Eric Canal Bike Ride
I first signed up for the whole 8 day, 375 mile Erie Canal ride across the upper NY region. Later, coming to my senses, I reduced that to half the ride, or two hundred miles, or from Buffalo and Syracuse. The full canal riders are still out there, arriving in Albany sometime tomorrow.
This Erie Canal bike ride happens every year, for who knows how many years. This year had a bit more historical significance because it was the 200 anniversary of the opening of the Albany to Buffalo man-made waterway, the mule and man made ditch that spurred the western expansion of the US, pushing both ideas and commerce westward in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost.
The ride itself, organized by NY Parks and Trails, was a well-run affair that was a roving migration of 800 bikers, and 100 staffers, mostly volunteers - sort of Grateful Dead meets bluegrass festival meets religious revival meets military encampment.
The logistics aren’t easy - with 60 miles traveled each day, the encampment, the luggage of the bikers, the pop-up mess tents, porto-johns, truck showers, hundreds of tents - rolling into a school or Elks Lodge or town park, only to pack up and move on the next day.
The challenges of biking that far are varied, and probably rotate each year - this year was the heat, a heat that pressed down as the day wore on so while scorching at 1, continued to its climb to late afternoon, leaving an oppressive blanket late into the early evening.
It’s an interesting crowd - a crowd that has to be comfortable with the variations and unpredictable nature of the weather, rain, logistical screwups - a go with the flow while riding a bike 60 miles a day.
Many people had done it before, many had done it several times. Not the hardest ride in terms of elevation climbs or leg burn out, but still, sitting in that little seat for 5-8 hours a day is its own form of meditation. My goal - as a person that spends a fair amount of time on a bike - was to see if I liked a longer, overnight type of thing, and get a handle on how far is too far, how hard was too hard and be able to dial in on trips that fit my biking profile. I believe that has been achieved - I can now look at a biking tour group’s South Dakota or Amsterdam to Barcelona trip and see if it’s something I could do.
I’m confused at why and how the Cold Play Kiss Cam incident caught on and went so viral. I get it that it’s one of those ‘by the grace of god go I’, or ‘that’s why you stick to hotel rooms’ type of response, but still, the outlandish pile on by social media, memes and print journalism is hard to square with the actual thing.
I’m a history buff, and have a fair to above-grade understanding of American History, and feel very comfortable with the mid-19th Century history, say 1850 onwards. I got the rise and fall of slavery covered in some details, the industrial revolution, the railroad inception and progress from steam to coal, the assassination, the sad chapter of reconstruction, presidential rotation, etc… But the Erie Canal’s role in all this, the canal’s role in turning NY into the aptly named Empire State, as the canal became the primary lane of commerce in America.
This helps to explain the mystery I never solved of why so many important Americans in the mid-1850’s were living in Auburn, or Syracuse, or Rochester - towns that still exist today but seem very far out of the action - but I would read a book and William Seward would be living mid-state, Susan B Anthony, Harriet Tubman, and even 13 Years a Slave, when he was returned he returned to Mid-State, Upstate - it was literally not the middle of nowhere, it was the center of everywhere, with the Canal creating one of the busiest, vibrant string of wealth that spanned the whole state.
Not just commerce wealth. The Canal, its riverside banks - pushed ideas westward, pushed religion westward. The abolitionist movement fermented there, women’s rights, 7th Day Adventists and Brigham Young’s mormons, where the first 5000 copies of Book of Mormon was published and disseminated. Religious revivals - think O God Where Art Thou - up and down the banks of the countless towns that sprung up - Spencerport, LockPort, Brockport, Fairport, Albany, Rochester, Buffalo. The original cauldron of stew -immigration, the free market and freedom to worship and travel- that resulted in a circus and brew of personalities pushing self-reliance and the pursuit of individualism across the Appalachians in mass, for the first time.
The Bike ride was good. The history lesson was good. I can now hear the raucous canal life - the mules, the barges, the locks moving cargo against gravity, the preachers and sinners, block after block of saloons and bars - a dirty, frenetic, life edged with the unknown. A combustible circus of self-determination by whatever means necessary.
Future blog topics
- My recent upwork experience with suspected AI fraudster.
- The Bike ride
- Always coming home to a shitshow of one sort or another.
- Vet called Lulu a ‘Senior’.
- My son’s romance with a graduated Senior.
July Musing from the NorthEast
It’s been hot here in the NorthEast. And muggy. As I sit in my screened porch at 6am, it’s clear another hot and heavy day is upon us. I’m a big fan of promoting the non-traditional career route of less college more real life practice, but you can’t deny one of the true drawbacks of pure trades work is being exposed to the elements. Hot, cold, rain, etc… you are out there.
Currently we are having a ‘trades’ conversation across the country - the college route and the non-college route. It’s gotten a bit linear - be a plumber or work in an office. The term ‘trades’ needs to be expanded and rebranded since it doesn’t do justice to all the real alternatives out there to a four year degree. You look at a construction company - or a trades company - and just inside that company are many positions that don’t require a college degree and don’t require swinging a hammer. Same thing at a grocery store, physical therapy office, doctors office, accounting firm, hvac company, auto dealership.
Yes, you need to know how to read and write. The better, the better. Some book-keeping, some excel, some communication. What seems to be lost in the academic career prep track is the ability to prepare for the work-force - in fact, I think there could be a curriculum that is junior college, community college cost that is designed for work place prep. Basic quickbooks, advanced use of MS office- word, excel, powerpoint-, communication etiquette, personal finance, basic business practices and law. A foundation of useful skills that are valuable to a small business.
The team in the office is humming away. All men. A major switch from mostly all female. Looks like it’s a good team, a sustainable team. A talented team.
Without any homes to sell - currently working on 3 ‘your land our homes’ projects- I’m losing a little bit of my in-depth in-touchness with the real estate marketplace. Looks like homes are still moving, and moving at reasonable prices, and looks like there are some really nice homes for sale. Some of the new construction that went up and sold over the last few years are coming back on the market - interestingly, not much of it is our homes. People keep our homes. Other new construction, that seems to turnover sometimes pretty quick. People have always kept our homes - for decades. Just the back of an envelope - of my first 10 homes, I think 5 families still own them after 20 years. That’s pretty rare in a 2nd home marketplace that averages turnover every 7 years. I think it’s a compliment to our efforts.
Our 16 homes in Saugerties built in 2020-2021, only 2 have been put back on the market, and one was always an ill-advised investment play. 12 homes in North Branch, people are just getting settled in. 15 in Kerhonkson, maybe 2 have resold. 4 in Stone Ridge built 10 years ago - no one has sold. 40 in Narrowsburg - maybe 10 over 20 years have resold.
Which brings me to an interesting tidbit I was thinking on the other day - that two of my biggest successes of the last 5 years have been nearly inadvertent, near misses.
In Saugerties, when I bought 16 lots in 2 tranches of 8, the transaction was occurring just as covid was springing forth its bountiful wrath. I had already purchased the first 8, and the 2nd 8 were set to close in 60 days, and I did everything in my power to get out of the deal, since I personally had no idea where the market was going, and I was of the mind-set pre-covid (2020) that the sales environment was going to get rough, and was preparing to stay prepared for a rough spell - I think we were building a half a dozen smaller homes. The last thing I wanted to be was the guy holding 16 parcels of land (with borrowed money) as the market churned to a stop.
The NYC seller, who had owned all 16, would have none of it. A sophisticated seller with a tough attorney, they were going to hold my feet to the fire and sell these lots to me whether I liked it or not. This was March and April. So I bought them. Turns out these $40k-$60k lots were a good mine, as the Covid restrictions and fears pushed people upstate in a gold rush like volume. Soon, everyone was buying land; soon, everyone was buying homes; soon, lots of builders, designers and developers were seeking out land. And the cost was going up, quickly, and more than that, there was never a lot of land available, and it was becoming scarce rapidly. Prices for that $50k piece of land now ranges from $185k-$300k, and there’s not much to choose from.
What that did for Catskill Farms was give us a ton of land to project our building schedule - we weren’t out searching and competing for land - we owned it, we could show it, we could couple it with a house and sell it. And that we did - one after another after another after another And we were doing the same at several spots across our building area. We put up a shit ton of houses.
Same thing but different up in North Branch/Fremont NY, where I had a deal that was so good I had to buy it, but again, didn’t really want to. I think it was 300 acres - already subdivided - and ready to go. But before I bought it, I unsuccessfully tried to find a partner, and after I bought it, I tried like hell to find a buyer for the whole thing. Unsuccessful in both efforts, I did what I go best - double down, hold my breath, work like hell, and build the damn thing out.
Turns out, while a ton of work and a ton of risk, both projects (and others going on at the same time) were hugely profitable - and I was still selling at under true market value of what real estate was going for since, I was making deals on unbuilt homes that would take 8 months to monetize, and the market was going up like crazy in those 8 months - especially at the beginning when my prices started at $450k and then $550k and then $650k and then $950k (in 2024 when I finally caught up mostly with them market). You start making $200k-$300k a house and you start building real wealth.
But the point of the story is that it only happened because I got stuck in deals I was dying to get out of but turned into the best things that ever happened to me - being loaded up with great land when the great covid rush hit. I wouldn’t get the reward with venturing out into the deep seas of the flat earth first, chartering and navigating by the stars and currents.
I had a couple of things working for me - 1, I was used to death-defying risk-taking, 2, I had a great bank (Jeff Bank), 3, I knew the market inside and out, 4, I had a great marketing machine I could switch on, 5, I had a good foundation of a team to get the work done and monetize the opportunity, and 6, I had been doing this for 2 decades, so had a lot of soft relationships with engineers, building departments, utilities, etc… To scale, this was not the time to build relationships, this was the time to leverage ones you had built over many projects.
I’ve probably written this here before the clever analogy I came up with during this time or shortly after - that for many businesses, Covid was like being on a raft in the salt water ocean - there was lots of water (potential clients) but you couldn’t drink it because is was salt water (capture the business) - yes, your phone might have been ringing off the hook but because of a lack of business infrastructure, cash flow, employee recruiting acumen, production process - you weren’t able to scale and the only thing you got good at was saying ‘no, can’t do it’, or worse, saying ‘yes’ only to fail to finish properly or finish at all.
This was when having a business degree, a communications degree and 20 years of experience helped - we scaled, we met the moment, we executed, at the highest level, at the highest RPM, with our steering wheel shaking and our hands gripped tight - we scaled, we met the moment, we surfed that incredible wave of demand that swept right through our hood.
More June Musings
Fascinating transition happening in life and business. The slooowwww down. After literal decades of go-go, then two years of rebuilding, then a half a year of financial planning, I have a vision as to what the 3rd chapter of my life might look like. Although, as I put together a new squad in the office - interestingly of all men - maybe the spark to continue gains ground.
It’s an enviable position with lots of options; options that include timing, structure, pace, and commitment. Lucas Petersheim and my mom at Penn State for a football 7 on 7 Summer Ball.
That enviable position comes after the unenviable task of building a company for 25 years, where options were more like requirements, where discretionary meant not if, but when, are you going to do something (correct answer: better do it now).
I spend a ton of time thinking about this business stuff and enjoy it immensely, but I don’t write directly about it, and perhaps I will on this thread.
This classic Cottage keeps looking better with the landscaping, rails, and stone work. The Owners, who work in the sports broadcasting field, have invited us to an 'on the field' experience for an NFL game this fall, to a game of our choosing.
As I’ve said a few times in the past, I write more when things are uncertain - the act of writing for me has always been an effort at figuring things out, an exercise of strategic thought, an outlet for frustration venting. And as you can see over the last 2 months, the volume of my writing has decreased. That must mean things are on the mend, and it must mean I don’t have any front and center nonsense to deal with that is hogging a bunch of head space. Actually, it doesn't mean that at all -but the front and center nonsense is stuff I've seen before, so while it must be addressed, it's not new.
6:45am, Saturday - Off to play some early morning, windless pickleball in Matamoras PA. Then a stop at Home Depot, a couple of chores, obligatory late morning nap, some pool time, a new book, a work out and now watching game one of College World Series - Coastal Carolina v LSU. Update- LSU swept them.
Men’s league (45+ to play, 48+ to pitch) tomorrow at 10am. I’m 0-7 after two games and to add salt to the wound I broke my bat - and those bats aren’t cheap -$200 a pop. Update -this game got rained out.
Ranch 72, waiting on Electric - finished.
I’m mentoring 3 young high school men this summer - Gino, in the office. He’s super smart, just graduated, a walk-on volleyball hopeful, and has been helping with all sorts of tasks. Cameron and Zion, heading into their 11th grade year and good friends of Lucas, are working at my home on the grounds all summer. Building that work muscle, that show up to work everyday muscle, stay off your phone muscle - that work isn’t good or bad, the task at hand not good or bad, it’s just work. And the more you develop that muscle, the easier the task is, and the mind over matter battle is won - if you don’t mind it don’t matter.
I also loan them out to various other companies I know. The pictures below are at Tamerlaine Animal Santuary in Montague NJ, where they muck stalls, and make pals with rescued animals. No meat allowed in the packed lunches.
I’ll probably introduce them to some budgeting apps, and show them how to track their income and spending - develop their relationship and awareness of money, their habits, and the idea that money is 75% psychology and 25% math.
I have a small philanthropic fund (actually, is $125k small? - who knows anymore it’s all so relative and individual) and through that I run a financial literacy program and then hand out (10) $1250 scholarships for those chosen for the class and show up for it. And another $7500-$10k in various organizational grants such as food pantries, equine therapy, libraries, main streets enhancements, etc...
America is full of financial illiteracy, and really it’s a prison of unawareness at first, and then a prison of debt payments delaying, postponing and possibly eliminating the plans for your future.
Lake front home in North Branch NY.
The dumbness of new cars, anything with motors. Of micro-finance where you buy anything and finance it through some simple 'low cost' program. That the billions spent each year in marketing from American companies to get you to borrow, borrow, and borrow. Welcome to the machine, built and maintained for you, for a lifetime.
Even the all important credit score -it doesn’t monitor income to debt ratio, it measures a bunch of nonsense that revolves on how you borrow money - not on your net worth, your income, your cash flow. As a metric to measure someone's inclination to pay their bills without some excuse - yes, good and important monitor of that - but anything else, for anyone making real money and using debt, points, credit cards in a surgical way - nonsense score.
Are these baseball pants too tight? I accidentally picked up 'youth large' and not 'mens large'.
It has been wet in the northeast. Like someone was saying 17 straight weekends of rain. I know the contractors who work outside are struggling to stay on pace with their schedule - especially painters and landscapers. I’m trying to finish up my pickleball court, and that literally is like a 7 stop coating process which is impossible to do in between rain storms. And then it does one day stop raining and these guys are weeks or months behind on their schedule - it’s a zero sum game, it’s not like they can snap their fingers and catch up - you lose a day, it’s lost.
Now it’s hot - heat dome hot. Like 100 degrees in the shade, as they like to say. There’s so much moisture in the ground that the heat is baking the moisture out and windows are fogged up, eye-glasses are fogged in.
We have a large lake front house going up in North Branch for a lovely family. A bigger house, a really fun home where a young family will go to retreat, camp, pick worms, get lost in the woods and kayak on the lake.
Lots of road kill in May - on my daily mid-day walks, all sorts of migratory Bashakill species were getting run over trying to cross the road.
We are finishing up the lake house in Parksville for a family from CT. That project went really well. It’s pretty amazing what we can do when we don’t spread ourselves too thin. We’ve been spread too thin since the very beginning of Catskill Farms. So to take all that administrative, construction, planning expertise and laser focus it on a few projects can really produce results.
The spring and winter were tough with 1, a deep freeze, 2, a lot of black swan warranty and construction issues that I had to solve on my own since the team was in transition. Literally every Friday night or Saturday morning some real emergency would arise to ruin my weekend. It was tough. It was unnecessary. It’s why you always have to keep some gas in the tank, or at least have some reservoir of gas somewhere. Or just operate on fumes, hoping to get it done before the car putters to a stop. It's why this business is hard, especially if you care and take it personally.
I’m in St Petes. Not sure if I said that. Playing pickleball at 7am on 6 courts with 50 players rotating in. Never played doubles before - sort of fun, and definitely aerobic. I have a pickleball court going in at my home and super excited to get playing. Flew down on a plane from RDU with a malfunctioning AC system - the cabin was 90+ degrees. Very uncomfortable and the fear was the temps would keep rising inside that little aluminum bullet. American Airlines - ugh..
Been on a jig to improve my reading discipline - 20 pages a day. It worked and cruised through Salmon Rushdie's Midnight Children in less than a month. It's a good quest, put the phone away, and turn page by page for my daily quota - having read so much about the Satanic Verses, Midnight Children is considered one of the Centuries best 100 books. If you picture a book with the tempo, humor and weirdness of the way Rushdie looks on this book jacket picture, you can get an inkling of the book itself.
June Musings
(note, this was written a few days ago, never finished, and sort of rambling)
The immigration crackdown is fascinating. I use the word fascinating, which one could object to, since it neither relays rage or whole-hearted approval, the two most common responses these days to anything political.
The raids hit close to home the other day with an ICE action in Honesdale, a town neighboring ours. I wonder how and why they chose a little pizzeria in the middle of nowhere to police. The organizational effort being applied to these actions is impressive, or maybe not - take 20 heavily armed masked para-military in war machines and go surround a pizzeria located on a small main street.
On the job fronts, I haven’t heard from any of my subcontractors any noise about raids, men not showing up, etc… and I haven’t heard any news about any of this in the mid-Hudson Valley. I do see on my social media a lot of ‘raids’ and irate community members, but when your feed starts to flood on a topic, that’s when you need to be most aware of the nature of social media - that they feed you what interests you, and the correlation between your perception of what’s going on (based on the frequent feed stories) and what is really going on can quickly diverge.
I’m not surprised the local cops and the state police are helping out - these guys love to get the juices flowing with some over-the-top policing - more fun than pulling over teenagers coasting through a stop sign.
If Trump wouldn’t be his own worst enemy, he could be riding his successful border shutdown program to elite presidential status - it’s impressive and shows how easily a serious-minded person on the subject can achieve results. I get how we are sending a message - if you aren’t here legally, don’t come - that makes sense. That there is a potential cost to coming here illegally, and it’s not a fun price to pay. On the other hand, the individual cases of families being separated, of people who have lived here a long time being deported to who knows where, that’s hard to feel some empathy for. But wishy washy policy makes for wishy washy results.
On the other hand, the alternative reality is these people do a lot of work in this country, so like tariffs, there is going to be a lag before the true cost of the effort is known. I don’t know enough about the tariffs to understand if what we are doing is long overdue and fair, but I do know it sure seems hard not to believe it’s going to raise costs a lot (and add uncertainty and delay into a lot of planning). But on the immigration front, I really don’t know how you replace hundreds of thousands of hard-working, reasonably paid people - less workers, higher rates of pay, higher cost to produce, higher cost to consumer.
I’m sure you all have seen the story of the mid-50’s guy in Nambia on a safari who went outside his tent to take a squirt and got eaten by a lion. Not cool. I’m sure it doesn’t happen much, but still - it’s like a shark attack, doesn’t have to happen a lot in order for it to resonate on a deep level, far outpacing the likelihood of it happening.
We are building 3 homes right now - 2 in Sullivan County and one in New Paltz. I have zero spec homes under construction. This is the lowest risk positioning my company has ever seen. It’s a natural denouement of sorts, an unplanned slowdown, that seems necessary and overdue in retrospect. A slowdown caused by me being tired of the hamster wheel of buy, build, sell, rinse, repeat: of not having the qualified staff to get it done: of land being expensive and hard to find, though I am seeing a slowdown in the liquidity of land, which should naturally bring down the price a bit.
It’s the last day of school in PA, perhaps the earliest ever release from school year. Not sure why, but it is. It’s a sunny perfect warm day after weeks if not months of shitty weather, so that’s fun. Lucas has around 25 kids over - I said ‘how many people are coming over?’ and he said ‘not many’ but then in the next utterance said, ‘hey, you mind ordering 6 large pizzas?’ Reminds me of how clueless I was when my front lobe was undeveloped.
My pickleball court construction is sitting there as a large concrete pad, curing, and waiting on the court painter who of course is behind like everyone cause of all the rain in May. Saturdays have been a mess in general - it’s been months since we had a nice, seasonally appropriate weather environment on a Saturday. At least it’s not 50 degrees anymore. After a long cold winter, the long cold wet ‘spring’ was dispiriting. I think the JV baseball team had 2 rainouts for every game played.
High school graduation is today, and then Sunday if today’s weather looks iffy. They like to do it outside so have to be flexible with the scheduling.
I’ve been exercising regularly now that the weather has changed, walking and biking and lifting lightly. What’s been good is I’ve avoided any injuries which kept occurring because I’m used to continuing to push my limits and gain strength, leading to over-done-it syndrome and some lagging injury, but now I’m more careful to grow any strength training very slowly and aim as much for maintenance as to quick strength building. For 55, I’m doing pretty good - it’s getting close to the age where it really starts to show who’s been taking care of themselves and had an eye towards fitness and health, and those who don’t. At 55+, you can really look worn out, overweight, and over-aged and there is a definite divergence of men at this age as to how they look, act and feel. You can’t discount genetics in this whole scheme of things, but that’s only best leveraged with an accompanying scheme of eye on the ball healthy eating and living.
I put away the bottle of beer and booze almost two years ago now after a lifetime of low-simmering daily beer or drink, and some serious binging. I think it had on-the-margins ‘too much’ over the years, but not really, in the whole scheme of things. A lot of it was just out of habit, - order that instead of this out of habit - so a lot of the drinking was just being mindful and intentional, sort of like how you should behave with money - anything done without thought or awareness can overtime work against you. I think I commented a few times how I felt pretty cheated when the pounds didn’t just fall off after cutting out all those empty calories but it turns out substituting cookies and tastycakes for a beer is a one step forward one step back type of dance.
I handed out 10 $1250 scholarships the other day to 10 Delaware Valley High School seniors the other night, for a financial literacy seminar and scholarship I developed through a small non-profit I fund and run. Stay out of debt, don’t buy shit you can’t afford, have a budget and watch out for student loans. I reviewed 21 applications and got a lot of insight into high school kids these days. By any measure, I’m generous: with my time, insights, money and attention. I think any real generous person never really feels that way, because by positioning yourself as a giver, you always get a lot more requests than you can possible grant.
