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I now realize that "CHANGES” don’t come WITHOUT costs. I had a brilliant idea that money could be used as an incentive for my kids. NOVEL IDEA! I arbitrarily decided (which is how I pretty much do most things) on an amount that could create an incentive and not burn a hole in my pocket. The boys would each earn $.50 a day by making their beds (meaning, pull covers up and pillow on), place yesterday’s clothes in the laundry room (separating whites from colors), bring dishes to the sink and take trash to garage. Through trial and error, I learned that weekly allowance wouldn’t work. We needed DAILY REINFORCEMENT, immediate gratification. They are SOOO like me….Not only that, they needed to actually see the money go from my pocket into their “bank” before they trusted that it was deposited. WHERE'S THE TRUST? To me this was a NO BRAINER. Easy tasks to get them started. Basic chores that they SHOULD be doing anyway. The idea of course was two-fold – doing things for themselves ...

I’m retired AGAIN. Or should I say, I‘ve just completed my latest chapter. This one took 5 years to complete. I now have time on my hands and am once again, trying to figure how to fill it up. At 48 years of age, I am still in search of “finding myself”. I was always told that I could “have it all”, but the problem is, I was never quite sure what that meant. Was it the combination of career, marriage and family? Or did it mean a combination of any of the three? Or did it mean that each one had to be successful individually, and when I say successful, I mean wealth, happy marriage and well adjusted kids…How’s two out of three??? When I look back over the course of my life, I realize that I never really had direction. I was never focused on any one goal or specific track. I went to law school partially in an effort to delay the inevitable, and partially because that was something my brother Mark was intending to pursue. I went into the family business because I was fortunate that it was ...