work – Page 22 – The Hermits' Rest

Labor Day Labors of Love

I’ve been trying to not do quite so much this weekend, but other than putting off one important task (which I will work on all next week), I’ve been planning things, improving websites, and volunteering. I’m sort of proud of what I’ve managed to do! I love volunteering.

The Hermit Haus

One thing is that I improved the social media presence of our meeting venue, The Hermit Haus. I’d had a website since we bought the building, but not done much with it. I now have a Facebook page for it, where I can easily share upcoming events and news. Thanks to Mandi inviting everyone she knows, we have a good number of fans already!

Mandi and I also spent more time working on this business today, and we have pricing all set, with a sale for events during our renovation.

Who knows when it will actually look like this!

We also had lots of ideas for things to do. One thing is I want to start a coffeehouse/house concert series like the old Live Oak Coffeehouse I used to participate in. You know, so I can name it “CoffeeHaus Concerts @ The Hermit Haus” or something with “haus” in it.

I have some good music connections in town, so I hope to partner with one of them to do the bookings and such. The idea would be to have a “listening room” atmosphere where people actually pay attention to the music. By charging admission, the performers could get some pay and we could also give a cut to a local charity. Sound good?

That Brochure

I have also put in a surprising (to me) number of hours on the brochure I’m creating to our Master Naturalist chapter and another group. I’m real proud at how easily the draft came together. But, it’s taking a while for all the many, many comments and analyses by the committee to get cleared up. Thus, I’m making lots of changes.

To be honest, I’d rather work with eagle-eyed thoughtful reviewers than with people who don’t point things out until the item is published! Right?

One of the lovely images in the brochure, by Ann Collins.

I’ve been also chatting with potential people to work at Hearts, Homes and Hands, which I can’t help but do. And I am reading up on managing nonprofits so I can talk rationally about it with my fellow MTOL directors.

Spirituality

Those of you wondering what I was going to do about finding a spiritual community can rest easier. I think my friend, Martha, and I have come up with something we can do with a few local friends, which will nicely meet our needs but still be disorganized enough to NOT be organized religion. I’ll leave it at that, but I’m happy I figured something out!

I hope those of you in the US got at least a little break on Labor Day. I know many people don’t, including my own kid. And in other places, I sure hope you had a reasonable Monday!

Perhaps Too Much Technology

Why, hello there, friends and readers! I haven’t been quite the blogging fool I usually am for the past few days, and for what I find to be an ironical reason. I got a new laptop.

I admit to putting the IT team off for about two years, because every time I get a new work laptop, things go crazy. I just didn’t have time for crazy, even though now most of my apps and storage are off living on some cloud and not ON the laptop. I didn’t even know if it HAD a hard drive.

My previous little system had served me well, though at some point in 2017 it stopped being able to hold power if it undocked. So, oh darn, I couldn’t present at meetings. </sarcasm> I just had docks everywhere I worked, and it was fine. The poor thing has a brand-new battery in it, but whatever the problem is, it’s not the battery. Okay, so I needed a new computer.

Finally, last week, the thing started randomly shutting down while I was minding my ow business, typing, mousing, or saving a vitally important Camtasia file. So, I let Josh, the nice young IT dude, swap me out.

I made myself laugh, because I brought three laptops home with me to the ranch last weekend (old laptop, new laptop, and my trusty Surface), so I’d be sure to be able to work anywhere. Ha ha! Silly me.

I have, instead, spent the last three days trying to dredge up passwords for things that live in the cloud, trying to log on to the RIGHT Office 365 account for the right office, finding where my fancy Adobe Creative Cloud licensed things were, and so forth.

Brain Overload

Today we were in San Marcos, which is south of Austin. Why? Lee and Kathleen are starting a new business, which I’ll go into another time, so we went to a continuing education on how home health care providers can screw up when they are being inspected.

We were in a building so dull I forgot to take a picture. But the class was interesting once I translated some acronyms. Goes to show you all kinds of businesses are fun to study. This one has a LOT of regulations, but that’s good, because it keeps people safe.

Highlight of the state office building’s bathroom. Lots of stinky women must work here.

It seems to be a woman-dominated business. Lee was the only man. We were the only white folks, too. We learned a lot from the more experienced people, and had some fun conversations in breaks (lots about our fingernails). Kathleen has experience, too, so we will have lots of mentors.

Our brains are very, very full.

The funny part

When we were done, Lee and I went outside and saw Kathleen standing by my car. Only, it wasn’t my car. It’s not often that two cars of this model are parked near each other my British Racing Green car looked black in the gloom of the day. Easy mistake!

Also fun

The previous night, we stayed at a nice hotel and ate at the elegant Olive Garden of San Marcos. The food was good, and Kathleen and I enjoyed judging the light fixtures, which I wrote about on the Hermit Haus blog.

They insisted I show my nails, which hid the wine.

We also made a point to get wine to match my new devotion to pink. Perhaps the hotel happy hour wine we had earlier made this seem like such a good idea.

Taking a Break

I’m taking a little blogging break, because I’m doing so many other things right now. Here are some things.

The Austin job is full to the brim with tasks. And random new ones keep popping up. Job security, I guess, but, gee, if someone wants you to do something that you thought was their area, a direct request would help. I’m whining.

Here, this rose should make me feel better.

Luckily I visited my kind therapist/shaman person who listens to me and helps me plan how to deal with my challenges. One of these days I’ll share my big one, but it’s not time yet. Just remember that no matter how cheerful people may act, they may be hiding heartbreak.

Continue reading “Taking a Break”

Is This Thing On?

At work, we got access to new video hosting platform, and I saw that they have a free extension for Chrome that lets you record short videos, with your webcam embedded, so you can talk to people and show them things on your computer. It’s called Vidyard GoVideo, and it’s Canadian!

I had some fun trying the software out, and found it easy. It gave me LOTS of ideas, too.

If you’re on Facebook with me, you’ve already seen this (be my friend; I don’t yet hate Facebook!), but I’m sharing this for others who might find this technology useful in their work, or to publicize their blog or other projects. It’s got branding on it, so it isn’t perfect for all business uses, but you can see how many people view your videos and other basic statistics, so it’s potentially quite useful.

Check out this video: https://embed.vidyard.com/share/SudUdPsXyxuqsU4ikurAZN?

You can turn the camera off, and just talk about what’s on your screen, or just use the webcam to do a video blog. Best of all worlds, especially if you aren’t trying to be a professional video blogger who wants to be on video blogging platforms.

You can’t embed in your blog page, at least as far as I can tell, so that’s a downer. I’ll have to explore this simple tool more.

The Champion Is…

Today we did a rare and lovely thing at work: we had a relaxing team building activity! Our fearless leader, Craig, loves to barbecue and smoke meat, so he decided to cook for our team and have a traditional cookout.

Craig says he is very happy. Maggie sets out food.

My friend Maggie, who is a party planner extraordinaire, put together the side dishes, and we got out some lawn games the company had.

Rachel supervises competitive gaming. What’s this game called?

The day was perfect! Everyone had a delicious meal, then we tried all the games.

It was so nice to see the group relaxing and chatting. It reminded me of paintings of the past, with people picnicking and playing croquet or something.

The highlight of the day was when Maggie and our colleague Jon started game of big Jenga. As the stack of blocks grew taller and taller, more of the team gathered around. The stack would wobble, but keep growing!

More than once, we declared that HAD to be the end, but no! Maggie and Jon were really steady and smart.

Boom! The tallest stack any of us had ever seen finally falls.

When it finally fell, we erupted in cheers! Dipu got a Live Photo, and the one below is from it!

I wish we could all have a pleasant break from the work day in the spring when it’s neither hot nor cold. I’m so grateful to our group at work for pulling this off.