Monthly Archives: January 2013

I’m not a number

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Yesterday on twitter, I started seeing all of these tweets.

Hmmm Kred. I had been there at least once. I always go and check things out to see what they are about, if they are useful. I see people giving other people +Kred (whatever that is) but I don’t live in there and the number certainly doesn’t concern me.

Still, I was intrigued and clicked through to see my score. Hmm. It’s pretty high? Why am I not a 1% Elite Kredster? In the middle of a tornadic afternoon, I found myself starting to feel concerned, ripped off even, that I hadn’t made the cut.

Well, in my inbox this morning was the golden email. There it was:

Thank God they realized it! Ha!

In the light of day, well, it’s still dark but as I sit here with my new prize, I come back to the idea I’ve believed since Klout started messing around with their algorithms, I’m not a number!

I deactivated my Klout account several algorithm changes ago because, the way I read it, I was going to be penalized for interacting with “less influential” persons than myself. I call BS on that!

I love all of the people I meet on twitter. It’s such a rich and diverse group that you’d have a hard time assembling in real life on a daily basis. I learn and gain from ALL of them not just the top dog Klout wise.

When I started seeing articles that employers weren’t even looking at your resume’ if you didn’t have a certain Klout score, I thought, “now the world has really gone mad”.

I think that within my sphere I am influential to a certain degree. When I get excited, people get excited right along with me. I can see this with my own eyes and I don’t need a number to prove it.

I have gotten some very nice, real life, tokens of appreciation from various brands because of this quality. I haven’t even blogged about my trip to Washington DC as a guest of Eight O’Clock Coffee and I really should. It was a dream trip. Did they look at my Klout score to pick me? No, I don’t think so because when you go to Klout and look for me, you see this:

No, they saw me actually influencing others regarding their brand. I’ve been drinking their coffee since I was 15. It’s my favorite and it’s not a secret. I drink it, I hoard it, I tweet about it. This is real, not some put on. They noticed, called me a Super Fan, and flew me to DC for the experience of a lifetime.

I think the numbers are probably fun to a certain extent but should they mean anything in real life? I would give a hearty NO! to that.

So, if my klout score is the reason that someone will or won’t hire me, I guess I’m destined to be an unemployed trophy wife forever. Dang the bad luck! 😉

 

I won’t actually USE algebra in real life

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This is the thought I had when I was in high school.

I liked math when I was young. Then came high school and my first algebra class. I had to work for it but still managed to get a B.

Geometry sophomore year was not good. I didn’t understand it, I struggled but managed to still get out of there with a B. I will never know how.

Enter Algebra 2 in my junior year.

Awful

Inexplicable

This stuff makes NO sense

I will NOT use it in my every day life. Why must I take it?

On the very last day I could declare, I decided to take the class on pass/fail thinking that I would pass it. Maybe with a D, but I would pass it and it wouldn’t hurt my GPA. I failed.

The spectacular crash and burn.

I got tutoring and I still couldn’t pass it but apparently I got something for effort because I did manage to get a Pass on my report card.

This morning, we were walking in the cemetery like we do every morning.

There were some guys preparing to dig a grave. They were measuring and remeasuring.

David said, “Can you imagine if you dug the wrong place? You wouldn’t even be able to hide your mistake.”

I had been talking with my friend, Mariam, on twitter this a.m. about math and who uses it in real life.

Well, in order to make nice clean lines like this

grave diggers do!

I’m so glad I’m not a grave digger. 😉

Friends Friday – January 25

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Every so often on a Friday, I’ll see the larger friends grouping that facebook has spilled out and there will be a collection of people that I want to tell you about. Today is one of those days.

Here they are:

First comes my friend Janice, or J as I like to refer to her. I love this woman. She is our neighbor in Bartlesville. I’d say that J knows me just about as well as anyone on earth. We spent a couple of years walking around the neighborhood every morning, getting exercise, picking up garbage and talking. We called ourselves the Old Bat Patrol and we even had t-shirts. In addition to being so amazing and grounded, J’s married and her husband Keith, is an equally fabulous person. With a great beer fridge. 🙂

Dan Gordon and I became friends on twitter and have become friends in real life. He’s a great guy and is the owner of Samuel Gordon Jewelers in Oklahoma City. Dan was very supportive of the pageant while I was running it and allowed us to shoot an end of the year video in his store when the weather turned bad outside. He let the girls try on hundreds of thousands of dollars of jewelry which they loved! Dan’s got a great family and one of my favorite things to see on facebook are photos of his little girl, Hadley, who looks from every photo to have such an amazing personality. I hope to meet her some day.

I have known Debbi Raffalli for a long time. Back in the day we were both Pampered Chef consultants. In fact, I even WAS Debbi when I crashed a Pampered Chef convention in Washington, DC. She had two nametags. All went well until we were at dinner one night and a girl at our table said, “Oh I know you! We email together!”. Oops. 😉 Debbi gets me and I wish she was my next door neighbor. Although we might get into a lot of trouble. 😉

Mariam Kobras is another of my twitter friends who will become a real life friend as soon as we are on the same continent. Mariam is an author and lives in Germany. The next time she’s here, I’m going to throw her a book signing party so prepare to save the date. 🙂 Mariam is another person that I wish lived right next door and she is another person who gets me even though we have never met in real life. To consider Debbi and Mariam and I as neighbors? Hmmmmm… BIG FUN! Mariam’s first book is The Distant Shore, and her second Under the Same Sun are both available to purchase and she’s writing the third!

Laura Webster. You know she was named after me, right? 😉 Laura is my cousin Cindy’s oldest daughter and I adore her. She makes me laugh and you know how I love to laugh! Laura is on the way to her first big gig as deputy director of Leg Up India. I’m excited for Laura’s new adventure and I know she’ll do a great job. Laura is almost an exact replica in looks to Cindy. Especially in this photo below!

Tiny little Alisha Loper is another twitter friend who’s become a friend in real life. She is so tiny and cute! She’s a new mom and looking at photos of her little boy make my heart happy. He looks like a mini-me of her husband and it’s awesome to watch her be a good mom. Alisha is a talented designer and I love when she shares her work so I can admire it. 🙂

I’m trying to remember how I met Dawn Allen. I think it was through the Real Housewives of Oklahoma of which she is one. Dawn is terrific. Fun and kind and she clearly knows the importance of a good tiara. 🙂

LeAnn is my daughter-in-love Nikki’s Aunt Lee. I think she may have been one of the first relatives of Nikki’s that I met and she welcomed me like I was a direct member of the family. Lee is so nice and friendly and makes me believe that “in-law” can be “in-love” as I like to call it. She has a cute little granddaughter, Brighton, and I love seeing photos of them together.

So that is how facebook shook it out today. I am again reminded how blessed I am to have these people in my life. Makes it FABU! 🙂

Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?

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We stayed at a hotel on Sunday night in Dallas when Lyndzee and I went down to pick up the bridesmaids dresses for her wedding. It wasn’t too long after we checked out that I noticed an email from the hotel in my phone. I deleted it thinking that they would probably want my input on my stay and I would take care of that when I got home.

I was going through the email in my computer this morning and found that email again. This is what it looked like:

Say what? Even if you blow it up, it’s nearly impossible to decipher. I took a look at that and thought, “Okay, I don’t know what they are saying to me but I’m not interested. Next!”

There is a book by about just this subject by Colin Wheildon called of Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes?

I think this woman was just trying to make pretty shapes because I had no idea what she was trying to communicate to me. More importantly, I didn’t want to have to slow down to find out.

When people have as much to look at as they do these days, you really have to work at getting their attention. Putting a clear, readable font into your email is key if you want to even have a chance at getting your message read.

The Harlow Solid Italic font that she used (some of the letters in SILVER?)

was so impossibly hard to even take in much less read. It looked like a mess. If I were ever going to use that font, it would be sparingly on a graphic design that was bolstered up with some other clear, readable font.

When typing email, it’s better to use a serif font. Popular serif fonts are Times New Roman, Palatino, Georgia, Courier, Bookman and Garamond. Almost everything you read – books, magazines, newspapers – are written in a serif font. They are easier to read, seeming to simply flow together.

I wrote a reply to the lady who sent me the crazy font email. I offered her constructive criticism on her choice of font. I do hope that she will take my suggestion as what it is – HELP! – and not just think I’m a witch and disregard my advice.

I did have a nice stay at her hotel but I’m not sure if that’s why she contacted me. I can only guess. Or spend way too much time trying to decipher her email.

Who cares?

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You can’t turn on the radio or TV (twitter, facebook, etc. etc. amen) or open a newspaper today without hearing that Lance Armstrong confessed to Oprah that he used performance enhancing drugs to win the Tour de France seven times.

via Sports Illustrated

I don’t care.

Maybe if I were his competitor I would care but maybe I wouldn’t. Back in 1999, I competed in the Tampa Bay Natural bodybuilding contest. Note the word “natural” in the title of the competition.

There was nothing natural about the women who stood on the stage with me. You simply can’t get distended, cut, man abs and a strong jaw unless you take some sort of male hormone.

I came in last but I didn’t care. I had been working towards that show for 12 years. I was wearing the red posing suit I had dreamed about and my kids (and their friends!) and my husband thought I looked good and were proud of me.

The beauty of the bodybuilding stage is that when you are up there, and people are clapping, they could very well be clapping for you or not but it all sounds the same and you feed off of it.

So, get on with your cheating self Lance Armstrong.

Today is the first day…

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…of the rest of my fabu life! And I’m so excited to get this party started.

2012 was an interesting, and quite mobile, year. We started out the year in an apartment in Little Rock.

Except for the shopping being traumatic, I think I liked Little Rock. But between waiting for, and being in Oklahoma for the birth of the glambaby

and babysitting Lauri and Laurence

I wasn’t there a lot.  After that project was finished, we moved back to our Bartlesville house.

The next project had us living in an RV in Amarillo.

Now that was a lot of fun even though I was forever planning what to do when the strong Texas wind blew the RV over on its door. 😉

Back to Bartlesville for a few weeks and then I took a job managing a ranch. There, we lived in a cabin.

I so loved getting away from the awful barking Bartlesville dogs, the sky

and the ducks.

Now, today, we are in Sallisaw, Oklahoma and it is the first day of the rest of my fabu life. With David by my side and the world as our oyster, I’m SO excited!

Happy 2013! 🙂