I was still working in 2006, as was my wife. I was always self employed and lead a hectic work life.

I did small repair on buildings. Most of my jobs took 55 minutes to complete. I was doing six jobs a day, six days a week when the economy was in good shape.

I was on the phone day and night as my office was in my home. I was out in the field during the day and had a pager when that was high tech and then moved onto the cellphone when that became a reality.

We had a plan and an amount of money I needed to make every day for that plan to come true.

As always the free market economy makes all things possible for those who are willing to participate. I gave a written estimate before every job.

If the price was too high, I didn’t get the job. I usually got the job. Even after twenty years, I ran my business as a start up, in that I tried to charge as little as possible and give the best service. I was always on time and had few complaints.

Some people cannot and do not want to be satisfied. Thankfully that was a very small number of customers.

I drove around one hundred miles a day doing my service calls. I was one busy fellow.

Every five years or so my wife and I would go to the Hawaiian Islands. They are close by to us here in California and there was usually an inexpensive way to create a nice trip.

My wife went to school to be a travel agent and learned how to book trips quite well.

She, as always, took very good care of me.

That photo above is the type of place we were looking for after working hard for many months.

I will put up several stories and photos over the next few days about this trip.

This is a beautiful place to come to, but it is not highly developed yet. That is exactly why we choose it.

Books and sleep were a large part of this trip.