Thing-a-day.com

Yesterday morning I was on the bus heading in to work, and we were in the downtown corridor where most people get off. I see this woman stand up while the bus is in motion, coffee and scone in one hand, and reaching for her backpack on the ground with the other. I’m watching this carefully because something doesn’t seem quite right. I’m not accustomed to seeing people move that well on a moving bus –from watching her you would have no idea we were on a moving bus doing it’s usual jerky fits and starts traversing 3rd Ave.

After watching her for a bit I realize she is blind. I had heard on many occasions that when someone loses one of their senses that the others will step up their game to help out. I assumed they were referring to smell, touch, taste, and hearing.

I also know that from a movement perspective, that the body’s first processes information via the visual system, then the vestibular system (balance), and then the proprioceptive system (which is the body’s awareness of itself in space).  I had recently gone through a certification course where we tested the effects of the various bodily systems on movement, and had been told that when one is eliminated that the others must compensate, but for some reason I hadn’t made this exact association.  I had never observed that with the visual system gone the other systems not only pick up the slack, but they actually excel. This was a truly graceful woman!

As we were approaching her stop, she confidently walked up to the front of the bus, never grabbing a seat back or railing. The driver said to her, “you know where you are”. She politely replied, “yes, I do, but we aren’t to the stop yet”. So, not only was she able to maintain her balance, but she was acutely aware of where she was in relation to where she needed to be – with stops are 3-4 blocks apart in this part of the route, she knew exactly where she was.

It was just a fascinating example of how the body will work together. We are hard-wired for survival, and this was gorgeous example of that.

Long story, but I needed to make some relatively to-scale drawings of my house to take to the city zoning board.  They are going to look crazy, but the issue is parking, and the relative height, width, and size of my driveway and garage. Believe me, you don’t really want to know.

I take the bus to work, and it’s generally one of the more enjoyable parts of my day. The morning ride in is when I mentally plan my day, and the evening trip home is when I decompress and plan the evening. I often also get a good story out of it, and tonight was no exception.

I usually ride the same buses, and have gotten to know many of the drivers to a certain extent – at least well enough to know their driving habits, predict how likely they are to be on time, etc. For example, there is the woman who drives the 8:30am local. She is an older woman with salt and pepper spiky hair and these fantastic red-rimmed glasses. She is the only driver I know who can say “good morning” when I get on and “have a great day!” as I get off, and sound like she means it.  Then, there is the man who drives the 4:47pm bus home – he used to be my morning driver, and you could set your watch to him! Even though he can be a bit gruff, I appreciate that he fights like hell to keep on schedule, so he ranks quite highly on my list of drivers.  Lastly, I cannot forget the singing driver – he places a large “SMILE” sign in the front window of the bus, and one day regaled us as we were leaving downtown with a original ditty to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb – he even used the air brakes on the bus as punctuation in the song!

Tonight was someone new. I was riding home later than usual, and as we head out of downtown our driver announces in a voice that is better suited to a late-night jazz station than a bus, “and now we are turning east, leaving beautiful downtown Seattle behind us.” Accustomed to driver announcements more along the lines of, “Pike Place Market, Westlake Center, monorail”, we found this amusing. Later, as we left Fremont (“Center of the Universe” – really, we have a sign to prove it) and turned up in to the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard, we heard, “Turning in to the Independent Republic of Ballard.”  Living in Ballard, I got of the bus minutes later and was finally able to see the person that went with the disembodied voice. He was an extremely pleasant 40-something Italian man, probably just looking for a way to make his evening route more enjoyable.

A few more hours tonight hacking Adobe Lightroom web galleries, and one huge step closer to being able to get my images up on the web quickly and in a coherent manner.  Since I can’t find anyone that has done this before, it counts as both create and invent. However, there is nothing visible to show for my work tonight.

My previous post of tying aspiration to action stuck in my head, and I felt I needed to make the collage I had referenced.

It’s tough to capture what I had done, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

When I moved to Seattle from Minneapolis 3 years ago, I dreamed about having a nice back yard that I could “live in” virtually year round. In the upper midwest it’s too cold in the winter and in the summer the mosquitos are the size of small birds, so that’s out, too. So, when I inherited some money a couple of years ago I used it to give myself my a nice back yard. I absolutely love it.

Today was 60 and sunny in Seattle, and I was off of work for President’s Day. So, I went outside and did a little photo tribute.

Last night I did some reading, as promised. Wired magazine had this great infographic about the “cost” of various items at the grocery store. I ended up writing a blog post about it first thing this morning on one of my personal blogs. InfoGraphic and blog post links.

I took this graphic mentally with me to the grocery story.  I found myself, for the first time in a long time, actually reading all of the labels and pondering the organic vs local vs what are the more traditional food processing techniques of today. Regardless of where you land on this issue, it was interesting to consider. Am I better off with “all natural” yogurt that is from Seattle (where I live) or organic that is shipped in from California?  I ended up with a little bit of everything in my cart, but at least it was all put in there intentionally.

The other interesting side-effect, that I hadn’t really considered, is that I didn’t buy nearly as much as I normally would. I bought just what I thought I would use, because it’s more expensive. Which means I’m not composting it in a week when it goes bad because I never ate it (which is a win all the way around).

So, why is this a thing-a-day for me? Because I ended up both creating and destroying some mental models for myself. That and because I started doing some research in to how to create a visual around this for my training business, but after about an hour of reading ultimately concluded that what is most important to me is that people make it a conscious choice — whatever that may be.

I was emailing with a friend today, and she made a comment about work and how they aren’t “tying aspiration to action”. I’ve heard her say this before, but today it resonated with me.  Since I’m big on eliminating the “noise” in my life, I like this.

According to m-w.com, aspiration means, “a strong desire to achieve something high or great”.

I like that. I have a lot of things I want to do, but what do I aspire to? I’m not sure I really know the answer to that.

I think I like this today because I’m currently feeling a bit like a hamster in a habitrail. Running, running, running, but not really getting anywhere.

I think there is more here, but right now I WANT to get off my computer for the evening and curl up with a book. Tomorrow I think a collage on this topic is beckoning, but that will have to be tomorrow

The beauty of this project is that I was worried I’d run out of ideas (I’m SO not a crafty person), but instead I find I run out of time!

Tonight I spent about 3 hours writing our marketing newsletter, but since it’s a corporate document, I can hardly post that. I then spent just a bit of time drawing out our two visual activities from last night’s mentoring meeting. Having the visuals will help me remember what they are in the future — I also found them annoyingly powerful — even in their quickly sketched state.

I missed Tuesday. My bad. I was out quite late with a friend in from out of town. As Tuesday was my father’s birthday, I had intended to do a collage in his honor. I will be making that up this weekend, as it’s still important to me that I do that.

Forgiveness actually refers to the title of the workshop that we had tonight in my mentoring program. I really wish I had taken some photos of the process, because it was creative AND very powerful. The idea behind the workshop is that not forgiving someone is only detrimental to yourself — and holding you back from moving on. So, this was a chance for people to forgive someone they felt has wronged them.

We had large rolls of paper, scissors, markers, glue, and tons of magazines. We were to trace an outline of someone who is of a similar size of the person you are forgiving. Then, draw a vertical line down the outline, splitting the body in half. The next part was to find images, words, and ideas that represented what we didn’t like in that person or how we had felt wronged. We wrote in or glued in those ideas on the right half of the body — like a collage. Next, we found images, words, thoughts, that convey what we want(ed) from that person — positive thoughts and ideas. These were put on the left half of the body.

Once that was complete, we sat in a circle (there were about 40 of us) and we had the chance to walk the community through our creation — first the negative, then the positive. Once we were ready to forgive, we ripped the paper in half, down the line splitting the left from the right. Then we were asked to look at the community and see where you are finding these positive attributes (as we usually find them in someone else) and give them the left half of the body.

Very cool and very powerful. As I said, I wish I had taken pix.

-Jen

I spent time today designing new business cards for my training business. Moo.com lets you decorate both sides of  your cards, and I wanted something clever for the back of my card.  I ran a text cloud on my web site, and then took inspiration from that to create this text cloud.

In my ongoing attempt to make my personal web site functional, I spent about 2 hours tonight fixing template problems, trying to find the missing icons (still MIA), but did manage to get the layout MUCH closer to correct. Tomorrow will have to be the hunt for the icons and making the collection name dynamic (right now the code is a bit hacked). Then, I need to get the gallery index page working. THEN, I can finally start uploading pictures in bulk — that is where the fun part comes in. I’ve already started uploading and proofing the journals, so they will be all ready to go when the picture side is.

But, I’m getting close, and this makes me very happy. I’m excited to see this finally come together after well over a year of promising I’d make this happen.

http://jwaak.com

-Jen

My girl, Bj, is an endless source of entertainment and joy for me. At 10.5 years (I’ve had her for 8.5 of them) she’s starting to slow down. She sleeps a lot more than she used to, but other than that she is still my trouble-maker.

She is the happiest dog I’ve ever met. Walk — check, bed — check, yard — check, car — check, vet — check. Wait, the vet? Yep. To her, it’s just another chance to get belly rubs and attention (plus there are other animals there). Sure, there might be a few uncomfortable moments of a stethoscope, thermometer, and the occasional needle, but to her it’s worth the sacrifice.  I travel a lot, and she now boards at the vet (even prior to this, she still loved going to the vet’s office).  We walk in, and it’s like her own personal version of the Cheers bar — the entire staff calls out to her when she walks in. They send her home with a report card — where it invariably mentions the belly rubs and how she enjoys her walks. Her most recent report card talked about how she has trained them to give her treats — she has a sit and a look that I know well. You just cannot turn down those brown eyes!
She is a big fan of rawhide — and I love giving it to her, as it’s good entertainment for me. When she gets a piece she picks it up, and then flings her head in a circular motion to throw it. When it lands she pounces on it, much like a cat would. Pick up, and repeat. She oftentimes alternates the throwing with barking at it like it’s an animate object — she will lower her front paws and head to the ground, but up in the air, and bark. That’s my queue to tell her to “kill it”, which leads to more pouncing. That goes on for several minutes, and then in one final flourish she picks up the rawhide, races to her bed, and makes a dramatic leap on to it. Then it’s on to the chewing part, where she doesn’t give up until it’s gone.

Every day I feel lucky to have her around.

-Jen

Today’s “thing” took considerably longer than I had hoped, but I’m excited about it. One of the “things” I’ve been promising to do for over a year was to get my photos up on the web. I finally got the shell of my web site up, and the beginnings of my photo gallery in place. I’m using a combination of WordPress with Adobe Lightroom web galleries, and there is a lot of code hacking that needs to be done to make the two play nicely together.

You can see the beginnings of my project at JWaak.com

Part of the high school mentoring program that I’m involved in is goals. We set them by the semester, and our group didn’t do so well last time around. New semester, new opportunity. This time we are using checksheets and a whole new style of accountability.

As a means of keeping the students interested, I’m taking photos of them and our group from the school year thus far and having them made in to stickers. They meet their goal for the week, they get to choose a sticker for that week.
There is a great company in the UK, Moo, that does them. I’m editing down to 90 photos, and rather than subject this group to all 90, I’m picking a few of my favorites to share.

I don’t have a photo to share from Wednesday, but I spent my Wednesday evening with my Community for Youth mentoring program family group at a senior rehab center. We volunteered with activity night, helping these seniors make valentines to send to their families.

It was a touching and rewarding evening.

Success usually comes from focusing on the basics. You need to first own the fundamentals before anything else matters. I was thinking about different ways to represent that term…

Continuing to play with OmniGraffle, icons, and how to show motion and movement in simple drawings. I made a couple of variations on my basketball from two days ago and made a first attempt at tennis. Right now I have a body-less racquet, but it’s a start.

The football season is officially over (although as a Packer fan, my season ended two weeks ago). Can’t say I’m disappointed with today’s outcome.

I was originally going to work on another icon for today, but decided to take inspiration from “current events” instead.

The trophy is the Vince Lombardi trophy, named after the great Packer coach, Vince Lombardi. One of his notable quotes, which I must keep in mind during thing-a-day this month is, “Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”

I love visual imagery, and am working on finding my own style. I like the comic style of imagery for a lot of communication, so worked on that today. I started sketching today, and just wasn’t getting what I wanted. So, on to the computer I went, delved in to OmniGraffle. I created two images, one colored by hand (on the left) and one colored by the computer. For what I’m trying to do, I like the computer version better.

This is going to be an interesting month for me.

-Jen