{ view from our front porch }

I was once jealous of people living in areas that regularly get a decent amount of snow accumulation. After our recent record snowfall here in North Texas, I’m cured of that jealousy. We rarely see much more than one snowfall per winter and that one snow event is usually pretty lame. We are lucky to get an inch of accumulation. Most of the time it comes down for an hour, doesn’t stick and then turns to a sleet/freezing rain event. We get those days at least a couple of times a year. On February 11, however, we were surprised to wake up to a few inches of snow on the ground.

The snow continued to fall the entire day and into the night. By Friday morning (the 12th) it had accumulated to at least six inches at our house. School was cancelled! We had a blast building snowmen and women, throwing snowballs and doing basically nothing for a couple of days while the school was shut down and the roads were a little too dangerous to drive. It was definitely a nice experience.

I can’t imagine having that happen several times a year, though. I guess we’d get used to it if it was the norm here, but our family went into hibernation mode and got little to nothing done. Again, thats nice every now and then (like during Christmas break), but I’ve got to be careful not to let myself get too used to downtime. Like most people, I am more productive when I’ve got alot to do. When things are slow, I tend to get less productive (which is really stupid, because that is when I should be busy doing things I’d put off due to a hectic schedule!) I am kicking myself for not getting my taxes done during that time, but I wouldn’t have been able to watch all of The Office episodes the DVR had piled up. Thanks to our rare opportunity to be snowed in, ‘Thats what she said!’  has become my involuntary response to just about anything. There is the silver lining, I guess.

I feel like it’s been a while since I checked in on the blog, here.
December was basically a blur - a fun, fast paced blur (as it always seems to be.)
January was basically a hangover from December.
Now February is here and with it comes lots and lots and lots of catching up on bookkeeping….
Tax time. Oh. Boy. It’s not all bad, though - my birthday is coming up and not long after that, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland will be out in theaters! After seeing Avatar a couple of times in 3D on an IMAX screen, I am even more excited about AIW. I imagine that my husband and oldest son will enjoy it even though they don’t care too much for the story (I know, they’re insane.)
As for BlueSkyRocket.com- I’ve got alot of VERY COOL things to add SOON. We’ve got an amazing new brand of AWESOME babies/kids onesies, tees, hoodies coming as well as new designs from our existing brands. After Christmas we started carrying the Color Me House and Color Me Rocket. Those are very popular and perfect for indoor play during the cold months. (Spring’s right around the corner and they are great for outdoor play as well!)

I don’t usually blog about random childhood memories, but thanks to a contest on TwitterMoms.com (called “What Was Your Most Surprising Gift?” in which the winner receives $100 Target Gift Card) I had a chance to stop and remember a truly awesome Christmas morning.

I was 9 and my parents had been struggling financially for a couple of years. My dad was an artist and did freelance work. He had previously sold off his half of a sound and lighting company called Dallas BackUp, so we were sort of coasting on that money and the money my mother made cleaning houses. Things were tight to say the least. Because of our small budget, my parents didn’t buy every pair of Guess! jeans I HAD to have. They didn’t shell out tons of money for expensive shoes. Instead, during those years my parents took the whole “things don’t last long, but memories last a lifetime” idea and ran with it. They saved the money they would have spent on frivolous purchases and overpriced clothes and booked amazing road trips for us to take. This particular year, they booked a surprise trip to DisneyWorld. It was on Christmas morning that they unveiled the plans. My mother had cut pieces of Mickey Mouse themed wrapping paper into puzzle pieces. Each piece had a letter on it. I was supposed to A) have the patience to put the puzzle together and B) have an actual reaction to the solved puzzle. I remember quickly getting frustrated (it doesn’t take much for me) and complaining about not being able to figure out the word jumble. I am sure my mom kicked in some help (she usually did) and then… it was spelled out right there on the floor. “D I S N E Y W O R L D”.

I remember being confused and then my parents quickly filling me in on the trip details. We were to leave New Years Day for Florida. By car. This meant our trip would take us to several states east of Texas. I loved to travel and the idea of seeing Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in addition to Florida seemed just as exciting as DisneyWorld itself. I was very excited, although I do remember moving on rather quickly to the pile of unwrapped presents that remained under the tree… I am sure my parents felt a bit deflated by my reaction at the time, but I think the trip itself made up for my lackluster performance on that Christmas morning. It was truly amazing walking right up to any ride we wanted to ride, experiencing NO LINES at all and being able to ride them over and over as we wished. Yes I missed some school, but my teacher at the time told my mother that I would learn more on my trip than I probably would that week in class.

23 years later (well, almost - i’ll be 33 in feb…) I still have those memories, but those parachute pants with the zippers all over them? Those would have been long gone.

This year I doctored up my son’s sweats to create his Halloween costume. He is a HUGE (I repeat HUUUUGE) Muppets fan. He favors Kermit, since he’s sort of the leader of the pack, but would have been happy being Fozzy or Animal. While searching online for Muppets costumes, I found a serious lack of cute ones available for purchase (for toddlers). I stumbled upon a craft site that had a picture of another mom’s Kermit creation. It looked easy enough, and after having copied the creative mom’s idea, I can say it really WAS easy.

First off, where the heck are the green sweats??? I had to dye some heather gray sweats. No big deal - it worked perfectly with RIT’s Kelly Green dye powder. My friend suggested I use styrofoam balls as the eyes, rather than the stuffed eyeballs the costume in the picture had. This worked great. I just glued on some black “Kermit pupils” and used a Tapestry/Upholstery needle to sew them onto the top of the hood. I then cut triangles out of lime green felt and sewed them around the base of the hood.

Ta-Dah! Kermit:

my younger cousin is getting married in december. growing up I basically adopted her as my little sister…(as an only child i was always ready to exert my authority on SOMEONE and alyson was usually the one that i lorded my powers over- she was a good sport but also gave it right back to me when i deserved it…) anyway i am sitting here blown away by her gorgeous bridal portraits. she is such a gorgeous, sweet girl and i’m so proud of her. anyway, just had to share

Seriously.The.Tastiest.Website.Ever: www.TasteSpotting.com

I don’t know whats going on, but since I got online this a.m. I have been printing recipes.

Is it because today’s the last day of summer (signaling the coming of fall, which means I’ll be baking like betty crocker…) Is it because I’ve been doing less cooking since working from home and I’m ready to get back into the kitchen? Am I preggers?

No it’s because I found two wonderful cooking/food blogs that I will have to avoid visiting in order to get anything done from now on. As if Facebook, LinkedIn & FunnyOrDie weren’t distraction enough. TasteSpotting, as I mentioned above, is THE one to check out. It’s like food porn. Nothing but pictures in a grid formation - click if you want the recipe. Perfect.

The other site I found is www.LoveAndOliveOil.com. Again, lots of pics and lots of great recipes. The author of this blog is also a fabulous web designer.  

while updating some graphics for the shop, i came across the first ‘mission statement’ (if you can call it that) that i came up with for BlueSkyRocket. this was before i started stocking the shop or even designing the site. as you can see, the squirrel in the background was one of the ‘keeper’ ideas. the plan was an ambitious one considering it took me a while to realize that i needed to make money to keep things up and running before i could start donating to charity. now that the shop has ‘legs’ i can start on this phase of the original plan :)  oh, and notice the outdated reference to a ‘myspace’ page for the shop… i do still have one, but this was when myspace was THE social networking site to visit.

The baby mohawk hat gained some fans today from an unlikely source…

I had to write about this. It’s just the bees knees (or some other word/phrase for that which is ‘awesome’ since i use that word too much)…
So, I start the work day off the usual way: check email & onto studying up on my Google Analytics data (for those that don’t run a website, thats just a tool that tells you how many people visit your site and where they found you & a million other bits of data). This morning I find a small stream of traffic coming from a site called ‘ugly crap’ or something to that effect. The shock! The rage! The instant spewing of words that typically come out of your mouth when you feel you’ve been insulted…
Naturally, on over to said site I go. Lo & behold this livejournal blogger (thats where said site is hosted- not a stand alone website) has ripped the thumbnail size pic from my site and pasted it onto their critique blog for all to throw darts at. Below the picture are a few sentences that basically say “this creation sucks”, after that - its up for review by the readers. Comment time. Oh boy.
The item up for ridicule? The Baby Mohawk hat from my shop.
I know, I know, calm down - you are right to be shocked, we all know this hat kicks ass - but the funny part is coming…
Scrolling down to read the comments was like hearing “just kidding” after the opening line “you’re gonna be sooooo mad at me when I tell you this but…”. I believe the author of the blog had 2 people out of about 40 commenters agreeing with them. (Like i said, it was only a small stream of traffic coming from the mini-site.) The rest of the commenters expressed their love for the hat in various hilarious ways. Oh, and I did a little reply posting myself, couldn’t help it.
You can’t please them all, nor do you need or want to exhaust yourself trying to. It’s not the author’s opinion that bothered me in the first place. I guess what bothers me was the “i don’t like this, it sucks. make fun of it” theme of this blog. I get it- you, the blog author have taste. You will demonstrate this by publicly criticizing products &/or berating the creators of products that you would never buy.  There’s lots of mileage to get out of that theme.
Here’s the thing, I (like most people) like people with taste, but I like those people only when they come equipped with class.  The artist/designer/kick ass lady/mom/PERSON that creates these has children. She has other responsibilities to tend to. She carves out time to create, by hand, something for children to have fun with. The funniest part of their failed snarky blog post is that most of the defenders of the mohawk on the blog post said they didn’t have (and some said they didn’t like) children at all, they just liked the product and took a sec out of their day to say so.
To close this up, I just want to say - keep it up creators of potentially “ugly crap”. You create. Others just critique, but then again whats that old saying??? Those that can’t create criticize? Oh, thats not a saying? Well it should be. I would rather carry an array of authentic creative products vs your typical mass produced, Hanah Montana endorsed, ‘Made in Taiwan By Underpaid Factory Workers’ sticker toting selection of products you can find anywhere.

So… blog post fail! (not mine.theirs.oh you got that? just making sure).
If you want to see it just google ‘ugly crap mohawk’ and you’ll find it. no need to give away links

I can honestly say that I now get Twitter. I get it!

I mean, the concept is about as straight forward as you can get, so I never had a problem grasping the idea of ‘tweeting’. I just had a hard time understanding what the big fuss was about and why people were claiming to be so addicted to it.

I have been addicted to other types of social media (myspace a few years ago, facebook for the last year, etc) so I was sure I’d be hooked soon after creating my account last Spring. But that wasn’t the case (right off the bat at least.) I think I’ve only updated 50-something times in the past year, so that tells you how little the Twitter buzz affected me up until this point. 5 of those updates were spread out over several months! I’ve only recently started to update on almost a daily basis. I am not quite to the point of no return - I can quit any time I want. However, I think as I get more interaction w/ my fellow Tweeps and get up over a couple hundred followers (I’m close!) I will be strung out on Twitter.

There is a WEALTH of information to be discovered via fellow Tweeters. Most of it you could care less about. But if you follow the right types, you will be knee deep in quality info/websites/videos/pod casts/etc. For example, I follow a social media guru (one out of a billion so called SM experts currently tweeting). This guy must not doing anything but twitter all day - doesn’t sound like my kind of fun, but hey - lucky me. His lack of a life outside the confines of social media websites has helped me. He directs his followers to articles on everything marketing related. Articles that have actual content and not fluff. Thanks to this guy I’ve learned how to effectively optimize my shop www.BlueSkyRocket.com so that search engines like Google rank me higher in the search results.

If you don’t run an online company or you don’t work for a company that has an online presence that would benefit from this type of info, then yeah, spare yourself the time Twitter will suck out of your week. But if you do anything web related - jump into Twitter head first by tweeting as much as possible. Tweet about things that interest you. Tweet about things you would want to read. You’ll eventually start to attract an audience with similar interests. Imagine having that kind of resource - a big pool of your peers that you can tap for info/advice/referrals/whatever at any time of the day or night!

I love Facebook, but I can’t relate to Jenny from my 4th grade class like I can to some dude in North Dakota that tweets all kinds of great news on the CPSIA issue. What kind of info can Jenny give me about Internet Retail? Wordpress design? Blog advertising? Nothing. We don’t share the same interests or careers. As much fun as it was to catch up with each other after losing contact for 20 years (give or take!), our ‘reconnection’ was pretty much over as soon as it started. With Twitter, you may not get to relive moments from your past with a former classmate or sorority sister, but you can sure as hell get ahead in your online career.

One day last week I found a post on a popular blog highlighting a product in my shop. The owner of this blog follows me on Twitter and read one of my posts. He liked my site, liked the product, threw a review up on his site and just like that - I had my first (known) Twitter related success story. Thanks to him, I got traffic, new followers and who knows - maybe they subscribed to my newsletter! Maybe they were one of the people I sold to that day! I don’t care really. It just makes me happy.

So, according to this former skeptic, Twitter is actually worthy of the hype. Just don’t expect it to do the work for you - just like any form of social media, the more you give, the more you get. Oh, & visit Mr.Tweet - that’s something I’ll discuss later, but do it now!

This morning my husband called to let me know that one of our best friend’s fathers passed away overnight. We knew he had been having trouble with his health. We went out with this friend and his girlfriend Saturday night. They were telling us how he seemed to be doing better.  

I just can’t imagine what my friend is going through. What do we do for him? I know he is in shock and hasn’t communicated with us since he texted my husband at 3:30 a.m. to tell him the news. I texted him to let him know I was sorry and that we love him and are a text/phonecall away if he needs anything… but this just doesn’t feel like enough.

As a couple, my husband and I are not the best at keeping in touch with everyone. We definitely let people have their space. Lots of it. I think we are more of the ‘lets meet up for dinner’ couple than we are the ‘let’s go in on a timeshare together’ couple to most of our friends. With the exception of talking to a couple of my girlfriends, we aren’t big on phonecalls either. We are just content as hell in our little bubble over here, and that I wouldn’t trade for the world. However, when we are around friends we have a blast.  We make plans to do this and that after 4 beers and then forget the plans we made. We exchange numbers and email addresses and then never use them. We just get used to our own world and it’s easy to just do what we do. I think most people are this way…

But, this being our closest mutual friend - a guy we lived with for a couple of years in the beginning of our relationship (the only roommate we ever had as a couple) - a guy we met in highschool that both of our families came to love as much as we do - I feel like there is something more I should be doing. I mean besides the obvious ‘make some food for them to store in their freezer and eventually throw out’. But what?

In the meantime I am just thankful for dads in general. My father is across the globe in China where I can’t hug him, but I will when he gets home. I know how lucky I am to have him in my life.