Chapter 11: Loose Ends and Split Ends

One of the reasons my engagement to Lars went smoothly was that he got along with both my brothers. This was no small feat. Sean liked having him as a business contact for Germany. Richards Enterprises deals more with personal property than industrial equipment, but both need to know the regulatory landscape. Lars relationship with George was pure geek to geek. Over time, Lars taught George to seek advice on presentation, meaning Sheila.

It does not hurt my pride to say that Lars and George would both have married Sheila if Sean had not been there first. I felt the same way. Because of that, it is a source of pride that Sheila relies on me as a buffer. She is so smooth and so knowledgeable that it is easy to miss how private she is. Shy even. She does not deal well with pushy idiots or noisy crowds.

I have the size and demeanor to deal with both. God help them if we need to resort to Christine. You may have seen the video she posted of Howard Jones saying Sheila was an airhead bimbo. Alongside, Sheila was telling Winifred Smith how learning hurt, because of the loss of innocence. Howard Jones ran from town with his tail shoved up his ass. I'm not sure Sheila knows that Christine posted that one, but I do. Do not fuck with Christine's people. Just don't.

All that said, Christine is quiet to the point of disappearing. I cut a big silhouette. It used to be with my nipple rings showing through a thin shirt and punk fashions. More recently, it was power suits and posture. Either way, no one misses my presence. What makes me a better deterrent is that, when push comes to shove, I can get down and dirty. Sean does the same thing in his large sphere of influence, but he lacks my pass to the women's room. Gerald has a Sean-ism on his wall. We protect those who serve.

My services as guard dog were quickly necessary. Sean was doing a massive upgrade of net access to the House. It started as a home office for Sheila. That evolved into a 24/7 executive suite for the whole corporate structure. If either Sheila or Sean did not need to press flesh, they could stay home with no loss of functionality. For Sheila, this played to her shy/private nature. For Sean, it was a command center that did not require a drive into town.

All this required people setting things up. Sean and Lars were helpful, but there was only so much they could do from their workplaces. Sheila was solid with security and also very good with tech, but she is misplaced in a conflict. George could handle the technical questions, but he was hopeless with construction or security concerns. Once again, I was project leader by default. Someone had to have the last word.

If it sounds like chaos, you have a small taste. The first major issue was where and how to run the trunk line. Security, correctly, assumed it would be to their existing office. What they did not anticipate was that this would effectively evict them. Gerald set the example by giving up his office. Locations for servers and state of the art image processing soon took over the security suite. The pool tables moved into the smoking parlor. George moved back into his room in the old house so Gerald could have an office.

On the side, I started my own small fiefdom. I was going to spend most of my time in New Hampshire, but it made sense to set up a base of operations while everyone was setting up theirs. One of the small guest rooms was converted into an office. I had Harlan Lipton set up two companies, one nonprofit and one for profit. If you ever wondered about the FD in FD Consulting, it stands for Frau Doktor. I was a lobbyist before I went into politics. Beacon Light Services is the nonprofit on the other side of a computer firewall. All the office furniture is the same.

As confusing as it was, the whole project took only two weeks. We had Sheila's home office ready for her first day on the job—June 12th. By then she was fully up to speed on what her dedicated server and workstation could do. Doodling with CAD software on a laptop, she made an uncanny rendition of my old room. Soon she was able to set up a laser scanner and get a millimeter-accurate drawing in seconds.

What she did for Hollywood defies belief and it was not her top priority. I was able to watch her rough out the key scenes of a Will Smith movie. The movie is an hour and forty-seven minutes. Sheila contributed to twenty nine minutes. For that, she received a high five figure check, an Oscar—Best Film Editing—and residuals you would not believe (she could retire rich off the one flick).

Sheila spent twice as much time designing loft apartments for her new warehouse renovation. See Architectural Digest and AIA Journal, April 20xx and New Jersey Architectural Quarterly, 3rd quarter. Michael Weston is the credited architect, but the designs are hers. The woman is frightening.

While that was going on, I dealt with mundane things like running electrical/data conduit in a 200-year-old house and figuring the placement of central heat and air. I thought as a child that the fireplace did a poor job of warming my bedroom. It turned out that reality was usually much worse. My bedroom fireplace had an innovative, for the mid 1800s, radiator built into the fire grate. Similarly, there was a wind powered ventilation system built into the house, between attic and roof.

That drew attention. We had some very excited people from the Architecture Department at NJIT. They did a feature article on the all the renovations in the official quarterly journal, with a subarticle on the 19th century modifications, see New Jersey Architectural Quarterly, 2nd quarter. I never did get rid of them. They saw some of Sheila's rough work and stayed around to write up her lofts.

Everything ends. While the planning and design was tricky, actual work on the house was relatively brief. By the 4th of July, we had the nursery and nanny rooms complete. Christine moved into her official room and proceeded to never use it. She preferred life as my alarm clock. I was not so lucky. I needed to return to Hanover to wrap up my fellowship, write and defend my second dissertation and spearhead the halfway house project at the state capital in Concord. I did not owe, but it was off to work I went.