Monthly Archives: June 2008

(Community Matters) Not Pink Floyd but our retaining wall. This is at the west end of our property, behind the courtyard and pool house.

April 21, from adjacent property (immediately west),
ladder going down into our yard

April 21 the original wall (circa 1930s) and fence

May 2, immediately after wall demolition

May 2

May 2, (pic from West, adjacent property)

May 20 from adjacent property (many trees removed)

June 24 – the base has been poured. A six foot horizontal base will be buried
under 5 – 6 ft of dirt (from adjacent property)

June 27 – view from our property

earlier today nearly ready to pour
(view from adjacent property, immediately west)

late yesterday afternoon – they are finally pouring

(Community Matters) They just picked up Steven who’s spending a night riding with EMS.

(Community Matters) She’s just arrived and is already being mean!

(Community Matters) This may be very cool

here

(Community Matters) Time continues to heal and most Senator Clinton supporters are warming up, if not excited, about D’s chances to take over the White House under Senator Obama.

Admittedly, more progress yet to be made welcoming, including & actively addressing the issues important to Senator Clinton supporters. Participating in several national campaign conference calls, I can promise this is a top priority.

(Community Matters) I’m hearing there’s a very cool archeological excavation happening in North Austin where they’ve found very interestingly dated West Coast artifacts. Evidently the dig is UT sponsored.

(Community Matters) As representatives of the Obama Campaign, Kirk Rudy and I attended a gathering of many key volunteers organized by Travis County Coordinated Campaign Manager, Ian Davis. Impressive and encouraging group of, mostly, young folks who all contributed greatly to Senator Obama’s success in Travis County/Texas including: Travis County Democratic Chair Andy Brown, Jessica Cassidy, Priest Cantu, Eva Lundsey, Jeff Strunk, Brooke Hellor, Dan Grant, Bobbi Kommineni, J.D. Gins, Crystal Viagran, Jocob Fernandez, David Kobierowski, Alex Ferraro, Blake Rocap, Bob Binder, Churck Yarring and Amber Goodwin.

(Community Matters)

Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan

(Community Matters) I wasn’t able to make last night’s swearing in ceremony but am very happy for friends/new & returning council members Lee Leffingwell, Randi Shade & Laura Morrison. Randi & Laura round out an excellent group of council members.

Of course, we’ll miss Betty Dunkerley a great deal. There’s a reception at City Hall today at 4pm to honor Betty. And, friends are organizing a thank you gala and debt retirement party at the Headliners on August 6. Sponsors are giving $300. Tickets will cost $50. Please feel free to contact me or Cis Myers if you’d like to participate.

(Community Matters) Steven and I are producing two of our friend’s (Michael Mitchell’s) plays, Highway Home & Them. Austin & New York award-winning director, Katie Pearl will direct. The two short plays will be presented as Two Fountains and open Nov 29 at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre.

Katie directed a workship of Michael’s Highway Home at one of his last UT classes in the Spring. She loved it, we loved it and several weeks before any awareness that Michael had cancer we talked about producing the show. Given the situation today, we’ve timed the production to coincide with the end of Michael’s 6 months of chemo (kinda an exciting light at the end of the tunnel for him, his family and friends). We’re raising the $25,000 production costs from family, friends and sponsors of the arts, so that we can designate all box office proceeds to two nonprofits, the Lance Armstrong Foundation (for Austin patient navigation) and Fuse Box, an important Austin arts festival . Sponsorships qualify as charitable contributions through the ABPorter.org Fund at the Austin Community Foundation. More here

(Community Matters) Yesterday was a terrific and productive day. Always a great day when get to spend most of it with enthusiastic, committed entrepreneurs. Breakfast with my friend/author/speaker, Thom Singer. We were eating at Galaxy Cafe on West Lynn where ran into several other friends including newly elected council member Randi Shade, Paint Texas Blue entrepreneur Alexa Wesner having breakfast with political gurus Mark Harkrider and Wyeth Wiedman. [Regret that we’re unable to be at Alexa’s big do on Saturday. Expect they’ll bust the $1mm mark for D campaigns. We’ll be celebrating a dear friend’s 75th with lots of friends and their family]

Second breakfast with Marion Cimbala who’s running the breast cancer services project for the Entrepreneurs Foundation. Good progress on our current projects (though admittedly never as quick as I’d like): patient mapping, patient navigation, food & nutrition project, bike ride for breast cancer services and a web portal for regional breast cancer organizations.

Lunch over an Austin Community Foundation board meeting. Our investments committee (which I chair) presented on our $105mm investments portfolio, our plans for changes in management and the investment policy and won approval to move a portion of our fixed income assets to Sage Advisory Services. I’ve learned a lot about Sage Advisory over the last couple of months. They’re an outstanding operation; I recommend them for core & core-plus fixed income strategies.

Afternoon Obama campaign related meeting with political entrepreneur, David Kobierowski. He’s one of the three who, with Ian Davis, launched Texans for Obama and the Obama Book Club. Very enthusiastic about raising more money for the campaign, so we met to brainstorm & strategize.

An especially wonderful meeting with arts/social entrepreneur, Ron Berry, founder of Fuse Box Festival, Refraction Arts and a local actor. Steven and I adore Ron and the festival he’s created. It’s already an extraordinary asset for Austin. We wanted him to know we’re here to help grow his festival in any way he’d find helpful.

Finally, dinner with one of our former MBA students and his business partner who traveled down from Dallas so we could review their start-up business plan and offer ideas. Interesting nugget and potentially super opportunities. We felt good about the feedback we were able to offer. Hope they did too.

(Community Matters) It just keeps getting better and better – of course, many say polls don’t count until after Labor Day.

FiveThirtyEight.com