Chickens in the Road

Chickens in the Road ~ country living, cooking, gardening, cute farm animals, and fun! Find out more at: http://www.suzannemcminn.com.

This is one of my favorite blogs of all time. I absolutely love this simple country lifestyle on a farm. If I could choose only one way to live, this would be it.  She is living my dream life.

Never Lose a Chance to Say a Kind Word

If only everyone could practice this simple act of kindness, the world would be a much better place.  This saying, when placed in our home, school, etc., acts as a reminder to everyone who sees it to offer kind words to those they see.  It could possibly be the only encouraging words they hear on a day they desperately need encouragement and strength the most.

Find this uplifting expression in the Uppercase Living Catalog and encourage kindness in everyone around you.

To have and to hold... from this day forward

Today I was reminded of the importance of keeping the focus on my marriage while going through turmoil and terrible ordeals with our teenage sons.  As a mom, I'd grown accustomed to focusing on them first, putting other things second and taking care of myself dead last, if at all.

This was ok I guess when the kids were small, but the cute and innocent years passed by far too quickly and I came painfully aware that our boys, as much as we love them unconditionally, can think we're horrible parents regardless of any outpouring of love and care and simply leave us one day.  I don't think kid's in general have unconditional love for their parents.  And when you have teenagers, you become aware of just how conditional their acceptance or love really is.

I'm lucky to be married to my best friend for 26 years.  And I realized that regardless of what our sons do, we can always have each other.

The wall lettering expressions shown below are available from the Uppercase Living catalog: 

Personality Test: I'm Reserved, Solitary, and Discreet

I like to take personality tests.  Not sure why - maybe because I'm introspective and wonder how I've changed through the years.  I realized fairly recently that I'm definitely introverted, but I wasn't always so solitary.  The past six years definitely molded me into a more solitary type of person and in some ways this is not necessarily a good thing.

I discovered this after seeing others on FriendFeed taking this test.  The test is free, but you have to sign up to get the results and cool graph.  To take this test, go to Signal Patterns - http://www.signalpatterns.com/.

Here's my top 10 traits out of 90 that uniquely describe me:

Words for Living - The Beginning of My Personal Branding

Shortly after I signed up to be an Uppercase Living Demonstrator in late 2006, I started the process of picking a username for a new email account and other uses.  At that time, I knew absolutely nothing about "personal branding".  It was really important to me to pick a name that would adequately describe me in my Uppercase Living business.  So, after quite a bit of thinking, I finally decided on Words for Living [Wordsforliving].

The main reason why I chose that one was because I desperately needed words that would encourage me and give me hope.  It was a point in my life where things had gone horribly wrong.  My purpose as far as work had been destroyed and I had recently suffered through significant trauma from losing my job, plus a number of other very unfortunate events.

Becoming an Uppercase Living Demonstrator gave me a glimmer of hope that one day our family would have a better life and hopes and dreams be revived.  The concept of putting encouraging sayings on my walls as a way to refocus and a constant reminder was exactly what I needed - it's what everyone in the family needed. 

My Blogging Experiment

A few weeks ago I got it in my head that I wanted a bunch of blogs.  One for every niche thing I wanted to blog about.  The problem is, I'm a perfectionist.  That's a problem in general and as usual it surfaced as I was trying to decide on a blog platform, layout, etc...

FriendFeed - My Personal Favorite for Sharing

Absolutely nothing is better than FriendFeed for sharing all the cool stuff you find on the internet. It's the ultimate in "microblogging" and so much better than Twitter.

Although I love Twitter too, with the FriendFeed bookmarklet, you can share excerpts and even images right from the page you're visiting. Simply click the images you want to be included in your post to FriendFeed. Type your comments or excerpts you want to include, click post and almost instantly your post shows up on your FriendFeed page.  After your post shows up on FriendFeed, people can "like" or comment in real-time threaded conversations! 

Nothing really compares to the awesomeness of FriendFeed. But unfortunately, since Facebook bought out FriendFeed, the much inferior Facebook will either change it into something unacceptable or get rid of it altogether. Hopefully that won't happen. But I'm not holding my breath.

in reference to: Jannifer @wordsforliving - FriendFeed (view on Google Sidewiki)