Talk about right on schedule... Yesterday we kicked in the air conditioner for the first time of the year. Maybe one more freak storm but winter should be pretty much done with otherwise.

Just thinking about what technology still has to bring to our lives. Ten years from now perhaps. This would be after the broadband wars and every home has a high-speed two-way ATM fiber link. Let's put together a jam session. We'll get Eric Clapton from down in Florida, Sir Paul from London, perhaps Metallica's drummer from Fremont and a few others. Everybody connected? Let's rock. They'll be mixing it digitally in New York. Listen to it live. Or punch the buy now button and burn it right to your CD.

Guy walks in - needs a string for a lap steel guitar. Sure, no problem. Then he starts telling me about his surgery. Takes off his hat and like half the top of his head has been like patched together after brain surgery. Steel plate and all. Skull has been pushed out of shape. Thinking to myself please put the hat back on. Quickly. But no, he doesn't catch the fact that I'm getting queasy and stepping away and trying not to look. It ain't pretty. The guy should be dead. Real lucky to have made it - but dang that's an ugly scar.

I think my business plan has finally started to gel into something I can actually describe. Today may have been a turning point. I'll tell ya' about it. I got a discount coupon a few days back from one of my suppliers offering some really cool name brand guitar amps at a price too good to refuse. Not guitar amps as in something you lug around to jams but guitar amps as in walls of speaker cabinets and kilowatts of energy. I'm a guitarist and I'm literally frothing at the mouth to try these things out. But there's only so much money for new inventory (and the books I mentioned earlier add up fast) and so I had to make a tough choice. No wall of sound this month. That puts me in direct competition with Haight-Ashbury and Guitar Center. Nope - that isn't a very good business plan. Both could crush me in a minute if I threatened them. Gryphon has a pretty good lock on high-end stringed acoustic instruments (except perhaps concert strings). West Valley is run by a flautist (somebody who plays flute) and Draper's is an old sax shop that also has a bit of rock-n-roll. I have a little bit of all of the above. So what did I buy with my new inventory money? 2 Accordians. A concertina. A bajo sexto and a couple of cuatros. Nobody's got 'em but me. I can supply a young rock-n-roll band or a concert or jazz band. A string quartet. Bluegrass or mariachi or norteno bands. A baritone horn, a bajo sexto, two trumpets and an accordion. There's your wall of sound.

If you want to check out the latest name-brand gear I'll have to send you elsewhere. Likewise for a Martin guitar or Yamaha sax. But I've got beautiful guitars and saxes, and violas too. That's my business plan in a nutshell.

In fact today also marked the first time that I am aware of where I actually took back a customer from the competition. Started out as a lost opportunity - she needed her clarinet fixed today and I couldn't make that promise and sent her to the competition to see if they could do better. It's a rental clarinet (from somewhere else) and she's getting tired of driving around to get it fixed. I guess she returned it broken from wherever she got it and came back to get one of my new in-the-box clarinets that cost less than she spent for a year of rental plus all the repairs.

Last night I was talking to one of my customers (I do a lot of that) and the whole subject of retirement came up. What does the word mean? Perhaps that you have the resources to do whatever the *!-# you want. But, but... what if you always do whatever you want? Does that make me retired? Resources always come and go. I probably won't but I could close the store tomorrow and go fishing. No, retirement is basically just doing what the flying truck you desire. Once you put it in those terms, it's a cakewalk. Heck, I retired about thirty years ago.