A Simple Little Project

I've decided there is no such thing as a simple little project. At least when it comes to home improvement.

My front lawn has a section that has been filled with little white rocks. I don't like these rocks, and I have thousands of them.

I decided I needed to get rid of them. I've been planning my strategy for a while. Today was the day I decided I would start. I stopped for a cup of coffee on my way to town to help rev my engine. Friends were there so I chatted for a while, then went on to my mother's to borrow her wheel barrel. No quick trip there. The cleaning ladies were there, and since they used to clean my house, I had to chat for a while. Nice people. I had to chat with my mom for a while too, so by the time I got home with the wheel barrel, I was already well beyond my 90-minute window. Good thing I'm self-employed.

I started my project. I filled up the wheelbarrel with rocks, which I discovered requires picking them up by hand. Searching for my gloves caused a ten minute delay. Once you pick the rocks up by hand, you put them on a shovel, get a good load, and then dump them all in the wheelbarrel. Yes...I've tried to use the shovel to dig them up directly, but it doesn't work because of the protective liner under the rocks. The hand method seems to be the only way. Anyway, today I learned that a section of about 1 foot by 3 feet of current rocks equals one wheelbarrel about half full. Half full is a lot, but I'm about 1/48th of the way done.

But as soon as I got the wheelbarrel full I realized the tire on the wheelbarrel was flat. Fortunately we have an air compressor, so I went in the garage and found it, backed my car out of the drive next to the wheelbarrel, plugged the compressor into the phone charger slot and filled up the tire. I was proud.

When I got to the back yard where this first load of rocks was going, I realized I now had to weed the new area. An hour later when I had the area weeded, I realized I needed to wash the rocks. (Yes, I am obsessive. I know it.)

After washing the rocks, I realized that all rocks are not created equal. I spent the next hour sifting through the rocks picking the best white ones, washing and rinsing again, and picking the best again. Then I started sorting the non white ones into a pile. I had rocks with yellow, rocks with rust, rocks with a rosy color, silver rocks, and even some black rocks. I picked out all the best white rocks and made a border around my new rock garden in the back. I got done with that and lined the boarder with non-white rocks, yellow first every foot or so, then red filling in, then the gray ones, and finally the black. The rest of the "okay" rocks got poured into the body of the bed and spread with the shovel. It looks good.

My 90-minute project turned into five hours. But it's a good start. At this rate, I should be done in August. Glad I got it started though.

Meaning of Life, Part Two

I've decided this week that I have no problems.

What I have are mere obstacles. I know a couple people who truly have problems. Multiple obstacles that have joined together as a larger "problem." A lot of it comes down to health. Physical and mental health.

If all you have are obstacles, you can pray for the focus to use the talents that you have inside you to overcome them. It's amazing what we achieve when we do that. Since problems are just bunches of obstacles, with a lot of prayer and focus, we can usually overcome those too. Or I'd like to think that.

So many people don't know what to do when they face obstacles. (And remember, that's the easy part.) If they do nothing, repeatedly, obstacles in their lives join together and become problems. It's not behavior that can't be changed, but it's behavior that does change people into believing that they really cannot control what happens to them.

When you have problems you have so many choices about how to deal or not deal with them. But when it's the first time we've dealt with an issue, and we don't know what to do, and we try to handle it ourselves, and we don't ask others for help, sometimes we choose the wrong thing.

I don't think we have to make it all so hard. I find that prayer works for me. Some might call it meditation, chi kung, hypnosis. I get mine from prayer. Because we're only human.

"We're only human? What does that mean? "
"I thought the human was at the top of the food chain brain-wise."
"We're sort of in charge here. Aren't we? "

Think about that while you drink your morning coffee.

Something new, and probably rare:
Morning prayer: Dear Lord, thank you for this beautiful day. In Texas the sun is shining the trees are blowing, the mowers are mowing. [Down here someone would say at this point cry out, "Hallelulah!" another would shout "Amen!"]

"Dear God, Jesus taught us to worship you and to believe. Too often we don't take the time for that. But if we just did it, and used the time to thank you for what we have, to focus on what we need, and ask for direction, our lives and the lives of those around us would be forever improved. "

Jesus walked around the world telling people to follow. Follow what? Follow him? Yes, and no.

He wanted us to follow God's plan. He wanted us to know how much God appreciates our praise, our thanks, our time. So today fit in a talk with God. Thank him for your blessings. Ask for his favors in helping you focus on the things that really need to get done.

I believe God wants me to share my "bounties" with others, and that sounds great, but I have to achieve those bounties to share them. That's my job today.

What's yours?

Martha, Martha

In the early quiet hours of today I received a devotional from a magazine called CALLED, for whom I have considered writing, but for which I have not found the time.

Anyway, the devotional for the day was the story in Luke about Martha, the woman who welcomed Jesus into her home and then busied herself with all the cooking and serving, while her sister Mary sat at the feet of Jesus and listened. Martha was so angry with her sister, but Jesus said to her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part..."

My goal this week is to be a little more Mary and a lot less Martha. It's going to be a beautiful day.

The Meaning of Life

I'm no genius. In fact the older I get the more I realize how much I don't know. But I do think that life isn't supposed to be so hard. It's not supposed to be stressful. It's supposed to be filled with love and with people we care about.

Instead, in this day and age, we fill our lives with work. We try so hard to make things happen. It makes me wonder what would happen if we just sat back and let it unfold. Maybe that's the secret to happiness. I know I'd like to see what happens if I take that approach -- even just for a while.

When it comes to my work I usually am pretty confident and I'm dedicated and I work hard. I know how to get things done and how everything seems to fit together. In my personal life it isn't quite that easy. People we are supposed to care about are the ones that hurt us the most. People we're supposed to care about are the ones we're mean to. People we care about the most are the ones who disappoint us. I just don't get it.

So today I've decided to try something new. I am lowering my expectations for everything. I am going to be fine with working eight hours a day and stopping. If I don't get my work done, too bad. I'm going to be fine with not having my house as clean as I'd like and not having the laundry up to date. I'm going to be fine with having little to nothing in the pantry. I'm going to be fine with towels on the floor and dishes and soda cans scattered in the bedrooms. I'm going to be fine with kids who don't do their homework or who choose to wear shirts that look like they slept in them.

I have a theory on this. I think that what I will find is that letting these things go won't screw up my life. What it just might do is make it easier to get up in the morning and face the day. I think it will ease the pressure. I'm going to open up my mind to new possibilities and forget for a while about what society says I'm supposed to do.

I'm doing this because I want to find the meaning of life. So far, in my 40 plus years on this earth I haven't found the happiness that I think we're supposed to have. I haven't found that thing that makes me hang on to life and appreciate it and realize how precious it is. Maybe by cutting out all the pressure and the expectations, I can find that.

Because one thing I know is that life is short and for the last many years, despite the successes I've had with my business and my acquisition of material things, and the good work I've done for my clients, I haven't had much fun. I can no longer truly say that I am really happy or that I am having a great time. Maybe by relaxing a little and opening my mind to new possibilities I will.

I'm on a quest for the meaning of life. I'll let you know if I find it.

My best "family" vacation

I just returned from a vacation, and for the first time in a long time, I don't actually feel like I need a vacation. I guess that means "mission accomplished!"

So where did we go? We went to Destin, Florida. It's an easy drive from where we live, and it's a great place to get to once you've arrived. White sandy beaches, glorious blue Gulf waters, and a resort with four golf courses, 15 tennis courts, and 17 swimming pools is a nice place to be. This particular resort also allowed for four hours of "free" bike rental each day and an hour of "free" tennis, as well as "free" transportation via shuttle buses anywhere within the 2400 acre compound. It was a pretty nice place. Sort of a Disneyland for adults.

Of course, no matter where you go, if you take your kids you're going to deal with that necessary kid evil: boredom. Yes, even with golf courses, bike paths, shopping, tennis, dozens of swimming pools and the Gulf of Mexico at your doorstep, if you're 15 or 13, this sort of paradise is actually "boring." Who would have thunk it?

Fortunately, my husband and I have gotten to that ripe old age where we, frankly, just don't care. It sort of bugged us at first -- the fact that the kids had no interest in watching the sun set on the beach and the fact that they thought bike riding was "geeky." We were concerned that they whined a little at the swimming pools being cold and the "game room" having only four games in it. I guess after nearly 16 years of being parents we're done trying to keep them constantly entertained. Besides, if a five star resort can't do it, who can? I've decided that teens are actually on a mission to be miserable, so we decided to let the kids do what they wanted to do this vacation and be bored. It certainly helped that we were having a great time -- enough so that we really didn't notice how bored the kids were.

Yes, we rode bikes and felt the thrill of the warm winds on our faces as we raced along the manicured paths. We played tennis as often as we could, enjoying the clay courts and the warm spring sunshine. We even hung out at the pool, where we sampled adult beverages, listened to live entertainment, watched the spring breakers in their bikinis and smiled at the parents busily entertaining their younger children.

"I wonder what the kids are doing?" one of us would occasionally say. "Who cares?" the other would answer. Of course we did care, but we weren't real concerned. There wasn't much for them to get in trouble with at this resort. With security guards at ever access point and "free" transportation anywhere they needed to go, we didn't have to worry about carting them around. We saw them at the miniature golf once. (They pretended they didn't know us.) We waved at them at the pool once. (They pretended they didn't see us.) And we showed up back at the condo with ice cream and a few groceries every day around 4, just to make sure they didn't starve.

Yes, we went to Florida and mostly our kids stayed inside. With three televisions in the condo, and two or three game systems brought from home, plus a fully stocked refrigerator and resort keys that allowed them to charge anything they really needed, we weren't too worried about their entertainment needs.

Yes, I've finally gotten to the point where I love family vacations.

Technology

I've been writing my blog for almost a year now, and I'm starting to bore myself. So in the interest of spicing things up a bit, I've decided to start a series of articles about things that we take for granted.

Today's topic is cell phones.

I grew up in an era before cell phones. Today I marvel at how we as a society survived.

Just a few minutes ago my husband called me to ask if he should pick up our youngest son since it was raining. He wondered if they'd still have track practice after school. Since I hadn't noticed it was raining and don't usually pick up the kids, I told him to call his son. Of course the logic there is flawed, because kids don't carry cell phones when they are running around a track in the rain. Or so one would hope.


Going back a few decades, I don't mind telling you that I had the benefit of being on the leading edge of the mobile phone phenomenon. When I worked in media relations for the utility company in the late 1980s, we had a car we would drive to sites away from corporate that had a phone in it. Our department also had a mobile phone that we traded between us depending on which of the three reps was on call. I don't mind telling you that, although the phone in the car was cool, that "mobile phone" was in retrospect a really funny thing.


If you watch old episodes of 1980s cop shows, you might see the type of phone I'm about to describe. It was very similar to the phones you also saw in war-era movies, like Vietnam or maybe even WWII era. The guys on the field had a big phone (ten inches at least) with a long antennae, and a huge battery pack that traveled with it. That's what our department phone was like. It came with a suitcase -- a very heavy suitcase -- that included the charger. The phone had a battery, but it didn't last long. The EMFs that came off the phone will probably be my demise in another 20 years, but at least I could talk to Channel 4 or a radio station from a restaurant on a Saturday night and explain a local power outage. Besides, having a mobile phone was way cool.


I bought my first cell phone -- a Motorola Flip Phone, remember those? In 1994. I was pregnant with my second child and felt I needed the security of having a cell phone. My husband had given me a mobile CD player for my birthday, but I returned it and bought that phone. It was so cool.

A year or so later I bought a BMW that had a cool car phone in it. We never hooked it up, but my by then toddlers loved to play with it and pretend we were in an airplane calling the tower.

Flash forward a decade or more and I now pay for five cell phones on a shared plan with bills so complicated I'd never understand them. All I know is that two out of three times I try to reach anyone whose phone I pay for I get their voice mail.

Not to mention that the new house we bought is in the country and the cell service here is abominable. We all have to go outside the house to get a decent signal, and our phones never ring. They go straight to voicemail. Even if we do connnect, we're roaming and we tend to lose the signal within ten minutes. It's helped all of us keep our chatting to a minimum and keeps me under my maximum minutes.

But what did we do before cell phones? How did we tell our spouse to pick up milk or tell the kids we were running late? How did mothers get their kids to meet them in the drive to carry in groceries? I guess they had to go inside and yell for the kids. I find the cell phone much more civilized.

At the same time, I liked it back before clients or employers knew how to reach you if you weren't around. I liked it when people wouldn't dream of calling me at home or late at night. They wouldn't expect me to pick up a call or retrieve a message and return a call on a Saturday morning. In the era of cell phones, there's no excuse for being out of touch.

Now I remember what I did before cell phones. I focused on my driving, listened to more music, and didn't dally to my destinations. I worried about being on time because there was no time to stop and find a pay phone. I returned missed calls because the people really did miss me, not because I had avoided them the first time around. I legitimately got back to people the next day, rather than feeling guilty for holding off until then.

I also didn't pay thousands of dollars every year for the privilege of being reachable 24/7. I'm not sure what I did with all that money I saved, but I think those were easier times. Phone calls used to be cherished things (remember "Reach out and touch someone...") not requirements.

Now I do like text messaging, and I find that to be the best way to reach my kids. In fact, I can sit in my living room and say, "Dylan, Dylan, DYLAN" and get no answer from my son's room. But if I text him a message saying, "Dylan, please come here," he'll usually respond. Oftentimes with a message that says "Y?" But at least I'm communicating with my kids.

Ah, technology. It really is a marvelous thing.

People and Polos - the Trade Show

I have to say that I still can't think of a better way to meet a whole lot of people and really launch a public relations program than at a trade show.


The International Builders Show attracts hundreds of thousands of people every year. It's the trade show of trade shows, and a lot of people attend to see the coolest building products, appliances, tools, trucks, and windows, lots and lots of windows.


I've been coming to this show for several years. Not every year, but at least every other. It's been in Orlando at least five years running. I'm looking forward to when it goes back to Vegas, but for now I've at least become comfortable with getting around Orlando. The best thing about trade shows is the friendly people.

The people you meet at a trade show are immediate friends. After all, you all have something in common because you're at the same show. I enjoy working a booth and talking to people. I swipe cards and provide product information as best I can. It's a great place to meet all the ad reps and editors that I hope will someday help promote my clients.


But I like wandering around a trade show and typically I manage to avoid being stuck in a booth for any extended period of time. I've worked a lot of booths, for a lot of different clients. I can do it, but it's just not very good or me to be confined in a 20 x 10 space for several hours at a time. It's like being an animal in the zoo.


Now something I don't like: I don't really like polo shirts. I'm the only person in Orlando at this time without one -- guaranteed. Everyone at a trade show wears a branded polo shirt. I have never asked clients for one and have never had a client make me one. So I show up without my uniform, stick out like a sore thumb, and that's pretty much okay with me.

If you're a potential client and you're reading this, you should know I'm real good at a trade show. I like to talk to people and I learn quickly, so I can at least pretend I know what I'm talking about and do it convincingly. I also do a good job tracking down media people and giving them client information -- when I'm not stuck in a booth.

One thing that will probably never change though, I don't own and probably never will own a polo shirt. Please don't ask me to wear one. Thanks.