We did a couple of small deals in the Baltimore area, and hired a couple of additional people for the tax law and due diligence aspects. They got a decent paycheck, but they didn't become partners. By our accounting, the value of our investments was already worth quite a bit more than what we had started with, between the general market rise and the specific private equity deals we had done. When some of these outfits did their IPOs, we would be worth a fortune. Everybody started tossing ideas around for new investments. John, Jake Senior, and Melissa knew the local business environment better than I did (especially John, a very well connected lawyer), and Melissa and I were able to network with people for Silicon Valley deals.
Missy's marriage collapsed shortly after the turn of the year. She didn't talk much about it, but I got the impression that the pair just drifted apart. She never said he was catting around on her, and I didn't think she was the type to fool around on him. John helped her find a decent lawyer, and while he didn't take her husband to the cleaners, he did keep him from getting his hands on Missy's shares in the company.
Missy moped around for a bit, and Marilyn and Taylor got to talking about it, and they decided to do an 'intervention.' They roped Andrea and Tessa and a few other women they knew into a Chippendales party. Okay, I don't know if they were technically speaking the 'Chippendales' dance group, but it was a bunch of male strippers. She had done this a few times my first time around, too, and I knew exactly how it would turn out. I smiled when she told me she'd be home by eleven or so. As I expected, she came home somewhere around four in the morning, drunk as a skunk (they had rented a limo, I insisted on that), and horny. She had her way with me, I rolled over and went back to sleep, and Marilyn had a two day hangover the rest of the weekend. I have no idea what Missy did when they got her home, but she seemed happier afterwards.
Dum-Dum proved fairly easy to train, Marilyn not so much. It's easy to train a dog and I had done it several times over the years. As soon as you catch them pooping or peeing in the wrong spot, you grab them, yell at them, rub their nose in it, and smack them with a newspaper. This is pretty standard stuff. On the other hand, Marilyn had never raised a puppy before, and thought I was heartless and cruel, since I was beating a poor and defenseless animal and rubbing their nose in it. I should only yell at them, or something like that, and I swear she actually found a book that she thought agreed with her. It didn't, but it was so full of New Age bullshit, it was hard to tell. I had Dum-Dum trained by February.
The nice thing about the town house layout turned out to be the multi-level aspect to it. Our room was upstairs, and I made Dum-Dum sleep down in the kitchen, walled off by a baby gate. She whined, but you couldn't hear her upstairs. Charlie just loved his new buddy, and they chased each other all around the place. Once she was housebroken, and we let her have free run of the place at night, she mostly slept in Charlie's bedroom, which was just fine with Marilyn and me! On my first trip, we once had a dog that slept in bed with us, between and perpendicular to us! It made for difficulties in the romance department.
We moved into the new house the week after the Chippendales episode, and if Marilyn was still feeling under the weather, she had only herself to blame. Strangely, she didn't appreciate my informing her of her own culpability in this state of affairs. In fact, every time I laughed at her, she extended her middle finger and said words that an impressionable young lad shouldn't hear his mother saying!
The night after we moved in, the lights went out. We had a county-wide blackout. The next day I ordered up an emergency generator. What a pain in the balls!
I hate moving! This was the second time in a year we had done this, and both Marilyn and I vowed not to move again until they put us into pine boxes. I had a local moving company handle it, and it went smoothly, even if the entire process is a clusterfuck.
Everything in the house was muddy by the time we were done. One thing I had learned over the years is that all those beautiful construction site pictures had grass magically edited in. A real construction site is a muddy disaster! We had grass seed planted, and some hay blown around as cover, but it would take several months for anything to look like something other than raw construction.
By April Charlie's language skills had developed to the point where he was speaking in complete sentences. "Dum-Dum poop!" is a sentence, right?
In April I took a couple of weeks off and made some arrangements with Taylor for another nice vacation. First we drove up to Utica in the Town Car, since it was the only thing big enough for the three of us plus Dum-Dum in a car cage. That was a long trip; by the end of the trip I was wishing we had Dum-Dum in the seat and Charlie in the cage! We stayed a few days with the Lefleurs, with Charlie and Dum-Dum living at the house, while Marilyn and I stayed at the Sheraton. Then we got a lift over to the Oneida County Airport, where Taylor had a Cessna Citation II waiting for us.
Our vacation was going to be in the Caymans, which was a place we had been to several times in a previous lifetime. The Citation II wasn't as big as the G-II I had ridden in from Hawaii to Bellevue and back. It was a bit larger than the Learjet we had last year, with a longer range. I teased Marilyn about rejoining the Mile High Club, but she refused, pointing at the open doorway to the cockpit. I laughed and told her they could put their headphones on, and Marilyn's eyes opened wide and she stared at me until I broke down and laughed at her. That wasn't on my list of fetishes.
Taylor had rented us a villa on Grand Cayman, on the inner North Sound side of Seven Mile Beach. It wasn't quite as large and as private as the estate on Eleuthera had been, but it was still private. Marilyn managed to work on her all over tan around our pool. I liked the place, but then I had always liked the Caymans. It consists of three islands, Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brac, but almost the entire population lives on Grand Cayman, around 50,000 or more. The place is clean and civilized and modern, and simply very nice. There are a lot of restaurants and places to go and things to see and do.
I got Marilyn to talk about what she might want in a vacation home. "You're serious?!"
"Sure, why not?"
"I thought you were joking."
"I'm always serious about goofing off.", I said with as straight a face as I could muster.
My wife snorted at that. "That's true enough. So you're serious about this? We can buy a place somewhere?"
I nodded. "Yeah, why not? I don't want to do it until we're worth about $100 mill, but I figure that's only another year or two, tops. Also, we're only talking one place. I'm not going to buy a place on a half dozen different islands. So, what do you want in a vacation spot?"
Marilyn shook her head in mystification. "I have no idea!"
"Well, compare this place to last year, in Eleuthera. That was a lot smaller island, lower population, but the place we stayed was larger and had a much bigger beach and was more private."
"Oh." Marilyn gave it some thought and shrugged. "Maybe something in between. La Valencia was simply gorgeous, and it was so private, but there wasn't anything to do there. Maybe something like that on a bigger island?"
I nodded and smiled. "Okay, that's a good start. For our next trip, let's ask Taylor about that. I want something that we can take the kids to for family vacations, but also come to by ourselves for an adult vacation."
"Just how adult did you have planned?"
I smiled at her. We were just back from lunch, and we were both wearing t-shirts and shorts. Well, I was wearing shorts, and Marilyn had on a denim skirt, and I knew she had nothing else on. I crooked my finger at her and said, "Let's talk about that.", and we spent the next few hours discussing in detail just what kind of adult vacations would be planned.