Thursday, July 26, 2012

You Know You're Old When....

you see a piece of equipment you've actually used being displayed in a museum. We were at a local amusement park called Lagoon. This is a park that was founded in 1886 and it's a pretty interesting place. It's one of the few places in the US where you can bring a cooler in with your lunch, park it somewhere and go off and ride rides for a few hours and you come back and everything is still there waiting for you. Just try that at Disneyland or Magic Mountain!

Anyway, one of the things they have at Lagoon is a Pioneer Village. It's made up a lot of original buildings from early in the century with a lot of original equipment that they used in pioneer towns as well as some more recent stuff. In the building where they had old telephone stuff, I found this.

Sorry, it's not a very good picture. I just had my camera phone. Anyway, it's one of those old "spaghetti boards" that telephone operators used to use. Funny thing. When I was in High School, I worked for an answering service and I actually used a board just like this. Yikes, how freaky is that to find it in a museum! And it wasn't all that long ago. Sometime back in the late 70's, but I guess it was older equipment even then. Although the technology has changed so much in the last 20 or 30 years, I guess it makes sense that something like this would end up in a museum. Now wait until I find some of those old punch card machines. I used those in my first computer programming class. Ancient history!

I guess I am old. I remember when typewriters, shorthand and secretarial pools were common. Now I don't think we have an actual typewriter anywhere in our office. I remember when we had just ONE computer in our whole office and you had to get permission to use it. And it had Word Perfect and something called Visicalc on it. That was before Excel or Windows were even invented. Guess I'm dating myself too much. As my kids would say, that was back when dinosaurs ruled the earth!

Anyway, we had a nice time today. I always love taking my kids to amusement parks. I mean it! All of my guys are total troupers when it comes to any kind of amusement park. They hit the ground running and they don't stop until it's time to go home. They don't complain about the heat or that their feet hurt, or anything else and they want to go on every single ride they can possibly go on. These kids are totally fearless and they have a ball!

Actually I was the one who wussed out today. About 5:00 it started raining - big time. And like a dummy, I let them talk me into going on a water ride right about then, so between the rain and the water from the ride, I was totally soaked!!! What is it with amusement parks these days? I never minded rides that splashed a little, but nowadays, they have to completely SOAK you and I just hate walking around in clammy, wet, squishy clothes! Oh well, it's good that we left when we did because everyone was all wet and cold and it was starting to thunder and lightening. In fact, it's still raining 6 hard hours later.

But we had fun and the weather was nice up until that point. It was 105 degrees yesterday, so we were grateful that it was a little overcast and cooler. It's interesting going to places like that. You see some interesting people. I've never felt so thin, or untattoed, or proud that I actually have all my teeth. Wow!

Monday, July 23, 2012

Spending Time with my Peeps at EVO

Last weekend was our annual EVO conference up at Park City. If you don't know what EVO is, it is the EVO-lution of Women in Social Media conference and it is an awesome one! It's my favorite activity of the year - these are totally my people. The classes, the sponsors, the charities, the parties, and all the wonderful people it's all the stuff I love. Here is a video that shows some of the highlights of it:

http://youtu.be/As5nulPbi1I

This was my favorite part of the whole conference. This dapper, energetic man is Derrick Kayongo and he is a hero in my eyes. He founded something called the Global Soap Project to take used soap from hotels (by us wasteful Americans!), mold it into new, fresh bars, and send them home to people in his home country of Uganda. And it's saving lives, particularly the lives of children in his country. He showed us the type of soap his father had made in his country. It was pretty nasty looking and he said it burns your skin, and wouldn't be very good to use for children.

Ways you can help - ask the hotels you stay at to participate in the project, or you can donate to the project. It's a very worthwhile cause and I'd like to help. Here is a video of Derrick teaching us a song from his country.

On my first day, I went to downtown Salt Lake for a walking tour/photo workshop. Despite the 100 degree heat and a very poor shoe choice (sigh), I had a lovely time and I learned a lot. This is my lovely teacher Karen Waldron from Choonkooloonks. Her motto is "Wildly convinced that you are uncommonly beautiful" which makes me just adore her all the more! PS: I think she is uncommonly beautiful too.

Fountain at the new City Creek shopping center. Our group had a bit of an advantage because I was local, so I was able to steer them towards some of the cool downtown sites.

Part of a fountain at City Creek.

Table decor at the Joseph Smith building. Karen steered us towards an app called Snapseed that helped me spiff it up right from my iPhone - nifty!

Pretty shot of the Salt Lake temple through the fountain.

When I got back to the hotel, it was time to check in with my roommates. We had a lovely two-bedroom suite at the Canyons. It was absolutely gorgeous - two fireplaces, three bathrooms, I even had a fabulous garden tub (that I never even got a poke a toe in, because I was so darn busy!). My roommates were just terrific. Stacie (seated below me) is the only one I had known previously. Actually, she is my Avon lady and I had met her at several different blogger events, including EVO'10. Next to Stacie is Summer from Summer Scraps and Dennissa from Denny On The Spot. I found them through the Evo12 Facebook group. Your roommates can really make or break a conference for you, so I was very pleased that everyone was kind and friendly and totally considerate towards each other. We had a terrific time together.

I had to have another shot at Dennissa - talk about uncommonly beautiful. If I hadn't seen her five children with my own two eyes, I would never have believed that this pretty girl could be the mother to that many children.

Babies were a big hit at EVO'12. Families are always invited for the parties and some of the special suite activities and this year we had a big crop of babies. This little guy Edward was my last year's roommate in a way. His Mama Ashlee from I'm Topsy Turvy was about 5 months pregnant with him when she was my roommate last year. And look how darn cute he was playing with the materials for our Lowe's DIY Craft Challenge. Actually, I kind of wussed out on this one. I was feeling intimidated because I was the only non-craft blogger participating, plus I had a headache and was in huge need of a nap, so I ditched the challenge and had a refreshing nap that I badly needed. Sorry guys!

Carly and her new baby next to Summer at one of our keynote speeches.

This is my dear, sweet friend Kathy from Danish Mama. She ended up winning the grand prize of a whole new set of kitchen appliances from our sponsor at Whirlpool and everyone was just thrilled for her. Couldn't have happened to a nicer girl!

This year, I made a new commitment. In the past, I have always come away with lots of pictures of "things". Pictures of my room, the sets, the table decor, or large anonymous shots of groups of people. This year, I made a public commitment (on the site's FB page) that I wanted to get the pictures of people I had always been too embarrassed to ask for. And I did it. I came away with a whole bunch of "people shots" with the people I care about. And I loved it because these are MY people. These are women (well, mostly women) who GET me and love me, and support me in my journey, and that's what the heart of EVO is all about.

This is me and Rachael - one of the Evo Founders and Organizers. We are posing in front of the Shot@Life posters, which is a cause I met at Evo and plan to get involved with. I have plenty of room in my blog and my life for causes like this. For $20 you can see that a child in Africa gets all the vaccinations they need to prevent them from a lifetime of dire diseases, and I think that is worth talking about it. Stay tuned for more posts on this subject as well as the Global Soap Project, and the Protectors, an anti-bullying initiative. These are all people and cause I would never have met if it hadn't been for Evo.

Me and Jill - she and the other Jyl handle a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that happens at Evo, and in their spare time, they run a little empire called Mom It Forward. Both of them have been to Africa for a bloggers tour and are trying to change conditions over there. They are totally awesome and Jill and I just clicked when we met last year at another conference. We need to have some time to hang out more because we just have a great time together!

I had to get a picture with my photo teacher Karen Waldron.

OK, I just threw this in because she's so darn cute! Look at those Jennifer Garner-like dimples! This is Elise from the Family Lab for Inquiry and Play. We had a very interesting hallway discussion, which I love because Evo offers you plenty of opportunities for little encounters like that and you always come away with a greater appreciation for the people you meet.

Oh and did I mention we had a little blackout? In fact, all of Park City was blacked out for about 6 hours, but we didn't care. We grabbed whatever flashlights, cell phone lights, glow sticks from the hotel, and touch lights from the Lowe's challenge, and the party went right on as planned. The hotel had a generator to make sure the door locks and automatic toilets worked (after all, those are totally the most critical things!) and it was just business as usual! In fact, it was probably more fun to have a party in the dark. And the lights came back on the next day so we could all use our hair dryers and curling irons. After all, this WAS a Women's Conference - gotta have those things!

All in all, it was a terrific weekend and I had a very lovely time with my peeps. I even rode the zipline with my son's girlfriend at the closing party - (good thing I didn't hear about someone getting stuck on it right after me!) Made some new friends, picked up some new causes, and came away inspired and re-energized. That's a good conference in my book!

By TwitterButtons.com

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Friday, July 20, 2012

The Cat-lympics

Naturally with all the Olympic excitement going on around here, our four footed friends decided that they needed to get in on the act. So they came up with their own kitty-cat versions of Olympic events.

This is the synchronized chair-climbing event.

Here are Nike and Buster competing in the tandem napping event. Note the extreme leg extension and precise placement within the playing field.

Here are the winners in the Competitive Bug Hunting (and eating!) event. They placed Gold and Silver.

Naturally, all world-class Cat-lympic athletes have their product endorsement deals. Sassy is still fielding offers from several sponsors, but Buster has decided to be the new face of Mr. Coffee and to represent Milwaukee's Best Beer.

Medal Ceremonies will be held following the Cat Nap Marathon events - both individual and pairs.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

10 Things I Love Best About My House

Tip Junkie issued a challenge to post 10 things you love best about your house. Tough decision. There's a lot of things I like about my house, but I managed to narrow it down to just 10.

This is my hope chest. I don't know if you can see it, but it's got hand painted flowers and my name in pretty script. My Mom bought it for me just before I got married. Inside it are all kind of mementos from my wedding and my kids.

This is part of my unicorn and fairy collection. I've been collecting them for probably 20 years, but I'm pretty good about keeping it down to just a few special pieces that I like the most.

Here's my baker's rack. It's next to my reading chair so I can see my family pictures. My sister and I did the wallpaper and it took 3 tries to get this wall painted the color I wanted. It's an exact match for one of our retired Stampin' Up! colors - Baroque Burgundy. It was one of my favorites and I just love it! I had nothing but white walls the whole time I was growing up, so now I'm a big fan of color.

This shelf is on the other side of my reading chair and above my hope chest. I've had it forever because it goes with just about everything I have.

This was my Mom's curio cabinet. I don't know if you can see it, but inside is her collection of beautiful glass fish. I know it seems like I have a lot of my Mom's stuff, but rest assured, it's just a tiny fraction of what she had. She was like a magpie - she liked "stuff" and lots of it. When she had this same cabinet, it had twice as much in it and most of it was junk, so you couldn't really see the pretty pieces. I like it better my way.

I love this sign. Describes my life to a tee! I love little smart-ass sayings like this. If you can't read it, it says "Never Put Off Til Tomorrow What you can do the Day After Tomorrow" Brilliant!

This is a picture in my bedroom. My Mom painted it. She and my Dad were both artists and I have several paintings they had done. I think this is the best one. Sorry about the glare. It's a beautiful swan on a lake.

Guess Mom wasn't the only talented one in the family - this is a King Tut picture I did in needlepoint for her and she framed it. Then I put the pretty vinyl curliques around it last week.

This is in my hallway. It's a quilt that was made for my Mom by my sister's sister-in-law. I thought that was so sweet of her. It's a name quilt with all our family members on it. I just love it. Sorry I couldn't get a better picture of it, but it's a pretty narrow hallway.

The list wouldn't be complete without a picture from my stamp room. These are built-in shelves and they are just perfect for all my stamp sets and samples.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Neglected Kid Time

I got to thinking about some of my favorite posts and I realized that I'd never posted one of my favorite essays. This was a post I wrote a couple of years ago for one of my stamping business websites. This relates to my Stampin' Up! business, but it really applies to any home business or hobby that we tend to obsess about. Thankfully, since this period in time, I have made a lot of changes and I no longer invest nearly as much time in my business as I used to, but it's still an on-going struggle.

I'm writing this at 3:42 AM, so I apologize if it seems a little "unpolished", but I've just had something the Flylady calls a "God breeze". She refers to Him as the "Midnight Editor" and He sometimes sends her little messages and topics for her essays in the middle of the night. The topic I received tonight is "Balance" - you know that thing that Shelli talks about so frequently in her little newsletter at the front of our Stampin' Success magazine.

However, a lot of us don't really practice the habit of Balance - I know I don't, which is why I'm sitting up here typing in the middle of the night. As many of you know, I recently lost my mother, which tends to make you step back and take a look at yourself and your life and right now, I don't really like what I see.

I love my stamping business, but there definitely is a dark side of it and I've run smack into it tonight. I'm an enthusiastic "all or nothing" type of person and when I throw myself into a new "something" - I tend to throw myself pretty hard and damn the consequences.

In this case the consequences translate into something I called "Neglected Kid Time" or NKT. I look back on how I spent my day today and it's nothing but NKT. Here it was a beautiful, sunny (though chilly!) Saturday and I had my husband and my two wonderful sons right here, waiting to spend some time with me after a looong week of working and yet I sacrificed pretty much the entire day to my own selfish hobby.

I had a chance to attend a quarterly downline meeting and even though it wasn't really my downline, I was invited and I decided to attend, even though I had already spent an entire evening with my my stamping friends a couple of days earlier. Tons of fun, and a nice chance to get out with some great girlfriends and make some fun projects, but again a entire evening of Neglected Kid Time as my kids sat home with my husband and probably watched TV all night.

Then I add in travel time, preparation time, time spent making samples, and waaaay to much time staring at this computer screen at waaay too many stamping websites like this one and I wonder why I have a couple of grouchy, unruly kids with their rooms a mess and their chores and homework not done - duh!

Then I look around at my house that looks like a bomb went off in every room (if Flylady saw this house right now, she'd turn tail and run right back to North Carolina!). I look at my husband who has watched so much football, I think he has green Astroturf imprinted on his eyeballs! Then I look at our two boys who practically have square eye sockets because they've watched so much TV, played so many video games, or spent so much time on their computers! (Yes - we do have HIS, HERS, and KIDS computers as well as separate TV's for each - that's a big clue right there!) And I think - boy did I screw up again!

I don't know about you, but pretty much all my adult life, I've felt like that guy you see in the circus with the spinning plates. I have all these plates going and they are labeled WORK (my "real" full-time job), KIDS, MARRIAGE, HOUSEWORK, STAMPIN' UP!, CHURCH, a whole bunch of others and even a little tiny one called ME. Then I realize that I've been spinning the ones called WORK and STAMPIN' UP! so much this whole year that all the other ones are starting to wobble badly and even start to fall.

So what do I do? I have to admit right now, I don't really know. Obviously I'm going to have to stop spinning these two plates so much and go over and give the other ones a few extra spins. But how to keep them in balance for the long term? That's really the $64,000 question, isn't it? Do I reduce the number of plates, or just figure out some great master plan for spinning them all a little more evenly? I don't know - maybe that's not a good question for 4:20 in the morning.

But I do think it's a good time for us all to ask an important question - what are your kids (if you have any) doing while you are reading this message?

Hopefully by now, mine are spending some Non-Neglected Kid Time with their one and only, ever lovin' Mom.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Our First Crowdtap Party

For the last year or so, I have been a member of a website called Crowdtap. It's a survey/sampling website where you can give you opinions on a wide variety of products, services, and everyday activities. They also have companies that they work with, such as Old Navy, Verizon and AT&T Wireless, Goldfish Crackers, and McCormicks Grilling spices. You can win prizes and stuff - it's pretty cool and a chance to shape the marketing of products.

I had a chance to do a sponsored party for two different vendor partners. One of them was McCormick's Grill Mates Spices and the other was Verizon Wireless. McCormick's sent me this great assortment of spices to use for the food (plus the nifty BBQ apron):

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Verizon sent me gift cards to pay for the food and any downloads we wanted to purchase as part of the party. I decided for the Verizon part of the party that I would have my son Matt give a quick tutorial to teach us older folks how to use all these darn smart phones.

We invited a selection of our dear friends - mostly people we've gone to church with for years. And then we got to cooking. My husband is the cook of the family and he whipped up a delicious pork roast with the Brown Sugar Bourbon BBQ sauce that was to die for. We also grilled chicken breasts with the Memphis Pit BBQ Rub.

Here's a mouthwatering picture of the pork:

Here's me in my apron in my kitchen getting ready for the party. I forgot to get a picture of Tony and his brand spankin' new OU (Oklahoma University) spatula that he bought in honor of the occasion (MEN!).

Here we are chowing down. Matt is the one giving me grief (as usual) and his darling girlfriend Pam sitting next to him. At the end of the table is our dear friend Dusty and his wife Bonnie (who is our Real Estate agent) is cut off at the edge of the picture.

After dinner, we all got our cell phones out and swapped pictures around, and looked at some apps. Matt gave us his best recommendation for a GPS app - WAZE, and showed us how to download ring tones - Mine is the Mom, mom, mommy, mom one from Family Guy for the boys and a great version of a Jackson 5 song for my husband - "Oh baby give me one more chance to tell you that I love you". Remember that one. Only it says "Oh baby please pick up the phone, your husband's calling". Very funny and I can always tell who is calling me!

I think everyone learned a bit. That is Tony in the green shirt across from Matt and our sweet friend Dru sitting next to him.

For dessert we had root beer floats and this adorable cake. It even matches my new watermelon nails!

Thanks Crowdtap, McCormick Grill Mates, and Verizon Wireless for giving us such a nice evening with our friends!

By TwitterButtons.com

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Thursday, July 5, 2012

Smart Money: Where there's a will....

there's a lot of relatives. Boy, is this old saying true! At the risk of jinxing myself, I'll say that I think we're finally at the end of settling my father-in-law's estate and man has it been a wild ride! There's a lot of dirty family laundry that I'm not willing to share in my blog, but I think I can safely say that this has been the most stressful six months of our lives. Relatives and money can make for an ugly and unpredictable mix and some of our memories are forever tarnished. (This is a repost from when my father-in-law passed in 2008, but it really bears repeating)

This is the fourth and last parent that we've lost, so I guess I'm the ranking expert on dealing with death, wills, and estates. If you love your children, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do them the kindness of putting together a decent will and maybe even setting up a trust. I guarantee your children will bless you for it! Trying to settle an estate without a proper will can mean a total disaster and means LOTS of lawyers, LOTS of stress, and LOTS of money wasted. You can even end up with piles of money going to people you didn't want to leave a dime to and nothing at all going to the people you wanted to leave it to - seriously! Listen to the voice of bitter experience here.

And choose your Executor carefully. Tony's Dad picked him as the Executor, which frankly, was not a good choice. Even though he is the oldest son, he's a lousy with money, a bad record-keeper and is really terrible at any kind of paperwork and I'm not great at it either. Fortunately, his older sister (bless her!) was willing to take over and did a tremendous job, otherwise I think we'd still be wrangling with lawyers and filling out forms for the next few years.

I can hear you saying - but I'm too young to worry about dying and depressing stuff like that. Well, my friend at work just lost her 49 year old husband today to a sudden stroke or an aneurism, they aren't even sure yet. I'll bet you he didn't have a will and she is not on good terms with his family, so I imagine she is going to be going through living hell trying to get his estate settled and end up with enough money to live on. All I'm saying is bad things happen fast and unexpectedly sometimes.

Did you know that if you have the wrong wording on your title to your house, you can end up spending thousands of dollars in fees and taxes trying to get the matter straightened out? Again the voice of experience. One wrong line on a form and it cost us a thousand dollars in my Dad's estate. The way they set up that title is THE most important decision you will ever make in regards to your house - trust me.

Take a typical scenario - a husband and wife with a basic house and two kids. Both their names are on the house as joint tenants and they leave no will. Both of them are killed in an accident. Now the kids are wards of the court with their fate decided by lawyers - which is never a good choice. The house can't be sold until it goes through probate which will eat up as much as a quarter of the value of the house for taxes and will take up to a year to settle. Naturally, all this time, their parents or whoever is handling the estate has to pay all the house payments, utilities, and outrageous lawyers fees - it might cost as much as fifty thousand dollars, for a nice round number (guess how I know that?). If they don't have the money to do so, the house is foreclosed on and all their equity is lost for their children.

Now take the same scenario, but the husband and wife have a properly written will and have the house in a trust. The children go straight to the relative or relatives they have designated, and the Trustee of the trust can turn around and sell the house with no probate, no lawyers, and no exhorbitant fees. Which one would you choose?

How difficult is it to set up a trust? It's a lot easier than you'd think. After all this crap we've gone through, the first thing we did was find a good estate lawyer. We didn't even have to go far, there was a great one right at the end of our street! We had one two-hour meeting with him to tell him what we wanted and how we wanted everything set up, then he had the papers ready in a week, and we had one more hour-long meeting to review and sign the papers. Cost - about $1,000 for the whole package, 2 wills, 2 trusts and all the other paperwork. Probably the best thousand dollars we've ever spent.

Sorry to be all serious and depressing, but I would sure hate for someone else to have to go through any degree of what we've had to go through over the last few months. It's just not fun and that's why we made sure our kids won't have to suffer like we have.

PS: If you really love your kids, start cleaning your house out NOW! It's surprising how much crap parents can accumulate after a few decades of living in a house - ugh!

PPS: Call your lawyer - today!!

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