A new book published!

My aunt has had a dream for years to create a book about my uncle and one of his childhood adventures.  We finally made it happen!

Her first book, called "A True Christmas Story", has been completed and is not available.  You can see it at  http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/TrueChristmasStory. 

I have to give Lulu credit for a pretty easy process.  My learning curve was a bit steep, I've never designed a book before, but once I got into it, it went well.  Excellent customer service so far.  We're ordering her holiday gifts tonight!

I am going to turn this into an e-book next.  And then we'll see what other ideas people want to get published.  Now that I know how to do this, I'm adding to my list of editing services.  Let me know if you have a book you need help getting to the final proof stage!

Hello November

I see you November, hanging out just past Halloween.  I'm getting all of the NaNoWriMo emails. I'm seeing Christmas decorations in the stores.  I cannot believe we are here right now. 

It has been a busy fall.  Empty nesting is not quiet.  All of the invitations that we pushed to the fall, when we expected to have free time, meant that we had no free time as the weeks rolled.  And as the holidays start to kick in I realize I still have books to read, and projects to knit, and rooms to clean out.

On a bright note, my aunt's book is in the final proof stage, I've emptied a room completely in my house and will be re-purposing it to empty many other boxes around my house, I "think" I have a plan for several other projects and I just welcomed a new client to my freelance business. 

What do you still have left to do this year?

Cheap computer

So, I bought myself a cheap laptop.  It's a Packard Bell  N1400BK and I got it from JCPenney.  They sell them. Really.

Anyway, it is perfect for what I need, which is to connect to the internet and run Microsoft Office so that I can freelance from anywhere. I don't need games or storage on this device, I just need to be able to travel without carrying the monster machine I "got" as a hand-me-down from the kids.

Last night I had to do a Windows update. Took hours.  One of the drawbacks to this simple computer is a lack of storage on it. This has a whopping 2GB DDR3L-RS DRAM 1600MHz system memory. I had to scrub files just to complete the update.

So, today I am learning how to modify my device. Found a few helpful bits of code. Sharing for my own use in the future and if it helps you too.

Decrease the hibernation file:
Open Command line as an admin
Type  powercfg/ H / SIZE 40 (changes the size to 40% which I understand is the minimum for allowing hibernation to work. I don't really use that, so went low)

Remove useless apps.
Open Windows Powershell, right click to run as admin
Type Get-AppxPackage *program* | Remove-AppxPackage

I was able to remove xbox and zunemusic. Debating others to remove. Hat tip to Tech Advisor for this info.

Evolution

Recently I think I started a transition and now that I'm in the thick of things, I'm not quite sure when it started.  When people talk about time flying, it usually means that milestones stack up with very few unique markers breaking them up.  If you have children your signposts are probably the start of school, the winter holidays, spring break, and the last day of school.  Then a short summer and do it again.  Rinse, repeat.

Now that my kids are grown, I'm finding different markers in my life.  Some of these are sad (co-workers get new jobs, friends move away, death comes too soon) but many offer the potential for happiness. I am overwhelmed with the possibilities and find myself trying to decide where I go next.  My client shifting has opened up a ton of free time for me.  My kids moving out means I have lots of extra space to spread out for new projects. My bookshelf is full.  It's almost too much freedom after being so structured for so long.

While I hem and haw about the next "big thing" I've decided to help my aunt get her book published, to help my Dad sort through his house and to clear out the project pile in my workroom.  Each one of those activities will teach me a new skill that might open up more freelancing and will help me come to peace with my middle age.  My mom's passing showed me how a lack of planning impacts the next generation, I'm not doing that to my kids if I can help it. 

Freelance: What it means to me

My culling post generated some interesting conversation which made me go consider the definition of a freelancer and what it means to me.  I googled the term and liked the description from Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freelance.  I never considered the mercenary Middle Ages concept before (but duh, an extra lance for hire makes sense) but the word seems to trigger different reactions.

To me, freelancing means freedom, but I think to a lot of other people it means free. I like the freedom of learning new things, helping my clients, and being able to help cover some expenses while doing that. I think for many people looking to hire talent, it is a way to get "free"  or very cheap help.  The global world makes this possible up to a point. I'm curious to see how it continues to evolve.  

Culling client list

I made one of the hardest decisions any freelancer can make yesterday. I terminated a client contract.

This client connected with me almost three years ago, he had seen my work via a friend of his and he wanted me to work for him.  I had pretty steady work with his company until several months ago when he changed the terms of the workflow. There were now additional steps that he wanted for each of the completed projects in order to consider them finished.  These tasks doubled the amount of time I was spending on his work, but there was no noticeable change to my compensation.

When I sat down to do my taxes and realized how much time I was spending on his company I realized that I was losing ground.  My freelance business is a small part of my week compared to all of the other things that I do, so I need to make every hour count to justify taking that time away from my family.

I sent a request to update my profile with his company to change the types of projects I was being asked to complete and the result was a complete lack of work for two weeks. 

Thus, I decided to end the working relationship.  This is a really hard choice for a freelancer to make. There is always a fear about not being able to replace the client. However, at this point in my professional career, I know that I am worth what I charge.

WCAG

I had an opportunity to talk to one of my clients yesterday about the WCAG initiative. That acronym stands for the web content accessibility guidelines. You can start to read them all at https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/   The goal is to make all web content easily enjoyed by all viewers no matter how they access that content. If I can help you with a website, please reach out!

26 Shirts (Again)

My second sponsorship day for 26 Shirts will be Sunday, March 11.

 Check out their designs at https://www.26shirts.com/ this week and help someone today!

Purging old content

In the new age of changing tools and more privacy needed, I've made the decision to purge another blog I started.

I've always loved the idea of writing, but finding the time to just write for fun doesn't always happen. There is always another chore or task to be done. So, I just deleted something I started in 2011 when my oldest was looking at colleges.  Seven years later I posted a whopping 13 times as the meanestmother.

Real life is just way more interesting than a virtual one.

PS: When I deleted the blog, I realized that I had created a Twitter account in tandem with it.  Will be purging that too.  But I did love this little avatar I made for that.  I have three kids and while they are similar in many ways, they are also doing different things all of the time.

PPS: I also appeared to have created a new email account for that Twitter feed that I completely forgot about (and hadn't used for three years).  Now I'm wondering what else I started and never used again.  Does anyone else have this as an issue? 

Three Buffalo Shirts Today

Well, I hit the jackpot! Off Peak is sponsoring three special Buffalo shirts today at http://www.26shirts.com/. Buffalo is Awesome and The Frosty Buffalo benefits Amanda Jakubowski and they brought back Eric Woods shirt Front and Center to say thank you for his career and to help his charity one more time.  Visit and order today!

26-Shirts Update

The team at 26 Shirts decided to up the ante for the people sponsoring a day with them.  I had originally planned on being the sponsor for Sunday, January 28 (just cause it was the next open day when I visited the site to donate) and was waiting for my instructions or followup etc.

Yesterday, they announced that they were expanding the sponsorship package and because they changed their mind in the middle of the month I would be getting a second sponsor day (partly as a thank you and partly to be sure I'd benefit fully from my sponsorship).  So, I think I'm still sponsoring Sunday, but now I'm also sponsoring Sunday, March 11 (day 70). 

There are still lots of day left to sponsor (http://www.26shirts.com/sponsor-a-day) and they do a lot of amazing work in Buffalo (as well as other cities).  Visit and help if you can. Or buy a shirt! I get tons of compliments on the shirts I own, they are really high quality and unique.

Internet Access

It appears I'm spoiled where I live and work. No issues ever accessing the internet. Lots of wifi connections I can make and when I absolutely need to do it, I have easy access to the cloud and can turn on my personal hotspot. 

Last week I visited northern California along the coast.  It was a place called Jenner, about two hours north of Oakland.  Very limited wifi access.  My phone did not work, the house we rented had SLOW access and the towns nearby only worked in the wide open spaces.  Normally on vacation this is not a bad thing, but I had a freelance deadline in the middle of the trip.  So, I got a little freaked out when I could only get my computer to connect when standing in the middle of the bedroom.

I managed to meet the deadline and also managed to avoid jobs before I headed back to the airport.  But it was an eye opening moment to realize a few things. First, how dependent I have become on internet access. Secondly, how I never considered California to be remote. Finally, how the lack of land lines will be an issue if the internet gets throttled.

26 Shirts - Doing Good in Buffalo

I decided to sponsor a day for 26 Shirts.  So, on January 28, 2018, Off Peak Productions will be the sponsor of the day.  You can learn more about them at http://www.26shirts.com/

They specialize in creating unique limited edition sports-themed t-shirts every two weeks. After a shirt's respective two week run is over, the design is retired and never sold again. They are currently operating in Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. For every shirt sold, a donation is made to a specified family in need or charitable organization.

WCAG 2.0

The web content accessibility guidelines 2.0 are going into effect in January 2018. For those of you not familiar with this change, you can check out the WCAG initiative overview here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Content_Accessibility_Guidelines.

If you want to see if your website meets the standards, then check out WAVE (http://wave.webaim.org/).

Working to get my clients covered before the changes go into effect. Accessibility helps everyone on the web! 

2017

This has been one of the best years for my freelance business.  I'm juggling four regular clients and enjoying all of the work I've been doing for them.  Debating the next steps for determining growth versus maintenance of the business.  Wondering how much more time I'll have when the day-to-day activities cease when the youngest starts college next fall.  Lots of fun choices to make.

Scary week for America

Reading "The Way We Never Were" by Stephanie Coontz.  Last week was eye-opening for awareness of how much I don't know about history. I don't want to see America step backwards. From chapter three: "sentimentalization of middle-class family life justified terrible exploitation of those other families (African-American, immigrant and working class).

Last night the GOP launched Trump as their candidate. And I'm so sad.  This is no longer the party of Lincoln or Reagan. We used to try to move people ahead, and he wants to grind people under his heel.  Very much like Germany and Italy in the 1930s.

I miss the National Review when William Buckley and George Will wrote it. Political news nowadays is fear-mongering. No attempt to promote new ideas or vision. No attempt to bring people together.  I'm glad I left the GOP before the convention.

As for the people who question why I left the party (and am currently unaffiliated) I share this quote from George Will: "I joined it [The Republican Party] because I was a conservative, and I leave it for the same reason: I'm a conservative... The long and the short of it is, as Ronald Reagan said when he changed his registration, 'I did not leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me,' " 

Even years

Not a fan of even years.  In fact I'm pretty sure this rant has been published before but it's time again. Made it to the end of April this year before stuff started to go south again.

I don't pretend to say that I expect life or work to be easy, but it is incredibly frustrating to have to drop everything I'm doing to manage a crisis that was created due to inaction or a failure to share critical information.  A real crisis is one thing, a crisis manufactured by inaction is another.  For some reason my view of the even year issues tend to be the latter.

Freelance Growth

So, 2015 was my best freelance year since 1998.

1998 is when I went back to work full-time so that I could stop working night/weekends and spend time with my family.  Most of the work from 1998-2014 were special projects that I did when tuition was due or when there was a conference in Buffalo etc.  Then last year my family got so busy that I had a lot of free nights and weekends to work at home again.

So, now I balance my full-time job with a lot of really interesting freelance projects.  The internet has created opportunities for me that I never could have imagined when I started to phase away from doing that freelance stuff full-time. Now I can see huge potential in the future and I'm really excited about where it is going. 

Still not a towing company

But the phone calls are lessening and the need to get my name erased is getting better. My guess now is that a description from the Off Peak Towing company in Hawaii got merged with my business somehow. I think I've managed to scrub most references, but there are old cached sites that still have the wrong info. This is proof that anything posted to the internet never goes away. Even when it is wrong.

Third blog post for my class

Well, with the second blog post I've officially passed the class, but I'm planning to keep on doing the homework. It's actually pretty interesting to see how they collect content and have peer grading. I got dinged last time for writing only 300 words, but since the assignment said "write a 300 word blog post" I'm not sure I get that. Oh well.

Here's my third and final post for the class:

One of my fondest grammar memories, and yes those exist, occurred on the first day I was in fifth grade.  My teacher drew an upside down “e” on the board and asked for a show of hands for people who knew what it was.

I raised my hand.

Now, I’ve never been a popular kid but that pretty much sealed the deal that I was one of the biggest nerds and possible teacher’s pets ever in the history of the world.

You see my dad, who taught English for several years, had just explained what that symbol meant the previous night at dinner. Less than 24 hours previous to her asking the question.  How could I not raise my hand?

For those of you who don’t know, the upside down e (and I can’t get that symbol to work right now) is called a schwa. According to Merriam-Webster the schwa is “a vowel that has the sound of the first and last vowels of the English word America.

That moment saved me tons of time for the rest of the year. She assumed I knew what was going on most of the time and so I got to do lots of fun things in the room. She had a box of starter sentences. If you needed to write an essay but didn’t have any ideas, you could go pull out a card and finish the topic. I loved that. It was a great idea generator.

Someday I hope that I can write a novel or a series of short stories. When I try to get my thoughts on paper I often catch myself creating first sentences, just like that box, as a way to get started. Helping my own kids get through school limits my time right now, but someday I think I’ll get it done. But, I did manage to do one thing for my kids, just like my dad did for me. They all knew what a schwa was on the day their English teachers asked. 

EDX Post 2

So, the second post is due today and I decided to share my story about proofreading. Publishing it here again just to prove it is my original work (if that ever comes up).

***

As we move through the EDX course I am being reminded about information I learned long ago and am being challenged to improve my writing. Years of being asked for short summaries at work and writing for social media have hampered my creative writing abilities. I am going to try to write more after this course and see what I can create. 

That said, the most valuable thing about this class so far was reading blogs from the class. I do some freelance work and spend time proofreading papers for individuals for whom English is not their first language. I’ve read some really amazing pieces of work and am pleased when I can help turn a phrase or make their meaning clear.  

My favorite example of what I do for those clients came very shortly after I started that job. I was reading a paper from someone whose primary language was Asian.  They were describing some individuals and were trying to portray enthusiasm and exuberance in their account.  As I was reading along a phrase appeared just wasn’t right. They had written “it was above the wall.”

For the life of me I went blank. I knew that wasn’t right but I really struggled to determine the meaning. I ended up flagging the line, finished the chapter and then went back. Upon the second review it dawned on me that what they wanted to say was “it was over the top.”

I finished editing it and believe that I maintained the spirit they wanted to portray. It was an eye-opening experience of how sometimes terms just don’t translate well.  I hope it has made me a better editor and listener in that I want to hear what a person is trying to say even if the words come out jumbled.

EDX update

I scored 9/10 on the blog post. Got some decent feedback and now have to write another one. Debating my schwa story or my favorite example of how hard it is to translate idioms. That post is due Monday so I guess I'll stew about this for a while. Maybe I'll just write both :)

EDX courses

So the Marvel course got me sucked into EDX MOOC courses. I'm loving them. I've done three now.The Marvel course, one on coding and one on HTML5. I'll be honest, I'm mostly doing the homework and tests without watching all of the videos, but I'm learning and applying the skills to my job.  This time around I'm taking an editing course with a focus on grammar. This is the homework for this week. I decided to publish it so that I can claim it as mine in case of any plagiarism. Sad but true. 

As this week’s topic in my EDX class is about verbs, I’ve decided to focus on a news article for my blog post.  If the assignment was allowed about any grammar topic, I was going to write about the schwa, but with this change in topic, that will be a future post. 

According to The Guardian, a British newspaper, there is a new verb being used by German teens. The verb “merkln” appears to be based on the politician Angela Merkel. From the article, ““Merkeln’, which means being indecisive or failing to have an opinion, is topping a poll to choose Germany’s favourite new ‘youth words’” (read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/04/angela-merkels-influence-now-extends-to-german-slang-merkeln).

The most interesting thing to me about this topic is the evolution of words, how new words enter the lexicon and how quickly social media shares these new terms around the globe.  And while newspapers in the traditional sense are dying, they still manage to have a luster and authority with their online posts. I am willing to consider this discussion because it was published by them as an article and not just because I saw a tweet using it.

Also from the article “The competition has been held by Langenscheidt for the past seven years and aims to reflect the evolving nature of the German tongue. On 31 October, a jury will choose 10 winners – ranking the top five – which will be included in an ever-changing e-book.”  Langenscheidt is a publishing company and I love that they are getting people excited about language.  I think that many languages are open to new words, such as English and German, whereas some languages are protected (i.e., French) and others die from a lack of change (i.e. Latin). Every three months the Oxford Dictionary updates a list of new words (read more: http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/) 

Cleaning out the basement

Finding all kinds of interesting things.  Like the fact that I freelanced for the University at Buffalo in 1998, long before I ever started working here in 2006.  The assignment for Buffalo Physician was Roswell Park focused, and since I started working at RPCI around this time, I guess I just figured it was a part of that job. Turns out it was not. I found the UB contract over the weekend.  I guess I was meant to be here :)

Here is a PDF file from the Buffalo Physician Winter 1999 issue with my three articles extracted. Kind of a fun weekend. Now I have more sorting, scanning and cleaning to do. But perhaps soon my basement will be organized and the stuff I want to keep will be safe. 

Prepping for the Tri-State Conference

I think I'm done with my presentation, I've gotten my hotel reservation confirmed and my travel plans are set. I'm excited to be speaking at the Tri-State Consortium of Opportunity Programs in Higher Education 25th Anniversary Conference.

While this is not the first time I've ever made a presentation about social media, it is my first workshop. So I'm excited for the give and take with the crowd and hoping that I can learn a few new things along with the information I'll be sharing.

I will be sharing key pieces of the presentation on the blog after the meeting. If you're interested, watch for those updates.