1 Million Friends

I’m looking in to how RCF is going to grow this year. The #1 thing to do is to change from a company solely owned by me, to becoming a corporation, a non-profit one, where the members own the club. This does a few things:

• Members have a larger stake in how things are run at RCF
• People can donate and get tax deductions
• Schools are more amicable to letting us advertise to their students
• Radio and news will give us free publicity when we have events
• At some point, I could leave and the club would live on. Not that I plan to leave any time soon, but someday.

Then on top of that I’m looking in to a facility. I want to buy a place, build some equity for the club. There’s a nice space, 15,000 sqft, on 2 acres, it would easily fit 9 strips, all the stuff I want like a pro shop, locker rooms, bag storage, etc.

The price: $1 million… plus now utilities, maintenance staff, taxes, property insurance, etc. would now be on the club.

So the question becomes, do I have 1 million friends willing to donate $1 each? Or make 100,000 friends willing to donate $10 each to see Lafayette have the premier fencing facility in the Midwest? I think in reality, I might know 1,000 people, most of whom I could talk into parting with a buck or two.

So some other ideas I’ve had that might compliment the friend idea well:

• We could have RCF things at places like Taco Bell where they ask you “would you like to donate a dollar to the children’s hospital?”
• Another thing to do is sell parts of the club. If it were new construction, we could sell bricks in the pavement, or bricks on the side of the building with the names of the person who purchased it. Since this is an existing building we could put plaques at the ends of the strips, “sponsor a strip for $1,000″ or something like that, get businesses involved that way.

Of course, if some wealthy individual out there is suddenly feeling passionate about fencing and would like to see a young man realize a dream, then our address is:

River City Fencing
222 N Chauncey Ave, #102
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Booked!

So I’ve started making arrangements for my move. I’m not leaving Lafayette, just switching from a run down house to a new-ish apartment complex. No grass to mow. Not that I mind the act of mowing the grass, it’s more finding time to do so. Anyway, I’m planning to move on Saturday June 16th and an email with my new address will go out soon.

To help get me across town, I’m having a moving party and you’re invited!. Ok, so it won’t be much of a party, it’ll really be a couple of strong backs helping to load and unload the UHAUL. And a few more hands to help pack up the last minute odds and ends and unpack at the new place. Moving starts at 9AM and has to be done by 3 or 4 at the latest so I can help run a fencing demo at the Taste of Tippecanoe. Then Sunday, I’ve got to head up to Mishawaka to formally accept the hand-off of the duties of being the Indiana Division USFA Secretary.

I’ll have a weekend between moving and when I leave for the National Fencing Championships in Miami, FL. If all goes well, I’ll be mostly settled before I leave for a week.

A Hollow Victory

I won the beard-off, but only because my coworker shaved. He claimed he couldn’t stand the itchiness. I grow it and shave it enough that it doesn’t bother me. He says it’s because I don’t grow a beard on my neck. I guess he could be right.

I figured I would have lost, but it would have been a close margin, no blow out. So I don’t really know why he gave in. Maybe he had a sales call. Maybe he had a hot date. maybe it really was just too itchy. Regardless, i think I get at least a few man points for stickin’ it out.

Habitat for humanity (HFH)

I finished my online orientation for HFH tonight (my sleep cycle is all out of whack), and I’m worried that volunteering this way isn’t going to jive with my job(s). They do construction from 8:30AM until about 3:30pm when they send people home according to the site. They work Tuesday through Saturday. So at least there’s a Saturday, but I’m rarely home on the weekends as it stands.

Once I get a hold of a real person at HFH and get the full scoop (because there’s also no houses listed on the construction calendar), I may see if I can finagle a shift in work schedule, do HFH from 8:30-noon, then work 1 to 9 or so, once a week. I really want to get back in to swinging a hammer in service for others.

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Beyond Lafayette Fencing

It seems I’ve been found by a fencer down at AFA and that they’re offering blogs to their members. I thought about this idea, but there’s so many other places for people to blog, like Fencing.net and their own wordpress,com account not to mention facebook and such that I figured I’d let someone else do it better.

A Fun Day By Design

I’m in the middle of this beard-off, and by Friday, it was clear that I probably wasn’t the winning horse. So I did the next best thing to cheating, made a joke. Today i walked in to work with a long thick, black beard that even Gimli would be jealous of. It only cost me $5 at the costume shop and for the laughs I got, it was worth every penny.

Then my coworker Matt had his birthday today. He loves telling variations of this joke:

A pirate walks in to the bar, and he’s got a ship wheel in all of it’s cumbersome, weighty glory attached at his waist. A guy at the bar wonders what’s going on, so he walks up to the pirate and says,
“Hey sailor, what’s with the nautical wheel?”
To which the pirate replies, “Arrr! It be drivin’ me nuts!”

So Matt was quite pleased to find a belt buckle with a ship wheel on it and much fine laughter and retelling of the joke ensued.

You just can’t go home unhappy after a day at work like that.

Dreams Are Back

I’ve kicked the Coke/caffeine so I’ve started dreaming again. Last night’s dream was crazy. What I remember was running out of the door in the garage in my house back in Farmington. When I lived there, there was a fence, so we’d let the dog go out there, but now there was no fence, but certainly the same house. I made it to the back property line before I heard my chaser coming. I didn’t look back till I had made it to the front of the neighbor’s house. What I saw was a tall woman, 6′ maybe, slender, big dark curly hair, wearing a tight black t-shirt, black hiking boots, and what looked like old red cotton panties over an athletic supporter. Yeah, my brain is weird.

So I ran, and I cursed the distance between houses in my old subdivision, wishing I lived in Chicago where house were practically on top of each other. Here there was too much open space, not enough room to hide, or change direction and lose someone. Sure, there’s bushes and stuff, but you’re a sitting duck. I woke up, afraid. I knew I was awake and I was able to rationalize that I had no need to feel like I needed to run, that I was hundreds of miles from that place even if there was some half naked woman after me. I knew all of that in an instant, and yet my brain was still telling my body that danger was nigh upon me.

What impresses me the most is my body’s ability to fool itself. To imagine a threat that is not real and to react as if it were. It is amazing people can get through the day, keeping the imagination at bay. Maybe it is stuff like this that makes some question what is real and what is not. For me, it’s real when my eyes are open.

Not Surprised

As I was delving through the depth of Facebook (see previous post) I found photos of Big Joe’s craziest of girlfriends, hanging out with my craziest girlfriend. How do they find each other? Is there built in crazy-dar?

Facebook Developer

I just finished getting the PFC site up to a point where I don’t mind people looking at it. But now… I want to tie in to Facebook. Luckily, there’s a whole API for it. It looks like I can even authenticate against Facebook and not have the fencers create yet another login and password. Plus everyone becomes friends on facebook which might make it easier to track ‘em down after college (ahem, alumni). This will be my first foray into tying an existing app into a 3rd party app so learnin’ here I come!