Who Needs Role Models?

[caption id=“attachment_673” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Don’t put that on me, dude[/caption] I’ve started doing the Firepole Marketing Great Online Marketing Scavenger Hunt. And it’s been a lot of fun. The first week I was very focused on it, but the second week I realized that I needed to do some other, actual, work. The great thing about this is that I’m getting practice at doing things to help my site(s) get better and better. For example, the above photo I took of my dogs, McKinley and Stormageddon. They were offended that most captioned photos on the interwebz are of cats. So they wanted to pose for a picture too. But posing for a picture while wearing a fire hat, not so thrilling. I took one of Auto too:

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the 80s—big hair, power ballads, CDs, Miami Vice, break dancing, lingerie as outer wear (okay, maybe not that last one). But one thing that I don’t miss is the idea that the only place you can do work in a corporate environment is in an office. Saying that you “work from home” was equivalent to saying you were unemployed and preferred to sit around at home watching soaps, eating bon-bons, and generally slacking. This attitude persisted into the 90s, perpetuated by people like my dad (love ya Dad!) who believed that it was impossible to “work” from home. (Quote marks his.) But in the companies I worked for in the 90s, only one didn’t allow work at home, and that was because of the job, not just categorically. And at my last job in the 90s and 2000s, I not only worked from home 100% of the time, but I also managed a team of between 7 and 10 people, all of whom worked from home at least every once in a while. Rather than sacrificing “speed and quality” as Yahoo! CEO Marisa Mayer  implies happens (read the memo at All Things D) when employees work from home, my team was extremely effective, had regular meetings where we had strong communication and collaboration. In fact, my team worked with people in Europe, India, China, Japan, Brazil, and North America on both coasts, and it was possible because we could wake up at 2am, stumble to the phone, and be on a call in our pajamas. If I were expected to come into the office to be on that call, I wouldn’t be on the call, and neither would any of my team (except someone who worked out of the office where that was business hours).

I’ve always felt that life is never dull, but sometimes I help it along a little too much. What’s funny to me is that over-scheduling seems almost natural, but these days my idea of over-scheduling is much less rigorous than it used to be. I used to schedule myself with 60+ hours of stuff to do in a week. “Sleep is for the weak” was my motto. These days, I like to sleep. I think having a kid helped me realize how much I like to sleep, since he does his best to deprive me of it. Jaryth believes that mornings start sometime between 4 and 6am. I instituted the rule of no TV before 7am and no video games before 8am. This kept the sound down a little until he started watching “The Tigger Movie.” That movie is evil. Evil, I tell you! Firstly, there’s the theme–where Tigger no longer wants to be “the only one” and wants to find his family. Finding his family is fine, but why does that mean he can’t still be special? But what’s really bad is the bouncy song. Jaryth likes to imitate it. He bounces off the walls–yes, he slams himself into the walls and bounces off of them. We got an exercise trampoline which he likes to use to start his super-dooper-alley-ooper bounce on. And since you’re crashing into things you have to make the crashing noises at the same time. Luckily he hasn’t tried bouncing off of sleeping (attempting to) mommy. But that’s not why I’m busy. Some of the things I’m doing right now include:

I’ve been doing web design work since 1995, and one of the things I like best about it is how much it changes fairly regularly. When I started, writing HTML required that I know vi and be able to edit the files directly on the Unix server. Then I started storing files on my local hard drive, editing there in a text editor (Homesite was my poison), and then uploading them to my web server. In the last few years, I’ve started using the WYSIWYG portion of Dreamweaver to handle some of the trickier aspects of design and then using the text editor in Dreamweaver to manage the HTML. And of course, all the change in how I do this is not why I like web design, it’s just a side-note. What I find interesting is how stubborn people can be about their opinions about editors like Dreamweaver. Back in the 1990s when Dreamweaver first came out, the HTML that it created was questionable. Not as questionable as HTML from other WYSIWYG editors (FrontPage was especially bad), but still a lot of bloated code to do things that you could do much more efficiently in the HTML using a text editor. But that was over 10 years ago.  These days, even most of the no-code editors that I’ve tried out do a decent job with the HTML and CSS. It’s rare to see a FONT tag in an HTML document that was edited by a WYSIWYG editor, and tools like WordPress offer easy-to-use WYSIWYG tools (I’m writing this post in the “visual” editor of WordPress, for instance.) built right into the blogging system. So I don’t understand why even in 2012, I can receive comments on my About.com blog like this one (emphasis mine):

I have to say i’m very impressed with myself. On July 1, 2012, I started on an 8-week program of attempting to eat not only no sugar, but also nothing sweet at all (i.e. no Diet Coke, no fruit, no stevia, etc.). The first few weeks were tough. There were points where I thought that I would chew my arm off in the hopes that my blood was sweet. I would get frustrated at the drop of a hat, and don’t get me started on the headaches and general grumpiness. Anyone who tells you that sugar is not addictive is living in a dreamworld, or they have completely different metabolism than I do. For me, sugar (and to some extent anything sweet) seems to result in this intense need to eat more and more and more and more and more. I think the cravings were the worst. I would be doing something else, anything else, and suddenly I would think “what I really need right now is some chocolate.” Before this experiment, I would just head into the kitchen at that first thought and look for chocolate - or if we didn’t have anything chocolate, something sweet of any kind. But this summer, at the first thought I would then stop myself, and search to answer what it was I was really wanting. In many cases, this search would result in the whiny brat inside me starting to whine and cry and say “I don’t want anything else, I want CHOCOLATE!!!” There were some nights were I would completely miss the plot of whatever movie or tv show I was watching that night because all I could think about was the sugar I wasn’t eating. It sucks to feel that out of control. The second week is when the headaches started. I was waking up every morning with a migraine. The only thing that kept me from throwing in the towel right then was the knowledge that too much sugar has triggered migraines for me, so I was fairly confident that it wasn’t the lack that was generating these headaches. My husband pointed out that I had been drinking 1-3 cans of diet coke a day prior to this experiment, and perhaps I was addicted to caffeine. He is a genius! I now drink cafe au lait all the time (iced because it’s hot), or at least my version of cafe au lait which is: 1/2 cup regular coffee 1 cup whole milk 1 1/2 cups ice Pour all ingredients into a 20oz iced coffee cup (I use my stainless steel cup with stainless steel straw), stir, and drink. If it’s too bitter, add more milk. My son loves to make the coffee for me. Who needs a coffee maker on a timer when your kid will do it for you?

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of answering a survey about health care. Normally, when I get those types of robo-dialed call-center calls, I wait for the person on the line to say “Hello,” but for whatever reason, I said hello first. And then, when asked if I’d be willing to do a survey, I uncharacteristically said “yes.” It was interesting to take the survey both because of what I know about health care and my opinions on it. But what was more interesting was how the questions were phrased. I’d often wondered how one company could do a survey claiming that 87% of Americans love chocolate. And then another company could do a survey the next day claiming that 87% of Americans hate chocolate. After taking yesterday’s survey, I understand how this can happen. The questions (and supplied answers) can rig the results. For example, several of the questions had this format:

July 25, 2012  Update I couldn’t do it. I spent all month trying to get a Ruby dragon, and yesterday I got one. The egg was going to hatch today. But Jaryth played the game this morning, and he sped up the incubation (using all my gems) and then sold the dragon egg for gold I didn’t need. When I found myself almost crying because of this, I realized that I needed to stop playing this game. Dragonvale has been deleted from my iPad, and Jaryth hasn’t realized yet. I’m sure when he figures out that it’s gone, he’s going to scream bloody murder. But I couldn’t stand feeling angry at him over an animated image. No game is worth that.

Week three started last Sunday on my quest to purge my system of sugar. This week, the goal is to eat no more than 10-20 grams of sugar per day (1 tsp = approximately 5 grams), or between 3-6% by weight. In some ways this is pretty easy, as I’ve already removed the crazy sweet things from my house. In fact, when I get a craving most of the time I can’t really do anything about it because we don’t have any sweets available. Yes, there are a few things—treats for Jaryth, Mark has some that he keeps in his office—but in general there’s nothing sugary that I might want. 

Help fund the Creative Dubuque Letterpress Post Card Series! I love this project for two reasons:

1. it’s Letterpress!
2. it’s cheap

If you’ve never contributed to a Kickstarter campaign before, this is a great one to join. You get a nice letterpress postcard for just $5. How cool is that? [iframe src=“http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pfraterdeus/creative-dubuque-letterpress-post-card-series/widget/video.html" frameborder=“0” width=“640” height=“480”] Letterpress is one of those things that I’m actually afraid to learn to do because I’m afraid I’ll become addicted to it. So instead I spend time looking at the prints that other artists have created. [iframe frameborder=“0” height=“380” src=“http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pfraterdeus/creative-dubuque-letterpress-post-card-series/widget/card.html" width=“220”]

Sugar sucks. I gave up eating anything sweet three weeks ago, or was it two weeks ago? I guess two, but it seems like forever. I keep hoping that there will be a point where I won’t feel these intense cravings for sugar or something sweet. In fact, I can say with some honesty that the cravings are not as bad today as they were on July 1st. But saying that is like saying that my bathtub isn’t as wet as the ocean because there isn’t as much water there. Yes, the cravings are less, sorta, but when they hit, they hit hard! Jaryth is watching “Monsters, Inc.” and he just got to the part with the abominable snowman. “Sno-cone?” he says, and I immediately start wanting a lemon sno-cone. I don’t even like sno-cones and I especially don’t like leman! And then all I can think about are sno-cones, or maybe ice cream, or perhaps a popsicle or maybe a lollipop, my cravings don’t care.