I think this whole idea of keeping a Journal is sort of stupid, embarrassing at best. I mean, it's like a teen age girl writing in a diary. But, the woman who taught the management seminar I just finished (and paid over a grand to attend) says that for executives/owners of small companies it's essential. See, according to the woman who was giving the course, those of us that are small business owners tend to get so submerged in our businesses that we let the company become our whole life. Before we know it, we lose sight of what is really important to us, to us as people. So if we keep a Journal we can put down our thoughts and goals then have them in writing when we occasionally come for air from our business lives. Well, everything else the woman said was right on target, so I guess I'll give this a shot - even though it feels stupid to be doing it. I haven't written anything except proposals, financial statements and marketing plans for ten years now, although I did have a bit of a fling at some fiction right after I got out of college. Anyway, here I am with my laptop and a cup of coffee starting a Journal. The sun has just come up and the family is still asleep, it's just me and the dog out here on the patio, so here goes.

Like the name on the cover says, I'm Jack Palmer. Well really I'm John Jefferson Palmer, but no one, except my mother, ever called me anything but Jack - and she died three years ago, so I guess I'm Jack. My dad died in a plane crash when I was seven, so I was mostly raised by my mom and older sister Jean. I have been married for nineteen years to a wonderful woman, Lynn. I have two absolutely great daughters, Lee who is eighteen and Michelle who is sixteen. Lee is a graphic artist and computer animator, she works for my company which produces high-end custom software for political polling and campaigns. Lee started drawing when she was just two or three. She always had a pencil or crayon in her hand as she grew up. When she discovered computer graphics it was like she was a duck that suddenly discovered water. Michelle, my little one, is in training to become my CFO (Chief Financial Officer), she is a math whiz. Her idea of fun is to sit down at my computer and do an analysis of projected earnings to try to find a new way to estimate project development costs. She has always been like that, at ten she could tell you the correct tip for a restaurant bill in five seconds flat. My wife, Lynn, is a nationally known political consultant. She works for various candidates in their campaigns for national office. Her father, now dead, was a Congressman for over twenty years, and she has all sorts of contacts in political circles. In fact, we met when she was just seventeen and working for her father in one of his campaigns. I was right out of college, a political science major (there's an employable degree - not) and got a job on the Congressman's campaign as his media consultant. He won re-election even though his daughter and I spent most of our time in the back room of his campaign headquarters making out. Just goes to show the power of an incumbent. Anyway, Lynn's job often takes her on the road for prolonged periods of time, leaving me and the girls to fend for ourselves. That's not a bad as it sound, see there is something a bit unusual about our family.

I guess I should put down a description of my girls. Lynn is a gorgeous woman. At thirty eight she looks as if she were still in her mid-twenties. She is tall and has long dark hair, china blue eyes and a firm and well developed body. She loves sex and is an innovative partner. That makes it a bit difficult with how much time I spend at my work. I guess I have to say that we have a rather unique family arrangement - me and my three girls. Actually the strange structure of our family started right after Lynn and I were married. We were on the second night of our honeymoon at a resort in Phoenix when Lynn confessed to me that, although she was a virgin - which I could certainly attest to, having a sore prick for a few days after breaking what we had begun calling Fort Knox (I swear her hymen must have been double strength) - she and her older brother, Frank, had done some serious playing around for several years. He never really penetrated her, "just put the head in a little" she confessed, but they had been mutually masturbating each other and having oral sex for years. I asked her if her Mother or the Congressman suspected anything about their relationship. She didn't think so, but some of her friends were concerned that she never dated in high school. In fact, I was the first guy she ever kissed, except for Frank. I guess Frank was a pretty good teacher, she could really kiss, and once in the back room of the campaign headquarters, she gave me a blow job that curled my toes for the rest of the day. You know the old expression - "the chick could suck start a leaf-blower", well that was Lynn. Anyway she said that she and Frank were very close, and if I didn't object she would like to see him occasionally - see him sexually she meant. Well, I thought about that for sometime. I figured he was part of her family, he wouldn't just go away. If I said no she might sneak around and do it anyway, at least if I agreed I could have some say in what went on. He was certainly no stranger to her body, it wasn't like she was having an affair with a stranger. So I said that I guess it would be OK to try, but that if it turned out to be a problem to any of the three of us I reserved the right to change my mind. After all I thought, I had her cherry, not Frank.

The next day Lynn and I sat at breakfast out of the balcony of our hotel room and talked about what her having a relationship with her brother Frank meant to our marriage. I agreed to let it continue but I wanted some conditions: First, she must guarantee that she wouldn't get pregnant by him - I wasn't going to raise Frank's child. Second, no fooling around in our house, she could meet him at his place, or see him somewhere else. Lastly, I wanted her to know that I was reserving the right to have someone else in the future if I wanted. She asked me if it I had my sister Jean in mind. I burst into laughter, I told her I would rather try my luck with a garbage disposal than suggest to Jean that she let me put it in her. No, I said, just a future draft choice to be named later. She agreed immediately, a look of relief spreading over her face, I guess the relationship with Frank was pretty important to her. In a way I was even more convinced of how much she loved me to be willing to take the chance of having to give up her brother if I pitched a fit. Neither of us fully understood what a major change in lifestyle we had launched that morning in Phoenix.

Actually, the situation with Frank worked out just fine. I had no problems in my interactions with him, we weren't best friends, but we got along and there wasn't any tension between us. We never spoke of his relationship with Lynn, and they never did anything other than a brother-sister type of hug and cheek kiss in front of me. Lynn went off to see him four or five times a year for a couple of days and it never interfered with any of our plans - in fact it seemed to "tone" her up sexually, I could look forward to getting fucked silly for a week when she came back from one of these long weekends with her brother. Three years after we got married, Frank married a woman about five years older than himself, Kathy, and since neither of them wanted children Frank had a vasectomy - my concerns of him getting Lynn pregnant disappeared. Kathy and Frank loved the girls, they were always present for family events such as birthdays and Christmas. I don't know if Frank had told Kathy about his relationship with Lynn, and I really didn't care.

Our beautiful daughter Lee was born almost a year to the day after Lynn and I were married. Michelle came along two years later and was just as pretty. I loved my baby daughters madly and the four of us were very happy. Lynn had her tubes tied about a year after Michelle was born, we had decided that two were enough with the way our lives were going. I became involved with a friend of mine in building some custom graphics software for political campaign analysis and the next thing we knew we had a small business underway. The next twelve years went by in a blur, I was working fourteen hours a day and Lynn's schedule wasn't much better. We started involving the girls in the business because that's where I was spending my time, if I wanted to be with them they had to be where I was working - because that's about all I did. We worked hard, made a pile of money and exposed the girls to a world that most kids - especially girls, never saw. I can still remember one Saturday when Lee and I (she was about seven) spent the day putting labels on four thousand floppy disks because an order got screwed up and the candidate needed them that following Monday.

The girls were growing up just beautifully. Lee was going to be tall and lanky like Lynn, I could tell by the time she was about ten. She had long auburn hair and big green eyes that could look right through you if she though you might be bullshitting her. She was gifted as an artist along with being extremely bright. She was drawing and painting long before she entered school - not the usual "put it on the refrigerator" type of stuff, really good work. She was interviewed at a very well known art school and they just salivated to get her enrolled at age seven. Over the next three years she concentrated on sculpting and pen and ink sketches. When she was ten I got her a Mac and some drawing programs, including one of the early three-dimensional animation programs. She took off on that computer and never looked back. She spent hours in the office with me, over in a corner working on her Mac, drawing and making animations.

Michelle was completely different from Lee. She was shorter and had wispy blond hair (she got mine, I hoped she wouldn't be bald by forty) and clear icy blue eyes. She never showed any interest in drawing or even computers until I showed her how to work a spread sheet when she was about eight. She had always been a math whiz. At five she knew all her multiplication tables and could do percentages and ratios by age seven. When she saw what she could do with a computer it was a marriage made in heaven. Now I had both girls in my office with me, working at their own little tables, one drawing and the other with my spread sheets learning how to manipulate the numbers.

I think I hear my girls moving around inside the house, I'd better quit for now and see what they are up to for today. If I don't get involved in the decision process they just move along without me.......(cont)