Personal Archives

November 19, 2018November 19, 2018

Missing in Action

Hey everyone…sorry I haven’t been around much lately. Okay, you’re right, I haven’t been around at all. There has been a lot going on in the household, all good!

Aside from the usual soccer craziness, I started a new job! I have a friend who suggested that since I like to write, I should look at freelancing. So I signed up with Upwork (interesting site, has been very useful) and started looking for jobs right away.

My experiences have been really good so far. I have transcribed handwritten recipes into a Word document for a cookbook. That one was fun, and the recipes looked really tasty. I also transcribed a 29-page legal document from PDF into Word. That one was tedious, because it had stamps all through the letters, and was full of legalese. But it paid well.

Most interesting have been the reviews and articles I have written. I have learned more about portable coolers, shoes for different kinds of feet, robot vacuums and Korean beauty products than I ever thought I would. I hooked up with an agency that does landing pages (the pages you land at when you click a link), and I have done several of those for Kings Dominion, Universal Studios and Disneyland. Those have been very fun!

(If you are in the market for any of those, let me know. Seriously, I’ll hook you up with all of my insider knowledge)

I’ve also received a couple of inquiries about being a Virtual Assistant. This is something I hadn’t even thought about existing, but in the online world that we live in now, it totally makes sense. I’m not sure of the parameters of either job yet, but as far as I can tell, it is basically a personal assistant via the internet. I’m looking forward to seeing how those pan out, because that could be creative and something different!

Another job gets me a little bit more exposure, so I hope to continue working for them, because it is some fun writing. You can see what I have done for them here and here. If I can get enough people sharing them, I will be able to pitch my own content and write to my heart’s delight 🙂

The best thing about all of these is that I get to do it on my own time (as long as I meet my deadlines). In between games at the soccer showcase in North Carolina a few weeks ago? There I was researching K-beauty products. In the waiting room of the Kia dealership while they replaced the tire with the bolt in it? Creating a landing page for the best discount tickets to Kings Dominion. (Oh yeah, about the tire? That’s a post of its own).

My husband will say that the actual best part about all of this is that I get to work while still in sweatpants. He’s not wrong.

Anyway, I hope that now that I have gotten my feet wet, I will be able to equal out my time, and get back to posting here and doing book reviews. I’m really behind on those, so be prepared for quite a few all at once over the next few days.

Thanks for sticking with me! Off to an article about a moose on a porch!

September 25, 2018September 25, 2018

Now boarding…(Part One)

I’ve always been a pretty good planner. Regardless of whether it was scheduling for a job or vacations for the family, I’ve been doing it long enough that a lot of it comes second nature to me. I learned how to plan vacations from my mom. Dad worked for the airlines from the time that I was 10 years old until he retired, so we were always flying somewhere. Prior to that, we would do road trips. I literally learned about researching hotels and destinations at my mother’s knee

(Of course, that was long before the internet. She did it the hard way, with maps and travel books from AAA, and LOTS of phone calls! The internet has made it so much easier, for the most part)

This past summer, I had to partially coordinate a trip to England. My son was asked to be on a team that was going for a week to train and play with Academy teams over there. Since we were going over early anyway, we figured that it would be a great opportunity to add some sightseeing as well.

Rule #1 of Travel: Always, and I mean ALWAYS, plan to get to your destination a day or two ahead of time if at all possible, especially if you are going on a tour or a cruise. It is worth an extra day or two in a hotel to take away the stress of worrying about whether you’ll miss the tour or ship due to airline snafus or other problems. Case in point, a large number of people on this tour last summer booked their flights to get there the day the tour started. Guess what? They were delayed. Guess what else? They missed the first training session. Totally not worth the aggravation and lost activity that was already paid for.

It wasn’t the easiest thing to plan. In the course of trying to decide what to do and where to go in England, we couldn’t figure out why everything was sold out or super expensive. We knew it wasn’t just the summer months, because natives generally go elsewhere. Further research (thank you internet) gave us the answer: the days we were looking to be in London early were the finals of Wimbledon. All of a sudden, everything made sense.

Obviously, getting out of the area was going to be the best bet. We didn’t really want to rent a car and drive if we could avoid it, so we started looking at options. My son mentioned Eurostar and the Chunnel, and wondered if we could go to Paris for a couple of days. So I researched, and found cheap tickets and a decent hotel. Paris it was. But not so fast; we couldn’t find a train back to London to make our tour. Why? Because of the tennis finals. Back to the drawing board. We went back and forth, around and around trying to agree on something.

Rule #2 of Travel: Never Give Up. No matter how many times you have looked at a website, or thought of and discarded an itinerary due to sold out transportation or high prices, keep going back. It’s like a roulette wheel. Keep spinning it, and it will eventually land where you want it to).

After spinning that wheel dozens of times, I saw that a train had been added to the Eurostar from Paris to London on the Saturday before the actual soccer tour started! Perseverance paid off!! Multiple days of surfing, e-mails, and even the old-fashioned phone calls finally landed us an itinerary.

We left Washington DC on Tuesday night, landed at London Heathrow Airport Wednesday morning. Took the Underground to St. Pancras Train Station (on the other side of London) to catch the Eurostar.

Rule #3 of Travel: Make the Most of Any Situation. You’re traveling for goodness sake. Enjoy it! We had nearly 7 hours to kill in St. Pancras because changing our Eurostar tickets (I had reserved them for early evening. See Rule #1) would have cost more than the tickets. We found a charcuterie pub with good beer and snacks, and got to talk with some interesting people.

After catching the Eurostar, we arrived in Paris around 10 pm Wednesday evening. Our hotel was not even a 10 minute walk from the Gare du Nord train station. We got to spend two full days in Paris before taking the train back to London on Saturday

(I won’t even get into the planning that went into the sightseeing, because who knew that the World Cup Semi Finals would involve both England AND France)

(Oh, and I forgotten that Bastille Day was the day we returned from Paris to England, so didn’t account for the influx of the countryside into Paris. But that’s another post for another time).

Had to get ourselves from St. Pancras back to a hotel out near Heathrow. Then had to get transportation from THAT hotel to Heathrow on Sunday morning to hook up with the tour. Stayed with the tour for the week. When the tour was over, we had to get ourselves from that hotel to a hotel we had booked in London for a few days before flying home on Tuesday morning.

Feeling tired just reading it? Good. Because tomorrow I’ll explain WHY I detailed that planning, and what it all means.

To be continued….

September 13, 2018September 13, 2018

Technology

This morning I woke up (at 5 am, but that’s another post) and checked my phone (as always). Now, I don’t know about you, but I check apps and pages in a certain order. I’m not obsessive about it, but I do think my days go differently depending on the order of the morning app-check. Just kidding.

Sort of.

Anyway, before I go any further, I need to explain that my phone is now 2 generations old, and will be 3 down in March when the newest ones are released. Over the past few months, each update has made the phone worse and more unstable. There was the update that temporarily wiped out my entire photo gallery, and the one that caused social media apps to open and close at random times. Somewhere along the way, my notifications got turned off, and no matter how many times I manually reset it, they don’t appear. (Sorry if any text or e-mail responses have been delayed, I don’t get the “you’ve got a message, dummy” pop up bubble anymore). The next to last update caused random system pop ups, such as telling me an app had stopped working and needed to close…even though it had been disabled and/or never activated. THAT one has been really annoying.

But this morning? This one beat all. I checked my text messages, and all of my contacts had disappeared. Well, not exactly disappeared; the contacts are still listed, but they’re blank and not associated with the numbers anymore. The only people who remained were my husband and my son. And I don’t even text them the most, so it’s not a matter of usage.

Now I have messages that are from strings of numbers. And the group messages? Forget about it; those are like a trigonometry nightmare. I decided that since I had all of the time in the world before our morning commitments, I would set in to update people. Have you ever tried to remember who you were having what conversation with, while working on 3 hours of sleep and no coffee?

So, yeah. If you hear from me over the next few days and I am referencing a topic you’ve never heard of, it’s because I don’t know who you are and I’m still trying to sort it all. (Those of you who don’t share the same area code as me are in the clear; you guys I can figure out). I know I could just text everyone and say “okay, who are you?” But I’m one of those people who is bad about clearing out old text messages, so I literally have text conversations going back 2 years. That could get awkward really fast.

Remember when we just used phones to make phone calls, and didn’t have to worry about any of this? Ahhhhh, good times….

September 11, 2018September 11, 2019

Never Forget

I debated whether or not I wanted to post today, because we try so hard each year to make it a “normal” day. But I still can’t let it go by unrecognized. I wrote the piece below last year. But the statistics have a grim update:

The number of first responders (and others who were in the WTC area) diagnosed with cancer has climbed to almost 10,000
In 2017, 23 current or former members of the NYPD died of 9/11-related diseases. That’s the same number of NYPD members who died on September 11, 2001
According to foundation that supports 9/11 rescue and recovery workers, there have been more losses so far in 2018 (163) than in any year since they started tabulating in 2008
By the end of 2018, it is expected that those who died from toxic exposure will surpass the number killed on the actual day. NOTE: just last year, they didn’t expect this to happen until 2020.

FROM 2017: Please take a couple of minutes to read this. I know everyone has a lot going on…

I’m currently watching CSPAN2 coverage of the ceremonies at Ground Zero. Always a gut punch (RIP Steve and Mike).

But I wanted to let people know some other statistics, according to the WTC Health Program. It started tracking data in 2011, so anything that occurred in the first 10 years after the attacks is not included in these numbers.

-over 1300 deaths have been attributed to 9/11 related illnesses
-92% of those were first responders
-there are nearly 77,000 survivors and responders who are enrolled
-roughly half of those enrolled have at least one certified illness attributed to 9/11
-about 6,600 have some kind of cancer, and almost 7,400 have respiratory disorders.

-it is expected that by 2020, only 3 years from now, the number of people who will have died from illnesses that can be directly attributed to 9/11 will surpass the actual number who died in the immediate attacks.

This is the reality we face. This is what we live every day. The shock of yet another friend’s diagnosis; strain of seeing friends deteriorate; another racket to attend; another name added to the list.

The worry at every cough.

And we won’t even go into the ghosts and memories that continue to haunt.

For some, “neverforget” is a hashtag that comes up once a year. And that’s very important, especially in today’s world of the divisiveness and polarization. But for many, we never forget because we just can’t. It’s always in front of us, facing us, challenging us. And we continue to fight.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading.

#September11 #WTC #NYPD
#NewYorksFinest
#NeverForget
#WeRemember

September 11, 2018September 11, 2018

Melkam Addis Amet

Happy New Year!

Nine years ago, we found a new way to recognize 9/11. In Ethiopia, today is Enkutatash, and it marks the beginning of their New Year. Ethiopia’s calendar is a solar calendar, so it has different dates. In fact, the Ethiopian calendar is always 7-8 years behind the western Gregorian, so it is actually 2011 there.

I fully believe in the universe speaking through events and actions. In my mind, it is no coincidence that the kid who has brought us such happiness is from Ethiopia. AND that they celebrate a new year on the very day that changed our lives forever (we found out about the date connection only after he came home). It is a constant reminder that we heal, that life goes on, and that joy can be found in each new year.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Ethiopian calendar or Ethiopia in general, please visit www.ethiopian-online.com and/or rainbowftf.ngo