Nantucket Journal
Wednesday, August 1
Grazing this morning for coffee and the papers, I met Jill Schlesinger, the president of Strategic Point, the investment and money management company. They advertise quite heavily and she does a radio show. She’s here for the first time, is a New Yorker and sarcastic, and also wanted to know who switched the cream and skim, so we had instant karma. (We both feel like we’re crashing a great party here and no one has noticed, yet.) Check them out at strategicpoint.com. We are going to “do lunch” in the near future.
After breakfast, over the dunes to the beach and an absolutely cloudless sky. Fabulous water, mild breakers, but water temperature warmer than Cape Cod or Cape May. After doing the heavy lifting (literally) and reading Glory (Europe from 1648 to 1815), I’m now into The Judas Strain, which allows my brain to go into complete shut down. Midway through the third chapter I suddenly looked up to find a bird perched on my hat. Asleep. He must have been reading over my shoulder.
A martini with sidecar and stuffed olives with Mitch at the bar, and I’m prepared for dinner.
Dinner at The Galley. The Galley is built on the beach directly facing the sunset, and every table has a great view, avoiding ugly scenes among people who really know how to make ugly scenes. The woman to my left, very well put together, early 20s, was using her left hand to push her Caesar salad onto her fork, then immediately used that hand to push her hair behind her ear. This was the first case of using anchovy gel that I’ve yet encountered. You can dress them up, but…..
The sun descends around 8 p.m. this time of year like a tire with a slow leak—deceptively fast. It turns from yellow, to orange-yellow, to orange-red, to red. Finally, it’s extinguished on the horizon, and you expect steam to rise. It was the first great sunset in two weeks, and the mostly season-long crowd at this restaurant gave it a round of applause.
Grilled octopus, Caesar salad with white anchovies (kept off of my head), and a marvelous sole Muniere. This was finished later on our porch under the stars with a Davidoff Aniversario #3 and a 1929 Madeira.
I have the best tan of my life, and I think I have two book deals in the works, one of which I can reveal: Wiley has asked me to revise Value-Based Fees, which is “selling like hotcakes” I’m told. (It’s number 55,000 or so out of over a million titles on Amazon, so you can’t trust solely those volume figures. Million Dolllar Consulting generally hovers at about 7,000.) I’ll also release the long-awaited second Process Visuals book later this year (I’m finishing the writing and charts this week in the early morning) and have another tentative book project I’ll find out about in the next couple of weeks on strategy.
Tomorrow: Back to the beach!
