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June 28, 2005
Time to move
About a month ago our building was sold and our new landlord recently stopped by with the new figures for our rent. All I can say is OUCH! Although entry fees ultimately help pay for our rent, unfortunately it is too late to increase each entry fee by $3 this year. That is what it would take to cover the increase in our rent.
It is hard to imagine that we have been in this same office in Clermont for 15 years now. We moved to 838 West Desoto Street in 1991, the same year we introduced the Great Floridian Triathlon. Prior to that time, I ran everything out of my house. At first we shared the office with a couple of other tenants. One was a graphic artist and the other was a computer salesman. After a couple of years they both moved out and we took over all the space.
Recently, office space in Clermont has become scarce and rather pricey. It is the old supply and demand theory. Clermont is growing too fast and office space is not keeping up with the growth. I must admit we had a good deal with our old landlord. He only raised our rent slightly each year so we had no reason to look elsewhere.
Many people picture us in a giant glass building overlooking Lake Minneola. Everyone is in private offices with a receptionist out front to great all of our visitors. Yeah right! Our office is part temporary storage, part work room, and part office space. We are a team of 5-6 doing the work of 10-12. Although we don't overlook Lake Minneola, we do overlook a small pond that serves as a retention pond for Downtown Clermont and HWY 50. Not quite the same ambience...
Now for the bad news, our rent jumped up from less than $750 a month to just over $2,000 a month. This guy must be nuts, we're on a side street in Downtown Clermont with very little parking. You can get office space right on HWY 50 for the same price.
So now the search begins. We ready to move out and July is a great month to do it. We only have two out of state events in July so we could easily execute a move. We'll just treat it as another event.
The tough part is finding a place to move to. Currently there is very little office space available in Clermont. If we move out of the Clermont area, we would save at least $6,000-$8,000 a year. Something I have to ponder....
Now if we only had the 300 square feet of office that was promised to us by the National Training Center when it was being built, moving out of our Desoto Street office would not be so tough. Unfortunately our promised office space at the NTC ended up being just a dream, along with the other promises that were made to us like; "The NTC is not, and never will be, in the event business....we will not put events on that will compete with yours....and CFT will be our event and training camp partner at the NTC". It is amazing how many people in Clermont think our offices are up at the NTC.
So now the search begins. We are looking for 800-1,200 square feet of office space that is available now. Anyone have any leads?
Posted by Fred at 06:38 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | More in: Random Thoughts
Training and Blogging
My blogging and my marathon training are both performing at the same level - terrible. Actually I did get a couple of short runs in over the weekend, and I started several new posts on my blog, so there may be hope. Now I just need to finish my blog posts and continue with my running and I'll be back on track.
Posted by Fred at 06:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | More in: Random Thoughts
June 08, 2005
What was I thinking?
That's what jumped through my mind when we left Clermont at 5:00am Monday morning for another trip to my home away from home, Orlando International Airport. What made it so tough was that we just wrapped up race #1 of our Central Florida Tri Series. With several consecutive days with very little sleep, followed by an almost all-nighter Sunday night to prepare for the trip, I knew it was going to be a tough site visit. I opted to let Brian drive to the airport so I could squeeze in a 30 minute power nap. There was going to be no sleeping on the plane because I had an exit row seat lined up, allowing me to use my laptop. I'm running at least a week behind on my emails and I needed this quiet time to make some headway in my always bloated in-box.
Soon we were on our way to MSP to work on our TriAmerica St. Paul event. While this will be our third year in St. Paul, we are moving to a new venue this year so it is almost as if we were starting from scratch. The main objective of this visit was to finalize the bike course. The course that we had received preliminary approval for had recently been axed by the higher-ups. It seems a running event that used a portion of our proposed course earlier this year disrupted commuter bus traffic. This was enough to raise the blood pressure of one of the management types and as a result, this course was now off limits to us. Our job was to identify and sign-off on a bus route friendly alternative bike course. Because most of the vehicle traffic was going to be restricted from the route, we opted for a 20K course that the sprint distance athletes would complete twice, and long course cyclists twice. For this stop of the series this would work great. Typically a TriAmerica race will have twice as many athletes in the long course race as the sprint. For St. Paul, we experience the opposite. For the past two years we've had twice as many sprint athletes in the race as long course athletes. I'm not sure why that is because there are not many international distance triathlons up this way.
We hired a great local event director to assist us with our St. Paul race. When we met with her first thing in the morning she informs us the police have mapped out a 4.2 mile course they would like us to consider. Sprint athletes would bike three laps, and international distance athletes, six laps. Maybe if we were only expecting a couple hundred athletes we could attempt to pull this off, but with an expected field of over 1,000, no way. Some athletes have all to do to keep track of a one lap course and are totally challenged when we make it two laps. Three or six laps would be a nightmare for the athletes and for us. I remember at Worlds several years back when participants used the sticky dots on the handle bar routine to try and keep track of their laps. It worked for most, but for some they either set a PR for the bike or had the worst bike of their life, depending on how many laps they actually biked.
The run course here will be awesome. It will utilize a trail that travels around Lake Phalen. What's cool is that a good portion of it is semi-shaded…and it just happens to be a 5K loop.
Next on the agenda for St. Paul will be a return trip on July 6 to go before the St. Paul Special Events Council to hopefully receive the official formal blessing for our event.
Posted by Fred at 09:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | More in: Tri America
June 03, 2005
Yellow Jackets - 5; Fred - 0
Grrrrrrrhhhhhhh!!!! This is absurd, those damn wasps are still there. With all the rain we've been having I didn't have time to check out the damages until Thursday.
I think I'm making progress though, I just need to act fast before the hive gets back up to full capacity.
The result of my fire was a hole that is about 4 feet across and 18 inches deep. That's a fairly good size wasp nest. The heat must have colapsed the top levels of the nest in order to make such a perfect depression. Now that I can see the nest better, I noticed there are four distinct entrances to hive located around the perimeter of the hole. This will meake it slightly more challenging for my next attack.
I spent a few hours on the web researching ground wasps so now I feel I'm ready for my move. Weather permitting, my next attack will be Sunday night or super early Monday morning. I head out of town early Monday for a visit to Minneapolis-St. Paul so I'll do another attack and get out of town mission.
More to follow....
Posted by Fred at 09:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | More in: Random Thoughts
Technolgy, don't fail me now!
It never fails, when you are at deadline preparing for a race, technolgy always lets you down. Either we have a major network crash, our DSL goes down, my computer crashes, or we have printer problems.
This time it was our high speed color copier/printer. We print most of our race materials in house, including final instruction booklets, course maps, and just recently, our race numbers. A couple of days ago I noticed we were having registration issues with color printing. Our service guy was quick to respond, but the news was not good. We need a new belt and some other exotic parts, non of which could be located in their Florida warehouse. Finally the parts are located in another part of the country and are overnighted to the tech guy.
Now it's early Friday afternoon and we have 4 hours of ptinting to look forward to before we can stuff packets. I guess it will be another long night....
Posted by Fred at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | More in: Random Thoughts
June 01, 2005
Yellow Jackets - 4; Fred - 0
That was the score leading up to my Sunday night offensive against the Minneola Yellow Jackets. The odds were not in my favor, but this was one match I had to win.
It all started a few weeks back when I decided to break up a large bed of bromeliads. If you are familiar with my yard, you know it is part jungle, part botanical garden. Hardly a week goes by that I don't locate something else to plant. Many of the plants are the result of my journeys to local nurseries while we are on the road with our events. I really hit the jackpot when we went to Arizona with our TriAmerica Series. I smuggled back all sorts of west coast plants in our truck.
Anyways, back to my battle with the yellow jackets. It began while I was standing in the middle of the bromeliad bed figuring out my strategy. Something started buzzing around my head but I just figured it was a determined horse fly that had been antagonizing me earlier in the day. I swatted it away and bent down to start pulling up plants. Little did I know that it was actually a wasp and it just let out a silent battle cry that would soon trigger a mass attack. Within seconds I was being swarmed. It caught me totally by surprise. It took a couple of seconds and a rather painful sting to realize that I was in some serious trouble. Off I went in a mad sprint away from ground zero. Thank goodness nobody was driving by the yard at the time because it looked like I was performing some sort of exotic tribal dance as I did everything possible to get the wasps off of me. I made it half way up the yard towards my house and assumed I had outrun the wasps. Besides, I needed to let my heart rate drop down below 200 bpm. Big mistake, the wasps where right there with me and I was shocked to see at least a dozen clinging to my shorts, a few of them where a little bit to close to an area I did not want stung. My body jumped into turbo drive as I did a mad dash to the house. I had my shorts off before I was in the door and was in the shower a few seconds later. While the cold water was drenching my body I quickly checked to make sure I did not have any of the unwanted guests with me. It was then the adrenaline started to wear off and the pain began. I felt like I was a human dart board. The count, eleven major stings that I could see and a few more that I could not. This meant war!!!!
After a few hours the pain subsides and off I go to Home depot for some hornet spray. The label says one can will do the trick, so I purchase two. I head down to the war zone to locate the nest. My findings were not good, it was an underground nest. I had never encountered one of those before and I quickly recalled the many news stories I had read of people and animals being attacked, and sometimes even killed, by their encounters with underground yellow jacket nests. The cans say the spray will reach 15 feet so I get only as close as need be in order for the spray to reach the nest. I start unloading my liquid weapon and the wasps go crazy. Fortunately they seem more interested in attacking the streams of spray hitting their nest than coming after me. After emptying both cans I leave feeling confident the war would soon be over.
The next afternoon I head down to the battle zone. Much to my surprise it was business as usual for the wasps, with a steady stream of the creatures coming and going in and out of the nest. I was furious. I decide my next step would be to thoroughly drench the nest with insecticide. I mix up an exotic insecticide cocktail for my new friends and then super-size it to five gallons. I load it into my high pressure sprayer and totally drench the nest. No insect could live through this I figure.
After being away for a couple of days for a site visit, I return and anxiously head down to the war zone with shovel in hand. I was curious what the inside of the nest looked like. As I approached I was shocked to see wasps coming and going in the nest as if nothing had happened. This had to be a joke; it was as if my pesticide cocktail was an energy drink to them.
I then decide to head up to our local farm store to see if they can offer some advice. The sales clerk tells me about this new spray foam especially created for hard to kill wasps. One large can will do the trick he says, so again I grab two. With cans in hand, off I go to battle. I quickly unload both cans and the entire nest is soon drenched in inches of foam. I can see wasps already dropping after coming in contact with this stuff so I know it's going to do the trick.
A few days later I return from one of our road trips and I quickly dash down to the nest to check things out. Once again I can hardly believe my eyes when I see the wasps buzzing in and out of the ground as if nothing had happened. Now it was time to be creative. I remember watching a story on TV where the pest control guys came in with a giant vacuum and sucked all the wasps out. I was not sure if my shop vac was strong enough for that so I thought for a few seconds and then fire popped in my mind. Besides, the entrance to the nest was partially covered with a downed branch and I knew it would eventually have to go if I was going to get up close and personal with the wasps. Fire would do the trick! I plan out my strategy; I knew I would have to be quick with the fire, a flame thrower approach would be ideal. I gather up a bunch of palm fronds and sprinkle them with tiki torch fuel. I also gather up plenty of fire wood because I wanted this fire to burn long and hot. My strategy was to quickly throw a small bucket of torch fuel on the mound and almost instantly light it. I knew I only had one chance to light it so I drench a t-shirt in tiki fuel and hang it on a long pole. I decide to attack at sundown because I knew most of the wasps would be inside the nest.
It's time to go to battle. I toss the fluid and drop the burning shirt on the nest...woooooosh, success! I quickly toss the palm fronds on the fire followed shortly there after by the firewood. I watch the fire burn for a while until I knew it was under control. Before taking off to the airport for our Zion site visit, I walk down to the nest to check out the remains of the fire. The coals are still glowing and radiating out heat. There is no way the nest survived this. If nothing else, the fire had to seal the nest entrance for good.
Now I'm on our return flight to Orlando and I can't wait till tomorrow morning when I can view the results. I just know I will be victorious!
Posted by Fred at 01:26 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | More in: Random Thoughts
