What Would You Do?

Anyone that knows anything about me will tell you I love technology.  I one day hope to have a solar powered house that I can control with my iPhone if that tells you anything.

But it is not just the technology that interests me.  It is the people behind it.  I love learning about the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world.  I like to know what they did before they made it big and what they are doing now.

Two of the guys I have been following for a few months now are Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.  While their names might not sound familiar, what they created will…Twitter.

Now they weren’t the only two involved and their amount of involvement is different, but in the grand scheme of things they were both there in the beginning and help get it to where it is today.

But once again, it is not what they are currently doing that I am interested in, it is where they started and what they are doing now that I like.

For Evan Williams, this wasn’t his first company.  Not by far.  He has created several other start ups, including a little one called Blogger that he sold to Google.  For those of you that don’t know, Blogger is a “template based” website that allows you to post your blog.  It is what I use mainly because it is simple!  Anyone can do it!

Jack was a little bit different.  For him, Twitter was his first successful startup.  And for him, it is what he is doing now that is interesting.  While he still has a role at Twitter day to day, he founded another startup called Sqaure.

As a side note, I am a huge fan of Square.  I loved the concept and the ease of use. 

From squareup.com: Square is the simplest way to accept credit cards. It’s easy to use and comes with a free credit card reader for your phone or iPad. Sign-up is quick. No complicated contracts, monthly fees, or merchant account. When you swipe cards with Square there is just one fee: 2.75%. 

Now, the main reason I am fascinated with this is because my wife sells Mary Kay and taking credit cards has always be a challenge and expensive for her.  Not anymore!  If you have a small business or sell something on the side and you want to take credit cards, check them out!

OK, sorry about that! 

My point is, Jack moved on and did something else that he was passionate about with his time and his money.

And it was just announced yesterday that Evan (along with 2 other guys he started Twitter with) has moved on and created another start up company.  The name of the company is TheObvious Corporation.  The Obvious Corporation makes systems that help people work together to improve the world.

So that brings me to you and my question.  If money was no object and you could start a startup or start a non-profit, what would you do?  Would you tackle AIDS like Bono?  Would you battle disease in third world countries like Bill Gates?  Improve schools like Mark Zuckerberg?  Or would you continue to find niches in technology where you could make a difference like Jack and Evan?

What would it be? 

What would it look like? 

What would you do?

Burgers, Beef and Security

So with our 10-year wedding anniversary behind us and Alexis’ birthday just a few days away, I thought I would recap our weekend for everyone! 

It started on Saturday morning with us taking Alexis to see Cars 2 with TJ and rest of The Leckie family.  Since this is my blog, I will give you my review…it was NOT as good as the first one.  Way too much action for my liking.  It was the characters that made the first one and they seemed to get away from them in this one.  But I digress.  The kids loved it and that is all that mattered. 

After the movie, we took Lex over to my Dad and Stepmom’s for the day/night.  I thought since we had time before check in at the hotel, we would hit one of the new In-N-Out burgers in D/FW.  I will blog about this later, but we LOVE In-N-Out.  Great food.   We waited in the drive thru for about 20 minutes and then sat under a tree in our car to devour it.  Man, it was worth the wait!

From there we headed to the Hyatt Regency in Dallas for the night!  We got checked in and hit the “pool”.  I use the quotes, because it was like a large hot tub.  It was BAD.  This is a 4 star hotel with a 0.5 star pool.  It was about 15 foot wide and about 25 foot long and only held about 10 people comfortably.  No swimming could be done unless you were the only one in the pool.  Really disappointing.  BUT we were at the pool with no kid and it was nice! 

After the pool, we headed back to the room to get ready for dinner.  But because we are “Peery’s” things didn’t go as planned.  There was a horrible noise in our room…our room with a king size bed and great view of downtown.  It sounded like someone was dragging cables through the wall.  Really annoying and no way we wanted to spend our one night away from Lex listening to the noise!!

I got ready and went downstairs to see if we could switch rooms and the hotel was booked except for one room with double beds.  Not ideal, but we still had our good view and we didn’t have to listen to the crazy noise!!  We finished getting ready and took all our stuff to our new room and headed to dinner.

Dinner was at Al Biernat’s.  I have heard about this place for a while, but we hadn’t had the chance to go until now.  Two or three times a year we try to go to a nice restaurant so we save our pennies so we can get what we want.  There are 4 parts to dinner…cars, food, security and atmosphere…so I am going to break them down for you.

Cars:  We pull into the parking lot and there are 2 Maserati’s parked next to some really nice Mercedes and a Range Rover.  Being a car fan, I just wanted to go over and look at them all.  I quickly remembered that we were eating dinner and not at a car show!

Thinking that it couldn’t get any better, we walk outside to leave and parked on either side of one of the Maserati’s were two Rolls Royce Phantom’s.  If you don’t know what these are, google them!  They are $450,000 each!!!  I was looking at over a million dollars in 3 cars!!!  It was crazy!!!  So when they pulled our Ford Fusion around from the auxiliary lot (you didn’t think they would park us with the nice cars, did you?) we jumped in as fast as we good and left!!  This is where having our Lexus would have been nice!  We wouldn’t have seemed so out of place! 

Food:  One word…amazing!  We spilt the calamari that came with two sauces (for which there are fancy French names for) and each had a Caesar salad.  I had the dry aged 16oz NY Strip and Heather had the 8oz filet.  We split mushroom risotto and creamed corn.  While the steaks were great, the risotto was unbelievable.  So good!  For dessert we split a chocolate cake with a scoop of ice cream.  We were stuffed!!

Security:  As we were wrapping up, the owner comes over to the table next to us and tells the guy setting up that this table will be “security for table 12”.  Next thing we knew, they were setting up the table behind us for “security” as well!  We were intrigued.  This place was the hottest ticket in town for the Super Bowl where you couldn’t get a table no matter who you were!  Not only that, but President Bush lives in the neighborhood.  All the local athletes eat here too.  Who could it be?  Who is that big that they need two tables for security?  I was really thinking it might be the President! 

Well, to this day we have no idea who it was!  It was a Hispanic family that was not dressed to go out or they just had so much money they didn’t care what they had on.  But they came with a “security detail/entourage” of 5.  We were slightly disappointed. 

Atmosphere:  This place really was nice!  It was in an area of Dallas were all the “money” is.  This is old Dallas money.  This isn’t money that a rapper gets for selling records or a reality tv star gets…this was old Dallas oil money.  The cars in the parking lot were not rentals or leases or loaners.  These people were the real deal.

As a side note, we were wished Happy Anniversary no less than 5 times by the staff.  There was a good chance we were the poorest people in the restaurant that night, but they all made us feel like a million bucks.  If you ever have a chance to go, save your pennies and go!  It really is worth it all!!

So that was our weekend!  Picked up Alexis Sunday afternoon and back to the real world!  It is always nice to get away, even if we only went 20 minutes away for 2 days!!

All You Need Is Love

Back in 1967, four lads from over the pond told us that all we needed was love.  The premise behind it was pretty simple. 

John Lennon said that “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done, Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung, Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game, Its easy…All you need is love.”

While it is a great song, and one of my favorites by The Beatles, I am here to tell you that you do need love, but in a relationship you need so much more.  You need a best friend.

Ten years ago today Heather and I were married in a chapel in Las Vegas where the temperatures were in the 100’s and we literally felt like we were going to melt.  We were surrounded by our best friends, Nick and Kim, as well as other family members.  But our relationship started long before that day ten years ago.

It actually started over 20 years ago in 7^th grade in Mrs. Morrow’s English class.  (Apparently she liked the fact that I smelled like Downy soap.)  We became great friends. 

But Heather was popular and always dated the older boys.  And I was doing good to look ANY girl in the eyes and not freak out.  Pretty sure looking back on it that I was a lot like Raj on Big Bang Theory…didn’t talk to girls too much!  So I thought I was doing pretty good that one actually talked to me AND wanted to be my friend!  Jackpot!!

All through Junior High we were the best of friends.  Always laughed and had a great time together.

High School rolled around and at the start of the 10^th grade year we were attached at the hip.  It was after a trip to the State Fair and before a Friday Night football game that we decided to date.  (As a side note, I should have taken this as a sign of things to come, but she fell asleep on the bus coming back.  Ironically she still falls asleep in cars, buses, tanning beds, airplanes and any where else she can get a nap.  Haha…)

Life was good.  We got to see each other at school and then after the Friday Night football games we would go get pizza with the band.  She celebrated my 16^th birthday with my family and me and in turn I celebrated her 16^th birthday with her and her family.  To this day it is some of the best pics we have together. 

Like most high school relationships, it didn’t last.  We had a lot of great moments together and a lot of firsts that we both still remember to this day.  We stayed “friends” through most of High School.  To say things were great would be stretching it.  We tried to date again our Senior Year, but things just never were the same. 

Life after High School wasn't perfect for either of us and we made some mistakes.  We both had our struggles and life was hard.  We didn’t see each other much, if at all after High School.  I think we only crossed paths once or twice.  Nothing to really write home about.

Then one night in March 2001, as I was sitting on my couch, she called…and I was excited and surprised.  She wanted to know if I wanted to get together for drinks.  I said “sure, when?” and she said “how about now?”  It was late, but I lived on my own, so why not?

We met at the Embassy Suites in Grapevine and had drinks and caught up.  It was great to see her.  She looked great.  Like nothing had changed.  We laughed like we in the 7^th grade all over again and got caught up on the past 7 years.

I like to tell the story that she “stalked me” mainly because I think it sounds better.  But truth is she just happened to run across a mutual friend that I had just seen a couple weeks before and we had exchanged numbers.  Remember, this was before Facebook and cell phones, so she did some great detective work! Lol…

We hung out a lot over the next few weeks and things were great.  But truth of the matter was even though she wasn’t the only person I had ever loved, she was the only person that I loved and loved being with.

So one night in April, I suggested that we get married.  Now the details on all this are a tad “R-Rated”, but even though alcohol was involved, I did know what I was doing.  However, I think Heather thought I was just kidding and probably hoped I had forgotten when we sobered up.

This is the other part of the story I like to embellish on and tell people that she was homeless and I took her in.  Granted she didn’t have electricity and she was a few days away from being evicted, she did have a place to stay.  Just sounds better when I tell people she was homeless.  :)

I had planned to go to California and see my brother in June so we decided we would drive to Vegas and get married.  We were really excited!  Heather moved in (and cleaned up after me) and we were on our way. 

Now to stay our parents were surprised and supportive would be a stretch.  They all got a call along these lines:

Us:  Hi!  Do you remember Mike/Heather from High School?

Parents: Yes

Us:  Well we reconnected the other night.

Parents: OK

Us:  And guess what?  We are living together and getting married next month!

Now, we were excited about this, but the parents not so much.  They might lie 10 years later, but we are pretty sure they ALL thought Heather was pregnant!  Lol.

So we got married on June 25, 2001.  To say the first 12-18 months were “easy” or “fun” would be an understatement and flat out lie.  We were married and really hadn’t been around each other for 7 years and that was just in High School.

It was hard.  But see, this is where The Beatles don’t have it 100% accurate, because at the heart of our relationship was our friendship.  One night we made a pact that divorce just wasn’t an option.  Since then our relationship has flourished.  It hasn’t all been roses and we have had our issues, but we have always worked through them and remain committed to each other.

So on our 10 year anniversary I want to let you all know that I love Heather Danee’ Peery and she is my best friend in the whole wide world. 

In the last decade I have laughed more and shared some of the best things in life with you.  You have given me the most amazing daughter in the world and for that I can never thank you enough. 

We have shared some of the neatest things that would have never happened without you in my life.  I am proud to say I shared all those things with you and proud to know at the end of the day you are standing by my side. 

You make me a better person everyday because the last thing I ever want to do is hurt you or make you sad in any way.  So every day I wake up, I want to be better for you.

You are my best friend in the world and I don’t want to do life without you.  I am excited to know that when we are old and gray that it will be you that is on the swing next to me.

I am extremely proud of you and all that you have accomplished.  I know that our current place in life isn’t where either of us thought we would be 10 years later, but we are doing it together and that is all that matters.  We are Team Peery and I am so happy you are on my team.

So happy 10 year anniversary to my wife…my best friend.

Love,

Me