Gotta love this.  At a meeting of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, the CEO of Haliburton was onstage and apparently about to drink fracking fluid.

Fracking is the hydraulic fracturing of rock to extract natural gas from it. Fluid. Well, you know what that is.

But this kind of fluid facilitates fracking, and it’s allegedly full of toxic stuff that pollutes groundwater and allegedly make people sick. Allegedly.

Wrong, said Dave Lesar, the CEO, before raising a beaker of the stuff to his beak. He seemed ready to take a sip, but he stopped and invited another company executive to do the deed.

Later that evening, the two were arrested for disorderly conduct in the Hydraulic Tap, where empty beakers littered the barroom floor.

(I made up that last part.  Now, back to the facts.)

A reporter called to follow up on the “condition” of the subordinate executive.  (“Is he dead?”)

He was just fine, thank you, and the company took the opportunity to promote the product he’d been swilling, called CleanStim.

It must have been a slow news day, and more journalists jumped on the story.  Somebody called the Environmental Defense Fund for a reaction.

A spokesman wasn’t amused.  If CleanStim was so clean, he asked, why did a lower-level dude have to endure the indignity of drinking it?

“Why wouldn’t the CEO drink it himself?” he asked.

The environmental guy called the incident a stunt.  It was, in his view, “indicative of the problem the industry has in assuring the public that they are in fact taking public concerns seriously.”

He went on.  “A typical homeowner in Pennsylvania doesn’t have the option of having an underling drink his water. He has to do it himself.”

True enough.  But I have to come down on the other side on this one.

Consider the bright side of this story—the right side, in my view. CleanStim is safe enough even for human consumption.

I say the real problem is that some people are never satisfied.  A Haliburton boss drank fracking fluid onstage, and that’s not good enough?

The concerns might have blown up from there.  Was it really a glass of CleanStim he drank? Or just a vanilla shake with food coloring?  And is CleanStim widely used in the field?  Or is it counterfeit product brewed up for PR stunts? And did the executive take an antidote before or after his performance?

And even if it is widely used and safe to drink…does it taste good?

The industry should declare a victory here.  The environmentalists ought to be happy. Instead, we have the usual unsettled scuffle.

Couple years ago, a prominent black Harvard scholar, Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested by a white police officer.  Gates said it was racially motivated.  President Obama tried to defuse the situation, and invited both men to the White House to chat over a beer.

That’s what should happen here.  The executive and the environmentalist should get together somewhere neutral (maybe the Hydraulic Tap).  I’d even buy ‘em the first round.  Whatever they want to drink. But make mine a Coors Light.

More proof of the Power of Intention occurred this week in San Diego, when someone dressed as Gumby tried to rob a 7-Eleven.

(“The Power of Intention is connected with the Law of Attraction, which says you attract what you emit in life.  Walk around angry and you’ll attract a lot of pissed-off people.  Walk around dressed like Gumby and you’ll attract, I don’t know, Bugs Bunny.)

Gumby, you’ll recall, was a green, three-dimensional cartoon character from the 1960s.  He was like a stick of gum with arms and legs, and he had an orange horse named Pokey.

So Gumby pops into a 7-Eleven in the wee hours of a Monday morning.  He’s animated, with his arms flailing around, and he’s accompanied by a normal-looking guy in a baseball cap.

He announces his intention to rob the place.  We don’t know what he said.  Gimme all the green stuff, maybe.

This is California, of course, so the cashier remains pretty calm.

“You don’t think it’s a robbery? Let me show you my gun,’” said Gumby.  (This according to a police detective who investigated.)

Gumby reaches into his pocket, or whatever he calls it, but his oversized hands won’t fit.  By this time, the accomplice has bailed.  He’s back in the getaway car, a minivan, honking for Gumby to give it up.

Which he does, and the two of them drive off.

No money was taken.  In fact, Gumby dropped 26 cents on the floor, which he didn’t bother to pick up.

The cashier wasn’t even sure he should it was a robbery.  But the next morning, he told his boss, who called the police.  The whole thing was caught on video.

But back to the Power of Intention.  It says basically that when you’re doing something, you should think about doing it.  If you’re neurosurgeon doing a delicate incision inside someone’s skull, don’t be pondering where all the good new shortstops might come from.

Keep your mind on your work.

Now suppose you’re heading out to stick up a convenience store.  One could argue that very idea of wearing a Gumby suit is not a good one.  Even if you’ve already got it on.  Granted this is California.  But maybe you should take five minutes and change into something else.

Let’s suppose there was no time for that and Gumby had to get out the door.  The bar was closing, or whatever.

So you show up at the store ready to rock.  But the clerk questions your resolve.  You reach for the gun and, whoops!  Hey this pocket…is too…tight!

If you’re out there, Gumby, just a few words of advice.  Think ahead dude  Might even want to rehearse the whole act in the mirror a time or two.

As I post this piece, the opening bell is eight hours away.  That is, the bell marking the open of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, August 8, 2011.  This open is more ominous than most because it’s the first day of trading following Friday’s downgrade of the credit of the United States of America.

I never thought I’d see those words in print, much less write them myself.  They downgraded whose credit?

That’s right—the entire nation took a whack in the wallet when Standard and Poors decided the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. aint what it used to be. S&P unleashed the announcement after the close of trading on Friday, August 5.

At this writing, I know not what direction the U.S. market will take.  I do know the Hang Seng in Hong Kong, which opens a half-day ahead of our markets, is down more than 4 percent.  Japan is down 2 percent and Australia is down 3 percent.

Standard and Poors is famous for the S&P 500, which is not an auto race but an “index” of the share prices of the 500 largest publicly
traded American companies.  It is also been known for its ratings of securities going back a century or so.

Remember the financial crisis of 2008?  When venerable financial institution older than S&P itself were were swirling down the drain like dishwater into a kitchen sink?  That event was brought to you largely by Standard and Poors, which stamped a “Triple-A” on every stock or bond with a pulse until the whole phony system collapsed under its own weight.

In the months and years before it all hit the fan, the ratings wizards at S&P were sleep-walking on the same beaches and golf courses as their cousins at Fitch and Moody’s.

So last Friday, they decide to downgrade the U.S.  Not based on the numbers, they said.  It was more about the dysfunctional politics that
led to a near-crisis when legislators bickered about whether to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.

Which to me is a lot like your math teacher saying you get a failing grade—based not on the correctness of your calculations but on your “attitude.”

I haven’t had time to check the Sunday papers.  I’m guessing at least a few commentators are saying the same thing I am.  S&P’s latest slap at the economy is grandstanding, pure and simple.

When S&P’s self-serving credit move is viewed in the hindsight of history, I hope it will be seen in the truest light and described
with the most accurate adjective—irrelevant.

Life happens in six-week blocks.  We all know that.

And Labor Day is six weeks from today.   So you have to start wondering, what are you going to accomplish in the next 42 days?

My own priorities are clear. I need to sell two houses.  They are fix and flip properties that I bought, respectively, five months and two months ago. The older one has been listed for sale for 95 days.  The newer one went on the market last week.

Both are beautifully renovated, and I think, attractively priced.  One is a great starter home for a couple, a family with kids, or a smart, single person who is tired of throwing away money on rent.  The other is a three-bed, two-bath in one of Denver’s hottest up-and-coming neighborhoods.  Great for a family or a yuppie couple, close to downtown.

(The addresses are 1820 Jay Street in Lakewood; and 2924 Columbine Street in Denver.  Potential buyers can contact me or a trusted real estate broker for pricing and a showing.)

It is crunch time on the selling calendar.  I don’t what seven-day period of the year statistically represents the “peak week,” in terms most contracts signed.  But it’s got to be right around this one—the last stretch of July.  Six weeks ‘til Labor Day. Families are making decisions about school.  Buyers are making commitments.

I need to make the most of this period.  Which is why today I am launching “42 Ways to Sell a Home.”  Every day, on average, I will dream up and execute an idea for selling a home.  Each idea will be listed below on this page.

Note that I’m not promising to post “daily.”  I hope to add an idea per day, but you know how that goes.  Life gets in the way.  I’ll commit only to 42 ideas in that many days.  I will commit to seven ideas each week.  That way, there’s no getting too far behind.  There may be a lot of catch-up work on Sundays.

And I’m not calling them “new” ideas.   Many—perhaps most—will be established, well-known, and non-original approaches to home
selling.  Like posting a listing on Facebook.  Everybody does that.  The point is simply to do something each time
that I haven’t done before.  In that sense, each one is new.

Other methods, off the top of my head, may include phone calls to prospects, door-knocking, or using  Google Ad Words.  Again, I make no claims about originality.

My second objective is to end up with something worth reading.  A collection of ideas that other sellers will find useful and interesting.
Perhaps I’ll rearrange them in a step-by-step fashion rather than present them in order or occurrence.

So consider this Day 1. Below is Idea 1, to be followed by 41 more before Labor Day.

Idea 1: List about 42 distinctly different home-selling ideas. Make a commitment to them in writing for the world to see.

Idea 2: Call a bunch of people.  Metrolist identifies more than 100 brokers with prospective buyers for my Columbine Street property.  On Monday, the the first day of this post, I cold-called 10 of them. Not one was unappreciative. One claimed to have a real buyer. I spoke to some great people.

Idea 3: Yesterday, near my Lakewood home for sale, I walked into a well-known education institution.  My plan was to post a flyer advertising the property. A big bulletin board beckoned, but my flyer would have been too conspicuous. An unapproved piece like mine, I think, would have been rapidly removed. My “idea” is to create a less conspicuous ad, maybe 3 by 5 inches, to post at local businesses, grocery stores, etc.  While exiting the school, I noticed a nearby government facility big enough to employ a couple hundred people.  The rest of this idea is to find a dozen well-populated sites and post a print piece at each one.

Idea 4: Maybe kind of a cheap one here–I’m pressed for time.  Hire someone to create and post a virtual tour like this one.

Idea 5: This one is legitimate as an “idea,” though not necessarily a formula for great success.  Maybe it needs tweaking.  A couple of months ago, I posted this property description. Rather than pitch the house, however, I focused on one bank’s special financing program available in that home’s geographic area.  The program offers 100 percent financing, even to buyers with relatively low credit. Buying this home, my post said, was a good alternative to renting an apartment—especially with rents rising so dramatically.  The “idea” here is to direct a sales pitch at one targeted audience.

Idea 6: Craigslist posting is pretty de rigeur among property advertisers.  But before you go there, go to Postlets.com.  You can create a much nicer-looking ad than Craigslist software permits.  Then follow some simple instructions, and you can post that pretty “postlet” over at Craig’s place.  And it gets blasted out to a lot of other sites of your choosing.

Idea 7: Open houses, what can you say.  I staged one today, a week into my 42 Ideas Campaign.  And I staged one a week ago, a day before the campaign.  A few thoughts: Use a Craigslist/Postlets announcement on the morning of the event. On site, for better or worses, my style is very low-maintenance. Let ‘em walk around, don’t be a helicopter. I left a “sign-in” sheet on the table. It worked better the first time, when I peppered it with a few dummy signatures. Nobody wants to be first, I guess.

For those of you who didn’t call or write (basically everybody)… yes, I became a licensed real estate broker today.  It became official when the Colorado Real Estate Commission posted my license number on their web site.

True, I didn’t announce it to  anyone.  I didn’t post anything on Facebook or invite people to comment on my “status.”  I didn’t start blogging on Acid Rain.  I didn’t notify anyone in any way, really until right now.

So how could I expect congratulations.

A few things did break differently for me, however, or seemed to.  Driving to Home Depot this morning, a dumb-looking dude in a dirty pickup cut me off.  Then a lawyer in a Volvo cut me off.  Then a kindly, grey schoolteacher in a Buick, on her way to do some charity work at a non-profit, gave me the finger.

At the store, an orange-aproned customer servant asked, “May I help you?”

Yes, I said, before realizing he wasn’t talking to me.  I stood by while he staged a lawn-watering clinic for a guy who’d asked where the hoses were.  I was about to speak up when a blonde lady in a short skirt squeezed between us and solicited help in the construction field.

“A two-by-four?  Come on, I’ll show you,” said Apron Man.  They hustled off together.

I solved my own plumbing problem by poring through a tech manual strung to the shelves, and headed to the checkout counter.

“Cash or credit,” said the cashier.

“Cash.”

“We don’t take cash,” she said.

“Then why did you ask?”  I asked.  She shrugged.

“Credit,” I said.

“We don’t take credit.”

“Wait a minute!”  I started flailing around in protest—then realized I was agitating about in bed, amid blankets.  It was all a bad dream.

But the orange-clad cashier said one last thing before I was fully awake.  “That’ll be one-hundred-eighty-two thousand, three-hundred, four dollars a sixty-seven cents,” she said.   She handed me a receipt for $182,304.67.

“What’s 2.8 percent of that?” asked an anonymous voice.

I didn’t hesitate, and spoke the number as I sat up in bed: “Five-thousand, one-hundred, four dollars and fifty-three cents.”

I awoke not only a licensed broker.  I am a commission calculation savant.

Buy and own this beautifully renovated home for less than you'll pay in apartment rent.

Apartment dwellers in Lakewood, Colorado have a lot of choices.  Like the luxurious Pines Apartments, near Red Rocks Community College.  A two-bedroom, one bath goes for between $749 and $860.   That’s an affordable price if you’re employed and don’t have a ton of credit card debt.

But look closer, and you’ll see that price is for “income restricted” tenants.  Which means Section 8.  “Not all renters will qualify and other restrictions may apply, so please contact the property manager for details.”  So say their web site.

When you contact that property manager, he may not be the most accommodating dude.  Apartment vacancies in metro Denver are at a ten-year low.  They’re going lower, and the prices are going up, according to the authorities who track these things.

If you are lucky enough to land an apartment in the Pines, you’ll be very happy there.   You’ll have more than 200 neighbors in this grey wooden edifice built in 1972.  Neighbors to the left, neighbors to the right.  Neighbors above and below.

They will all be very nice people, clustered together there with their motorcycles and stereos and dogs and cats.  If you have a pet, you’ll fit right in. Only it can’t be more than a 45-pound pet, and other rules apply.  “Two pets per unit. $150 non-refundable pet fee and $150 pet deposit per pet, plus $20 per month pet rent.”

If you don’t squeeze in at the Pines, there are other great choices in Lakewood.  There are the Hamptons, at 8507 West Hampden.  They are pricier than the Pines, with an 808-square foot one-bedroom unit renting for up to $880 per month.  It’s understandable, because the Hamptons have a nice pool and a “country club atmosphere.”

Just don’t expect a big red carpet there either, with vacancy rates what they are.

Here’s another idea.  For less than you’d pay at either apartment cluster, you could make monthly mortgage payments and own—not rent—this private, newly renovated three-bed, 897-square-square foot single family home in old Lakewood.

This home at 1820 Jay Street is a walking distance to Sloan’s Lake and funky downtown Edgewater.  It’s got original hardwood floors, a granite-and-steel kitchen, and a huge, fully fenced backyard.  The neighbors are nice, and they’re not right on top of you.

A lot of renters think they can’t afford to buy a home.  They don’t have cash for a down payment.  Their credit isn’t the greatest.  They think they‘ll never keep up with the payments.

Well, check this out.  Key Bank has a program call Key Community.  They;re not very good at publicizing it.  But it’s designed to get people into good homes in certain “lower income” communities.  Many of which are really nice neighborhoods, especially this part of Lakewood!

Key Bank will lend up to 100 percent of a home’s purchase price to borrowers with credit scores as low as 620.  (There are terms available for folks with lower scores than that.)  No mortgage insurance is required.   The lender will pay $500 toward closing costs, and they’ll let the seller pay 3 percent toward costs.

I confess, the seller is me.  This a tremendous opportunity for someone looking to get out of “luxury apartment living.”  Or who can’t get in.  Or doesn’t want to.

Call my listing agent, Zach Zaleski, at 720-210-3668 for a showing of this beautiful single-family home.

.

My head is still spinning, or swimming, or whatever the expression is when you’re overwhelmed with ideas and information about your line of work.  Mine is real estate investing, and I recently spent a Saturday at a “success summit” staged for investors by, of course, other investors.

I attend a lot of these things.  Probably most of what I know about real estate was conveyed in a class, a seminar, a Tuesday night mixer, or a weekend boot camp staged and sponsored by a guru or other investors.  Some of ‘em were free, some required a nominal fee, and some were very costly (like a couple grand, although some of those were discounted).

Which is to say I’m still a relative novice.  If “most” of what you know was picked up in training classes, it means you’re not doing many deals.  Because it’s in doing deals that you really learn.  In my case, in my first year, I completed several fix-and-flips and made dozens of formal offers on potential rehab properties.  So I’m not a total novice.  Just a guy whose experience is outweighed by perhaps an excess of training.

Enough perspective.  Seminars are great learning environments.  When you come home, you’re ready to conquer the world, except you don’t know where to start.  You’re also mentally exhausted, having struggled to understand new financing techniques and marketing methods and investment opportunities.  You’ve shaken a few dozen hands and exchanged a lot of business cards and presented your own elevator pitch a bunch of times.

Were you working?  Was it work day?  It sure felt like one.  When you look back on the work week, Saturday was just as strenuous and challenging and any other day.

But now it’s confession time.  In my case, having attended more of these events than I can count, the vast majority of them led to nothing.  No new business, no new deals, not even any new approaches to marketing.  Just a bunch of notes that went into a file.

This time I intend to be different.  I am about to list three new ideas to put into practice in my real estate business in the next 30 days.  Check back with me for a report on June 8.  It is already on my calendar.

The three ideas:

• Peruse the MLS for “stale” listings.  These represent sellers who may be unable to lower their price because of too much debt.  They may be candidates for “creative” deals such as a “subject to” purchase.
• Obtain a “late list” of homeowners who are not yet in foreclosure, but have missed two or three mortgage payments.  Credit bureaus may be the best source.  These people may be motivated sellers who haven’t yet been swarmed by investors.
• Hire a virtual assistant—someone to help me with data entry and other computer tasks such as getting my Outlook contacts file in shape.   A good source of leads may be Odesk.com or Elance.com.

Yesterday’s Denver Post led off with a 4,300-word expose of shady land dealings in Adams County.  A county commissioner allegedly scored a sweetheart deal in when she some sold real estate to the county in 2004.

The story was thorough, professional journalism.  Two veteran reporters must have spent the better part of a week on it.  But I doubt if even 5 percent of readers got past the jump to page A10.

Lot of people say traditional media will disappear.   It’s irrelevant, it can’t make money, and they once wrote something bad about my uncle.  The Rocky went away and we’re okay, right?

What if ALL the real journalists go away? Who will do difficult stories like this one?  The blogger pecking on a notebook down at Starbucks?  And with no cops on the beat, how will all the self-dealing public officials react?  They’ll probably throw a party.

The rest of the Sunday Post included the usual crush of colorful ads, which in my house go straight to the recycle bin.  But I’m glad they’re there, because it means somebody is paying for the product.  And I noticed a shoe sale that I might check out.

The Perspective section of the paper section included not one but two appeals for public help in saving traditional media.  An editor blasted a proposal at the University of Colorado to discontinue its journalism program.  A columnist riffed on the decline of society when all public discourse happens on Facebook and Twitter.

Let me add a third voice.  Please read the paper.  At least buy the shoes.

“>

The second tier in life is where you find a lot of first-rate talent.  Like Avis, where they try harder. The rank below the top is full of people who still care. Not that everyone in the executive suites has lost it. But many of them have forgotten what it means to strive.

Yesterday was the end of the three-day Mid-Winter Bluegrass Festival in metro Denver. It’s an annual event that attracts top talent—in the most real sense of the word—but not the biggest names in bluegrass. I took in a Sunday afternoon show with Audi Blaylock, a hard-driving guitarist in his late 40s who tours the country with three band mates half his age.

Talk about hard-driving.  They rode up from a show in Wichita the night before, arriving in town just in time for the Colorado sunrise and a few hours of sleep.  After their two sets, Audi told me, they’d hit the road for Havisu, Arizona.  I told him that the Travelin’ McCourys, a top-tier bluegrass act, happened to be arriving in town for a show yesterday as well, though not at the Mid-Winter Fest.

“They fly,” Audi noted.

Here’s to the second tier, where they still strive, and still drive.

Ski the Birkebeiner