Make a Negative into a Positive!

This week I decided to clean up my desktop, both online and on my physical office space. During this process I found my Lulu.com account online! The short story (of the long version): Back in 2000, I received first honors [yay!] with my design thesis with the University of San Francisco's 1st Student Gallery show in addition to a standing ovation from the design thesis committee at the California College of the Arts. Eventually, I decided to self-publish my project (which was told through a book arts) through Lulu.com. Note that I was a complete novice and naive about the whole thing, and although the subject of my design thesis was about my leukemia survivorship, I categorized it under "Self-Help" as opposed to "Arts and Architecture"—a more appropriate category for the audience who would be looking at it.

So after all these years, I actually checked back with my account and found a negative review from the one person who actually downloaded my book! What is to be learned here? Research BEFORE you publicly produce anything. In this case, I failed to research and instead, I got negative feedback (1 out of 5 stars) from someone expecting completely different when she downloaded my book. My book is an interpretation of my diary through design and art concepts, so anyone looking for an actual written diary would be disappointed of course!

LIVE AND LEARN: I did fix the mis-categorization among other things, and I suppose the books are more of a printed version of the actual project. Although my project can is best experienced by seeing the original project (which I have at home), the book(s) will also be available for free download soon at Lulu.com.

The monster in the closet

This week I've been working on my business plan this past week. I admit, however, that I've been putting it off because I was overwhelmed by it. I would read at books, magazine articles online and on print—I've even gone to a seminar or two about business plans—only to look at the outline and write one or two sentences before putting my notebook away. I felt that I 'needed' to get this right, or get this section done before moving on. It wasn't until I came across this article on Bplans.com that I shook the dust off my notepad out and—I'm embarrased to say this—finished what I started three years ago.

What was in the article that got me motivated? It was this one sentence: "Size your business plan to fit your business."  Such a simple concept! Dragonfli is a small business, therefore all I need is a small business plan to start. I wished someone would have told me that when I started!

So if you haven't figured out the connection between the title and my business plan, I'm going to spell it out: my business plan was my monster, and I was afraid of that I couldn't handle was behind the closet door. But when I opened it, that monster was just really a small one that I could put a leash on, give structure and care for as it grows.

The picture below is from "Monsters Inc" - one of my fav Pixar films (my favorite animation studio other than Studio Ghibli

If I keep saying mañana, then I should just change my name

Last time I posted, it was a year ago! That's just not good at all. We all have excuses and use them as reasons not to do something (unless it's something that's a real emergency and cannot be ignored). That said, there's no excuse to set aside 5 minutes to write here.

In the meantime since, I've managed to sell all the XBox games that I've completed. Damn, they're like hotcakes on eBay! The picture below is of me playing the Playstation 2 actually—can you believe my then-22-month-old (for those of you without kids, you do the math) daughter took that picture?

The Convenience of Having a Pineapple Delivered at your Door

Being a work at home mom, some things I realized I took a lot of things for granted before the baby came into my life. One of them is going out to shop without thinking about time. Time management was just a concept to me then, and now it's plain reality to consider what I do with my time to keep myself mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically healthy. One of those ways is having essentials delivered to your door. An awesome example: this morning I had my groceries delivered to me (yay for Fresh Direct!) and that saves me an hour or so. That gives me more time to spend with the baby, as well as for myself.


I don't know if it was a mistake or a bonus with my delivery order, but I got a pineapple too!
(The pineapple pic above comes from the Fresh Direct website, btw)

I'm sorry for the __ (fill in blank) this may have caused you!

Because of updates and stuff going on at blogger.com, my blog is now located at www.dragonflitropicals.blogspot.com
Have you ever played MadLibs as a kid? Sorry for the ____________ (fill in the blank)!

I wanted to write "Sorry for the inconvenience!" Thesaurus.com has listed similar words for "inconvenience":


Main Entry: inconvenience
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: bother, trouble
Synonyms: aggravation, annoyance, awkwardness, bothersomeness, cumbersomeness, difficulty, disadvantage, disruption, disturbance, drawback, exasperation, fuss, hindrance, nuisance, pain*, stew, trial, troublesomeness, uneasiness, unfitness, unhandiness, unsuitableness, untimeliness, unwieldiness, upset, vexation


Now, just for fun, let's see what else I could have written: "Sorry for the annoyance!" "Sorry for the pain!" "I'm sorry for the trouble!" "I'm sorry for the vexation this may have caused you!"
:-D

Arrgh!! 2 months went by!! No blog.

I can't believe it's already November and Halloween came and went. We went to the American Museum of Natural History to trick-or-treat under the dinosaur bones. How awesome is that!!

Remembering 9/11

Tom and I were just getting up in our temporary apartment in Hawaii when heard on the radio about what happened that day 8 years ago. At first we thought it was prank but it eventually sunk in that the tragedy was very real. We wanted to make sure that our friends & family out there in NYC were ok too. Thankfully everyone we knew was safe. Now I'm sitting here this morning watching the ceremonies for Remembering 9/11 on tv—happening just across the Brooklyn Bridge from where I live.

We'll never forget and our prayers are with all who experienced loss that day.
"The wheel is come full circle, I am here." —King Lear by William Shakespeare

To give credit to the pic above, it's on the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum site.