View from the side

A view of the lake from the Living room

The pavilion

The Stage

The dance floor

A layout of the main house

The place was built around 100 years ago by old school New York money and was bought by my grandparents and a bunch of other Communists back in ’48. The idea is to make it a Hotel/B&B with a restaurant, hosting cultural events(music, dances) at the pavilion. It’s 50 miles from the GWB, the train to Penn Station is 70 minutes away(after they fix it, the hurricane last fall washed out a bit of the line.) It’s on 80 acres with exclusive lake access, mostly surrounded by state forest. At some point we hope to plant some fruit trees on acreage that is lying fallow along with growing as much produce as we can on site. The restaurant would have some slavic food, but would also feature the best food to come from Orange County and the Hudson Valley.

The kitchen needs a bit of work and some bedrooms need to be converted back to their original dimensions, but it’s actually not that bad if we can just get past political headaches and egos.  The Pavilion needs some ADA upgrades and the kitchen needs work(as does the bathhouse and snack shack) but with new LED lighting tech we can install a PA & lighting rig relatively cheaply.

Did a 2nd batch of tomatoes in a Burpee self watering system(it’s aces) and I’ve had so many go off and thrive I’ve actually too many and am donating.

In short season the Marmande and Moskovich varieties are thriving best with Orange Roma and Peche Jaune right behind them. I’ve had some losses due to a mockingbird doing what it does, especially with my watermelons and sunflowers.

On the cherry tomato front, Super Snow Whites, Isis candy and a random cherry variety pack are doing amazing, Black cherry and God Love are doing ok and only Hawaiian currant(I suspect they need night soil temps to climb into the 70s) and Coyote(probably another warm soil grower) haven’t really taken off.

The Basil has really taken off once it hit the 80′s, but hasn’t transplanted well, maybe 50% survival rate.

All of the Hops(Kent Golding, Hallertau, Fuggle & Cascade) have finally all taken off and most are starting to climb the string. As the days get longer they’ll accelerate their climbing growth. Flagstaff is about the bottom range of their reliable growing range and Tempe only gets a month of the sunshine hours they need. It’s going to be interesting to see if they can adapt to the desert and truly be productive.

When I was leaving I went looking for a bottle of local rum to take home and couldn’t find any, all of a sudden I plucked a little mind grape, but did nothing with it. Then last April I discovered I could do trademark searches online, so I looked for Silversword  and found only a video poker manufacturer and decided to claim it for myself. 6 months later I received a trademark and started pieceing together what I’d have to do. It looks as if I’ve got someone to partner with on the distro/sales side and now am in the process of getting a bottle sculpted and 3D scanned for CNC mold making. Gonna sorta look like this:

Can contract out the brewing and distilling at a reasonable price on the islands, shipping in bulk to the mainland and getting it bottled in California. Can get the cases designed here in town and printed close to the bottlers. Taxes are $2-3 a bottle between the feds and state. Upfront costs are molds & permits along with initial batch costs which ain’t bad at all, then there’s marketing.  We can keep it slow at first and use our contacts in the biz, then when it cashflows we can get into pushing the product wide.

Lots of work to be done, but at least progress is occurring.

Update: Got a url, bar codes for bottles and cases, setting up a meeting with a glass manufacturer.

The realty is unless the owners can hash out an agreement amongst themselves the league will basically  rend apart in 2010, followed by mass suicide in 2011.

The problem isn’t what the players make(which invariably works out to about what the TV contract is within 5%) it’s what counts for revenue sharing amongst the owners and the wide disparity between the haves and have nots amongst billionaires. Regular ticket sales are split 60-40 between owners to smooth out revenues, while club seats and sky boxes aren’t. Parking isn’t split, the same with concessions.  As a result, you have the Dallas Cowboys charging almost $70 a carload and Washington not having replay screens so they can rent out handheld sets for an arm and a leg to maximize non shared revenue.  The non shared cash these stadiums throw off (even allowing for the insane debt servicing levels) allows them to spend big on free agent signing bonuses and gain a competitive advantage. This has forced teams like Buffalo to move regular season games to Toronto and the Vikings and Jacksonville to look longingly towards Los Angeles.

Next season not only will be a uncapped season, it will also not have a salary floor. You could see a number of teams spending below the floor such as Arizona, Jacksonville, St Louis, Buffalo and the poster child, Tampa Bay.

The Glazer’s just refinanced their purchase of Manchester United again, bringing the total debt outstanding to over $1.1 billion dollars. The current debt servicing this year is $70mm alone. Facing that and a crappy on field product, I could see them trading down from the #3 overall pick and possibly even out of the first round altogether in order to save money and rebuild the roster quickly. Payroll could be substantially below this year’s floor of $112mm.

So you have billionaire who’ve had a rough go in this economy and want the players to become a junior partner in order to get that extra zero back in their net worth, but a  lockout in 2011 would be very damaging to teams that facing massive debt servicing. In a perfect season a team at best will only have 13 games(if they host the Super Bowl) to generate revenue, save the odd concert or monster truck rally. Jerry Jones is working his tail off to get as many events as humanly possible there in order to service his $700mm stadium debt. The Jets and Giants will have 20 games(plus playoffs) to whack away at their shared debts.

It’s odd that the teams that stand to benefit the most from the status quo will be the most exposed if there is no season in 2011.

The iPad could help revolutionize Jr. High-postgrad education.

Instead of breaking kids backs with 50 lbs of textbooks, they’ll just have 1.5 lbs to schlep around to do their homework, reading, testing, you name it. Anybody teacher or school district can put together their lesson plans online, can find superior lessons plans beyond what the traditional publishers put on offer. Lesson plans and text can be updated instantly to correspond with the changes in science or politics. School districts can keep books for K-4 or 5 because the subject matter is fairly constant, but after that every child should be issued one. Kids won’t want to steal them because they all have them. Now with kids having an Apple product may entice parents to convert the home to a Mac along with airport express for ease of function. It plays movies to boot? YAHTZEE!!!

Prices on “e-xtbooks” will be driven down due to both a lowering of barriers to entry and by publishers being able to slash overhead on printing and distro.

Schools are already buying iTouches for schoolkids, the iPad is right in their wheelhouse. They can buy in bulk and get their money’s worth on the warranty plan.

3G won’t matter except for a different market segment who will need it for offsite work, say Census Bureau enumerators.

I won’t buy one, but this device isn’t for me.

The console is originally from Trident Studios in London; Bowie, T.Rex, Queen and Elton John recorded using this desk. It then went on to Impact Recorders in LA where the 1st 2 Cypress Hill records were done.

The piano is a Baldwin 9 footer, also have a Hammond A100 organ with Leslie Cabinet a variety of guitars and low watt amps along with a Marshall head.

Peche Jaune, Buckbee’s 50 day and Northern Lights, take a bow!!

Spent yesterday walking on the arbor that is on the southern exposure installing eye hooks on the 1″x 1″. I felt like I was walking a tightrope even with all that lumber beneath me. The idea is that those eye hooks will hold the wire for my containers that also have eye hooks in them:

And when I get them up there they’ll look like this:

That way when the tomatoes really take off I can just have them hang off instead of building a trellis or caging them. This will provide extra shade as the sun rises during the spring. Want to put watermelons up there, but then I’d probably have to re-inforce the hooks with washers and bolts to keep them in the plastic.

Gearing up for my 1st spring in the new crib and boy have I been a busy boy.

Planted the following(thanks to Greenfield Citrus and Baker Nursery ) :

• Sanguinelli Blood Orange
• Orlando Tangelo
• Lisbon Lemon
• Macatera Sweet Orange
• Pink Eureka Lemon(it’s only pink when it’s unripe, but it is striped  like a green  & yellow tiger)
• Bonanza Mini Peach(2)
• Anna Apple(2)

Just started seeding the following short season tomatoes(thanks to Tomatofest.com) :

• Buckbee’s New 50 Day
• Early Annie
• Marmande
• Northern Lights
• Orange Roma
• Peche Jaune
• Siletz
• Sunset’s Red

And a Scarlet sweet Watermelon

The reason I chose Short season  is that A: they’re used to growing in chilly weather but will benefit from the full sun, and B: they mature so fast they’ll hopefully won’t get zapped by the sun to the point that they’ll split like the larger tomatoes usually do out here.

If the Lord’s willin and the creek don’t rise, the 1st of them should be ready before the Phoenix Open and most of the by the time pitcher  & catchers report for Spring training. Starting next week I’ll be seeding the Cherry Tomatoes that will keep me in sauce from March 1 thru June. Gonna be hanging them from an arbor that runs along the south roof line, gonna anchor them with sting and some eyehooks.

Just transplanted:

• Mexican Lime
• Buddha’s Hand citron
• Navajo Blackberry

I think the Lime will be OK, worried about the Buddha Hand and the Blackberries. Finding the right locations is hard, wonder if it’s too hot for the Blackberries even in this microclimate.

Getting ready to harvest:

• Pink Eureka
• Blush Grapefruit
• Minneola tangelo
• Kumquat

Have a shipload of kumquats, all of 4 Minneolas(then again the tree was half dead when I bought) 20 or so Grapefruits and a dozen Pink Eurekas