Apr 30
Ray PiercePhotography baby, birth, Denna Pierce, Jerry Pierce, Justin Rhodes, Kennedy Rhodes, niece, Ray Pierce, Rebecca Rhodes
My niece, Kennedy Jade Rhodes, arrived on April 29th, 2009 at 11:38am. She was 8 lbs. and 21 1/2″ long. Mother and baby are doing well.
I know every one is anxious for the pictures so I posted some of them on the web site. There should be a lot more coming, but hopefully this will be enough for now.
Click on this picture in this post and it will take you to the album, or you can click here.
Apr 22
Ray PierceWork bankruptcy, job, misled, Work
Good pay, good benefits, good boss, good coworkers, career path and objectives, work that I was proud of, etc. I thought I had found it all neatly packaged up here, my dream job. Things were peachy.
In October the news started to roll in. My company was not doing well overall as a company. Our contract was doing well, but not enough to buoy such a massive company. With the way the economy was heading nothing seemed that alarming.
Then November rolls around and the news that my company was going to be delisted from the NYSE, and do a 1:50 reverse stock split. This raised some red flags as I’ve been through this before with previous companies. Again nothing that we couldn’t come out of, but something that I should have paid more attention to.
Then we find out in February/March time frame that my company (corporate) is going to be filing chapter 11 bankruptcy. With the economy the way it is going and the climate in which we are operating in, this seemed like a good idea. Or at least that’s what our Managing Director (MD) painted it as. Lots of other companies are doing it right now, and the stigma of filing it would be mitigated somewhat because of the amount of companies doing it. A little restructuring of our debt….in and out in a couple of months…no problem. This is where I feel that I drank the Kool-aid so to speak. I didn’t get that alarmed because the MD kept reassuring us that we wouldn’t have any problems winning the rebid on the State portal contract (our money maker), and that we would actually come out of chapter 11 a stronger company and better positioned. It all sounded good, it all made sense. We were even reassured that we had contingency plans in place.
Then the big bombs started dropping. We were told that my company was going to be selling off Public Services, of which the state portal contract is a part of, to a huge auditing/consulting company. This would have been great for us. A large stable company that was trying to grow in the government consulting space. But lo and behold the buyer has an auditing business. Come to find out, they can’t actually own our contract because of the auditing conflicts with our mutual clients. So we aren’t really sure how this is going to play out. Are contingency plans going to kick in, is my company going to sell us to someone else, is the state going to step in, etc. A little noticed point in all of this was that my company sure looked to be positioning themselves for chapter 7 bankruptcy as opposed to the chapter 11 they filed. They started selling off their core assests/business units.
So at this point we have yet another company meeting and we are again reassured that we have contingency plans in place and that we would start trying to get the ball rolling on those. Again, sounds good, made sense at the time, but what was downplayed was the inconceivable scenario where we don’t actually win the state portal contract rebid. Again another Kool-aid moment.
So the biggest of bombs is dropped on us Tuesday morning. We received a letter from the State’s contract department, basically stating that we were no longer in the running for the state portal contract rebid. So all of the reassuring that had been given to us was in fact in error. Right now the State can’t tell us anything about the bid process because they are still in the procurement process for the rebid, but there is a lot of educated speculation as to why we weren’t invited to continue in the process. It’s assumed that the State’s contract department couldn’t justify giving the contract to a company who essentially didn’t have any financial backing what so ever. Leading up the meeting we found out that our so called “contingency plan” was a no go, because the SEC had some issues with some of my companies accounting practices for the state portal contract. Way to do due diligence!
And even during this meeting the MD is trying to mitigate how bad this really is. For 3 company meetings straight now, he’s mitigated the downside of the scenarios. And after all 3 meetings the worst case scenario has happened. I’m not putting much stock into the rosy picture that he’s trying to paint. Also this meeting is the first time that he directly mentions that my company (corporate) will more than likely be filing chapter 7 bankruptcy. Again, he tried to reassure us that we as the state portal contract team would be purchased by someone else by the time they file that. (Yeah, and I’ve got a bridge in Arizona to sell you.)
So now it appears that my dream job has just disappeared from underneath my feet. I’m now starting a job search not of my own choosing, in a horrible economic climate. Yeah me! The only glimmer of hope is that I’ll have a small amount of job security while we transition our work over to the new TOL contract owner. But that is a fleeting amount of security at best.
My head is spinning with all the things that are going on and I’m still trying to figure out which way is up. I hope that I can just land on my feet.
Apr 18
Ray PierceFood, Photography BBQ, day trip, Food, Hill Country, Llano, Photography, photos, Texas
Well after much talk, Johnny Harvey and I finally went to take pictures and get BBQ at Cooper’s in Llano. We started out taking Hwy 71 up to the Perdenales River, hoping that it wouldn’t rain on us. We stopped and took a few shots there. We were really amazed at how low Lake Travis is.
From there we proceded up to The Narrows on Lake Travis. I hadn’t ever been there before, but I had seen the signs for it quite a few times. 
On our way out there we came across a pasture of Longhorns right next to the fence. I think we actually got some good shots between the 2 of us.
It took us forever to get to Llano because we kept stopping to take photo’s. The pay off was getting some great BBQ. Cooper’s BBQ is one of the best BBQ places around in my opinion. Part 2 of the BBQ is hopefully going to explore Lockhart’s offerings. I hear nothing but good things, but that’s for another post.
From there we tooled around Llano for a while taking some shots around the Llano River and the dam/bridge area. I wasn’t really happy with most of the shots that I took there. I took over 70 shots and I really found four that were worth posting. I took 20 waiting on those kids to jump and got one with them in mid air.
From there we started working back home. The only real good shots from there came from Spicewood Vineyards. The vineyard was closed, but we were still able to take some photos of the grapes. The more interesting thing was that we found a sign for our friend Nathan Friemel for a choice destination for his bachelor party.
All in all it was a really good trip. It got me back shooting again, and as you can tell I actually processed the shots. I’ve got quite a few pictures sitting on my hard drive that have never even been looked at, much less processed.
You can click here or on one of the photos to see the entire album.
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