Mississippi Burning

Saturday, Dad and I went down to the plantation to watch prescribe burning on the farm. We have a very healthy pine forest, but we haven't burned for a while. The fuel load was getting a little high, putting the forest at risk should an uncontrolled fire break out, and running burns kills the brush and leaves more food for wildlife. It's just a good thing to do from a conservation point.

Dad has only been to Weir (the town he grew up in and that the plantation is closest to) two times in the last decade. Interestingly enough, the funeral home buried my Grandfather in the wrong plot, and rather than exhume him just put a new tombstone over his grave. Dad saw the tombstone for the first time - which is strange, since Grandpa died 17 years ago.

We visited a man named Sambo, who maintained the homesite after Grandpa died and is very dear to our family. I had always heard about Sambo, but never met him until yesterday. He worked doing very manual labor well into his 70's - he was mowing our yard at the plantation until about five years ago.

Seeing the farm was just strange. Katrina created winds which knocked several trees down on the house - we had to have it torn down. Only the concrete slab from the car port remains of the house my dad grew up in. The picnic house and several storage sheds have all been rummaged through by thieves, and all the roofs are starting to have damage on them. Dad and I decided that, since we want to hunt and fish on the farm, we're going to fix up the picnic house. We plan on putting a tin roof on the picnic house, cutting the branches away from it, digging underneath it, and putting bars on the doors and windows to keep it nice once we get it the way we want. There is a nice pond there with good fishing (Grandpa actually dug the pond himself). We're going to cut back the trees, leaving several around the pond for shade, and burn around it. Basically, we can fit three people in that picnic house comfortably as far as existing bunks go, so we just want a nice place to hunt and fish out of.

Above are some pictures I took from a fun Saturday. The great thing is that I wasn't really cost a lot of work by being down there - the wireless card we picked up for my laptop gave me plenty of opportunity to get work done in the car on the way down and back!

Monday, Monday, Monday

"I hate Mondays, and I love Fridays." People that say that frustrate me. Nine times out of ten, people that say that work for the other guy, don't maximize their potential in life, and react to things that happen to them instead of being proactive.

"I hate Mondays" is in direct contrast to the mentality that God has laid out in scripture of working unto him with our full heart and storing up for hard times when the Lord gives us the chance. We have a negative savings rate in this country. I'm really feeling that right now at the business - we're selling tons of engines this tax season. That fits right in with the statistic I heard the other day that says most folks only savings is in their tax returns!

If you hate Mondays, you need to stop whining, get an attitude readjustment, and go kick some butt at your job.

This was a rant, not a blog. :D

When You're Betrayed

I'm at a place in life I did not think I would be several months ago. About 8 weeks ago, my vehicle turnaround came to a halt. My friend, or the man I thought was a friend, the man we paid first and last month's rent for in a shop, the man we co-signed on rent for, the man we fed for three months, the man I tried to send business to (both customers and vehicles I bought to resell).

I have three cars at his shop. My dad has two - one of them is an expensive Audi A4, the other an 06 Trailblazer with only about 5,000 miles on it. Dad bought it as a rebuilder, had the body work done, and has been waiting on the mechanical work for six months. He told our friend he could drive the Trailblazer to pick up his kids, etc., since the friend was going through a divorce. Well, he's not doing anything. We've sent customer after customer to him. Their vehicles are always done weeks late. My vehicles haven't been touched in two months. And dude hasn't touched my father's vehicle.

He sent a vehicle out with an engine we shipped in. We recommended the customer to him. We used our good name and recommended him. He installed her engine and sent her out with a cracked intake manifold. We did not sell this gal a labor warranty, but we're paying to have the job done right at another mechanic's because we feel responsible.

Up until two months ago, this guy was gold. He's changed. He lies to me, he lies to customers, and he's costing me thousands of dollars.

I'm at a loss for what to do. I've found another mechanic who has had his own shop for ten years. He's priced dirt cheap, and he does good work, but he's not nearly as good as this other mechanic at diagnosis. I'm at a loss for what to do. I have to get three vehicles and $5,000 in used engines out of his shop, plus my dad's two vehicles - all without him locking the doors, or doing something to my stuff.

The thing that hurts though isn't the money - although that hurts. I'm doing this to get in good financial shape and it was working for a while, until he started lying and not doing work. What hurts is the lying. The "I'll have it done next week" for 8 weeks in a row. The "I can't get that engine" and going to his shop and finding him installing that exact engine in another customer's vehicle - when mine has been sitting there for 8 weeks.

I'm going crazy.

Back to Blogging

I woke up this fine Saturday morning and realized that I miss blogging. Blogging is, in a way, therapeutic for me. I'm able to sift through the torrent of thoughts I have and figure out which ones are important - even if I don't write about them.

So, a few updates.

The car situation in Memphis is going both good, and bad. The mechanic I really want to work with, and that I worked with at first, just flat out isn't getting my stuff done anymore. In fact, I send customers to him, and he's not getting anything done for them either. He's literally the best mechanic I know - when he works. It's like a month ago, he just decided he was done. So, I have a few vehicles over there, but I'm sending all of my new stuff to a mechanic we've sent engines to in the past, that customers have been very satisfied with.

Organization of all of this is fun. Tracking parts throughout the country, planning work timelines, creating profit estimate spreadsheets - I love it. It's a lot more fun than organizing my own life, to be honest.

On that note, my financial situation is greatly improving. I have good cash reserves, which I have to have to do what I'm doing with cars, and that reserve is growing. Bills aren't dreaded now - I can pay them without worry. Hopefully, I can get out of here and get on with my life on my planned timeline!

Avoid Credit Card Fraud

We recently shipped an engine to a customer in the great state of Louisiana near the end of December. It was a nice, expensive Cadillac engine. The customer said that their boyfriend was a mechanic and was going to install the engine, so we shipped it to their home (home delivery is not at all rare - many folks install their engine themselves). Everything our system asks for (and it asks for a lot as we take Credit Card Fraud very seriously) matched on the credit charge.

Needless to say, we got a call about two weeks later from our merchant services. The owner of the card had reported it stolen. At first, we were a bit miffed because of the fact that the owner of the card had signed for the engine. We thought it was a case of someone ordering an engine and simply deciding that they didn't want to pay for it.

Well, today we got a phone call from the police. They let us know they had recovered our engine. Turns out that this person was a huge identity thief. They worked at some kind of online merchant and stole a lot of folks info - the cops recovered massive amounts of data in notebooks on people.

We at Low Mileage Engines are proud of the methods we use to minimalize credit card fraud. Sadly, even the best systems aren't perfect.

Oh well. One fraudster is going to jail.