Hi All, This won’t be a short entry but hopefully entertaining! These last two weeks, I’ve been moving! What an experience! It’s been exiting, exhausting, emotional and exhilarating. One of my life’s axioms has been that you shouldn’t have more stuff than you’re willing to take care of yourself—and I would extend that to more stuff than you’re willing to move yourself. Well, I definitely have too much stuff!

Walking through my house, you would think it fairly Spartan—in fact, I’ve joked that people who come to live, come to the Monastery. Somehow over 20 years, the corners, shelves, spare rooms, closets and cupboards had filled with all kinds of things that are hard to part with.

I’ve thought that stuff falls into two categories—things of the past and things of the future. The past are things with emotional attachment. Things that you want to remember and if you throw them away, there’s a fear that the memories will be lost and a part of your past an meaning will be discarded as well. Like my duffle bag from the 1969 Boy Scout National Jamboree. I got it when I registered for the trip and at the time, it was the nicest thing I owned. For years, I’ve kept it around—in reality it’s cheap, plastic and just not very useful but it brings back the memories of that grand adventure at 14 where the bus and a mobile home tried to cross a too narrow bridge at the same time and where we watched giant screens showing fuzzy film of men first walking on the moon.

The other category of stuff is the future. Things that I’m going to do someday or will need some day. Books in case the internet and life as we know it ceases. Music I’m going to learn to play or things that I’m going to give my children. A pocket door for a house I might build or a golf net for when I get serious about playing golf.

If you have great memories and still a lot to look forward too—the baggage can be immense! As I climbed the stairs tonight, I looked down on all the stuff in the garage and it reminded me of that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where in the end, the Ark was packed away in a gigantic government warehouse with millions of boxes.

Wednesday was intense. I had taken the day off as I hired movers to take the big stuff. I also had a conference call that I had to be on as it was a big sales deal and they needed Product guidance. Two guys in a van showed up, sleeveless shirts, tattoos and bulging muscles. They started wrapping and moving and I started painting. I had removed a picture in my office to discover that there was a huge hole in the wall I had cut to rearrange some wiring. I pulled a can of paint from the inventory that was gray (there was only one room that was gray) and putting the paint on the wall wet it looked close but when it dried, it was way darker. Hence, I had to repaint the entire wall. Fortunately, it was close enough that it looked like the other walls but was just shadow that made it darker.

So we were going to close on Monday but my neighbor had texted me he got food poisoning. I asked the attorney if we could close one Tuesday and he emailed me 10:00 am. I showed up at 10 but the neighbor didn’t so I was beginning to wonder if the deal was going to go through. At this point, I thought, if the deal fails, I’m good with that too. Anyway, we rescheduled again for Wednesday at 2:15 pm. The neighbor asked if we could meet 15 minutes earlier to “count the money.” “Are you paying in cash?” I asked. “Yes. I told you I had the cash to pay you the down,” he said (I’m carrying the loan). With the juggling of lines of credit to make everything happen, I called my advisor at UBS and asked her if I could repay a line of credit with cash. “Absolutely not!” she said. “That much cash and you would be fingered as a terrorist.” That got me worried. I called the bank manager at Wells Fargo. He wasn’t in but his assistant said, “Yeah, anything over $10,000 is going to require we notify the IRS. It will probably mean you get audited.”

I called the neighbor and asked if he could do a cashier’s check. He could but it would take several more weeks and neither of us wanted to drag this out that long. I worried about it through the night but just decided to take the cash and figure it out.

So twenty minutes before the conference call, I finish painting the room and the doorbell rings. It’s my neighbor and he’s carrying a plastic Harmon’s grocery back full of greenbacks. I had already walked through the house, hiding valuables like my iPad and computer as I was concerned about the movers. The neighbor just pulled out the cash and was going to count. “Maybe we should move to room where these guys don’t see us,” I said—one of them could have easily taken both of us! We moved to the family room and I got about half way through a $10,000 pile of hundreds when I heard the movers coming toward the room we were in. We hastily gathered up the bills and headed to the basement.

It takes a long time to count $75,000!!! I was rapidly counting and just finished $40k when it was time to go take the conference call. I took it with me and stuffed it in a backpack. My neighbor counted the rest and confirmed the amount and left me to finish the call. I put it all in the backpack and then hid it in another bag and in box in the basement and went up to help the movers finish the load.

They were stopping for lunch so I pulled out the stash and counted the rest. It was accurate (enough). With all of the money on the desk, I though I should take a picture so I pulled out my iPhone and snapped off a shot. About 15 seconds later, I thought, “I have iCloud active—all my pictures are transferred right to the web. If they can rapidly search the web for face recognition, I bet they can do it for money too! And, all photos have GPS metadata included so someone scanning would know right where to come to get it!” DELETE!

The bill count (at least 750) was large and unmanageable all piled together so I grabbed sandwich baggies and put $10k per bag. Now what to do with it? Hide it here in the house? Hide it all over the house? Take it with me? If I take it all in the truck, what if the truck rolls over and burns? Do I hide it at the new place? I don’t know the area…what if the place isn’t safe? Should I dig holes and bury it? One hole or many holes?

I finally decided to take it all with me and put $10k in my pocket and all the other bags in a large gallon freezer bag and hid it in the tool compartment under the back seat of the truck. On the way to Riverton, I hit on the idea of putting it all in a safe deposit box and then just depositing it a little at a time. When I got to the house, the movers were waiting so I let them in, gave them instructions and told them I needed to go pick up a plug (I did need a new plug for the trailer lights) and headed to the bank.

When I got to the bank, I talked to a manager and explained the situation. He said they do report to the IRS but if the deal was legitimate and I had documentation, it shouldn’t be a concern. With that thought, I just deposited the whole thing. I figured that if I did get audited, putting in $9900 deposits every day for the next 8 days would be just as suspicious as one lump sum.

The ironic thing was that I got back to the movers and found that I needed to pay them in cash. I had to go back to the bank and take out $1200. They probably thought I was nuts—or laundering money!

By then, I was well over two hours late for the closing. I emailed the attorney I was moving and he emailed me that I needed to get to his office ASAP. After all, my neighbor and I had only shaken hands on the deal to this point. I had $75k of his money and no signed contract. I made it over to the attorney’s office and signed at the end of the day and everything was good.

So Thursday, I go into work and Ricky says, “Dude! You’re all over the internet!” He sends me a link to an article on the “Challenger Sale” and the image is a picture of me talking to someone. It was a stock photo that was part of a shoot I did in like 2005 when I was doing contract work. The funny thing was that he was able to use the photo link and find the photo in a bunch of other places…and tied with some interesting articles. Like, “How to Change your Church Without Killing It” (article to pastors needing to make changes) and Medical Exam Preparation.

The funniest thing was how it was discovered. One of the tech support guys (who is an avid gamer) was reading an online article on the top ten game myths—little things that are rumored to be able to be done in video games but rumors are false. The author states that anyone trying to test all the myths is going to have a 9 month gap in their resume and should have a plausible explanation ready to a potential employer for the wasted time. The picture at the end of the article was of me, as if I were in a job interview. When TJ (the support guy) saw it, he said it blew his mind and he immediately called Ricky (one of the people that work for me) and said, “You’ve got to read this article…read it all the way through and the last photo will blow your mind!”

Here are a couple of the images.