First of all, American Grocery was awesome last Thursday, as always. The place is a little bit of a secret, but it ought to be a destination. It would be worth coming to Greenville from Asheville, Charlotte, Columbia, or Atlanta to eat at American Grocery. I had the duck. I always enjoy whatever I have, but I can’t get past the duck. Duck’s so good it’s almost daffy.

Good time with the smart little brother. Look forward to seeing him again in a month or so.

Next order of business. A shout-out to my friend Willie, who gave me a really funny mug, about my really funny mug (check out those Bugs Bunny teeth). Willie seems to see right through me, no matter how hard I try to appear to be a normal person.

This week has been full of meetings and proposals. It’s one of the most stressful things I do. We did one for a school, one for a law firm, one for another school, one for an awesome town in Virginia, with a cool railroad station, a presidential birthplace, an awesome women’s college, and a 100-year-old brass band (more on that later). Had a great conversation with my pals in North Carolina about a small performance venue. We talked about some of the things they do and some of the artists that perform there. But they had me at Merle Haggard (“you don’t have to call me Waylon Jennings, and you don’t have to call me Charlie Pride, and you don’t have to call me Merle Haggard, long as you are on my fightin’ side, and I’ll hang around as long as you will let me, I never minded standin’ in the rain, you don’t have to call me “darlin,” darlin, you never even call me by my name.”) Could turn out to be a good week.

Smart little brother is back in town. Could you feel the lift in the median IQ of South Carolina about 7:00 this morning? He said the secret conversations with those people about that thing are going well. Nuff said.

We’re off to American Grocery. I’ll give you a review. Yeeha! Good times.

So, we met last Saturday about 7:00 in the morning at Miss Anderson’s house, to head off for our annual adventure at G-Hills. The trip was pretty uneventful—if a 7+ hour trip with a van-load of fundamentalists can be uneventful. We stopped on our way out of town to pick up some hymnals at the chapel. Interrupted Stan’s prayer breakfast, which gave Stan the opportunity to come out and wish Maxine a happy week. It was sweet.

Got our hymnals and got on the road. Made the obligatory Starbucks stop in Bristol, VA (just across the boarder from Bristol, TN, where the speedway is). Learned that Cheryl doesn’t drink coffee, but to be social she gets hot chocolate whenever she goes to Starbucks (I honestly didn’t know Starbucks had hot chocolate, but it makes sense). About two-thirds of the way we stopped for gas and lunch—a fateful stop in my opinion.

Pumped gas into the giant van. Got rhino-virus on my hands. Insufficiently washed hands before eating lunch. Got a sandwich at Arby’s, rather than a salad (increasing the likelihood of mucous. Sat in the over-cranked air conditioning, breathing truck-stop air. By the time we were back on the road I was feeling fatigued. By the next day, my throat was scratchy. Then it moved to a full-fledged sore throat…then chest congestion…then head congestion. Ended up laying out of meetings for a whole day. We blew off the camp food for the second half of the week, so we could stock up on the good greens. Began to fight back. Feeling somewhat better now. Somewhat.

The speakers were awesome. My good friend Alan Gamble, from Glasgow spoke on Nehemiah. Great lessons in leadership and nation building. His wife Elizabeth played the piano for several meetings—she’s really good. They call it the two-for-one deal. While we were there, G-Hill traded their grand piano for a digital. If you can’t say something nice about a piano, don’t say anything. So I won’t.

Also, got to hear Bruce Hulsheizer and John Gordon for the first time. They were pretty good—Bruce in 1 Tim. and Johnny in James.

We also, of course, had side trips. We went to Gettysburg for tea. And we visited the round barn—got an apple cider vinegar remedy that is made about 20 miles from here (discovered that later). And we went to a place called Ollie’s, which I guess is the Yankee equivalent to Big Lots.

Ride back took forever. It always does. Stopped at a little town in VA—Buchannon I think. Ate at a family diner. They tell me the sweet corn was awesome, and they wouldn’t lie about sweet corn.

It’s good to be back.

We’ve had this noise around here that sort of resembles the engine room of an oil tanker. It’s this floor-vibrating rumble. Started about two or three months ago, occasionally at first. Then, when we came in this morning, it was constant. For Kristen and Seth, it was like being part of the crew of the Titanic. We decided we needed to do something about it—a prospect that inevitably involves our friend and general contractor, Koko Korver.

Koko came by, poked around the back of our offices, and suggested that it might be upstairs. So we went up to visit our friends at M33 (one of South Carolina’s fastest growing companies according to Elliot Davis). Nobody was there except Nancy Edge, because the air conditioning was out, and since it was about 100 degrees around here today, that could be life threatening. Anyhow, Nancy gave us permission to poke around. And Koko found it!

The little flapper thing was worn in the toilet of the ladies’ room. So the water never stopped running…but it never really started running either. So, the valve had worn out gradually (sort of like what happens when you ride the clutch on a stick shift car). And as the watter ran constantly through this half-open valve, it vibrated the valve. And the valve, through sympathetic vibration, vibrated the plumbing around it, which in turn vibrated all of the plumbing in the building. The whole thing would turn this 100-year-old brick building into a resonator…a speaker housing…a giant, one-note, rumbling pipe organ.

The solution, turn the water off to that toilet. Noise went away. Everyone was happy. Of course, the folks upstairs will have to get a plumber to come and replace the guts of the toilet. But then—sweet silence!

You gotta meet Koko. While he was here, he told us a great story about the early days of his company. Seems that Joel (Koko’s dad and my favorite missionary) had started the company and sold it. They guy who bought it built it up into a thriving general contractor, built entirely on negotiated design-build projects. But then the guy got sick. And the negotiating stopped. And for a while, they had plenty of work, because all the contracts were pretty large and long-term. But, just as the guy was bowing out of the company (leaving it in Koko’s hands), the work dried up.

So Koko, trained to be a missionary not a general contractor, was left with a crew, a contractor’s license, and … no work. So, at the end of every day the crew would say, “what are we gonna do tomorrow?” And Koko would say, “I don’t know; come into the office and we’ll see.” And they would come into the office, have prayer together, do some Bible study and some devotions. And then … the phone would ring! “Hello. Yes. I think we can fit you in. How does … ah … right now sound?” And the crew would head out and do the job, and they would make their expenses.

This went on for months. Then, business picked up. And now the company is a well established general contractor in the area. But before they got to learn about things like cash flow, work flow, inventory, tax strategy, sales pipelines… or anything else, they got to learn about faith.

This is principle #18 of the 21 principles. And we really try to follow it. After all, no one of us can possibly be as smart as all of us. But to illustrate this principle, Anne discovered still another benefit of teaching a Sunday school class of teenage girls. Of course, the coolest part is watching these little girls struggle through this awkward time and come out the other side beautiful, unique, spiritually curious young women. But there are other things too.

Jules, it seems, is ga-ga over a singer songwriter named Jason Mraz. Now, we had never heard of Jason Mraz. So, in order to keep an eye on things that influence Julia’s young mind, and in order to be conversant on things that matter to her, Anne googled Jason. We learned that he lives in the middle of an avocado farm outside of San Diego…that he has a cute little Paul McCartney sort of voice…and that he has a style that is perfect for a certain brand located on the world’s most isolated populated land mass.

Thanks for the help, Jules. You rock.

At about 6:00 this morning, I was dropping my little brother off at GSP, for his return flight to New York. He was here for a lightning fast three-day visit, to talk to somebody (I could tell you who, but, well, I just can’t) about something (I can’t even begin to tell you what).

My little brother, sometimes known among friends as my “egghead” little brother, works for the conference board. You know them as the people who bring us the Index of Leading Economic Indicators (quantifying that the economy is going to heck in a hand basket) and the Consumer Confidence Index (quantifying that although the economy is going to heck in a hand basket, you couldn’t tell it to see people spending like drunken sailors). He is not an economist. Nor is he a PhD. He is a human resource researcher, with a background and education in organizational communication.

It was fun introducing him to the staff. They made the mistake of asking him what he did. His explanation was conceptual poetry of a sort (dude used “causal” and “empirical” in the same sentence). We went over to the Lazy Goat for dinner on Monday—somebody has to explain to American Grocery that if this is going to be a food town, they have to be open on Mondays. We ate a bunch of vaguely middle-eastern tapas things.

Then yesterday, we had a special treat. Our friend Katherine had us over for a basic, simple, home dinner. It was fun watching two of my favorite smart people get to know each other. Each has since expressed delight in having met the other, so as a connector I have had a victory.

Looks like my little brother might be coming back to talk some more with those people about that thing. I hope so. It’ll be fun hanging out some more.

In the past few days, we’ve gotten blog hits from every continent except Australia and Antarctica. We’ve been visited from Hawaii, and just about every mainland U.S. time zone. And the other day we were hit from an island in the Indian Ocean, off of Africa, which I had never heard of (somebody interested in the post about “Wearing somebody else’s clothes”). I get to talk to folks I will never meet, in places I will never visit. And if I use the right search words, I might get visits from even more folks. Stuff like dune buggy, locust infestation, rat pack, brat pack, and free-for-all.

Just imagine how far people would travel to hit this blog if it were a big important blog by somebody like Alan Greenspan or Clint Black. Humbling to think about, really.

We had a really nice phone interview with a young graphic designer from Wisconsin. Like all young graphic designers from somewhere else, she is looking to move to Greenville, South Carolina for all kinds of reasons having to do with her life. But she will come here and fall in love (with the place), and there is a better than 50/50 chance she’ll still be here 25 years from now. After all, we do have that bridge.

She is pretty good, judging from her work, which is nice to see. But what was really refreshing was that she is a really nice person. Very smart. Loves to learn. And LOVES to do graphic design. I remember those days…waking up in the morning daydreaming about the next big campaign, the shoot, the music, the roar of the grease paint, the smell of the crowd. It’s good to have young, excited people around.

Looks like we’ll be meeting this young woman again soon, this time face-to-face. That will be good. You can learn a lot about someone by what their face says right before their mouth starts talking. I’ll try to keep you posted.

Took about as long as it took James Joyce to write Ulysses, but our new site is up. Go check it out. Let me know what you think.

Okay, you might say I’m getting carried away with this whole ukulele thing. But I think it’s a rich vein. Here at the headquarters, we’re always looking for shorthand ways of talking about personalities, styles, capabilities, aptitudes, and stuff like that. We talk about the quintessential/exceptional paradigm, in which greatness falls into one of two categories (Michael Jordan is quintessential, Dennis Rodman is exceptional). We have a whole alphabet soup of Meyers-Brigs and HBDI language (I am an INFP, quadrant B resistant, D-C…of course).

Well, I believe I have discovered a breakthrough in personality pidgin-holeing (pun intended). I call it the Jake/IZ continuum. The whole idea is that the extremes are represented by Jake, the totally awesome, rhythmically sophisticated, precise, accomplished virtuoso of the ukulele. IZ is the other extreme—the primitive, self taught, inventive, one-of-a-kind charismatic dynamo of the ukulele. With these as the ends of the rope, we can create a continuum. Zero is boring…right in the middle, not all that accomplished, not all that charismatic, but safe. A J10 would be extreme mastery and virtuosity (Mozart). A IZ10 would be an extreme innovator, driven by invention, spontaneity, and charisma (Jim Cary or Dexter Gordan, maybe).

As writers go, I would consider myself about a J8. I used to work with a savant named Terry Doyle, who talked in headlines. He would be like an IZ7 or IZ8—his stuff always worked, but he couldn’t really tell you why or reconcile it to the strategy.