AAAHHH, HOME AT LAST, NOW TO SINK SOME ROOTS

In the last post, I jumped ahead of myself a wee bit, in order to get down on paper, a few memories of the girls in their new environment, while those memories yet remained with me. Ron was still not quite sure that she hadn’t been kidnapped from her home in the USA and then brought to Canada illegally. Remember her famous words when we told her about moving back to Canada, “not me Dad, I’m an American girl. Just leave me here”. Ange on the other hand was “hahaha, lalalala whatever”. She enjoyed the closeness and attention of gramma’s, grandpa’s, aunts, uncles, and, by now, a growing list of cousins, as Ol’ Bubbaloo’s siblings grew and started to propagate, procreate and pollinate.

We had arrived, found housing, office space, set up a business, found a client and got busy with our new life. All in a very short period of time. In this post I will ramble a bit. And try to paint a portrait of the chaos that seemed to follow us around, and a bit of how we dealt with it. First of all, let’s just say that while the girls were sinking roots deep into the Alberta soil. The roots that I sunk were very stunted and never did quite catch hold. It seemed that my destiny was not to remain in the land of my parents, for very long. Almost immediately, upon throwing myself into this whirlwind of activity that surrounded our arrival back. I found my butt back on an airplane seat and off once again.

Let me say, that in a couple of short months after arrival back to Alberta, our life was once again in turmoil. I had started an Engineering, Construction and Procurement company and almost immediately became very busy. Along with that my older brother “L”, brother in law “B”, Bubbaloo’s brother in law “J”, my friend R we were involved in trading a property, for a building in downtown Calgary. We were now, just getting into a complete renovation of this building. I was up to my neck in this work also. And then at the same time, my nephew “Huck” had come up with an invention for an inflatable, back-packable watercraft.

So now a new company took shape called Little Beaver Watercrafts. Same partners, plus Huck, and we now set off on a plan to manufacture these inflatables. I got busy with drawings, ordering materials, and trying to manufacture in our spare time. Everyone had jobs already so anything we did for this company was always after hours or on weekends. Huck, so named because he was the ultimate adventurer (of Mexico in an old school bus and Thailand on $2.50 a day fame.) Was to handle marketing to all of the sporting stores, I would handle drawings, advertising, materials, supplies and equipment and everyone else would pitch in with the manufacturing.

So you can see that very quickly after arrival, I was very, very busy. I had not even sat down at this point to see if I was even making any money yet. And then in the midst of this organized crap storm, I was hit by a thunderbolt!

My best, only, most loyal and singular “paying” client at this time had hired me to help them establish an overseas business in Thailand. Something they had absolutely no experience doing. And something that I could, maybe, have been considered an authority on, by this time in my life. I was to show them the ropes of International business. Then to teach their management how to proceed into these dangerous waters. I was cool with that.

There were only two significant problems that I could see. First of all, the ego at the management level in this organization was huge. There was not space in it to allow these people to realize just how much they did not know about doing business overseas. Second the top executive (the guy that paid my invoices) had decided that if I was truly needed. Then my worth would be overseas where they were starting up; not sitting on my ass in Calgary entertaining his top brass with travel stories. Oh great! Now some of you, especially Ol Bubbaloo will remember me harping on about never, not ever, travelling without my family in tow.

I had just left a fairly high paying job, with good benefits, when we couldn’t find a proper married status job that attracted us. We had a fit and moved back to Alberta, rather than travelling separately. Geezus, I am barely three months into the freedom of running my own business and being my own boss. I am suddenly, confronted with exactly the same situation I had avoided through all of those years with my previous employer. “Overseas alone! Out of the question! Who do they think they are! Don’t they know you are a powerful company? They can’t push us around? You promised, you remember?”

All of these things came from Bubbaloo’s mouth when I presented the dilemma to her. She was absolutely right, but it seemed like we had no choice. Here we were a short time into our new business, and we are at the brink of telling our first customer to “shove it”. We just couldn’t do it. Even though, the top man from the company, assured me that it would only be a “few weeks”. Bubbaloo and I both knew that “a few weeks” was the only thing it wasn’t going to be. Either I would be fired shortly after arrival, if I couldn’t help out; or if I could make a difference, I knew I was there for the long haul.

So leaving Ol’ Bubbaloo in charge of my business, the building renovations, finding clients for our new building, raising the girls, looking after everything, I boarded yet another jet and flew off into the sunset. It was early summer and I promised to return by fall, latest. Yet another in the life-long series of “famous last words” that passed thru my lips. As it turned out it took 18 months over three trips to finish a near to impossible task (story later). In total I spent about 6 months of the first two years outside of Canada, and it wasn’t over yet.