The blog where you go to play.

1) What is the single biggest sacrifice you can imagine asking a friend to make for you?

Babysitting my children for a week... Okay, just kidding. This is a difficult question because I really don't do well with asking for help. Thinking in terms of a huge sacrifice that I would ask of a friend takes that to an even greater level. Why am I so determined to be an island? I don't know.

I think the greatest sacrifice - and I know this is general - is one of time. Asking a friend for their time, lots of it, to help me do or accomplish or overcome something in my life seems like asking a big thing.

2) If you were in need of emotional refuge, what would you do to find it?

If my husband is at home, I go crying to him. If it's a conflict between us that's causing the need and I'm not quite ready to go crying to him, I would go for a very brisk walk and talk to myself and to God the whole time. This is part of why the neighbors look at me funny. If I am home with the kids and can't talk to Joe, I stop and pray and read from the Psalms.

3) In what way are you most unique?
In my way of thinking. I see no impossibilities. I don't get offended often because I like to try to think from another person's perspective. (I don't always like their perspective... ) I think positively, I love to analyze arguments, I love to find ways around the status quo, I love to ponder new ideas (my own or someone else's) and figure out how to make them part of reality. I love to learn and I love to work and I love to think about what I'm learning and what I'm working on.

4) What is your favorite sound?
Cliched, I know, but still, I can't find anything better than my children's voices, especially when they are being silly and laughing at each other. That's the best. I can't help but stop whatever I'm doing (usually writing) and just watch them.

A non-person sound I love is rain.

5) Show and Tell. What comes to mind first when you see this picture? Or, tell a story if it reminds you of one.

Reminds me of my grandfather's farm: almost 1000 acres of soybean and cotton growing fields in Mississippi. My mom grew up there with her two sisters and one brother. My grandfather started out with, well, not much, and worked hard and saved kind of obsessively and built up a successful farm. He is "retired" now: he runs an antique store from several of his buildings on the farm and rents his land to a young farmer.

I loved going there and just wandering around, playing on the hay bales, climbing on the tractors, and finding "new" fields... and then getting chased out of them by the angry cows who wanted grain...

See more at Wordless Wednesday

We stopped at Bread Co. for dinner tonight. I got the chicken salad sandwich. Okay, not as good as Mom's (no one else's ever is) and I should have gone with my standard panini.

Except that's what Joe did, and they kind of forgot to paninize it. Or something. I think they put it together and just skipped the whole heating-squishing process. It was a pre-panini'ed panini, which ends up just being a sandwich.

Kind of like my chicken salad sandwich. At least I expected mine to be cold.

Panini is a great word. It fits into the Food category of "Words-You-Cannot-Sound-Macho-While-Saying," like couscous and escargot. I don't care how gruff and deep and manly your voice is, when you ask for a big helping of couscous and endive salad, all the macho has left you. Bye bye.

What Joe actually ordered was a grilled panini. According to Wikipedia, the inerrant source of all information, a panini - or, to be proper, a panino, which is the correct singular of panini - is simply a "sandwich made from a small loaf of bread, typically a ciabatta." A heated and pressed panini, er, panino, is just one type of many possible panini.

(If you Google Image Search for panini, though, you'll find pictures of grilled panini until the 5th page of results, where this one shows up. I cannot tell if it is grilled or not. I'd like to try it with Filling Option #6. That tasty cheese is irresistible. You'll also find a picture of the Smurfs on the 1st page of results. I bet they like mushrooms in their panini.)

I guess Joe's cold sandwich still counted as a member of the panini panoply, then. I won't call customer service after all.

Resources: Can't get enough? Okay then:

Get your panini grills here. They are the latest rage in food service. And did you know they can cook virtually anything? "Yep, Bob, just throw that whole chicken on my panini grill there. Oh sure, it can handle it..."

The Panini Happy blog. Good recipes. I wish I had a panini grill.

Of course, a Squidoo page. How could there not be one?

Image Credit: The beautiful portabella and mozzarella panini picture is from daisygp at BiggestMenu.com. People at that site are licking the picture. The panini craze has gone a bit far.

The indelibly grill-marked panini image is from Chef Max Huppert, who says that panini "is simply the Italian name for sandwich, however it is mostly used in reference to sandwiches that are placed in a two-sided cooking press that compresses and grills the sandwich until hot and toasted" (emphasis mine). Hmm. Maybe I should call customer service. He is a chef.

And this picture of a great big panini grill for the accident-prone is from SnapDragon.com. You'll have to go there to find out exactly why it has such long handles...

I love this. Thank you, Joe, (whose name actually isn't Joe). This may be old news for you, but Joe's Goals web app is the most helpful thing I've seen since disposable diapers. I like it so much I put a button my sidebar. Go there now, sign up; yes, it's free. It takes two seconds. Then put in some goals. Assign them days. Add a log book for the goals if you want to record details ( read more about that here). Then use it!

I check my email kind of obsessively. Some of you use Facebook quite obsessively. (You know who you are.) Just start checking in with your Joe's Goals page when you check email or Facebook or Twitter or whatever you're hooked on. It has helped me keep track of what's going on with my day (I kind of use it as a scheduler plus a goal tracker). I can see progress. I can put in little checkmarks.

I love little checkmarks.

Really. Go. Set it up. You can thank me later.

Image Credits:  WPClipart 

I hate this topic.

Why am I writing about this topic? I don't want to be up right now. It's 10:47 am. I've drunk 4 cups of coffee. I've written 2 blog posts, applied for one writing position, read, fed my babies breakfast, talked to my sister and my Dad, made bread, helped Marzipan sit on the kid-potty five times, and put the babies down for a nap. I want to put myself down for a nap.

I got up at 6:13 this morning. My alarm went off at 5:00. No, I didn't hit snooze. I got up, turned off my alarm, used the bathroom, nursed Wick, stared at the coffee brewing, and crawled back in bed. My husband is so warm and cozy. Bed is so warm and cozy. The computer is like an alien. The coffee maker is slow. It was still dark outside.

There was this one time when we stayed up waaay past midnight.

I did a monthly challenge of getting up early. It was difficult. I wasn't completely unsuccessful, but not consistent enough to make it a habit.

Since then I get up at 5 probably 3 or 4 days out of the week. The other days I sleep until 7 or 8, as late as the babies will let me. I like it when I get up at 5. I get lots done. I feel ahead. I write before anyone else is awake. I have ideas. I read the Bible. I pray. I think about the day. I know I would be calmer, happier, and more productive if I would get up early every morning.

It's still a challenge, obviously. Sometimes I just don't want to get up. Sometimes it's because my night-owl husband kept me awake until 1am. I'm not sure what to do about that yet.

I did some internet research on this How to Get Up Early topic.

It's hand-in-hand with productivity gurus, entrepreneurism, life hacks, zen-ism, and other continuing, popular blog discussions. I make fun of these discussions, but I like them. I read them. I'm interested. I want to be a life-hacking, zen-thinking, productive entrepreneurial guru too. Apparently I have to get up early in order to achieve that goal.

Here's what they say:

• Steve Pavlina: If you don't get up early you're wasting a lot of time. You should get up early.
• Leo Babauta: If you don't get up early you're wasting a lot of time. You should get up early.
• Dave Cheong: If you don't get up early you're wasting a lot of time. You should get up early.
• Matthew Stibbe: If you don't get up early you're wasting a lot of time. You should get up early.
• An entire blog on early rising: If you don't get up early you're wasting a lot of time. You should get up early.

I've paraphrased them all a bit. I don't know why I can't get this idea out of my head:

If you don't get up early you're wasting a lot of time. You should get up early.

I want to, I really do. I'll be back later with more on this. Maybe early tomorrow morning...

WAHM Articles is a niche article database; I've only been a member for a week and only have two articles on the site, but I've been chosen for the weekly Author Spotlight. That's a warm fuzzy feeling.

Or you can go straight to my articles there. Thank you, Denise.

If you are a WAHM, this site is a great resource. The articles cover everything from Affiliate Marketing to Homeschooling to Love and Romance, Press Releases, and Time Management. If you are a writer specializing in WAHM topics, this is a database worth being part of. It reaches a targeted audience; if that's the same target you're after, half the work is already done.

You can read the submission guidelines, or start reading articles.

Thank you, service men and women, for risking your lives to serve and defend our country.

Shame upon you, leaders of the military and White House administration, for allowing such interrogation practices to be used that will forever mar the noble efforts made by these men and women.

Shame upon us, Americans all, for cultivating a society that says the end justifies the means. The torture that has been performed by American soldiers upon detainees is upon all our shoulders. What would you have done? What would I have done?

Listen to the NPR Talk of the Nation report: What happened at Guantanamo?

Read ABC News report on CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques. (This is not a funny subject, but somehow this is: "The detainees were also forced to listen to rap artist Eminem's "Slim Shady" album.")

And why? These methods are pointless. "It is "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough," said former CIA officer Bob Baer" (from the ABC report above).

Of course, not everyone agrees. Read this piece in support of waterboarding from Blackfive.

Here's a little background: I grew up in a conservative Christian family. We were those "radical evangelicals" that really scare the commentators on NPR. To a large degree, that's still what I am. And that's precisely why I find the interrogation techniques I've heard about so heinous and disturbing:
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," Luke 6:31. This verse is still in my Bible. I would not have open-handed slapping, forced standing, or waterboarding done unto me. The automatic response to an invocation of the Golden Rule is this: "Well they didn't treat us that way. What about 9-11? What about the bombing? That wasn't them using the Golden Rule."

Nope, it wasn't. Terrorism is wrong. Bombing civilians is abominable. That fact doesn't change the content of the verse to what we seem to think it is: "Do unto other as you would have them do unto you unless they've already done something unto you that you don't like, in which case you can just go ahead and do anything to them that you think suits."

Principles stand. Principles don't change with situation. Neither should we.

Running errands with one small child requires some forethought. You need diapers, wipes, a stroller, a car seat, bottle-feeding gear if you're not breastfeeding. Once you get past the nursing stage, you need food, a spoon, a bib, more wipes. Lots of wipes.

Running errands with two small children requires a degree of insanity. Fortunately, I have reached this level and somewhat beyond, so I don't let have two kids under two slow me down, even when it should. Read the rest of this entry »

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You, translated into business terms:

Market unto others as you would have them market unto you.

What does that mean? Seth Godin, author of New York Times Best Seller "Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable" (among others), put it this way Read the rest of this entry »