There are so many things to see and do that every step on the town feels like walking through history.   In another blog post I’ll try to elaborate more on my experience and share more pictures, but for this particular post I am concentrating on some photographs I took during my most recent trip over the 4th of July.

On the night of the Fourth Amanda and I decided to sneak onto the roof at her work to watch the fireworks.  Her building is about 12 stories high and has an ideal view of the fireworks that are set off over the national mall a few blocks away.  It is a highly coveted spot and each year her workplace auctions off tickets to watch from the rooftop.  We lost the auction, but decided that we were going to attend anyway.  The worst thing that could happen was getting asked to leave.  Fortunately, nobody was there to check tickets, so we walked right up and took our seats.

A few minutes later the fireworks started.  I decided that I wanted to take as many photos as possible and “learn” how to shoot fireworks with my camera.  I have a solid camera with many settings, one of which is a fireworks mode.  I started snapping photos in this mode and noticed that the fireworks didn’t look very good.  So I changed the exposure time and voila! Excellent pictures.

I think they turned out well… hope you do too!

Fourth of July Fireworks over Washington DC is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

I have long considered 2004 the worst year of my life.  Sure, a lot of good things happened this year (I bought my first house and my brother got married), but I was miserable.

Maybe it was the fact that I was severely overweight (I weighed 295+ pounds).  Maybe it was the fact that I was very bitter over a failed relationship.  Maybe it was the $10,000+ I had amassed in credit card debt.   Maybe it was the fact that one of my best friends, a star athlete who seemed to be in perfect health, was diagnosed with cancer at age 23.  Whatever it was, life in 2004 seemed to be a series of bad outcomes with little end in sight.

By mid 2005, a series of events helped me start to turn things around and set me on my current path in life.  First, I started to lead a healthier life by working out more and eating less.  After seeing someone at their peak physical health get cancer, my own sense of mortality set in and motivated me to improve my lifestyle choices.

Next, my brother and his wife announced that they were going to have a baby!  In order to get international travel out of his system one last time before Annika arrived, Brian and I decided to take a trip to Tokyo… for a weekend!  It was the trip to Tokyo that re-opened my world to all of the possibilities that I could pursue, and gave me energy to try and improve my situation.  Knowing that I was about to become an uncle made me realize that I needed to start being a lot more responsible with the way I lived my life.

Last, and perhaps most important, I started a working relationship and friendship with Harlan Austin – someone who believed in me and helped me unlock my business potential.  Harlan came to me in need of website help.  He had some great ideas to serve under-tapped niches online and needed someone to help him get things rolling.

Frankly, I wasn’t very good at web design, but I was determined to get the job done and created several websites with Harlan.  He was happy with the results and challenged me to learn how we can continue to make them better.  It was through being challenged that I realized that I needed to work hard and challenge myself in order to truly be successful in life.

From that point on, the rest is history.  I started doing freelance work at night in order to compliment the income from my day job and eliminate my credit card debt.   By the end of 2005 I determined that I could safely quit my job and make enough money freelancing to keep my bills paid.  On February 1, 2006 I became self employed, and I have been a business owner ever since.

In addition to my work with Harlan, one of my first contracts as a freelancer was with a small company called Three Deep Marketing.   At the time, there were only 4 people at Three Deep (Dave, Dan, Scott and my good friend Brandon).  Brandon introduced me to the team and we soon learned that we worked great together.  For a freelancer, it was a perfect cultural fit; there was a great synergy on our team and we worked together to bring many successful solutions to our clients.

In March of 2008 I became a partner in Three Deep, merging my freelance business and clients with theirs and teaming up to bring an integrated marketing solution to our clients.   Since joining the team, we have grown to 27 people and a new location in downtown Saint Paul.

Also in 2008, I started dating my girlfriend Amanda, who is my perfect compliment.  She is smart, funny and a genuinely great person.  She has introduced me to many new things and encourages me to pursue my dreams.   I am lucky to have her in my life!

I have really turned my life around and put myself on a path for success, but I am still hungry for more.  I know what it feels like to feel helpless, bitter, and to not take care of myself; I remind myself of these feelings every day as a source of motivation.  To me, there is no greater source of motivation in life than to know what “rock bottom” feels like, and to have overcome it.

Every little achievement that I have made  in my career builds on itself and I live my life in search of positive energy.

It isn’t always easy to stay motivated, but it is easy to stay on track you look in the mirror and you are proud of the person looking back.  In 2004, I didn’t feel a lot of self-pride.  By 2005, I found reasons to be proud of myself.  In 2010, I feel like I have completely changed my perspective on life.

If you have read this far, I thank you for sharing in my story.  If you are looking for a source of inspiration, let me know.  I would love to talk with you!

5 Years After I Decided to Turn My Life Around is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

These photos consist of three events:

• Target Field Open House in March
• First Twins Exhibition game vs. the Cardinals on April 2nd
• Second Twins Exhibition game on April 3rd

The stadium itself is beyond what I ever expected – it’s simply beautiful and is perfectly designed and executed on all fronts.  There isn’t a bad view in the entire stadium.  There are sections that are protected from the weather/elements and others that are completely exposed.  Some of the seats are heated!

Target Field is a great place to watch baseball.   Enjoy the view!

Twins Target Field Photos is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

View photos at SmugMug

Photos from my January 2010 Trip to Chile (1-100) is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

I waited in line for 2 hours to buy the first iPhone the day it came out.  I bought the second iPhone (the iPhone 3G) within 1-2 months of when it came out (AT&T subsidized it)… and I recently bought the iPhone 3GS when I was in San Francisco.

As the story goes, I was leaving Silicon Valley to go to SF when my phone battery died.  Rather than buying a charger, I bought a phone at the Flagship Apple store in Union Square.   Although it sounds like a major exercise in excess, I must add that I had intended to buy the phone when I got back to MN, and the poor battery performances simply forced me to play my cards sooner.

The phone purchase experience from Apple was exemplary, and I really had no problems.  In fact, I’m enamored with Apple for producing such an amazing piece of hardware.  Really, I have no beef at all with the phone; just the service provider.

While my phone is a business expense, and therefore write-off-able, I still think that the charges AT&T force you to pay are ridiculous.  The service charges for voice time are in line (about $50/month for my plan), and the data isn’t horrible ($30 for unlimited usage… about a $50/month savings over the stupid blackberry I used to own), the SMS charges are absolutely out of control.  For those of you who don’t know the lingo, SMS is simply text messages.  From a technical perspective, text messages are simply data points being delivered to your phone… only much more primitive.  Basically, SMS messages are transmitted over a data network (which I am already being charged for), and take far less data to transmit than an open web browser connection.  So why charge $20/month to use it?  For anyone under 40 who actually uses SMS as a part of everyday life, this is a travesty.

The other big issue with AT&T is that it really doesn’t work everywhere.  In fact, it really works poorly across most of America.  As I alluded to above, I was recently in Silicon Valley, which is literally the birthplace of any relevant technology over the past 50 years.  It also has horrible coverage from AT&T in many places.  New York City is also horrendous.  Sure there are a lot of big buildings in NYC, but there are also millions of users.  How about you put a tower on every building and actually make your service usable?

Rants aside, I have another rant for you.  After my recent purchase at the Apple store in SF, I got a survey invite from AT&T to give them feedback about my new phone.  I decided to tell them how I really feel.  When they asked my about the ‘negative’ points of my purchase from Apple, I stated:

The purchase really didn’t have any negative points, but the AT&T Policies are ridiculous.  Separate plan for SMS?  You should be ashamed of yourselves.  This is an old school technology, yet you charge separately for a data plan?  I think that you are completely out of touch with consumers and I hope your company loses exclusive rights to this superior product so that you can understand the repercussions of being such a horribly out of touch company.  Go back to tin cans on a strings, give up your profits/exclusivity with Apple, fire your executives, promote people under 40 who actually in touch with cell phone users, sacrifice a little profit, and then come back in 2-3 years with a service offering that people will resonate to using.  That is really the only way you could make any of us happy, aside from upgrading the service you offer to something relevant to 2009 and quit penalizing me for sending SMS messages.  Also, get MMS to work you idiots.

In addition to my rants, I answered the following question:

Is there anything else about AT&T, Apple, or the iPhone 3G / 3G S that you would like to tell us?

AT&T should do what Japanese businessmen do and fall on their sword and admit that they are horrible people and have no business blemishing an otherwise perfect product.

Maybe a little harsh, but really, the people at AT&T are bad.  Americans should speak their peace, and I have every right to tell a company how bad they are.  AT&T has made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit off of the Apple iPhone, yet they have done the bare minimum to accommodate the users of their service. For this reason, I don’t feel a single iota of guilt for telling them that they are horribly out of touch with the consumer economy.

Survey from AT&T about my iPhone is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

To start, I should first give you some background as to why I was in NY in the first place. One of my clients is a household name in the baby products area (if you have a cute baby, you say they look like my clients logo). Their offices are in New Jersey, about 30 minutes via train away from NYC. To get to NJ, I fly into the Newark airport, which is literally across the river from the city. Close enough that you can see statue of liberty out the plane window as you land.

The first time I visited this client, I vowed to make a serious effort to stay the weekend in NYC while I was there. My reasoning was simple; there are a million things to do in NYC, I had never been there, and I have friends who presently live there. When booking flights for the next trip, I told my boss to book my return flight for Sunday, because I was staying the weekend in the big city. This actually happened to work out perfectly, because we had been in talks with a similar company to ours about licensing a piece of software. Their offices are in Brooklyn, so we would be able to meet with them during our client trip.

I flew out to New Jersey on a Tuesday morning. That morning in Minnesota, the temperature was –35 degrees. It had snowed the night before, so I woke up at 4:30 AM to make sure I could shovel my car out of the driveway before catching my 7 AM flight. The bitter wind blowing on my face while shoveling made me sure of two things; 1) I should have shoveled the night before and 2) I was excited to get the heck out of the cruelty of Minnesota winter.

No problems with the flight and ensuing days working at the clients offices. Thursday afternoon we went to a train station in Summit, NJ and started the New York adventure. For those of you who don’t know, there are several commuter train lines in New Jersey that have a direct route into Manhattan. Getting into the city is a breeze, and relatively inexpensive.

The train ride was relatively uneventful, if not boring. I sat and read and waited for my opportunity to check off another state on my list of places visited. I even drifted off to sleep for a little while before I was awakened by a text message from my co-worker Scott.

“You aren’t on a plane out of New York are you?”

To which I responded “No, why?”

“Because it just landed in the Hudson river”

“Holy crap man, what happened?”

Before he could respond, I was already on the Internet, visiting cnn.com and trying to figure out what was going on. My phone’s data connection was pretty slow, so I wasn’t able to read anything before I got into a tunnel that went underneath the water separating NJ and NY. The name of that river? The Hudson.

At the time I didn’t think anything of it, other than curiosity as to what had happened, and if everyone was OK. In fact, I had even forgotten about the message by the time I made it to Penn Station and disembarked. I was more worried about finding our way to the subway station so we could catch the 1 to Chambers street and find our hotel.

We had booked a hotel at the Embassy Suites in the financial district, and because of the time of the year, we got the hotel (which overlooks the Hudson river and is a block away from Ground Zero) for like $130/night. I am guessing the hotel was so cheap because January in New York is not a desirable destination, and that was proven by the freezing walk we had from Chambers Street to the hotel. As I mentioned earlier, it was VERY cold in Minnesota when I left, and continued to be cold while I was gone. It was also quite cold in New York (5 degrees), and with a heavy wind outside, it felt like it was –10 as we walked 6 blocks to the hotel.

There are several levels of coldness, all dependant on circumstance and situation. While –35 in MN is absolutely brutal, at least we can walk from our heated garages to our destinations with little time spent outside. New York public transportation, on the other hand, is possibly more brutal because you have to walk several blocks to get anywhere. Anyway, enough weather talk.

After arriving at the Embassy Suites, I was pretty impressed with the great bargain we had found for the three nights I would be staying there. It was in nice shape and had some good views of the Hudson river. As we were checking in, I heard the lobby person saying that they were floating the plane down the river. I thought it would be a good story to say that I watch the plane float by, so I rode up the elevator several floors to see if I could watch a massive plane float by (turns out I missed it by about 15 minutes). There was a ton of activity going on both in the river with police rescue boats and barges floating around, as well as 25-30 squad cards and fire trucks lined up along each side of the street below. I saw all kinds of uniformed officers walking down the street toward the ferry terminal station, eventually disappearing from sight. It was amazing to see all of these people mobilize and react so quickly to this situation.

After about an hour of looking out the window and trying to play photo journalist on Facebook (I was uploading pictures from my phone and responding to people’s comments and questions about the situation), I gave up and got ready for Happy Hour. Happy Hours are free at Embassy Suites and I took full advantage. Well, since I still had a meeting the next morning, I didn’t take THAT much of an advantage, but still had fun.

Next we met up with some of my boss’s friends for dinner at an excellent restaurant called Tabla. Tabla was an Indian-American restaurant, and the food was very good (and expensive, but I wasn’t paying). Dinner was filled with good food and wine, and great conversation as well (one of the friends was a cardiologist so I told him about my Kenya trip) and I had a great first night in NYC.

A Weekend In New York – Day 1 is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

Most Underrated Movie Ever?

2. It is quite possible that I am the biggest fan of the movie Cable Guy in the world. I genuinely think that it’s a hilarious movie. Plus the fact that it bombed in the box office and a lot of people didn’t like it just adds fuel to the fire. America just wasn’t ready for Cable Guy!

3. I have gone to several countries without a plan. Each time I was able to get around via public transportation and order food by pointing at menus. Now that I think about it, I guess I did have a plan for where I’m staying, so saying I have no plan was a lie.

4. If 2007 was my year of Europe, 2008 was my year of North America. During this year I was in the following states/provinces: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Alaska, Yukon Territory, British Columbia, Ontario.

Heroes of Might and Magic II

5. In 1994/1995, I created a web site dedicated to a video game I loved called Heroes of Might and Magic II. I was able to create the site template in Netscape Navigator 2’s HTML editor and captured all of the images from the game itself. I uploaded them all to my dad’s company web server and then got people to visit my site through a web ring. I was getting visitors worldwide. I was a Hero without the might and magic. My brother would make fun of me for doing this. Now I have turned the Internet into my career. Who’s the dork now brother? What’s that? It’s still me?

6. When I was in college, this guy I know was allegedly involved with a server that hosted movies, music, applications, games, etc. that were all ‘free’ to those who visited the server. My friend at St. Thomas IT said this server sucked up 2/3 of the entire Internet bandwidth at UST before the RIAA sent a cease and desist. This guy was not me, I swear.

7. My brother and his wife have 3 adorable kids. Like model caliber children. I am training them to say stuff like “Uncle Jeff is awesome,” but I don’t see them often enough for it to stick. I am devising a plan that involves my voice coming through baby monitors and a getting a guest appearance on Dora the Explorer that will hypnopaedically implant this into their memory. They won’t even see it coming!

8. Continuing with the niece/nephew theme, I just love those kids to death. They are funny, cute and a little crazy too. They also have taken almost all of the pressure off of me to have kids until the twenty-teens. This affords me a lot of leeway in my life’s decisions. I am also working on giving them some money each birthday/Christmas so that they can travel abroad during college. International travel is something I think is very important, but is extremely expensive.

Hurricane Mike Ditka Sauer

9. I went as Hurricane Mike Ditka for Halloween in 2008 and rocked that costume. I even bought a mustache that contained real human hair and had to use some kind of human friendly contact cement to apply it. The night I wore the costume to a beer drinking party and the costume was well received. I enjoyed the attention. The part I didn’t enjoy, though, was the beer in the mustache. I just don’t think it’s very sanitary.

10. I am addicted to buying things on Amazon.com. The moment I get a glass of wine or a beer in front of me, my imagination runs wild. I hop onto Amazon.com, search, read reviews, look for something with ‘prime’ shipping, and buy. I would say Amazon converts me about 68% of the time when I have a little booze in me. If they were smart, they would monitor my habits and send me messages only during this peak window. During my periodic brushes with sobriety, Amazon converts at a much more conservative 10%.

11. I have never killed a hooker or a hobo. Carnies, are another story… which I will not be telling here. 5th Ammendment beeeotch.

12. Speaking of beeotches, when I broke up with my college girlfriend, I was heartbroken and thought the world was over. With time, I realized that she was actually an alien and killed her on the spot. I then proceeded to lose 50 pounds, wear something other than Cargo pants and band t-shirts, and start my own business. Life has been better ever since that time. It turns out that heinous alien was the best thing to ever happen to me.

13. I drink a lot of coffee. I think it’s awesome and life altering. Without coffee, I pretty much live in a haze and am not productive. If I would have drank coffee in HS and college, I probably could have gone to Harvard.

14. I chose to go to St. Thomas for college because my dad clipped an article from the paper about their Computer Science department. I knew that I wanted to go into computers, and my original intention was to make video games. Then I learned that you had to spend 100 hour weeks writing code in order to break into the industry, and you don’t make any money until you’ve been around several years, and I decided to give up that dream.

15. One of my good friends from my neighborhood growing up, Scott, also went to UST with me and did Computer Science because he wanted to make video games. We ended up living together for 2 years in college, buying a house together after college, and he came and worked with me at my first job. Since then, I see him about once a year. Sad.

16. Since I moved into my house in Roseville in 2004, I have had the following people live there: Sauer, Skaff, Weber, Smith, Catlin, Palzer, Pinto, Skaff, Petrich, Nick James (unofficial), Koba, Langhoff. That’s 12 people in that house. We have also had 1 pet; Skaff’s Parrot named Rossi. I now have 0 roommates and love it!

I am the guy front row in the middle

17. My business partner and brother from another mother, Harlan ‘Hucky’ Austin, was one of the most influential people in my career. He took me from doing static web development into the world of search engines and online money making, and if it weren’t for him, I would not be leading the life I live today. Plus, he taught me how to BBQ kickass ribs! He also allowed me to tag along with him to a celebrity fashion show as a bodyguard. That was an awesome experience.

18. When I was in 7th grade, I worshipped my sister. She owned several CD’s with a ‘parental advisory: explicit lyrics’ label, about 100 ‘cross colors’ shirts, and a pair of red Girbaud jeans. I remember wearing them to school one day with my red Chicago Bulls pullover Starter Sweatshirt and thinking that I was the coolest person in the school. I wasn’t, but for that one shining moment, Jeff was the proud little brother of Kristi ‘Straight Mackin’ Sauer.

19. Speaking of my sister, she used to drive a bright red Mitsubishi Eclipse. The thing looked fast. It wasn’t. During my senior year of HS, my sister had finished college and was substitute teaching at my high school. She used to give me rides to school in the Eclipse. One day she was too sick to work (read: hungover) and I took the car so that I could get to school. She was not happy about that. Another time, I took her car (4 cylinder engine, rear wheel drive) onto north Lindstrom lake and got stuck. It took me about 60 minutes to finally get off of that lake. Some redneck dude with a truck helped me out and scolded me for being so stupid.

1960 Corvette - Jimbo's baby

20. My dad has a 1960 Corvette that he’s had since he restored it in 1968. A red Corvette is the quintessential American Hot Rod and one could argue that this is the best year for Corvettes. Just an awesome car. I used to get jealous of my sister growing up because it was earmarked for her to be the car’s heir since birth. However, since I am retarded and can’t even drive the thing without stalling it, I am no longer concerned if I don’t get it. Also, by the time we pry that thing from my dad’s iron grip, I will be so rich I can just buy one myself. Or hire someone to sculpt one for me out of solid gold.

21. I have a huge extended family. Mom had 8 kids in her family and dad had 7. Let’s just say that my grandparents on both sides were getting busy. I have a lot of cousins too. They are all pretty awesome.

22. My 10 year HS reunion is this summer. I won’t be going, because I have already planned a trip to Chicago that weekend to watch the Twins play at Wrigley field.

23. I have a friend named Jeff Sauer who found me on jeffsauer.com while we were both in college. He’s from the Chicago area and we’ve talked on the phone. We almost met for a drink one time, but we both got cold feet and were worried that the world would implode.

24. I run a web site called FunnyVideoSearch.com where I post videos that are hilarious and it gets about 10 visitors a day. Most of those people come in through Google search. The top 5 keywords that drive traffic to my site are some derivation of “Gizz in my Pants.” When I look back on my life, I am hoping that this is my legacy. Jeff “Gizz in my pants” Sauer.

25. I registered jeffsauer.com a long time ago and have been posting pictures and stories online since around the year 2000. I called them ‘Random Thoughts.’ Then others started doing the same thing and calling it a “blog.” I like Random Thoughts better.

25 Random Things about Me is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

Funny Video Search

I have done a horrible job of promoting my own projects recently, so most of you have no idea that I have been posting videos on Funny Video Search since September of this year.  It really has been an easy gig finding videos (tons of friends and web sites post great videos), and I’m able to update 1-2 times per week… which is far more frequently than the once every 3-4 months that I have recently been posting on this blog.

One of my 2009 goals is to publish more content on Jeff Sauer dot Com, as well as get Funny Video Search to reach thousands of visitors per day (right now I get less than 20… almost all through search engines).  Hopefully if I have my friends help spread the word, this can be a reality.

That sets me up for my 2010 goal, which is to crack the top 10 on Google for the search term Funny Videos.  I think it’s possible, and I even bet my friend Amber $1,000 that I could do it.  It will take a lot of effort and help from friends, but I think I have a few things going for me (the domain name is killer), and I am a world class Search Engine Optimization guru.

If you read this blog and you have a blog, please tell people about Funny Video Search using the phrase Funny Videos to highlight your link.   This helps me rank better for that term.

Here is a complete time-line of how long it has taken me to get this site going:

• May 24, 2006 – I got the idea to register the domain name after being sent 2-3 YouTube videos each day.  YouTube’s search functionality was so poor that I could never find anything.  Using the site to find videos was a horrible user experience because there were just too many videos (like millions of videos every second without any quality control measures).  I got the idea to make a better site by hand-picking videos and registered the domain names funnyvideosearch.com and funnyvideosource.com.
• May 30, 2006 – Wrote this blog post about the site and made it sound like I would post videos all the time.  That obviously took 2 years to actually happen.
• July, 2007 - After going nearly a year without actually doing anything with the site, I got an offer to sell the domain name for $400.  I could have taken the easy cash, but I figured if a domain name without a site is worth $400, how much would it be worth WITH a site?  I turned down the offer and decided to come up with a site idea.
• July 25, 2007 - I blackmailed my friend Bill, who is a Freelance Web Designer in Denver into creating a site template for me to get started on the site.  It turns out that creating a template is very difficult without content in the site… so we got a rough outline done and then we were at a standstill.
• September, 2008 – I realized that the biggest thing holding me up was the design (which needed content to work), so I bit the bullet and decided to start posting things.  At a friends wedding, I got drunk and sold my friend Todd on the idea as a contributor, and he thought it was a brilliant idea.
• September 22, 2008 – I post my first ever video, which is a video by Tracy Morgan called You Can’t Be Black.  The site used the default WordPress theme and looked pretty ghetto.  However, I finally got over the posting a video hump, and I haven’t looked back since!
• December, 2008 - I found a cool theme for WordPress that allowed me to make the site look better without putting in a ton of work (it’s the exact same theme on Jeffsauer.com right now).  I can now build out a layout for the site incrementally as I make adjustments to the site.
• Some time in 2010 - I rank in the top 10 for “Funny Videos” thanks to your help!

Funny Video Search Update is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

Fortunately, I don’t have bad break-ups more than once a year, so I need some material to plug on this blog in order to keep it afloat (and yes, I realize that it is barely afloat, but fuck off if you’re going to give me a guilt trip). Unfortunately, my fat ass eats Chipotle like 14 times a week, so it is usually what I am doing when it comes time for blog posting.

That won’t be the case today. Aside from my obsession with the Mexican Subway, my other favorite things in life are as follows: Cable Guy and Arizona Basketball. While I don’t blog about either topic nearly enough, I was introduced at one point last year with the following intro on my friends’ blog:

Without further ado, this week’s entry comes from one of our long time cronies that we met back in St. Paul in the hall that is Brady. Three contests that you will lose against him: 1) A drinking contest, 2) An Arizona Basketball trivia contest and 3) anything Chipotle contest.

Given this accurate introduction, it comes as no surprise that I write this post while doing two of the above; drinking some red wine and lamenting the Lute Olson era at Arizona.

Lute Olson. My mentor in life.

You see, it finally just set in to me that my hero, my idol, my silver fox, my coach, my second dad, my source of inspiration, my surrogate grandfather, my rock, my COACH. The man who took the Arizona Wildcats from a basketball joke to the most successful basketball program in the past 25 years, is retiring.

The stats don’t lie, Lute Olson turned Arizona basketball into a nationally renown powerhouse. I basically grew up with Lute at the helm of the Wildcats, and was in Tucson, Arizona, visiting my awesome family several times while I was growing up.

It was during the 1988 final four season that I realized my love for the Wildcats. That was the team that had Steve Kerr and Sean Elliot, and I remember my little cousins Mike and Matt running through their Tucson house, yelling “Teeeeeve Terrr!!” while cheering on their favorite player. These kids were barely old enough to talk, yet they were already declaring their love for the Wildcats.

I have been to Tucson at least 10 times in my life, and each time I grew more and more enamored with the Wildcats and the legacy that was being cultivated by Lute Olson. In the 6th grade, my first pair of boxers were purchased. They had the wildcat logo all over them, and I loved those damn boxers!

It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I actually made it to an Arizona Wildcats basketball game. I was visiting my cousin Tyler in Tucson, and he was able to get us tickets to the McKale center (not an easy task since there isn’t much else to do in Tucson), and we watched my beloved Cats get throttled by the Oregon Ducks. Not a good Lute Olson cherry busting, but still a great experience nonetheless.

Personal experiences aside, there is no doubt that Lute Olson’s impact on Arizona basketball was profound and undeniable. The stats don’t lie:

• Career Record: 589-187 in 24 seasons at Arizona
• 1997 NCAA champions
• 4 Final Fours (1988, 1994, 1997, 2001)
• 24 Consecutive NCAA appearances
• 13 First Round Draft Picks
• Great NBA Players: Sean Elliott, Steve Kerr, Damon Stoudemire, Mike Bibby, Michael Dickerson, Jason Terry, Gilbert Arenas, Luke Walton, Richard Jefferson and Andre Igoudala.

Beyond all of that, he gave me something to look forward to. Whether I was a normal curly haired kid in elementary school, a dork in high school, an outspoken college kid (amazing how many UST bastards liked Duke), or a basketball passionate post-graduate, I always had Arizona basketball to look forward to every winter; even more every March.

That is why I am writing this post. As I was sitting at my computer, reading through various RSS feeds that I had caught while I was away on business travel, it finally set in for me; Lute is gone. Gandhalf the White is no longer. The most consistent thing I have ever known in my life is gone. I really don’t know what will happen to the Arizona basketball program. I think about all of this, and it started to get a little dusty in the room.

God bless you Lute. You are a class act.

Lute Olson and Me is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0

Hello, my name is Jeff Sauer, Grandson of Norb and Lenore, and welcome to our celebration of 60 years of marriage between Lenore and Norby, or as we affectionately call them; Lenorby.

I will be your master of ceremonies for this event, and I hope that you’ll soon find that you are in good hands. Grandpa chose me to host this event because he says I remind him of a young Bob Hope.

I have no idea what that means, but I am taking it as a compliment.

Enough about me. The real reason why we are here is to celebrate the 60th wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Norbert T Koch.

60 years! 6 – 0. That’s not a typo. 60 years! That is a long time for two people to be together. In fact, this type of longevity is almost unheard of in modern times. This is a testament to their long lasting love and devotion.

To see how they made it this far, let me give you some insight into how things came to be.

Norbert Thomas Koch and Mary Lenore Leroux had modest upbringings. Norb grew up in North Minneapolis, back in a time where it was safe to drive through the neighborhood with your windows down. Lenore grew up in the town of Hamel, on a farm that is now a high school and a housing development.

Due to some unfortunate turns in life, Norb was tasked with helping to prove for his family from an early age. In order to make ends meet, he had to make money in whatever way he could, including selling newspapers and shoveling sidewalks. One can only assume that working at such an early age instilled him with a great work ethic, and the drive necessary to achieve his own financial independence.

Lenore was a farm girl, and still has the green thumb to prove it. Over the years I have heard many great stories about Grandma’s days on the farm, but I think my favorite is the story about when she took the truck for a spin with her sister Jeanette when grandma wasn’t yet a teenager.

When the time came, Norb served our country and defended the free world in the Second World War. He was stationed in the Pacific and had one of the most dangerous positions in the entire Air Force. Fortunately, he survived without a scratch and made it back stateside a true hero, armed with an arsenal of ambition and some great bedtime stories for his grandchildren.

Upon arrival back to the states, Grandpa enrolled in college at the University of Minnesota, where he played baseball while completing his college degree. It was through baseball that Norb fatefully met Lenore, and it was through persistence that Grandma finally let him take her out on a date. After some time of courtship, they were married.

Grandpa sold life insurance and made quite a living for himself. I would go into details of individual deals and the perseverance involved with making it in the life insurance business, but I don’t want to put everyone to sleep. While I have been blessed with the ability to find humor in everyday things, it’s almost impossible to keep a crowd excited when talking about Life Insurance. I’m not a miracle worker here!

However, I do know first hand that Grandpa must have been really good at his profession, because he has a wealth of trophies corresponding to his various achievements.

• Salesman of the year – (13 times).
• President of the Minneapolis Association of Life Underwriters.
• The George Washington Founding Father of Modern Life Insurance Sales Lifetime Achievement Award. (OK, I made that one up)

You name it, and he’s got a trophy for it. During his day, Norb was like the Arnold Palmer of insurance sales (or for the younger crowd, he was the Tiger Woods of his field).

Insurance aside, when you look at his trophy case, you’ll also notice that he was once the Tiger Woods of Minnesota Golf. This guy has more trophies than I can count. There is so much bronze on his shelves that the only thing missing is a bronze statue of Norby himself!

Proving that they are meant to be together, Grandma has amassed herself quite a few trophies as well. In fact, rumor has it that she can beat Grandpa on the links nowadays. Both can shoot their age on the golf course, which I find quite impressive. I would need to be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest man before I could ever accomplish that feat!

But their real trophies are their children, grandchildren and great grand children; all two hundred of us. Well, maybe not 200, but there are quite a few descendants in the room today. That’s what happens when you have 8 children!

Nowadays 8 children is nearly unheard of, but in their time, this was expected. Much credit is due to their strong catholic upbringing as well as the fact that this all took place before the widespread use of contraceptives.

Catholicism also contributed to the naming of their 8 children. Resulting in their children being named after miracles past. Constance, Frances, Richard, Patricia, Theresa, Paul, Robert and Carol. It’s like a who’s who of Sainthood.

Those 8 children yielded 21 grandchildren and 4 great grandchildren, which is a remarkable feat in itself. Even more remarkable is how we have all grown up to be very well adjusted adults. Being among the oldest of the cousins, I had the pleasure of seeing everyone grow up since they were in diapers.

In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine some of you out of diapers (especially you little Zachy).
Grandma and Grandpa are so proud of their grandchildren, always touting our accomplishments to anyone who would lend an ear, and constantly impressing their friends with a seemingly never ending string of A honor roll’s and sports trophies.

I didn’t fully realize the extent of how much they talked about us until I was in the 10th grade. On the first day of school, I found myself sitting in science class with our teacher reading off the roster of students for our class. He read through most of the alphabet without a hitch, and all was going well until he got to the S’s. He took one look at my name, read it out loud and said “Jeff Sauer, hey, I know your grandparents! ”

Awkward!

I had no idea how to react to this. How did this guy know my grandparents? How did he know my first and last name if it wasn’t Koch? Are people going to think I’m a nerd because of this? There goes my shot at winning the high school popularity contest! Being in 10th grade, the last thing that I wanted to be associated with is being the kid whose grandparents knew the teacher. That’s like putting a gigantic “kick me” sign on my back for the rest of the year.

Embarrassment aside, I was also curious as to how the heck this guy would know my name and how he knew Lenorby. It turns out that my teacher, was a waiter at a Chinese restaurant called the Pagoda. My grandparents were regular customers of his for several years (we all know how loyal Lenorby are to Chinese food joints) and had been telling Roger about our achievements ever since we were in elementary school! Knowing grandma and grandpa, I wasn’t surprised at all, but I WAS surprised that he knew who I was given the fact that I have a different last name! Those must have been some in depth conversations at the Pagoda.

As you can see, it is obvious that Grandma and Grandpa love every one of their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Over the past 60 years they have instilled this love into everyone around them and they have served as a catalyst for all of our life’s achievements.

Like any long-term relationship, it takes work to keep things running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. I’m not going to lie and say that everything has been good every step along the way, but the good far outweighs the bad, and overall the past 60 years have been great!

I am honored that I was given this opportunity to be the MC of this event. I love my grandparents with all my heart, and they have instilled so many good qualities in me that I am a better person as a result. My fathers’ parents passed away before I was born, so I have only known two grandparents in my life. While nothing can take the place of two sets of grandparents, I feel you did everything you could to make up that gap for me.

Thank you for everything you have done. I love you so much. Happy 60th anniversary.

Love, your little Jeffy.

60th Anniversary Speech is a post from: The Jeff Sauer Experience v7.0