate into happiness.

Before I go off the deep end with criticism, Gabrielle is a human and it takes courage to be honest. Unfortunately, I didn’t see a lot of remorse to try and do things better. So, while I think sharing your life is gutsy, I feel a bit of pity for her because it seems like a lonely existence.

End Your Programming Routine: If you can’t stand my point of view most times, then this might be the story for you. This might be the most harsh review that I have ever written. I am looking forward to next months selection ‘Extra Virginity’.

September 29, 2021 – Repurpose Rice

September 29, 2021 /

Knowing what my week looked like, I set about making a plan on how to line up the meals. Usually, part of my strategy is to look at what we have and what is risking going bad and how I can try to ‘get rid of this’ (without waste). Looking at the schedule I also have need to have some leftovers or at least quick meals.

Currently, my biggest problem is that my freezer is at capacity. I also know that is a good problem to have. However, inheriting a lot of food yields things that we wouldn’t normally purchase or prepare. With that, I am trying to clear up space while trying to do new and interesting things (that will be eaten). We got an open package of pot stickers to finish off last night.

Yesterday, I talked about beans. I don’t always, but I did decide to pair with rice for my fish tacos. I partially did that because I was expecting to make fried rice with the pot stickers the next day. How do you make rice that pairs with beans and can then be repurposed to Asian the next day and by the way make it vegan and meat only eaters will eat it? Well it is not easy, but we found a way to make it work.

Let me diverge a slight bit, I am going to beat up on Mexican restaurants again. When you go out, the only rice you see is reddish in color and has some degree of seasoning. That is an attempt to make the classic rice preparation which is essentially rice made in salsa (at least that is the color). The best way to finish the combination is balance the remainder of the liquid with chicken broth and add some cumin.

I learned a long time ago that is only one way to prepare rice. You can omit the salsa and make a white rice (with onion). This is more typical in the southern part of Mexico. Cumin is out if it is to become fried rice tomorrow and of course chicken broth fails the vegan test. We also learned recently another way of doing it which is to use coconut water. This becomes more Caribbean and leans more to the Asian for sure. Plus, I think that it is highly appropriate for fish tacos.

I softened some onion and then browned some rice. Then, I added the coconut water and made rice the way you normally would. Typically, part of the recipe is also coconut milk as well, I just wanted a small amount for us, so I omitted that this time. and that is it.

The next day, I fried some vegetables and added the rice, some soy sauce and viola. Again, to keep this vegan I had to omit the butter, egg or fish sauce. But, it was good enough to pair with pot stickers and green beans in black bean sauce.

End Your Programming Routine: With planning and modification, you can span the globe in two nights with half the amount of work. That may be a slight exaggeration but the principle holds true. The other advantage is that it reduces the chance of orphaned side dishes that can sometimes be difficult to eat or pair. Not every meal is fancy, tonight there is enough from the previous meals in the last couple of days for leftovers too.

September 28, 2021 – Kick-Ass, Refried Beans

September 28, 2021 /

There is going to be a lot of food content in the near future. It is partially because I am cooking a lot, partially because it is harvest time and I have to take advantage of that and partially because I haven’t done much in the past year. Aside from running kids around and sorting through junk this is the one thing that is going on in my life.

Some friends brought us over a meal the other night. It was black beans, chicken and tortillas with salsa. I would call it basically burrito fixings. We ate on it a couple of times. But I can’t get my kids to eat the same thing more than twice in a row, so a big container of beans sat in the back of the refrigerator for a week. And the reality is one of my son’s is vegan this month so he wont eat anything that is unknown origin so it was just the two of us eating all this food.

I got really introduced to beans when I started hanging out with my wife. As a child, we would open a can of refried beans and make burritos about once a month. We didn’t go out to eat much and we just weren’t really exposed to the different preparations. Somewhere in that journey, I was introduced to repurposing whole beans into refried beans. I just never gave it much thought. Mind you, this is really a leftover technique, which is right up my alley.

Have you ever gone to a Mexican restaurant and had tasty beans? It is pretty rare. Most of the time, the stale tasting beans pairs nicely with the crappy, bland rice and pour excuse for fiesta food. They lack salt and depth normally, the only thing that fixes the situation would be some fiery hot salsa so that you cannot taste them. OK, I am going to stop bashing Mexican restaurants now.

Why is that? What is going wrong? There are two things, one is that no one is tasting as time goes on. The other is that there is nothing going into the beans to make them taste any better. It is very simple to take beans from meh to great.

Sometimes, if I have leftover pico de gallo, I will add that. In this case, I added a small tomato and a little bit of onion and a clove of garlic. I also added a heavy spoon of bacon grease. There is no real recipe for this however, think about proportions. If you open one can of beans, then I would say about a 1/8 cup of additions. is about right.

Add additional water to the mixture and boil the heck out of it. The object is to boil the raw ingredients until they disintegrate and are easy to mash. You also need to keep boiling off all of the extra water, so don’t carried away with adding too much water. After boiling for a bit, start mashing the mixture. Then, taste for salt and adjust accordingly.

You can always add more water and keep boiling if things aren’t as soft as you would like it. When I was done, I put the beans into a bowl and got a little heavy handed with the Feta (I was trying to get rid of the container and it had more than I realized). That is it. No cheese is necessary but for more authentic touch, use Cotija.

Other variations substitute olive oil for bacon grease or even skip it altogether. The bacon fat add smokiness and the fat in general adds to the texture to the beans. Sometimes I will add a little cumin. I like my beans a little coarser than puree so the masher works well, but an immersion blender would have a more uniform mix.

End Your Programming Routine: If you don’t like beans, it is probably because you haven’t had them done well. I really like them for breakfast with eggs and fried potatoes and a little bit of Cholula on them. I like them in my breakfast burrito as well. Another thing I discovered earlier this year was to put them on the bottom layer of a tostada. It will keep the giant chip from breaking up when you take the first bite.

September 27, 2021- Making Pesto

September 27, 2021 /

Harvest season is still going strong although I think that we are over the peak. Making pesto has been on my list for a couple of weeks now as my basil has started to flower. It is pretty easy with a couple of ingredients and a food processor. It stores well in the freezer for later.

I trimmed the majority of the stems off of the plant. I do leave some in case the plant wants to grow again or I have a little basil to use for a short while before the plant gives out. Strip the leaves and rinse them off. Gather the rest of the ingredients.

  • Parmesan cheese
  • garlic
  • Pine nuts (or walnuts)
  • olive oil
  • salt

Here is a rough recipe that I use.

  • 2 cps, loosely packed basil leaves
  • 1/2 cp shredded Parmesan cheese
  • 2 tbs nuts
  • 1/4 cp olive oil (approx.)
  • 1 clove garlic
  • salt to taste

Here is the process that I used minimizing cleanup with the food processor.

  1. Determine the amount of basil leaves so that I can scale the recipe proportionately
  2. Shred the cheese
  3. Add the nuts to the cheese
  4. When the nuts have been broken down with the cheese, add the basil and process as much as possible.
  5. When the mixture stops moving, add olive oil to the active mixture and additional chopping will begin to occur.
  6. Keep processing to achieve uniform mixture
  7. Add garlic
  8. Taste for salt

If you eat pesto, then you probably have an idea about how much you use per serving. I would say that we use for about a 1/2 cup of pesto for a family of four’s pasta. I would suggest that portion is how the batch gets distributed for storage. That way, when you pull it out to use, then you have the proper amount for the meal.

End Your Programming Routine: Basil is easy to grow, it likes hot weather. I used some from the plant throughout the summer but the majority went to make this pesto. Pesto is easy to make and delicious. It’s great this time of year, but it is also great in the middle of winter for some reminder of the flavor of summer.

September 24, 2021 – Friday Night Lights

September 24, 2021 /

Hopefully, we will end on a high note this week. I have talked a little bit about the potential drawbacks of living in a small town. However, one of the great things about living in a small town is the cohesiveness around something (sometimes). One of those seem to be football on Friday nights. Sure, not everyone is there but those that are are into it.

It was 2012 when we had some discussions with my wife’s sister about my nephew coming to live with us. I won’t get into all the dynamics of the decision, but in essence he moved in around the time school started. At that point, he was in eighth grade and played football. At that time playing in middle school games were on Wednesday. As he progressed in High School, Freshman games were on Thursday and then JV games were on opposite fields of the Varsity game but on Fridays. We became accustomed to scheduling our Friday Nights around the football schedule.

Since my nephew graduated over four years ago, we haven’t attended games so rigidly as previously. But it doesn’t mean that we haven’t gone to a game or two a year. Last year, was atypical because the games were in the spring and attendance was limited to parents of the players and a handful of students. This year, things are back to a degree of normalcy and my kids are playing in the Pep Band. So, I watched the game last Friday once again.

To try and express what I am feeling better I will try to describe the environment. In the middle picture it is halftime. Local children are playing catch on the field. The last picture is post the game and parents, players, fans and others are socializing on the field. To me that says that we belong here.

One year, we were watching the homecoming game and to our surprise, there were fireworks after the game. Apparently, fireworks were ordered for another event in town and it got rained out so they decided to launch the fireworks at the football game instead. I haven’t seen this in a couple of years, but for a short time there was a pre-game tailgater.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not saying that a stadium that holds maybe 1000 people represents the entire community. There are a number of people that choose to run their business or don’t have any current connections to the school, maybe their children attended. But for those that chose to attend, it does represent what is good about living in a small town.

September 23, 2021 – Grab Bag or a Flaming Bag?

September 23, 2021 /

Even though I am going to the range tomorrow, I am out of mental energy to come up with an appropriate topic today for Tacticool Thursday. Hopefully, we will get my dad’s rifles sorted out finally after two years of trying. Hunting season starts in two weekends so it is time to get this finished.

I was listening to the Orvis Hunting and Shooting podcast the other day. I don’t remember the guest by name but I think that he was around 70 by the timeline of his life. He was talking about his childhood and how they would spend months out in the field. By my speculation, that means this was likely in the 1950s or 60s.

I started thinking about how life has changed since that time. For instance, I don’t know anyone that takes months off year over year unless you are a teacher, but certainly not in the fall. I also don’t know any kids that don’t attend school on a rigid schedule. The guest was also talking about how they had to live off of what they procured such as small game and fish. With all of today’s laws, that type of recreation would not be legal.

My mind wandered a bit more. From everything that I read about history, this kind of more leisurely lifestyle was more common earlier in the century. My how life has changed. Now, we can’t even take vacation without worrying that we are impacting our career. I am not going anywhere specific here, I am just lamenting that I cant even imagine taking months off a year.

One thing that my job hiatus taught me is that I need some downtime periodically. The difference between a week off and two years is night and day. It is almost as if one week off makes things worse because it is not like you can drop everything and pick it back up when you return.

Maybe it is the type of job that I have? Maybe if I was building houses rather than computer systems it would be better? I don’t really know because I have never worked a non-professional job longer than three months at a time. I have said this before that my favorite job was working as a janitor in college. It was a complete context switch between the lab and studying to just mop the floor. I feel that way about delivering for Amazon as well.

For me, having that time off allows me to reflect on what I could do differently so as not to have the same problems or experience in the future. I don’t think that there is enough time in a typical vacation to do that. There is also not enough time to resolve anything either. Maybe I should just take my own advice and accept the situation is what it is?

Another interesting topic came up in that conversation. It is the decline of the ‘outdoorsman’. As a result of the compression of time, people have become very specialized in their interest and less so a generalist. You think of people that identify as a hiker, trail-runner, mountain biker, hunter, or fisherman. Then you can break it down even further such as I am a bowhunter, big game hunter, upland bird hunter, duck hunter and everything has specific gear and seasons and dogs.

The point was made that people don’t need to know knots anymore because you can now buy a cheap ‘thing’ to replace what a knot would have done in the past. That all counts for some of the decline of general outdoor skills. I have heard it said that the number one tool for pioneers was the ax. With it you could blaze a trail, build a house, make other tools etc. I suppose if all I had was an ax, I could probably so some stuff I never thought possible. But, as of now I have no idea where to begin.

I thought that those things were interesting and thought provoking. I ran across this photo today and I am sure that it is not what the headline appears. That said, what a disgrace that our media uses to propagate this nonsense. I wonder if they were vaccinated?

End Your Programming Routine: Between my choices I am making and circumstance, I am exhausted. Today was kind of a free form writing as things come to mind. I am looking forward to spending my month out in the woods some day. At least I am looking for ways to add leisure back in my life if I can.

September 22, 2021 – Top of Mind Today, Estate Planning

September 22, 2021 /

I am certainly no expert in this topic and I hope that you will not find it boring but I have learned a thing or two about participating in the process. I hope that I can provide some perspective for you to think about. The other truth is that I had one perception and the reality is something different.

First of all, if your estate situation is complicated, I would definitely consult an attorney. Proper steps made make a big difference in the outcome. I had always assumed that being married had the simplest transfer and to some degree that is true. What isn’t exactly true is if assets are not jointly held or titled, then they are subject to probate.

Let me try to explain a little further. Let us say that your partner has a vehicle titled in his name only. If that partner dies, that asset gets thrown into the probate pot. If there is a will specifically designating the spouse as a beneficiary, then it is pretty clear that the spouse will get the asset post probate. If the will is not clear, then the asset is subject to the executor clearing the estate post probate.

What does all that mean? It means that first of all, there is a ‘cooling off’ period which is called probate. This is a legal procedure that recognizes the estate’s executor by name. The executor provides fiduciary responsibility until the probate period has closed. That means that the executor is entitled to sell assets to cover outstanding liabilities during the probate period. It also means additional creditors have time to make a claim against the estate.

In the end, the heirs named in the will and post the probate period will get the remainder of assets divided appropriately. If you made the assumption like I did that the spouse will assume all of the assets, that is not true. The spouse assumes 50% of the assets unless they are jointly titled in which case they do get 100% or they are specifically named in the will as getting all of the assets or the court deems it was the deceased intent to do (in the case of an inadequate will).

Debt that is in the name of the deceased is slightly different. It is true that all debt is still owed, but that is subject to the value of the estate. Meaning, any assets that are singly held must be liquidated to cover the debts until they are all paid or there is no money left in the estate.

There are some loopholes here, for instance retirement accounts or life insurance. Those things (hopefully) have a named beneficiary. That money would then move directly to the beneficiary without involvement of probate. However, if there is no beneficiary name, the money goes into probate for paying the debt of the the estate or split amongst the heirs.

Whoa, I thought this was going to be easier to explain. A vehicle is significant, but what about a house? This is the same thing. What is even more complicated is that if there is current debt against the asset, the asset is the security for the loan payment. This is one of the best cases for life insurance.

I think I have gotten through all of that, now is time for a relevant detour. I am staring out the door at my office. The basement is literally littered and clogged with junk. Most of it has an occasional use and a purpose. The question is ‘is it used, do you know you have it, can you find it?’ I have had this theory that it is so much easier to acquire things than it is to actually get rid of them. Not necessarily emotionally (sometimes that too) but physically. For instance, I ordered a dumpster to help with cleanup at my in-laws which cost me $650.

As a person with a preparedness mindset. I am always thinking about spares and backups and a way to re-use things, I also know that I have acquired my fair share of ‘other peoples problems’. When you think about getting a house ready for the market where some of the stuff is going to go into storage there are lots of things that won’t. I have hazardous waste for garden chemicals, paint that is two colors removed and hardware of one million varieties. Me being a handy guy and a tool guy, I have most of what I need. But, I don’t want to just throw stuff of value away. But in the vein of estate planning I think it would behoove us to think about the lifecycle of all the things we acquire so that it doesn’t become another problem.

My plan after finishing my office was to initiate the basement and garage clean-up. I never anticipated this life altering event to occur. As a result, I have been trying to combine my clean-up with helping out my mother-in-law. That makes it go quite a bit slower (for me).

End Your Programming Routine: I used to think ‘who cares what happens when I die’. I think this event has made me more thoughtful to the consequences to this line of thinking. I am not rushing out to make a will just yet, but it definitely needs to be on the short list this year. Additionally, I am thinking long and hard about what I may think is acceptable to keep laying around as I reorganize everything.

September 21, 2021 – Canning Pears

September 21, 2021 /

When I agreed to to take on this task, I knew that it was going to be tough. Now that I am done, I am happy to have this done. Let me say that I am worn out. I decided to do it all in one night rather than splitting it because of the the amount of energy it takes to get started. Meaning, it saves time to keep going rather stop and pick back up again.

Just because peaches and pears are done, doesn’t mean that I am done. I have basil that I am going to make into pesto and freeze. I have grapes that I am not sure what I want to do yet, I might make jelly or I might do nothing. I have my plum wine ready to start. Usually, I make applesauce too. I don’t think that there are enough apples this year to do so.

Today, I am going to talk about the process of canning for high acid foods, specifically pears. The two most important things are having everything gathered up and the sequencing of the steps. Meaning, this process can go much faster if things are moving in the right order.

The first thing I do is start heating the water for the canner (black on the left). But as long as things are heating up, get your syrup going (right, back) and heat up the scalding water for peeling (right, front). Have your workspace laid out so there is somewhere close to put finished jars to cool. In the right picture, I have the prep station setup including someplace to dump waste. I have the lids already off and the jars lined up so that I can move the funnel from jar to jar quickly and minimizing the mess.

I tried a new way of peeling this year. It involved scalding the pear for 15 seconds, and then immersing into cool water. In theory the skin peels of. I found that no matter how you slice it, this process was messy and time consuming. After the pears are peeled, I quarter them and remove the core and other blemishes.

As you get going, be sure to keep an eye on things going on. You may need to refill syrup so that sugar has time to dissolve in time to get the jars filled so that you don’t need to wait on that step to run the canner. Time in the canner is 25 minutes at a rolling boil. I find that I need to fiddle with the power gauge up and down to keep it going. The canner holds six jars technically, I find that I can do seven by putting one jar in the middle of the basket. Once boiled, I set aside on a towel to cool. Interestingly,

Canning works by two principles. One is that the sugar water acts as a preservative. The second is that the lid ultimately creates a seal which increases pressure inside the jar. As the contents boil, there is a slightly higher pressure inside the jar which drives oxygen out of the jar. It means that the jar leaks while the process is happening. In theory, the jars being submerged under water creates a ‘one way’ drive out of the jar.

I say all that to say that the jars end up sticky because some of that syrup boils out. Before storage, it is a good idea to clean off the outside. Sometimes I don’t and the consequences are that ants may find the jars in the spring. Of course they don’t get in, but they do crawl all over the place and who needs that?

I usually have a failure or two. With my peaches it was one jar out of twenty this year and I had one pear fail to seal. Those go into the fridge for short term consumption. Also, jars can break due to a temper set of glass. I never do this because it takes extra time and I always put my jars away clean but it is recommended to run the jars through the dishwasher before use. This helps with setting the right glass temper as well as cleaning.

End Your Programming Routine: Everything that you need to know can be found in the Ball canning handbook about $10. For free you can also supplement with YouTube. Since I grew up with this, I cannot each store bought canned fruit. It does take some planning, effort and commitment but I think that knowing how to do it is valuable.

September 20, 2021 – Speaking of Saving Time vs. Money

September 20, 2021 /

We had our first taste of fall come on Saturday. It rained nearly two inches which is really unusual. Despite the fact that I plumbed the heat pump condensate to the sump and it has been running lightly all summer, wouldn’t you know that the pump failed Saturday morning.

We were trying to get ready to head out the door for a day of clean-up at my in-laws property. Since we were expecting it to be raining and miserable all day, we were getting our rain gear from the basement. Luckily I was near the pump and I heard the pump running dry. I went over to inspect and found that the screw holding the switch bracket in place had rusted off and had wedged the level switch in the on position.

Knowing that we were going to be gone all day and knowing that we expected a lot of rain, I could not leave the house with this situation the way it was and not end up with a lot of water in the basement. I have done this repair before, My first attempt was to extract the broken part of the screw. But the mud, low light and depth of the pump made my first attempt not successful. Since I needed to remove the pump to try and fix the problem, I decided to replace the pump instead. There is no guarantee that I can get the broken screw out anyway.

It is 9:30 AM Saturday. The local hardware store is five minutes away and open. The short of it is that I had the pump swapped out in an hour. There was no major issue and hopefully, I will have a spare if I can fix the old one.

Given that we already had a long day scheduled and that we were late to begin with, I appreciate that the local hardware store was not only open but had what I needed in stock. Remember what I said on Friday maybe not always what you want, but will work? In this case, I replaced a 1/6 HP pump with a 1/3 HP pump.

Well, the smaller one was doing the job fine. Secondly, I paid probably twice as much for this pump than the smaller one. Lastly, pumps rely on pumping for cooling and the on/off cycle is the hardest part of the job. It is possible that this is oversized and will have a reduced lifespan as a result. I guess we will see. But, we had a dry basement and most of the day to do what we needed to do. Despite the trade offs, this will be good enough and price checking after the fact, I paid the same as at the big box.

End Your Programming Routine: How’s that for timing? I just want to reiterate that I appreciate that I could get the job done in such a short period of time. Anecdotally, I was explaining to my boys what was the problem and me fixing it. Meanwhile, on Sunday, the pastor was lamenting how his father never taught him anything around the house (which of course was the lead to a deeper subject). But, I think I was given a strong message with this problem.


September 17, 2021- The Value of Local Business and Relationships

September 17, 2021 /

I talk about planning a lot. I am pretty good about planning my stuff, but I fail hard on planning for the relationship level. Mother’s Day, Valentines, Birthdays and Christmas are all things that I dread. I would guess that it is because I don’t have a lot of interest in those things personally. I could care less if I do anything different on my birthday or not. Others in my family think it is a national holiday.

I have been holding on to this story since June, I am not sure why but I thought that I would save it until I really needed an idea. I know that it was at least partially because I wanted to do the topic justice. I don’t think that is really today, but it seemed like a good day to use it.

I live in a small town. It is the kind of place that nearly everything is closed by 8pm. Maybe you can imagine what that looks like but often doesn’t leave a lot of options from a retail standpoint. I would best describe the environment like you can often find something that will work but may not be exactly what you want.

I am speaking about hardware, building supplies, sporting goods, clothing and electronics. I am sure that it applies to other things as well but these are the things that I am often in search of. I have definitely grown more accustomed to going directly online. But that doesn’t work well when you haven’t planned in advance, see paragraph one above.

June 1 was my mom’s birthday. Of course I wasn’t prepared so I thought that I would get some flowers. Little did I know the flower shop closed at 4pm and it was 4:15. Fortunately, we already have a non-business relationship and she was still at the shop. I suspect that she would have done it for most people but it at least made me feel like I got preferential treatment.

In building this relationship, I have also learned that how things are done matter. For instance, I have learned that ordering directly from the flower shop puts more margin in the owners direction. So, while you might pay the same ordering from the shop directly versus a national service when the owner does better on the sale, other things happen. I talk about this more at the end of this post.

I do try to give business in town when I can. Without patrons willing to frequent the business, they wont be there at all let alone limited hours. Sometimes I pay the extra 30-50% premium to do my part for the convenience. I should also mention the next bigger city is nearly half an hour away. You are trading time for money in many instances. Unless money is really tight, time is often much more valuable to me.

The second half of this equation is that relationships aren’t free. Of course there is the financial part of it but I am talking about the quid pro quo side. I agreed to transform a picture frame into a memory box by cutting some slots so slogans written on blocks of wood could be slid in for a daughters graduation/birthday party.

It probably took me two hours to do. I will say that I was way more careful than I would normally be because it wasn’t my frame to damage or mess up. But, that is a good lesson for me as well as I can be a little too casual sometimes and things don’t go the way that I think they should in my mind.

Getting back to the theme here. Sometimes the relationship occurs before the business or sometimes it is the other way around. When I was in college, I became friendly with a guy whose parents owned a Chinese restaurant. We did our fair share of buying meals, but usually we got something comped or brought out to sample as well. There were a couple of times that we were invited to the Chinese New Year dinner with the family. That was really cool.

I will throw in one last example. There was a local gas station that unfortunately developed a tank leak and had to be torn down for environmental cleanup earlier this year. He says the plan is to rebuild quickly, I hope so.

I was going to the station across the street because the price was the same and it was the easiest to get back on the road in the direction that I wanted to go. But several times, the attendant asked me to wait 15 minutes for their staff meeting (we do not have self-service gasoline in Oregon). After about the third time this happened, I left to the first station I mentioned and never went back.

I was one of his earliest repeat customers I am pretty sure because he had just purchased the station. Each time I would hand him my debit card he would take the time to read the name and thank me before I left. It wasn’t long and he knew my vehicle, what I wanted. This guy was a people person anyway and I noticed over the years people would pull into the station largely to talk.

He also employed local kids to work. But the real reason I kept going to buy my gasoline was that I began to notice his business was a frequent sponsor of youth sports teams, seasonal music etc. I have never seen the station across the street sponsor anything in this town. Even though I paid at least 10 cents per gallon more I made the choice to spend my money there because it was working harder at things that were important to me.

End Your Programming Routine: The point to all of this is that business can build relationship. And, when you have commerce with relationship that becomes community. Community is caring, the drive to belong and participate which allow both to business and relationship to thrive.