Monday...

Sitting desk duty at the Glen Burnie office today.  When you first start in this business, you hear all the time about sitting desk duty and sitting open houses to get business.  It took me about 2 months before I realized that it would take me 10 years to build a business by just doing these things.  Still, I do it, cause I’m still new enough that it doesn’t make sense for me not to do it.  It gets me in the office and, in between the occasional phone calls that come in, I am busy doing e-mails and mailings, and making phone calls of my own.  I did get 3 leads today, but two of them are on land deals that I am referring out to other agents with more experience in land contracts.  The third one has a lot of promise.  It sounds like they have a “friend in the business,” a common phrase you hear as an agent, but their commitment to this friend sounds moderate at best.  They have a townhouse to sell in Piney Orchard, and want to buy a home in some of the newer parts of Seven Oaks (Piney Orchard and Seven Oaks are the two most well known subdivisions in Odenton).

 

Meanwhile, I spent a large portion of this weekend packing boxes in preparation to next month’s move.  Our buying this house seems absolutely definite, and all we need to find out now is how much the sellers are going to need to reduce our “closing cost help” to get returned vents installed for the air conditioning system.  Things are crazy tight right now, but we’ll manage.  No matter how well you do your first year of real estate, if you are doing it right, most of what is coming in should be going right back out in marketing, system development, and education opportunities.  Our cell phone bill coming back at $400 more than normal didn’t help either (as my business as picked up, my cell phone usage increased exponentially and I managed to completely blow through our accumulated rollover minutes, plus about 800 more minutes).  Fortunately, Sara got them to knock $100 off of that, and we upgraded our plan.

 

Besides packing this weekend, Sara and I went to see The DaVinci Code yesterday afternoon.  The movie is definitely not as good as the book, but both simultaneously entertain annoy me and entertain me.  Friggin Dan Brown…puts this book out there as if any of the ideas in it are new, and as if they have strong evidence to substantiate them.  I could preceed to go on a rant about the numerous things that The DaVinci Code misrepresents, but there are many who have done it better than me, and with more balance to their views, so I will let you go seek them out.  All I am going to say now is that the conspiracy theories behind the writing of Scripture and canonization of the New Testament simultaneously crack me up and disgust me.  Even at a liberal dating of the Gospels and the New Testament epistles, Dan Brown’s theories as to how Scripture is tainted falls in the face of the evidence.  And then to suggest that the Council of Nicea arbitrarily chose what to include in the Canon, as opposed to just making official what was already “decided” by what spoke for itself (on the basis of apostolic authority, among other things), is just silly.  That is like saying that a council of important people at one point got together and decided that Mozart and Bach and Beethoven were great composers…in truth, the test of time and the beauty of the music was what has raised the works of these men to the place of prestige that they hold today.

 

Okay, enough ranting. J

 

Peace,
Greg

 

P.S.  For more on The DaVinci Code, see www.probe.org.