The irony is that I’m not here to tell you that “… and NONE of it came true… everything was fine!”. Well, everything was fine, but that’s not the end of the story. The truth is that almost everything I dreamed actually came true. I did accidentally leave my computer’s power cord at home. I couldn’t find my laser pointer when I needed it. The wifi did get disconnected from my laptop in the middle of my presentation. Really, if you told me that all of that stuff would really happen, I would have run from the room screaming, called up Joseph Scott and told him to forget it, I couldn’t do it! In the nightmares, when all of these things happened, the world basically ended. My presentation was a complete failure and life ended there. Every night, in the middle of the night, I’d wake up, jot something down on a piece of paper I needed to remember so that I could prevent the catastrophe I had just envisioned.

But despite all these things coming true, life did not end. In fact, nothing happened. Thankfully, my battery lasted long enough to survive the length of my presentation. It did die eventually, but not until about halfway through the day – hours later. The wifi timed out on my laptop and disconnected, but I kept going even though the cool slide remote I had on my iPhone no longer worked. (In my opinion: a design flaw in the app to have it only rely on wifi and not bluetooth!!) The arrow keys work perfectly well to move the slides!! And the laser pointer I realized later I left buried in my purse so I just made do without it.

All the anxiety and thinking the sky would fall if any of these things happened, and even my desperate attempts to prevent them – they happened. When they did, there was a logical solution. And life went on.

I think I know I spend too much time worrying about what could happen. I spend too much time trying to plan for all conceivable contingencies. And the truth of the matter is that, when a problem is real, there is usually a solution at hand as well. I won’t say always. But usually. It certainly isn’t worth the time spent worrying about the “what ifs.”

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I can’t believe summer is coming to an end. Rachel starts school next week. I had wanted to go camping this summer, and make a small trip up to visit Portland, OR to see if we maybe want to move there. Good or bad, Sam was supposed to be laid off at the end of July and they ended up extending him 2 more months. So the time off we thought we’d have during the summer disappeared. Don’t get me wrong, health coverage and salary are good things – so I’m not complaining. I just wish the summer could extend to when he WILL be officially laid off so we could try to make lemonade out of the lemons we’ll be getting.

WordCamp is just 11 days away (but who’s counting). I still feel good about my presentation, but I am nervous. I don’t know the audience so I have no idea if I’m going to be talking over everyone’s heads, or going over the obvious. (or both) Also, Matt Mullenweg will be there. I’m really psyched about that. I feel like some things are coming full circle – A few years ago, Matt asked me to speak at a panel at SXSW and I turned it down. I feel kind of stupid having done that, but at the time, I was working for a company (not for myself, might have been more inclined to do it otherwise), as well, it meant having to travel there by plane and speak in front of people (obviously) – my two worst phobias: flying and public speaking – all rolled up into one. Anyway, I’m glad I was able to get over at least one of those fears in order to take this on.

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That is my poor dog. He’s been on Prednazone for a number of weeks and while he needs to be on it to keep him stabilized (we already tried reducing the amount he takes with bad results) the drug itself is causing all kinds of problems. The more annoying of which is it makes him pee. Endlessly. It’s like he manufactures pee from the air he breathes. I couldn’t keep up with all the accidents and even though he looks ridiculous, I broke down and made him a “doggie diaper”. Basically it’s just band that goes around his belly and I line it with an incontinence pad. Does the job. And this way he can still walk freely around the house.

In other news, I haven’t mentioned it on this blog – but I’m speaking at WordCamp Utah. I’m doing a presentation on using WordPress as a CMS. I finally finished making up all my slides and know what I’m going to say and I think it’s going to come out really well – so long as I stop saying “um” in between every other word. I’ve been doing a few practice sessions (including taping a few so I can see how I sound) and that’s the biggest thing I need to fix. I’m thinking shock therapy. I’ll rig it so it zaps me every time I say “um”. Eventually it should work, right?

I’m almost finished reading Ender’s Game and when I do, I’ll write up a review. I had been so proud of myself for how quickly I was able to read through “The Help” – (it only took me about a week – maybe two – that is definitely a record for me – especially for a book that size!) But that was during my vacation. LOL! Definitely hard to keep up that same pace while “normal life” is going on.

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Friday was a really bad day. I went to see him in the morning – he was still not doing well, getting worse. He looked horrible. I looked in his face and silently pleaded with him to hang on and get better. I talked to the vet over the phone in the afternoon and he suggested one last treatment before we gave up. All along we were treating his problems like they were ulcers – except the medication that should have worked simply wasn’t working. If it wasn’t ulcers – the other options it could be was cancer or inflammatory disease. He suggested giving him steroids to see if it helped.

A few hours later, I stopped in to see him. I brought the kids with me because I wasn’t sure if they were ever going to see him again, and I was getting ready to tell them to say goodbye to him. But when they brought him out, they put him on the floor, and he ran over to us, wagging his tail. Before he was shaking non-stop (most likely from pain), but he was hardly shaking at all – this was only hours after they started him on the new treatment. I couldn’t believe my eyes. We took him outside so he could pee, he did, then pulled towards the car like he wanted to go HOME. This is not the behavior of a dog that is giving up!

The next morning he looked even better. They told me if everything continued as is, he could come home that night. I couldn’t believe it! The dog had literally come back from the dead. That night I brought him (and about a dozen medications LOL!) home and he’s pretty much back to his old self now.

I’ve been told this is not a “cure” – his stomach is diseased. What this buys us is some more time with him. Whether it’s cancer or inflammatory disease, the steroids will eventually stop working. In the meantime, we are so glad to have him back with us for however long we can keep him. I still don’t know how I’m going to cope when the eventuality comes. He’s like my daemon / animal spirit. He’s always by my side and I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to say goodbye to him.

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In any case, I still have a number of photos I want to post from the trip so you’ll see them intermingled with other photos over the next couple of days.

Meanwhile I’ll also be working on losing the weight I gained both before and during my vacation. =sigh= Coming back to reality is no fun. LOL!

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In the meantime I don’t have too much else to say on the matter. All my wise advice is exhausted after repeating it to Sam several times a day and the rest of me is pretty empty. Yesterday and today I wondered maybe to fill the in-between time, I’d try to find something from my day and capture it. I really have been partial to the photos I’ve been taking with that ShakeItPhoto app – so I was going to do an experiment – not sure how long it will last – but thought it would be fun to just take a picture each day and post it. Too many days go by without notice of the details, so by doing this I’m trying to make myself focus on the details more. And focus less on the stress we’re dealing with right now. So now that I’ve said that, hopefully I can keep up with it. LOL! So many times, I have these lofty goals, and as soon as I say something I immediately fail at it. I’d really like to try and keep this one going. And since the photos will be coming from my iPhone, which is always with me, hopefully it won’t be too hard. So we’ll see how it goes.

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The first session I attended was about “Small Business Success” with Ciaran Blumenfeld, Lara Galloway, Lisa Leonard, Marlynn Schotland and Ana Roco-Castro on the panel. I went in hoping to find answers to whether or not I should grow my personal business and if so, how. I probably walked away with a slightly different realization than I expected, but that realization was that I don’t want to grow my business. At least not at this time. My business is me; coding. I don’t want to spend my time “running a business.” I want to spend my time coding. That’s it. So what I need to spend any additional business energy on is finding “partners” to help me continue that goal – primarily designers. I often get requests from clients to design, and I don’t really want to do that part of the project. So I need some reliable designers I can work with to do that part with me. As well, finding designers means they will also hopefully send work my way as well. That is, I think, where I need to go at this point in time.

The next session I attended was more for fun. It was a Photography Workshop with Aimee Giese, Casey Mullins, Jenny Cisney and Jen Lemen. Half of the session was spent listening to their tips and tricks and being inspired by their photography and points of view. The other half was spent outside wrestling with our cameras to try and create some of our own photographic magic. (Benspark got a photo of our group – the lady in the green halter top shirt on the left is me. Notice my look of total confusion staring at the scary settings on my camera? LOL! Also notice the bright sun, bare shoulders… and what you can’t see – lack of sunscreen. My shoulders still hurt from that burn.) I’ve been trying to be more adventerous with my D70 – so far the pictures I’ve taken on the manual setting pretty much suck donkey balls. But it’s a work in progress. I also think if I want better photos, I’ll probably need to get a better lens. A lot of the limitations I thought my camera had are actually limitations to the lens I’m using.

Oh, also – this session was up the mountain from where the rest of the conference was taking place. You had to take a 10 minute gondola ride up. At first this sounded like a ton of fun. But in reality, I don’t do so well with trust in mechanical things. Especially when I have to put my life in the hands of said mechanical thing, and instead of being a quiet, peaceful experience, the thing creaks and bounces and feels like it could drop you at any moment without a second thought. I was only able to snap one picture before I really had to hold on to the seat for dear life. Not that the seat would save me if we fell, but maybe my gripping the walls of the gondola would remind it to continue gripping the wire as we rode up. Moosh In Indy had a funny post about this experience too.

At this point I headed home for the evening. I understand there were a number of wild parties each night at The Canyons, but for someone who spends each and every day alone, at home, with nothing but a dog to talk to and my laptop to code on – I’m obviously not the most social, outgoing person on the planet. (Pretty ironic that someone like me would go to a social media conference actually.)

The next day I attended a design session in the morning. Scott Sorenson from StruckAxiom and James Rabdau from The Summit Group were on the panel, as was Rachael Herrscher standing in to talk about the design overhaul of Room 704. (The new design that was presented isn’t live yet) Again, this was more out of curiosity. I’m fascinated and intrigued by design. I wish I could do it better than I did in the past. I certainly like looking at and working with good designs – but it’s not something I feel comfortable doing anymore. The points were well made, about a logo not being equal to a brand. About how to create a brand and translate it across different avenues.

The early afternoon session I went to was about SEO, with Chris Frietchen and Carina Hoskisson. These two ladies really worked well together and gave a bunch of tips and tricks for writing content that is good for SEO without going too far. This obviously has relevance to my blogs, and to my business. Not that I write content specifically for my clients, but I’m often asked advice about these issues and I get the “basic” idea, but having some validation and new ideas presented was really helpful. I am definitely going to be putting their suggestions into practice. (In fact, in my last post about Printable Masks, I played around with manipulating the text the way they described, and I’m proud to say if anyone ever actually searches for “Printable Mask Ear Hook” – I come up #1. LOL!)

The next session after that was about writing reviews, making pitches to companies for sponsorship, etc. Connie Burke, Jane Devin, Christine Frietchen and Nick Wells presented. As you may have noticed, this is another area I’ve been dabbling with. I really am a total iPhone geek and love the playing with apps on my phone. I’d say about 20% (or maybe even less) of the usage on my phone is for actual calls, another 40% would be spent on email, and easily another 40% is spent playing with apps. So talking about the apps is a natural for me – getting apps for free that I can review is really fun. Connie gave insight on what companies are looking for, Jane gave insight as a blogger, Chris gave us tips on how best to construct the post and Nick on the legal aspects. One of their points was that bloggers should always be honest – giving the good and the bad. My standpoint has been up to now to try to be positive. “If you can’t say something nice…” That is not to say that I haven’t been giving the whole truth. Basically if I don’t like a product, I will usually just stick to whatever indisputable facts there are. I have at times made some suggestions on some items. But I understand their point that people want to see the negative stuff too.

This really was an interesting experience for me – start to finish. I was definitely out of my comfort zone, but started to feel better about that as time went on. I am a pretty shy person, but I started to realize that many of the people at this conference had come to it alone as well. While I was coming into this huge group of people, many of them did not know each other – some of them didn’t know anyone until the start of the conference – and that realization helped me be a lot more outgoing. For example, one person I had really wanted to talk to was Alma. I have actually spoken with her on the phone before and will be working with her on another project. I really like her work and wanted to touch base with her and talk about sending clients who ask for design work her way. On Saturday, I tracked her down – found her table where she was sitting having lunch, plopped myself down next to her completely uninvited and introduced myself. That is SO out of character for me. But I am so glad I did it. She is just the sweetest person and I was so thrilled to finally meet her. I met a bunch of people at the conference – introducing myself to complete strangers. Handing them my card. Almost as if I wasn’t a social misfit at all!! LOL!

So, as you can tell, I’m pretty jazzed up about the conference. I’m not sure if we’ll still be living here come Evo Conference 2011 – and if we’re not, I’m not 100% sure I’d be able to go – but certainly if we are still here – I will definitely be going again. Maybe next time I’ll come out of my shell a bit more and join in on some of the crazy parties I was hearing about.

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She also talked about the importance of just getting the shot you need – with whatever you have available – even if it’s your iPhone camera. On this note she had recommended a few particular apps. One in particular, I purchased the instant I got home. It’s called ShakeItPhoto. (It’s only $0.99 – SO worth it. GO right now and buy it) The “cute” part of the app is it plays off the old Polaroid camera idea, it “prints” the image on the screen – you “shake” it to develop it – but the photos it creates are actually pretty cool. It adds a filter to it that really adds a nice look to the photo. Take a look at this shot I took of Zachary with it – I think it’s instantly one of my favorite photos of him ever:

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I’d also like you to remember that the first snow of the season came at the end of September. If you mark that as the beginning of winter and the last snowfall as the end – that make it about 9 months of winter so far. If this year will be the same as last – and we start getting snow in September, that means we only have 3 months to squeeze a spring and summer into. Not cool. At all. I am so done.

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