December 6. Tuesday Night.

Hi Journey.

Today Mrs. Grufsen rang and says she simply can't face another Monday Night Football game with her current basement.

So I dashed over to her place and learned the inaugural NFL party had been a smash, but several of her husband's co-workers had migrated to the pool table and dart board in their downstairs rec room. She took me down there, and I agreed it's pretty sparse: a couple of gaudy neon signs hung askew on their knotty pine wall with a Falstaff bar light strung up over the pool table.

I told her we could definitely salvage her basement. Shelly should really come over, though, and possibly we should meet with her husband, too. If the guys don't like the feel of the rec area, they weren't going to spend much time shooting darts and plinking the balls around. I was thinking along either the lines of an English pub or possibly even a big-game hunting lodge. But, I know quite well enough to keep my mouth shut and not tip my hand in front of any client, even (especially!!) one I like, until I noodle some ideas over with Shelly first.

And if I can't get to Shelly, I'll run the idea by Joni. Better to have one of my staff tell me my ideas stink than to let a client think the professional advice she is paying for is golden and then have all her friends nod their heads and say how wonderful her new room looks and then about-face and talk behind her back as if she's an idiot for hiring a completely clueless decorative consultant

Swung by CoHo for a quick bagel and salad and a cup of Haitian on my way back to the office. The Weekly Business Gazette was laying there on the little two-seat nook that's just over by my favorite table, so I scooped it up and started thumbing through it.

And there's a big fat press release with the headline: Derrick, Isaac, Robinson and Trent Awarded Contract for First Charter Bank Branch.

But what caused me to spew my coffee all over the newsprint was this sentence:

“According to Sally Albright, branch manager, the focal point of the new branch will be a unique, triangular cast stone fireplace that will really help to create a hearth-felt feeling in our clients.”

Witch!

No, double-witch! Shelly plucked out that exact phrase and used it in the RFP we submitted. I had something simple in the RFP, something along the lines of warm feeling, but Shelly had ran across the hearthfelt line somewhere in her reading or maybe she just invented it but she made me put that phrase in the RFP.

Page 2.