Posts Tagged ‘random stuff’

and one of the problems that has occasioned is that I’m writing about 20 pages of stuff per week already, and now I’m adding another 3-4,000 words to that.  Folks, I can’t write that much.  I love writing.  I do it all the time.  But I find that I’m getting burnt.  Where I used to blog three or four times a week, now I’m down to once if I’m lucky.  I used to write a lot in my journal, too, but now I almost never get to it.  It’s as if there are only so many words available, and once I’ve used them up, that’s it.

Yesterday I spent most of the day at home, doing things I’ve been putting off and needed to work on.  I made bread.  I made loganberry-crabapple jam, which is about the tastiest stuff ever created by man, if I do say so myself.  I made grape juice and apple juice and crabapple juice and crabapplesauce – also incredibly smooth and tasty (it looks like yogurt) – ground wheat and cracked wheat and sprouted wheat.  I did a few mortgage things as well, just for spice and variety.  It was a great day.  I wrote less than 200 words for the first time in months.

I recognize that this is normal, that life goes in cycles, and that there’s nothing particularly wrong with not blogging.  Several billion people get on just fine without doing it at all.  Still, I realize that this blog is important to me, and like most important things, it requires time and sacrifice.  So I will not be quitting or even phasing out this blog, just so you know, though shortly I’ll be breaking it into two pieces, a mortgage piece and an “everything else” piece.  Watch for that.

Okay, random enough.  I read a bunch of stuff today, and it’s rattling around in my head, and maybe some of it will be useful to you.

1. There’s a bookstore in Lehi.  I can verify this, because I just bought the book Three Cups of Tea from it.  I like the book, and I like the store.  It’s on the corner of 1st West and Main in Lehi, so 35,000 people drive past it every single day.  Go in.  Buy something.  Forget Amazon.

2. My sister Alison Wonderland wrote a post about how she’s adopted an alternative lifestyle.  This doesn’t mean what you think it means, but it does mean exactly what she thinks it means.  There are 23 comments, which is not a record for her, but it’s waaaaaay above average, so apparently she has hit a nerve.  I have only one thing to say about the comments – apparently people think that “conventional” means “everyone does the same thing”.  Being that I live the quintessentially conventional life that she is supposedly turning her back on, I have this to say about that: there are a whole lot more people living her uncoventional life than my conventional one.  A whole. lot. more.

3. It’s still a good post, and she’s a good writer and a better person, which is saying something.

4. There’s no such thing as “conventional” if “conventional” means “everyone does the same thing.”  Only “non-conformists” (you know, those people that all dress the same and laugh at kids that do homework) think that “conformists” are all the same.  My father and I are very much alike, and if you know us, we’re as different as water and rocks.  EVERYONE plays his music his own way, and playing a certain way just because you think it makes you different somehow is moronic.  Just play your way.  Don’t worry about the fellow next to you.

5. Apropos of that (sort of, and note that I used the word “apropos” correctly), here is a great post on microventures from the BrandBuilder Blog of Olivier Blanchard.  This man’s bog is under-read.  Seriously.  This is a good man who writes well, and I learned a week’s worth of lessons in the hour I spent reading through the last month.

6. For those of you in selling, and brother, that’s everyone, here’s a chapter from a forthcoming (I hope) book on selling from Kevin Hoffberg.  There’s some great stuff here.  Note that he starts his book the same way I ended #4 above.  That’s not a coincidence.

Go to it.  Send me some interesting stuff yourself, would you?