Hi, blog fans!

As promised, I’m back with another blog to fill you in on the Snap-on kickoff meetings and the fight I had with some alligators, but first I wanted to include another couple pictures from over the holidays. One is from the house on Christmas with Jon, James and Jessie. Santa was good to them!

The other is dinner with all my family in California at a really nice Italian restaurant on the harbor in Newport Beach. We had dinner after Ginger and I went with my sister Heather and Mike for a ride through the harbor to look at all the decorations and Christmas lights. It was really nice, getting to relax a little bit and hang out with my family.

Now back to Snap-on and alligators. Every year, Snap-on has meetings to get their year started off right. Last Friday, Ginger and I flew down to Key Largo for the southeast region and Puerto Rick sales kick off meeting. Tom Kosbohm and Jeff Camarena are the managers for these two regions, and put me to work right away. Friday night, we had a welcome reception for everyone, and the meeting got underway bright and early on Saturday morning at 8 o’clock. Blaine Metzger, Snap-on’s CFO was on hand for the meetings, and Ginger and I got to have lunch with him and his wife on Saturday.

Saturday evening was their big awards dinner, kind of like what we have at the end of the season. Ginger and I sat with Gary Fisher, Scott Broman, Scott Amundson, Will Lambard and his wife Kathy.I got to help Tom hand out awards and congratulate all the top sales winners. The meetings went really well, and I got almost 100 percent participation from the franchisees for the Gainesville race. It looks like they will have more than 1,000 people there!

Since we were in Florida anyway, we decided to take Sunday and have a little bit of fun. We went on an air boat tour of the Everglades and saw a bunch of alligators and wild birds. It was really cool! One of the alligator was so big it must have weighed nearly a ton. Just to put it in perspective for you, it weighed about as much as a Top Fuel dragster! With me in it! I got to hold one, but not that one. We must like hats, because we both got alligator hats before we left, so that hat will go on the shelf right next to my Mickey Mouse hat.

On Tuesday, the guys from ESPN came out to the shop. You may have not seen their faces before, but they are the reason you get to see the NHRA shows on ESPN every Saturday and Sunday night during the season. Jason Pidgeon, Tommie Lee Washington, Eric Swaringen and Dave Dobson came out to film the car. They are going to do some 3-D CAD drawings from the film they took to better illustrate how these cars work during the shows. It should be a pretty cool deal, and I can’t wait to see how it looks on the show!

With the team getting ready to head out soon and the haulers coming in with their new look, I’m sure we will have more for you soon!

Over and out for now,

Doug