By the Letter E

Friday February 10 I went and had the first part of my full sleeve tattoo done. It's currently a half sleeve Koi and 2 lotus. After the artist was done I was given the option to let it heal on it's own in the traditional way which I'll call air dry and itchy or use a product called Saniderm to cover it. Saniderm is a product that looks a little like sticky Saran wrap that seals the tattoo and protects it from the elements while it heals under the breathable wrap. I thought I'd document my progress using this product to see if it lives up to the hype. Day 1: (Saniderm is applied) My experience getting the Saniderm applied to my aching arm was not that difficult. I mean I literally just had a guy grinding needles into my skin for 4 hours so a little tape wasn't going to be that big of a deal. My guy washed my tattoo and dried it off with a paper towel. Then he removed the backing to one of the strips he had pre cut and draped it over my dried arm. My guy told me ...

Where do I begin. 2017 was a year of personal achievements, goals met, and of flawless execution. Ok maybe some of it was a little flawed, but I tried. It felt like a miracle unfolding right in front of me. Everyday it seemed as if I were learning something new to take me to another level of understanding in my world. Up to this point my world had consisted of constant worry and self doubt on whether or not I was ever going to be able to achieve my goal of graduating from college. I had people around me telling me, you don't need college, you are already doing what people go to college to learn how to do. I started my own business and it was doing well and I always had work to do and people to help. I was doing ok except for the fact that I had a promise to fulfill and that nagged at me. A long time ago a 10 year old me had a conversation with my Mother, who confided in me that she didn't finish school because she didn't think girls were allowed to go beyond a certain p...

*spoilers abound*  So, once upon a time there was a little girl. She was different from the other little girls because she liked to hang out with boys, wear jeans instead of dresses, and play football in the street. She and her cousins would also play superhero games and each one would select their favorite superhero. There was the Hulk, Batman, and Superman, even Aquaman made an appearance one Summer night when the neighbors kid came over to play. The little girl was always Wonderwoman. Never Supergirl, or Batgirl...always Wonderwoman. The little girl read comic books, and dreamed about becoming Wonderwoman when she grew up. She was Wonderwoman for halloween. She spent nights thinking of ways to be better, faster, stronger, and smarter than all the boys in the world. Well...she tried to, as any little girl could. She watched Linda Carter portray her hero on Television as she grew up and swore that there could never be another that would ever take her place. Wonderwoman, was tru...

Today I watched as a young couple sat stoic and on and off in tears at the funeral of their 20 month old little girl. The viewing was hard. As a mother myself it tore me up and I cannot imagine how that young lady must have felt. Probably so beyond pain and deep into that place where nothing hurts anymore. The numb spot. It made me think a lot about life, and how it can be as cruel as it is kind. I sat through slide after slide of this beautiful little tiny person whom everyone in her life had just started to get to know. She was just at the point of developing her own personality and sharing smiles and laughter with everyone around her. I wept along with her friends and family. It made me think about what's going on in the world right now and about how heavy life seems to be at the moment. Life is hard. We go through this progression of life hoping for...for what exactly? Riches? A nice pretty car and a house to keep it in? Life is hard. We fight with one anothe...

What is a Genius? Is it someone who can name all 50 states at age 3? A 60 year old scientist that discovers a cure for some disease? An artist that can paint a masterpiece even though he can't see color? A musician, who creates and then shares his musical prowess with the world? The answer to all of these scenarios is yes. Yes is is.  Musical genius Prince, died yesterday in his home outside of Minneapolis. Many will remember him as the Purple Rain guy...many others will remember him as a friend, a son, a lover. I think that what he let us, the public, see of him was his legacy. It was what he wanted all of us to remember him by and what a legacy he leaves!  Countless songs, performed to huge success by countless artists all written by him, movies, performances, legendary song lyrics like "The kind you find in a second hand store...", or "I only want to see you laughing in the purple rain." He was a genius. A lyrical genius.  Why did people around the w...

The current word on the social media circuit has the potential to effect anyone that has a website on the internet. Google is set to release an update on April 21st that will effect how the search engines view and pick up on your website if it isn't optimized for mobile devices.  What does that mean?  Well since almost 80% of websites that are currently on the internet get all jumbly, cannot function on a mobile device properly, and just aren't adjusted well enough to handle such devices they will see falls in their search page rank. That's a lot of people that could potentially be affected by this update.   Why are they doing this?  They have noticed that more people are conducting searches for websites from their mobile devices vs. a standard computer browser.  People visit the pages only to find that they are not optimized for the device that they are being viewed on.  This looks bad for business not only for the business with the ja...

Life isn't fair sometimes. People will never cease to say things to make other people feel awful and humiliate them. I have reached the point in my life where I have no tolerance for hateful people. I have seen too many beautiful and good people die to know that life is fleeting. These are lessons that you learn as you grow up. I have lived in the Frisco/McKinney area for over 8 years now, and in that time I have read story after story about young teenagers taking their own lives because of bullying that they have been dealt at school. AT SCHOOL! You know the place where we send our kids to learn? Yeah that place. It has become a place of difficult transition from young adult to adult hood now for kids everywhere and it makes no sense. It takes a second to be kind and smile at someone to make their day better...but haters don't know that.  They only know how to belittle a person, laugh at them, gather around them, take the video, post it, and make that person feel shitty...

Get off of the same old path, and make things happen There is an old adage that states if at first you don't succeed try and try again. In this authors opinion, it should read if at first you don't succeed, fail and fail again. This might sound a little strange at first but hear me out. If every road that we traveled on were only one way and every time we took that road it led us to the very same place every time we walked upon it we as a society would have a bunch of well worn roads but we would never get to see or experience anything else. I think that the same thing applies to people that want to succeed in whatever it is that they choose to embark upon.  Let's think about this for a bit.  If every person was successful the first time that they tried anything so much of how we live today would not exist. This pretty mac that I am typing this on, non-existent. The light that I read by at night, non-existent. Think about the empires that people like Walt Disney, a...

Many of us look for ways to be more efficient users of our planet and the stuff on it. We try to recycle, up cycle, bicycle, and every other cycle out there to ensure that we aren't just using up her resources.  That's why when apps like Yerdle come up and offer us a new way of reusing our old items people are quick to jump into it and use it to do just that.  Yerdle was everything that we had never seen before.  It was a unique auction like system that allowed people to post items that they had lying around in closets and the garage and get "CREDIT POINTS" for them.  Then you were allowed to use your credit points to bid on auctions for other people's items.  The highest bidder wins and then pays a small fee for shipping. The poster prints the label that Yerdle sends you via email, then takes the package to their local UPS store for delivery.  That easy.  Well, that was then, and in just a few short months Yerdle has made it very clear that they...

Let me begin by stating that I have not had such difficulty assimilating the contents of an article in quite some time. I am referencing the WIRED article written in 2012 by Bruce Sterling titled An Essay on the New Aesthetic.  As I read, I found it difficult to keep up with all of the various and turbulent metaphors in the reading.  It was like watching a bouncing super ball in a concrete room. Did you see what I did there? I began to wonder if in fact Bruce Sterling really knew what he was trying to talk about in his descriptions of the New Aesthetic.  I managed to gather a few key points from his essay that make an attempt at defining the New Aesthetic. The article is older, but the ideas presented are timeless. The New Aesthetic is according to Sterling; A creative movement A Collective Internet based Built by and for working creatives All very true points, I like to take this one step further and say that not only is it these descriptive terms but t...

By the Letter E: Ello.co : A welcome change to the social media lan... : So there's this new social media thing. The "anti-facebook" out there in the virtual space. It is calling to all to join and n...

So there's this new social media thing. The "anti-facebook" out there in the virtual space. It is calling to all to join and not letting anyone join at the same time.  The elite, those with the coveted golden ticket can enter and partake on the newest social media site.  The Ello.co site is invite only while it is in beta testing.  I was fortunate enough to be able to access through someone in one of my Google+ circles (see Google+ is good for something :)).  I had a slight bit of difficulty entering the site because I was granted an invite, but just one I had to type in myself not the actual formal email invite.  So because I was trying to login using the regular ello.co site, and not the ello.co/join site, I had some issues BUT eventually we figured it all out and I was in. I soon discovered that I did not have the 25 invites that were once available.  This may have been because their server was down for a bit.  Virtually hundreds and hundreds of peo...

It has taken me quite some time to think about what if anything I wanted to express in my blog about the loss of actor Robin Williams. People die every second of every day, and I hardly bat an eye. I don't know them nor have I ever known their life stories. They are just people. Their lives are special to the ones that loved them. I hardly bat a eye as I know that there is nothing that I could have possibly done to save them. Death is a part of life. Wait, let me rephrase that, natural death is a part of life. Suicide on the other hand is not. It is something that I cannot comprehend. I don't understand the dark place in someone's mind and heart that suicide resides in. It is selfish. It is brutal, raw, and so unforgiving to those left behind. Suicide is not fair play. I think that is why I had such a hard time trying to wrap my head around the death of Robin Williams. The SUICIDE OF ROBIN WILLIAMS! Words left me after I heard the news, I was literally speechless and felt...

So, the other day I was reading through my usual social media outlets and catching up on the news.  I stumbled upon a post by Arianna Huffington where she was asking people what their " Wake Up Call " moments in their lives were.  She solicited stories from people and in exchange would select a few to receive a copy of her new book THRIVE: The Third Metric To Redefining Success And Creating A Life of Well Being, Wisdom, and Wonder.   I submitted my wake up call, not thinking anything would come of it but scared to death because what I told her in my story I had never told more than a few people about.  As soon as I finished my article and hit the send button on that email I knew only two things.  1. That I had just told the potential world that I and my family were homeless a couple of years ago, and 2. That admission was scary as hell.  There are many in the world that are quick to pass judgement on others and I had spent the last 2 years reading all of...