My brother in law took this video this morning at Barber's Point - a surf spot on southwest Oahu. The waves were rather small and lame, but the water was warm, and we had a good time anyway.

I sat down last week to blog and soon got sucked into an internet vortex. This happens sometimes when, although I have good intentions, I allow myself to cycle through a group of websites that I frequent. This includes gmail, kayak (if we've got a trip coming up and I want to know whether I got ripped off on the tickets we bought), digg, espn, craigslist (can be extremely addictive if you live in a big city), costco.com (you never know), and google news (cnn.com has become less and less useful over the years). By carefully following a 12 step program, I was able to remove cougfan.com from my website cycle, but we'll see if my resolve can stand up to football season in the fall.

For some reason (I'm not quite sure why) I have recently become something of a germaphobe. I guess it started back when I was working at my company's previous location. One day I realized that since every person who worked in that building had to enter the same door, the 5 square inches of steel that comprise that door handle is perhaps the dirtiest space in the county. Anyway, I started bringing large bottles of hand sanitizer to work (my current one is in the half-gallon range). I think life-long germaphobes have mostly mapped our their worlds, but as I go about life now, I discover new ways to worry about germs in my personal space. Two weeks ago I went on a business trip to Kansas City. The purpose of the trip was to see some customers who have recently decided to leave us for our competitors. When I sat down in the airplane, I thought about whether a seriously diseased person had occupied that area on a previous flight. Just then a rather large fellow sat down next to me, and launched into a fit of coughs. In less time than it took for his sub-microscopic viral particles to fly through the air and land on me, I had removed my travel-sized hand-sanitizer bottle from my bag, and was slathering it all over myself as if it were a key step in some ancient pagan ritual. I didn't mind that my actions veritably shouted "I hate sitting next to sick dudes!" or that the alcohol fumes wafting away from my vicinity could have started a cabin fire if one of those airline "blankets" had produced a static charge at an inopportune moment. Luckily, all blankets were removed from planes after 9/11 and sent to coastal regions of 3rd world countries where they are now used as fishing nets. Anyway, the rest of my trip involved trips to hospitals, where hand sanitizer is just as common as medicare fraud, so life was good. By the way, this has nothing to do with toilet seat covers.

This is the week before the much anticipated in-law reunion. Regardless of whether we're talking about my family or Mari's, we always look forward to them. However, we probably look forward to them too much. Pretty soon, we get to the family reunion, figure out what's going on, wash a few dishes, and realize that the reunion is half over, at which point we know we will soon return to our mundane lives. Soon after that, we really do have to go home, and we start thinking about when the next reunion or vacation will be. This has led me to conclude that the funnest time at a family reunion is really the week BEFORE the reunion, when I can think about all the fun stuff we'll do while we're there. So believe me when I say that work this week will be a blast.

Another random thought: I've gotten hooked on costco soymilk. I would have never believed it, but Mari got some because she's off dairy for Quinn, and I started drinking it too. It's plain (not "vanilla") and it tastes great on honey nut cheerios.

This week, as the credit crisis has deepened (today JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns for $2 a share - Bear stock traded at $150 last summer), I am again reminded of how much I dislike Realtors. Lawrence Yun, head economist for the national association of realtors, embodies the characteristics I hate about these guys. They were happy to rake in the dough when times were good, and now they are frantically trying to prop up the market by making statements that have no credibility. This blog is kind of sloppy, but the guy is dedicated to monitoring Lawrence Yun and the dumb things he says. We recently received a local rag - the real estate section was headlined by a helpful article (written by a local realtor) entitled "The Sky is Not Falling" - a clear sign that the sky is falling. Another thing I think is silly: homeowners who got into mortgages they couldn't afford who are now begging the government to bail them out. It funny that during the real estate heyday, I never heard these same folks volunteer to give a slice of their cash-out-refinancing windfalls to Uncle Sam. It wasn't as if they said "this 20%/year home price growth is so crazy - I've gotta send some of this cash to the IRS so that they can bail people out when this bubble pops".

A little preview to a future blog. For many years, certain products and activities have been shunned and hated by the Campbell family: captain crunch, first person shooter games, the spraying of PAM indoors, attempting to wipe off a table in a single pass, cable tv, fast food, video game consoles, car payments, seinfeld, sleeping in, most soft drinks, and terry gross. It's worth noting that some items that used to be on the list (frozen pizza is a good example) but became kosher sometime during the late 80's-early 90's. Although I happen to agree with some of these campbell aversions, in my next blog I will confess to something that is definitely still on the list. That's it for now.

I went to a tradeshow this week. No matter how many tradeshows I go to, they are all the same. The first constant is the Freeman family of companies. I have now attended tradeshows in the following industries: food, pharma, lab instruments, military weapons, irrigation, medical devices, health system pharmacists, and healthcare information technology. In every instance, the Freeman family of companies has somehow been around performing a confusing array of services for which it is paid wads of cash. Not only that, but they have a never-ending supply of exhibit hall carpet which is infused with proprietary energy-sucking ingredients. Even seasoned exhibit hall wanderers are not immune to the carpet's powers. After wandering between booths for a mere two hours, my body feels as if I am on an episode of Man vs. Wild and my only source of water on the African Savannah is elephant dung. (at last week's conference I succeeded in suppressing the urge to wrap my head in a urine-soaked shirt).

While wandering by the booths, my reactions to seeing each exhibitor also fall into predictable categories:

1. Awe - There are a few companies at these shows that just have their acts together. They have an impressive array of products and services, and seemingly move from strength to strength as potential customers and partners clamor to do business with them. At this show I went to last week, that company was Google. In spite of Microsoft's gargantuan booth, Google chose to go with a tiny 1x2, and were hounded by throngs of conference-goers from dawn until dusk.

2. Confusion - I am constantly amazed that certain companies can survive year after year. Even after lengthy discussions with them about what they do, I sometimes still don't understand how they stay in business, or why someone would pay them to do what they say they do. I realize that some of these companies exhibit for the sole purpose of getting acquired by a bigger company, but I wouldn't want to buy company that can't explain what it does.

3. Red-faced shame - There's always that one company which insists on using scantily clad "representatives" to push its products. I recall at the military convention a few years ago, one exhibitor paid some Washington Redskins cheerleaders to show up and mingle with potential customers. To me, this conjured up unsavory stereotypes about sleazy back-room government deals for contracts and the like. The cheerleader's shock value was relatively high, too. In the context of a tradeshow, it seemed especially scandalous to see someone who is essentially wearing a bikini. There must not be enough important women in the military to put an end to this sort of thing.

4. Contempt - As I wander by the competitor's booths, it is easy to imagine how the competitor's employees must be in real life. Most likely, they breeze into the express checkout line at the grocery store with 18 items, file fraudulent tax returns, download pirated media over the internet, buy non-energy star-rated appliances, and tell lies. Unlike me, they do not mind deceiving customers, and look like skilled practitioners of the shell game, pyramid schemes, the bait and switch, the Nigerian letter, the Spanish Prisoner, the pump and dump, and various Ponzi schemes. I see attendees standing there talking to them, and assume that they are slowly being led away to customer purgatory.

That's quite enough for now. I will call the attached video "Asha pwns chin-up bar". After cajoling us into buying a chin up bar for her on ebay, Asha has certainly gotten value from it.