Dateline: above the empty garage in Portsmouth RI, 10 July 2005
We found out today we are a four-PODS family. Too bad we only ordered 3 PODS. After moving the piano and the widescreen TV and a couple of mattresses (we're moving 6 sets in all, plus the crib!) into the POD, I looked at Vonne at around 1100 and said we either needed another POD or we needed to rent a truck for the remainder. No POD could be delivered until about 10 days after we're outta here, so no go there. Instead we locate a 16-foot Penske truck for half the price of what the fourth POD would have costed (you get huge discounts on #2 and #3 cause three can go on a single truck across the country). Buying $4 meant buying it full price. The truck was half that.
Then the issue of our two cars and getting both to Indiana. Turns out I took a speech date this week in upstate NY. I was planning to drive anyway because the air flights so screwy. So now I drive there, give speech, and then drive to Indiana to drop off car, flying back free (as always) on SWA. My son Kevin comes along. He flies free with me all the time on SWA (companion pass). We get back, pick up the truck, load it, and close on house--bang, bang, bang.
We had this all figured out and the plane tickets and truck reserved by 12 noon.
That, my friends, is why I married this woman--fastest decision-maker on the planet. Kirk and Spock got nothing on us!
Today I pack POD #3 for 13 hours, performing more heavy lifts that I can remember ever doing in one day. I'm talking the ones where you do the big-time grunting like a weightlifter at the Olympics.
I am beat.
Tomorrow, I have no idea whether we crank newsletter or not. My webmaster has not yet surfaced. If he does not, then I post a piece in my blog tomorrow from my partner-in-connectivity Steve DeAngelis. He wants to talk resiliency with regard to the London bombings. To me, resiliency is when you stop treating connectivity like a vulnerability and start seeing it as your greatest strength.
In lieu of a big post myself, let me say these things about the bombings:
1) If this is the big follow-up to Madrid a year-plus later, it's pretty weak, and no, I am not that impressed by bombs going off at the same time. If this is the long, slow ramp-up of Al Qaeda's civilizational war, then they haven't got a chance.
2) Picking London was a mistake. Too hard to really scare people there after all the IRA bombings. This is the home of the blitz--and the 2012 Olympics.
3) Trying to impact the G-8 was also a waste. All it did was bring terrorism and the global war against it back to the front burner.
4) Italy fears it will be next, with the elections and the direct threats from the group claiming responsibility. Frankly, Rome is easy pickings. Denmark, also warned, is far less so. The country takes its global peacekeeping role very seriously.
5) This bombing put a lot of resiliency on display, especially in the financial sector, which seemed to discount (in a financial sense) the attacks by the end of that very same market day. Clearly, a lot of the responses to 9/11, those new rule sets, are paying off. The Core as a whole becomes more robust in processing 9/11-wannabe attacks.
6) All such attacks will do is speed up the EU's legal and police integration. From that standpoint, the attacks couldn't have come at a better time than just after the "No" votes in France and the Netherlands.
7) Blair will come out of this stronger than ever. Right on the heels of winning the 2012 Olympics, he shows a strong face and his continuing push for deeper and better EU integration now looks more prescient compared to the go-nowhere French.
8) The post-9/11 reach pattern of Al Qaeda is unchanged: blow stuff up in Middle East and can reach into Europe. This is the same reach pattern we encountered with Middle East terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. What does that tell about who's winning a Global War on Terror?
Those are my big points for now.
I'll leave it to Steve in either tomorrow's blog or the newsletter to say more from the financial resiliency angle.
For me, it's butter pecan and lots of Ben-Gay--in that order.
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