Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence
Dec 21 2010

I mentioned I had a post brewing in my head about this fortune cookie “statement” (i.e., not a fortune) in a prior post.  I actually did see a real fortune the other day that said something like “The love of your life is just around the corner,” but sadly I did not open that cookie, our office manager (who has been married almost 20 years) at work did, so maybe she is re-discovering the love of her life. 🙂

Love is a strange emotion or thing or state of being.  It can be like a drug just like in the movie Love and Other Drugs I just saw.  It doesn’t often make sense.  People love Apple’s iPhone but if you did the practical analysis, the Google Android phone might be better.  In other words people’s imagination of the iPhone triumphs over hard data (i.e., intelligence).  Or there might even be a better phone option than that.  But people fall in love seemingly all of a sudden and sometimes there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why but some people like Steve Jobs seem to know how to push the buttons of a significant enough portion of the population and get them to fall in love with his ideas/products.  Selling to consumers is a tough job because we are fickle.  We can fall in and out of love (or is that “like”) of products pretty easily.   Probably because society doesn’t look kindly on us falling in and out of love with people, so we project that piece of our humanity onto objects.  No one will judge you or make you feel guilty for falling in and out of love with certain products.  I just came up with that piece of philosophy/wisdom so take it for what it’s worth!

Hugh McLeod (@gapingvoid) loves to cartoon about LOVE and I love the poignancy of his love cartoons.  Jeffrey Fry sent out a quote recently: “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” –Mother Teresa.

When people fall in love (infatuation), they certainly overlook the practical/potentially annoying things about something or someone (e.g., you have to keep re-booting the phone, but it looks pretty, it gives you good info on how to get places, and it gives you games to play or if it’s a person for some period of time you don’t see their flaws because he or she makes you feel special/noticed or it seems like they really see or understand you.).

The very few times I’ve fallen in romantic love in my life, I’ve been completely blind sided by it.  Knocked over like a ton of bricks.  Silly and stupid.  And on some occasions, I never even had a relationship with the guy – guess I’m just a romantic at heart and they somehow happened to connect with the combination of my mind/heart, which is very hard to do.  When I’ve fallen out of love, it seems to have happened over time and not suddenly after disappointment, disconnection, pain, and just the exhaustion that comes along with daily living.  I’m not trying to say I believe in ‘love at first site’ because I don’t, but that moment when you realize you love someone or ‘something’ seems to just happen without any warning.  One day you don’t have much feeling toward someone or you don’t know what you feel and the next you find you are in love with them.  Which has led me to the conclusion that we are not meant to love just one person (romantically) our entire lives.  I can see Jeffrey Fry reading this and thinking that I don’t know what true love is yet because he has studied it and apparently knows what it is.  He’s probably right, I don’t know.

There are people in ‘arranged marriages’ who grow to love each other and there are people who had ‘love marriages’ that didn’t work out.  It’s all that stuff that happens (and doesn’t happen) in between the years, the kids, the jobs, behind closed doors, etc. that I guess makes some marriages “work” and others don’t.  The same is true for business start-ups but currently the odds of a marriage making it to “death do us part” is higher (4o to 50%) than a small business making it 50 years (< 10%).  Plus, more people change their jobs and companies they work for now than they did 30+ years ago.  Go figure.

But the closest I’ve come to experiencing true love is the love I feel for my children, and yes the intensity of my love for them did surprise me at first.  And although they sometimes annoy the heck out of me (any parent who says their kids have not annoyed them at some point is a liar), I cannot even imagine a day where I would fall out of love with them.  I can see a day I may not like them sometimes, especially if they do something naughty or talk back to me, but I believe that I will always love them and do my best to support them.

I wonder if it’s harder to fall in or out of love?  That is the question.

And Then An Egg Explodes In Your Face
Sep 11 2010

You’re going about your weekend morning breakfast routine.  The kids are having fun and doing fine.  You boil eggs for them except they turn out a little runnier than one of your kids likes so you put it in the microwave to harden up the middle a little for 30 seconds.  The egg white was already slit and you remark that you hope it doesn’t explode in the microwave.  You pull it out and it looks fine.  You place it in front of your 5 year old daughter and take a fork to it to cut it for her and BOOM, it explodes all over your face, her face, the table, the chairs, the floor, etc.  You are stunned, she’s stunned, her brother is stunned.  You can’t see because there are egg pieces in your eyes and your daughter starts crying because she’s startled and scared.

You stand dumbfounded for a moment wondering what happened when you realize there are pieces of egg everywhere.  You wipe her face and your face and she walks off to sit on the couch nearby because she doesn’t want to be anywhere near the disaster and she wants to recover.  Your 8 year old son keeps walking around where the egg pieces on the floor are despite being told at least 5 times not to walk there, but he’s kind of amused by it all.  He keeps saying “sorry, I didn’t realize it was here.”  And you roll your eyes at him not comprehending why he couldn’t remember you just told him not to walk there.  You start laughing at the craziness and then after a few minutes you all start pointing at each other and laughing at the fact you all have pieces of egg in your hair.  You ask your daughter if she’s still hungry and she says she is so you offer her a bagel with cream cheese (which is her favorite) and she says she wants to eat it while sitting on the counter and you let her so you can finish cleaning the breakfast table area.  Her brother also wants to sit on the counter and eat a bagel so you let him do it too despite the fact he ate all of his egg because he likes runny eggs.

You clean up, you take them to your voice lesson where they color and play on the iPhone while you have your lesson, for lunch you cut them some apples and make them cheese & ham quesadillas that get slightly burned because you discover more egg pieces and get distracted trying to clean them up, you listen to them complain briefly that their lunch is slightly burned but you don’t get too upset because they are playing nicely together with some board games and staying out of your way while you continue to eradicate the kitchen of random pieces of egg, you take them to your daughter’s swim lesson where your son wants to download more free games to your iPhone, and then you come home.  You let them watch TV because you are tired and you lay in between them and fall asleep for 5 minutes before their Dad comes to pick them up.

Then you attempt to catch up on hundreds of emails, housework, paperwork, busy work, eat cereal for dinner because nothing else appeals to you, watch a recording of Mad Men, write this post and then go to bed.

Yes, that was my day today and I wouldn’t trade it for any other because an egg exploded in my face for the first time in my life and my kids were there to see it and everyone is OK. 🙂   And I’m grateful that it was just an egg and not an airplane exploding in my building like what happened 9 years ago in New York on this very date, September 11.

There are so many ways to tie an egg unexpectedly exploding in your face to life as an entrepreneur or parent, that it would take too long to write about here. So I’ll just leave it up to you all to come up with your own egg exploding business start-up and other parenting analogies.

Interesting Reads and Fortunes
Jun 13 2010

Here are a few interesting things that have hit my in box and show my penchant for Chinese food to read and think about:

Articles, Posts, & Cartoons

Why Change Is So Hard: Self-Control Is Exhaustible – Fast Company.

“People won’t change because they’re too lazy. Well, I’m here to stick up for the lazy people. In fact, I want to argue that what looks like laziness is actually exhaustion. The proof comes from a psychology study that is absolutely fascinating.”

“This brings us back to the point I promised I’d make: That what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. Change wears people out—even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.”

I found the short article interesting from a business and personal perspective.  Organizations and people can handle only so much change/stress that’s why it’s even more amazing to me when entrepreneurial endeavors make it because the speed and quantity of change that a start-up and the people involved experience is enormous.  Burn out happens often and frequently.  I’m a fairly high (and usually efficient) multi-tasker, but when I’m trying to process a lot of change and exerting a lot of self-control, it can feel exhausting which slows me down.  I also see how it affects people/entrepreneurs in the work environment.

Entrepreneurial Fog – A gapingvoid cartoon.  As an entrepreneur who has had a very interesting set of experiences in her life, many of Hugh’s cartoons resonate with me.  I did a couple of posts a while back on some of his cartoons called Love and Entrepreneurs Part 1 and Part 2.

“Army Generals talk about “The Fog of War.”  No matter how good your preparation is, it all means little once the actual fighting starts.”

It seems to me that many things in life are foggy and one characteristic trait of entrepreneurs and great leaders is that they are comfortable with the fog…well maybe not comfortable with it but have the wherewithal not to let it completely overwhelm them like in some scary, horror flick.

Passing it On – A post by my favorite VC blogger, Fred Wilson about one of their firms junior investment professionals, Andrew, that is moving on after his two year stint, teaching their new professional Christina about “proceeds by class of stock.”  The teacher in me liked this post.  Although I’ve only officially taught a short time in my career (i.e., a handful of undergraduate classes in entrepreneurship), I’ve always liked to teach people things.  It must be in the blood because my grandfather and my mother were both professors at different times during their careers.  It’s always an amazing/rewarding moment when you see a student/employee/person ‘get’ something for the first time or you see them applying skills they may or may not have realized they learned from the class.  I sometimes hear from my former students via facebook and it’s really hard to explain the feeling you get when they mention how things they learned are still helping them today.  I really did want to comment on that post, but I think I’ll have to refer back to the ‘laziness/exhaustion’ article I mention above…when I finally had a few minutes, I felt the time to comment had passed.

Fortunes

A while back I did a series of posts based on fortunes from fortune cookies I had received and one post almost resulted in me being mentioned in a New York Times article.  As I was searching for the  links to my previous posts on the topic, I discovered one I did on November 2, 2008 called Business Is Like War; Easy To Begin But Hard To Stop where the fortune actually said “Love is like war; easy to begin but hard to stop.” I compared Love and Business in an actual table format!  How…how…business like of me.  The end result was most businesses and marriages fail (as people tend to define failure – something ceasing to exist) in some form or fashion.  This is when I sometimes look back on what I’ve written and realize I forget that I actually wrote it.  Those words seem to describe the disillusionment I was entering into or maybe it was the illusion I was waking up from at the time and that was over a year and a half ago.  Weird.  Anyway, here are some fortunes I or others have recently had the fortune of receiving.  Like some others, I think that the fortune cookie industry has run out of fortunes and has decided to move into giving mere random statements:

You are a fun-loving person and will find much happiness.

Life is like playing the violin in the public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Love is the greatest gift of all.

You will be showered with good luck.

Be careful or your true idiocy will shine through. (I’m half joking on this one because someone I was sitting next to got something similar to this, but I can’t remember the exact words but the gist was the same.)

Chocolate covered raisins cure all ailments! (Yes, I made that one up because I’m about go eat some)

I’ll blame it on the entrepreneurial fog and change exhaustion as to why I’m not interested in doing full posts where I create compare/contrast tables on any of the aforementioned fortunes. 🙂

The Life of Books
May 10 2010

I’ve been asked several times by people what business books I read, and honestly I don’t read too many of them.  This could partly explain why I’m not a millionaire yet.  Maybe I have ADD (which many entrepreneurs purport to having in some form or fashion), but a book really has to get my attention and ones presented in fable or story form seem much easier for me to read. I used to devour books (mostly fiction), but with all I have going on, I’m lucky if I can get through one book every few months.  However, as things have started to settle down a little bit in my life (knock on wood), I’m trying to read more books.

Fred Wilson did a post a while back listing the books he recommends for entrepreneurs (e.g., Atlas Shrugged, Shakespeare) which resulted in a guy named Zachary Burt creating a wiki for people to list recommended books for entrepreneurs.  Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, is on this list and one of my favorites.  I used to give all my Intro to Entrepreneurship students a copy of Siddhartha as a good-bye gift.  It’s one of the few books I’ve re-read at different times during my life and each time I take away something slightly different and more.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about a book I read during a much needed break called The Happiness Hypothesis and I just finished Outliers by Malcom Gladwell.  I plan to write about books more often on this blog and highlight any connections I see between the content of the book to entrepreneurship and parenting.  The books will range from business related, to fiction, to classics, to possibly space exploration but I believe you can learn something from one book that later can help you assimilate (consciously or un) something you experience in the real world or read in another book.  I also plan to update the design of this blog and add a page listing book recommendations.

If you have any books you think I should add to my pile, please let me know in the comments or by emailing me.  I will be linking to Amazon for books I read and for full disclosure, if you happen to buy a book from that link, I will eventually get a small dollar % of that purchase.  To date in the three plus years I’ve been blogging, I have yet to receive a check from Amazon so I don’t anticipate writing about books will be a lucrative endeavor!

Texas Bluebonnets
Apr 7 2010

The spring flowers in Texas are blooming and this year they seem extra beautiful. I just had to share an iPhone picture of some bluebonnets, the Texas state flower, growing outside of the place I work. They seem to be extra big and extra blue this year. Flowers always remind me of rebirth…of Spring…of new beginnings.  There are patches of bluebonnets and other Spring flowers all over the city, and whether it’s a tradition or required by law, they do not get mowed until they quit growing.

If only we could appreciate the beauty of people like we appreciate the beauty of flowers.  I guess the difference is that flowers come and go so we see them anew each year and most of the people in our daily lives we see often.  We seem to have a harder time appreciating the beauty in something or someone we see everyday…unless of course they make us smile inside or out. 🙂

The Happiness Hypothesis
Apr 3 2010

I actually finished a book from beginning to end when I went out of town for a much needed week long break a couple of weeks ago.  This may not seem much to many of you but to me, I haven’t been able to concentrate (or have the time) to finish any book in a few years it seems like.  The book I read is called The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Amazon Link) by Joseph Haidt.  Many of us search for happiness and never find it or are looking in the wrong places.  We’ve all heard the saying that happiness comes from within.  Well that’s partially true according to Haidt but there are so many other factors.

He performed extensive research and referenced many of the great thinkers, psychologists, philosophers, doctors, etc. to come to some conclusions of his own.  I think many entrepreneurs are happy when they are able to see the tangible results of their efforts, but many think they will be happy if only they were to accomplish this one thing.  But as we all know, there’s always the next thing, and we as a species have a hard time enjoying where we are and what we have accomplished.  We have a hard time being happy with who we are because we compare ourselves to others.

The author directs you a couple of times to the website  http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx run by Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of Positive Psychology at University of Pennsylvania, so you can assess your own level of happiness. “Positive Psychology is a new branch of psychology which focuses on the empirical study of such things as positive emotions, strengths-based character, and healthy institutions. His research has demonstrated that it is possible to be happier — to feel more satisfied, to be more engaged with life, find more meaning, have higher hopes, and probably even laugh and smile more, regardless of one’s circumstances. Positive psychology interventions can also lastingly decrease depression symptoms. The research underlying these rigorously tested interventions is presented in the July/August edition of the American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychology Association.”  You have to register to do the surveys.

Here is the review of the book by Publisher’s Weekly from the Amazon site.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, lamented St. Paul, and this engrossing scientific interpretation of traditional lore backs him up with hard data. Citing Plato, Buddha and modern brain science, psychologist Haidt notes the mind is like an “elephant” of automatic desires and impulses atop which conscious intention is an ineffectual “rider.” Haidt sifts Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions for other nuggets of wisdom to substantiate—and sometimes critique—with the findings of neurology and cognitive psychology. The Buddhist-Stoic injunction to cast off worldly attachments in pursuit of happiness, for example, is backed up by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s studies into pleasure. And Nietzsche’s contention that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger is considered against research into post-traumatic growth. An exponent of the “positive psychology” movement, Haidt also offers practical advice on finding happiness and meaning. Riches don’t matter much, he observes, but close relationships, quiet surroundings and short commutes help a lot, while meditation, cognitive psychotherapy and Prozac are equally valid remedies for constitutional unhappiness. Haidt sometimes seems reductionist, but his is an erudite, fluently written, stimulating reassessment of age-old issues. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Since a couple of weeks have now passed since I read it and life has gotten in the way, the details are no longer clear to me but some of the things I remember are:

• I found it odd/irritating that most of the experiments referenced (e.g., monkey’s taken away from their mother and put in cages with wire frame mothers, babies being left alone to cry, etc.) were done by men.  Freud, Spock and others thought babies should be sent to a baby farm away from their parents.   There were a couple of women (Anna Freud) who also bought into some of this stuff, but I wonder if she had children at the time.  I guess to me it seems obvious that happiness is partially influenced by your relationship with your parents/family and the amount of support/love you get from them.  If your primary caregivers don’t accept you for who you are and don’t provide an environment where you are encouraged to discover your passion, it can make finding that inner happiness harder.  There are those who make it to the top of the proverbial ladder who are still unhappy.

• I resonated with the example he used of the elephant and the rider.  My favorite animals is the elephant and I used to collect images of them.  According to Haidt, we forget that as humans we are both the elephant and the rider.  As rational thinking beings we believe we are the rider controlling everything but if that elephant (base, primal, survival) decides it wants/needs something, there really is not much the rider can do other than find ways to train the elephant to move in another direction.  The elephant can be responding to fear, love, soul starvation, body starvation, boredom, etc. but the rational rider has to think of the long term effects of reacting to those urges and guides the elephant to safer ground.  As a flawed species, we don’t always do the right thing, our elephant desires are much stronger than we are and we fall off.  But then we must get back up on the elephant and try again, because if we don’t the elephant runs a muck and tramples a bunch of people in its way.

• A study done on 4 year olds and marshmallows is an indicator of a person’s ability to achieve and in some way feel more happiness.  I, of course, asked my kids the question and they passed.  The study has a grown up in a room with a 4 year old and the grown up shows the 4 year old a plate with one marshmallow and another with two marshmallows.  The grown up tells the 4 year old that he/she is going to leave the room for a little bit.  If the 4 year old waits until the grown up gets back, the 4 year old can have two marshmallows.  If he/she can’t wait, then he/she could ring a bill bringing back the grown up who would give them the one marshmallow.  Those 4 year olds who could wait, did better overall in education, test scores, etc. and by exercising self restraint tended to be happier individuals.  I’m not quite sure the direct tie, but when I asked my kids if they would wait, they both said they would so I temporarily felt a little relief as a potentially good mom.  🙂

• The big takeaway is that people usually can’t or don’t make significant changes in thinking or relating to people if they can’t train or convince the elephant why it’s better or at least cause the elephant to react in disgust to something.  Trying to convince the rational rider why it’s important to lose weight if he/she is fat is intellectually easy, but until the elephant is trained/convinced/physically disgusted it usually is a moot exercise to attempt to lose weight just based on rational thinking alone.

At any rate, it was a really good, though provoking read.  I started two other books The Art of Choosing (Amazon Link) by Sheena Iyengar and Outliers: The Story of Success (Amazon Link) by Malcolm Gladwell which I plan to blog about soon.  The Art of Choosing (like The Happiness Hypothesis) were my uncle’s books and I had to leave them with him when I came back home so I’ll have to get my hands on a copy so I can finish it.

May you be well.  May you be happy.  May you be free from suffering.  These phrases are part of the loving kindness meditation. Here’s another Amazon link to The Happiness Hypothesis.

Gapingvoid Cartoons – Love and Entrepreneurs – Part 2
Feb 25 2010

So now to part 2 – the Love series by @gapingvoid.  Check out Part 1 on Entrepreneurs.   In this post, I’m linking to some of Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter cartoons that highlight my favorite of his Valentine’s 2010 love series.  These particular cartoons touched me.  He has a way of taking words and using color, lines, space, and feeling in a unique way.  Please click on the image to go check out how to buy a print.

I liked the first one because it made me think of term sheets and love at the same time.  As an entrepreneur, when you raise money, you are presented with a term sheet (or create one yourself) and you negotiate terms until you come to an agreement with the person giving you money.  This cartoon to me represented yearning with a clear stated desire of wanting to be with someone while being vulnerable and trusting enough to let them name their terms.

The second one rings true to me because you know when you meet someone who is passionate about what they are doing or the story they are telling, you feel the love.  The stories and the people who you tend to remember most exude passion and love.  All great stories and works of art have love involved. What would the human condition be without love?

As for the last one, I just thought it was very cute and reminded me of being young, shy and having a school girl crush on someone.  As a little kid, I was naturally outgoing but was shy as a pre-teen and teenager, but I have always deep down been a very passionate person.  I never felt like I could express my passion legitimately through my writing and singing when I was younger for a variety of ‘life logistics,’ support, and inspiration reasons. But now I’m discovering that not feeling safe to express it, pretending to be someone you are not, or going through the motions for so long leaves one empty and longing for more.  I became less shy externally as I got older, but that shy girl is still in there and she’s working on being brave about love!

Happy Halloween
Oct 31 2009

I remember Halloween being one of my favorite holiday’s of the year as a kid and even as I got older.  This year my son dressed up as a scary skeleton, my daughter dressed up as a princess, and I dressed up in an Egyptian princess (Queen Nefertiti) costume I’ve had laying around for probably 8 years from a Halloween party we had at the house.  I think I surprised a few people who came to the door. 🙂

In the last few years, I haven’t been that motivated to put on the costume while their dad took them out around the neighborhood.  So I usually greeted people in my blue jeans and sweatshirt.  This year I went around the neighborhood with my daughter after my son had gotten his fill and decided he’d rather stay at home with his dad watching the UT Longhorn football game.

In the ghoulish, scary days of Halloween and other such stuff that can cause some nervousness, here’s a quote from Jeffrey Fry’s email list.

“We were not created to be eaten by anxiety, but to walk erect, free, unafraid in a world where there is work to do, truth to seek, love to give and win.”

— Joseph Ford Newton

Now we have to figure out what to do with all this Halloween candy!  We still have some left over from last year as we dole it out slowly throughout the year.  I told the kids that we’ll have to throw out the old stuff to make room for the new.  🙂

Happy Halloween!!

About Laughter
Oct 28 2009

This post called About Laughter came to me while I was in the shower the other day.  I guess I was thinking about About Sleep, About Writing and About Car Paint when the word “laughter” popped into my head and then a blog post started forming.

Laughter is the best medicine is an age old saying and according to: Laughter is the ‘best medicine for your heart on the University of Maryland Medical Center, Laughter is the Best Medicine on HelpGuide.org, and Laughter is the Best Medicine on Science Daily, laughter can help prevent heart attacks, help the terminally ill, create great working environments, make your employees think you are more effective, relieve stress & anxiety, etc.  A good laugh probably activates some feel good stuff (e.g., endorphins) in your body.

I have some funny people in my family.  My late grandfather had this mix of British and Sri Lankan humor that had a high occurrence of bathroom (or lack thereof) references.  Us kids thought it was gross and funny at the same time.  Even after he had a sextuple bypass at the Cleveland Clinic as well as on his death bed a decade or so later, he was still being funny and irreverent about life and religion.  I never could figure out if he was agnostic or not because he would quote the Bible, know hymns by heart, and later in the day make some funny derogatory remark about God, religion and some of his hyper religious relatives.  My mother has a similar sense of humor.   She also makes up words and describes people in caricature-ally true and funny ways.  She even has animal nicknames for all of us kids.  Sri Lanka was a British colony for quite some time and had a strong British influence for decades afterward and if you’ve ever watched Monty Python or Blackadder you know what I mean.

I also work with some funny people and a day doesn’t usually go by without a laugh or two or three.  Our office manager and I have a similar sense of humor, so she and I send some pretty funny emails around that others can’t keep up with sometimes.  We find many of the same things funny and find ourselves laughing at the dumbest of things.  We also sometimes cross some lines but fortunately we work in a laid back environment.  I have to say that I have met at least one of my 2009 non-resolutions which is to laugh more.  I feel like I have laughed a lot more this year than in past years.

When I interned in college, I worked with a great bunch of interns and we were all in stitches often.  That’s where I met my friend who I went to the beach with back in June.  He, I, and others in our group would come up with practical jokes, say the weirdest things and email about roller coasters and bowling and how they related to life and certain parts of life that most people aren’t comfortable talking about.  I remember laughing so much that summer.

Laughter is so important and can help through even the toughest of times.  We just can’t take things too seriously in life, start-ups, and margarita’s.   Maybe one day I’ll feel comfortable enough to show more of my humor on this blog, but I’m just not sure people will get it and then I’ll feel more stupid than I sometimes do!

An entrepreneurial endeavor without fun, social time, and laughter is not a place I want to be.  To me any good company culture has to include smiles, jokes, and many LOL’s.  😀

Now go make someone laugh and if you find yourself laughing until your belly hurts, you can tell people you exercised and did some sit-ups/crunches too!

It’s Nice to Win Something
Aug 5 2009

Sometimes I get lucky and win something.  Out of the blue I won the following just for being a subscriber to Parent Reviewers.

One (1) Grand Prize winner for the Grand Prize Pack including:
Wii Video Game ‘Ultimate I SPY’
Board Game ‘I SPY Memory Game’
I SPY A to Z: A Book of Picture Riddles
I SPY Treasure Hunt

Grand Prize Pack valued at $85.99

It arrived the other day and I opened the package this evening.  My daughter ran to show her brother the Wii game and he said “Whatever, it’s not Lego Star Wars.”  I told him he had a bad attitude and he said “Sorry” but didn’t really mean it because he has been dreaming about Lego Star Wars for quite some time because one of his best buds has it.   I’m sure he’ll like the I SPY game when he plays it.  Then we played the Board Game and he really enjoyed it and ended up winning by getting the most matches and beating me and his sister.  She’s a good sport because she’s two and a half years younger than he is so she usually doesn’t win unless he lets her win, which he frequently does so she’ll keep playing with him.  However, she often beats him at Bowling and Boxing on the Wii, which I think perplexes him.

He read one of the books and my daughter and I skimmed through the other but we were horrible at trying to find all the things in the complex pictures so we just talked about what we could find.  I think it’s a bit much for a 4 year old but she was excited to see the light houses because she remembered that we went inside one when we went on vacation to South Padre.

Thanks Elina at Parent Reviewers for being so cool and giving away cool prizes!

The random pictures of some lovely fuchsia/hot pink colored roses above are on my desk at work.  I got them this past weekend from Central Market (a grocery store here in Austin).  They opened up so beautifully and this mediocre iPhone picture of a few of them on my desk doesn’t really do them justice, but they are so pretty I thought I’d share.  They were 25 stems for $12.99!  I took some to work as well for some of the other women in the office.

Author: Aruni | Filed under: Just For Fun, random stuff | 4 Comments »

Playing With Fire – Happy 4th of July 2009
Jul 4 2009

The thing I enjoy most about 4th of July is the fireworks.  I remember my dad taking us to parks to watch fireworks when we were kids and letting us light fireworks at his house or other friend’s houses.

I have a great friend who has a house on the lake and every year, they throw a 4th of July party.  This is the same friend who got me the purple peacock hat for my birthday.  You get a perfect view of the fireworks right from the back yard of her house and there’s nothing like watching fireworks in an uncrowded place while sitting on chairs.

Needless to say I got my pyro-fix for the time being with a few firey delights which shall remain nameless.  I’ve always been fascinated with fire.  My mom used to get really upset with us for melting candle wax on the fireplace ledge and making things out of the wax when she wasn’t there.  Rightly, she was worried that we were going to burn the house down.  Fortunately, that never happened.

I did accidentally burn my sister’s fingers when we were kids.  I got in huge trouble with my grandfather who rarely got upset with us.  He sent me to a corner and I was devastated.  I think I was about 9 years old and in my mind I was conducting an experiment with medical tape wrapped around my sister’s finger and lighting one end of the tape with fire.  I have no idea what I thought would happen, and I had no idea how quickly it would burn.  I guess I just thought it would just stay at the end like a candle wick, but I was wrong and after my sister screamed, I knew I would get in trouble!

With little kids around, we don’t burn that many candles in the house these days but when I do see fire, I find myself mesmerized by it for a while.  It’s sort of calming in a weird way.

I wonder if other entrepreneur’s have a fascination with fire because really what we do is play with fire with some of the risks we take…

Interesting Reads Around The Web
Apr 18 2009

Here are some links to some interesting reads relating to entrepreneurship, people, parenting, and even Oprah!  I’m mulling over a couple of other blog posts in my head but until then check these out:

The Fine Art of Catching Liars – an interesting read on Time.com about research done by a psychologist on how to determine if someone is lying.  Might be useful for those of you who have older kids.  My kids haven’t started lying yet as far as I can tell.  My son just told me that he told some people at last week’s Easter Egg hunt that he ate some candy in one of the eggs when he didn’t.  I asked him why and he said he didn’t know but he seemed to think it was funny.  I’m honestly not even sure why he confessed that to me randomly.  I told him well that could be lying unless he was joking around with the other kids.  I think I’ll have an easier time detecting if my son is lying than my daughter.  I can already tell she will be pretty good at spinning a believable story and hide her true feelings.

Venture Capital Down 50%. It’s Not Just The Recession Folks – an article on TechCrunch analyzing how the decrease in venture investing is different this time around than in the post bubble bursting era of 2001-2002.  They say that clean-tech investing is down because so much more time and research is needed.  Health care investment is holding or not falling as fast.

Susan Boyle – The Biggest YouTube Sensation Ever? – an article on Mashable that links to the most viewed YouTube video of all time.  It’s of Susan Boyle singing on Britain’s Got Talent.  She shocked the world with her voice given her age and appearance.  A true “you can’t judge a book by its cover” story.  What an amazing voice.  She’s 48 years old, never been married, and his been taking care of her mother for quite some time.  Even Simon Cowel (American Idol judge) was blown away.  Go HERE to see the video.

Capsula Music – My brother-in-law sent this to me.  It’s an album of funky, psytrance music that is supposed to work in the background of your mind while you go to sleep.  I’ve listened to it while working on my computer but haven’t tried it yet before going to sleep.

How To Nail An Interview – for those of you looking for a job.  This was linked to in a post by one of my favorite bloggers, Seth Godin.  It lists 22 tips on how to do well in an interview.

Ashton Kutcher and Evan Williams (Twitter Founder) talk on Oprah – a post on Mashable about how last week Oprah joined twitter.  She interviewed Ashton who became twitter’s first user to gain 1,000,000 followers!  He was competing with CNN and he won.  Yes, I followed Ashton and Oprah!

Enjoy the videos and articles.  There is so much going on in the world and probably these links are some of the more trivial pieces of what is truly happening but that’s what I see and what people are sending me.

April Fool’s Day and Singing
Apr 1 2009

I haven’t had time to post for a few days (almost a week!) for a variety of reasons including kid’s birthday’s, anniversaries, my awesome & amazing mother visiting, life, shopping, etc.  Yes, my mom reads my blog …well I know she at least subscribes to my blog. 🙂

It will probably be close to another week before I post again because I’m attending the Landmark Advanced Course this weekend where I’m supposed to discover who I am – which I think is an elephant or maybe even a horse.  I also hope to discover what I want…or maybe I’ll discover that I already know what I want, and I just need to be brave enough to say it all out loud?  Who knows.

At any rate, today is April Fool’s day and I’m pretty sure I missed all the twitter April fools jokes since I usually only check twitter in the evenings while I’m doing some work on Babble Soft.  But at my day job, our office manager and I pulled a good one!  We told everyone that there was a full breakfast spread in the kitchen.  She even sent out an email with pictures she found from the Internet showing the food we bought (breakfast tacos, fruit, etc.) and several people fell for it!  It was a pretty darn funny, last minute joke.  People came with watering mouths only to find a sign telling them to look in the fridge and then a sign in the fridge that said “April Fool’s – you’ve been suckered!”  It had us laughing for quite some time.  Some people told us they were going to get us back so now we have to watch our backs. 😀

The only other April Fool’s joke I noticed was on the AustinStartup blog where they said they were acquired by TechCrunch.  I sort of believed it for maybe the first two sentences and then realized how unlikely that was.  I’m not usually easily fooled.  I think I can count on one hand the times in my life where I was totally surprised by something and one of those times was when my guy (yes guys) and gal friends hired a male stripper for my 25th birthday.  I was completely shocked.  I can’t recall if I told my mom about this…oops!

I also had a voice lesson today and it’s definitely not an April Fool’s joke that I’m looking to find some musicians to jam with from time to time.  I recently started this journey to find people with day jobs who like to express their musical tendencies.  I have met and communicated with some interesting folks so far and even ventured on to a Craig’s List search (despite my fear of running into creepy, potential crazy folks that might want to kill me) for the first time in my life.  I found a couple of listings that sounded interesting but one group already found their singer.

But what I have discovered is that I need to create a demo of me singing a few songs.  Although I have a presence in the major social networks, I have avoided My Space like the plague.  But My Space seems to be the place where people with musical inclinations put out their “look at me, I’m an awesome musician” crap.  Ugh.

So now I need to find a way to cobble together a karaoke type demo of me singing some songs.  I already know the two songs I’ll start with.  When I get a reasonable recording maybe I’ll upload them on the blog.

In the meanwhile if any of you know of some musicians looking for an amateur female vocalist to join them to sing cover songs, create some original music, pull together a CD to market on *gasp* MySpace or YouTube, and maybe play in public from time to time please keep me in mind.

Enjoy what’s left of your April Fool’s Day!

A Long Overdue Fortune Cookie Post and SXSW
Mar 11 2009

Blogging will be light over the next several days (I think) because I’ll be at SXSW end of this week, part of this weekend, and early part of next week.   I hope to meet many of you there at my panel called Building A Web Business After Hours.  I’m not really into live blogging but I’ll probably be sending out a few tweets so if you are interested you can follow me on twitter @aruni.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my random fortune cookie posts.   I’ve collected quite a few and I thought I’d share them, but before I do go check out some of the posts I did a while back with fortunes from those crazy cookies:

Business (Love) Is Like War; Easy To Begin But Hard To Stop – Nov 2, 2008

Those Who Seek Will Find – Sep 21, 2008

A Dream You Have Will Come True – July 30, 2008

Life Always Gets Harder Near The Summit – July 8, 2008

Look Forward to a Great Fortune and a New Lease on Life! – June 25, 2008

You can’t ride in all directions at one time – June 19, 2008

So here are the ones that have been sitting on my desk or in my purse for a while.  I won’t be writing full posts about these so here it goes:

A lifetime of happiness lies ahead of you. – Ah, that’s so nice to know.  I would be pretty bummed if a lifetime of misery lay ahead of me.

Your ability to trust fuels your ability to love. – Interestingly I have a hard time really trusting people for a variety of reasons, but oddly I love people.

The secret of vast riches begins with a single penny. – True but a bit simplistic, don’t you think?

You are compassionate and fun-loving.  – I do like being compassionate and fun! 🙂

People will find it difficult to resist your propositions. – This is exactly why I don’t make too many hard core propositions!  Understanding what it means if someone does accept your proposition is extremely important to know before you make the proposition…

Now, I’m off to watch Battlestar Galactica (recorded) with hubby who just completed the Landmark Forum and thought it was amazing!  I knew he would despite the fact he’s a rocket scientist and a know-it-all.   I’ll be doing the Advanced Forum in April where we are supposed to discover who we are…and I have a feeling I might be an elephant.

The Reader, Zilker Kite Festival, Random Stuff
Mar 1 2009

Since I blog about parenting as well as business here on this oddly unusual and sometimes entertaining blog, here’s what happened this weekend.

The Reader
Last night (Saturday) hubby and I went on a date night.  We decided, given the state of our financial situation, to do dinner & movie at The Alamo Drafthouse, where they serve dinner while you watch a movie and it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg.  Our original plan was to see the Academy Award winning picture, Slumdog Millionaire, but it was sold out.  So we ended up seeing The Reader (check out this link for the trailer) starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, one of my favorite actors.  Winslet won best actress for her performance in The Reader and we are both so busy that neither I nor my husband realized Fiennes was in that movie too!

I’ve actually had a long time fascination with Fiennes after his performance in Schindler’s List, despite the fact he played one of the really bad guys in that movie.  He was equally as interesting in The English Patient.  I was a bit annoyed at his performance in The Duchess, mostly because the character he played lacked depth and sensitivity, but after seeing The Reader I’m less annoyed.  I told my husband this and he said something like “All Fiennes has to do is smile that little half smile and you see his piercing blue/gray eyes and he’s back in your favor.”  Well maybe I added the blue/gray eyes part, but I had to smile and nod.  He then told me that Kate Winslet did all of her own nude scenes (of which there were many in this movie), and I asked him how he knew this.  He didn’t have a good answer other than he read it somewhere, but I could tell she did.  I think it’s cool that she’s so comfortable with her body that she even risked displaying a couple of her stretch marks (a.k.a. badges of honor).

The story was set in Germany and starts out with a young 15 year old Fiennes (I don’t know the actor who played him, but he was adorable!) having a summer affair with a much older Winslett.  She asked him to read her all the books he was reading in high school ranging from philosophy to mythology.  He later finds himself a law student observing a trial about the Holocaust where she is a defendant.  He is devastated because he had no idea she was involved in the Holocaust in any way and it deeply affected him and all of his future relationships with women.  It was a pretty good, thought provoking movie, but I wasn’t too happy with the ending because I was hoping for more resolution.  But I guess just like in real life there really never is a good resolution is there?

Zilker Kite Festival
This Sunday afternoon we tried to go to the Zilker Park Kite Festival.  We were supposed to meet up with some friends there but after more than 1/2 an hour of driving around the area, not finding parking, and not even being able to figure out in a timely manner where the shuttle parking was, we gave up.  Our friends were already there so after several calls and her telling me that it was chaos and she’d understand if we don’t come, we decided to bag it and take the kids to another park.  We stopped at The Domain on the way so I could return something.  Turns out the kids weren’t that interested in flying the kite so we hung out at the park for a little bit and then came home.  Hubby and son threw the football around and our daughter rode her little bike.  I threw the ball with our son for a little while, followed our daughter on her bike on the sidewalk for a little while, then washed some clothes, did some work on Babble Soft, and wrote this blog post.

Random Kid Stuff
Earlier today our 6 year old son asks our almost 4 year old daughter if she was in love with some boy named Steven (who is older than she is) at her school.  Steven likes to give her a hug when we pick her up.  She tells him “No, he’s mad.”  My son then asks her if she thought he was cute.  I’m not sure she responded to that one.  I laughed out loud because I thought how innocent that exchange was between them and how much meaning someone would apply to that exchange if they were teenagers or older.

Our son has made friends with an 8 year old girl at his school.  She’s into PokeMon and Bakugan (these toys that change from a ball to a creature and back again) and he sometimes comes home with several little Bakugan toys that he says she gave to him.  I asked him what he gives her and he says nothing, and I ask him how can that be?  He said, she likes giving the little toys to him.  I’ve told him that he must also give her some cards or toys back but he just says “But she likes giving things to me.”  So, I’m not sure what to say to that, but I feel as if I need to coach him to also give her something.  Well, at least he’s friends with a girl who seems to like sci-fi and typical boy stuff – just like his mama. 🙂