Getting close to LAUNCH

Have you ever worked on a project for more than 2 years, and then seen it come to fruition? There's nothing quite like that feeling. I'm in the middle of that right now with the new KidsOutAndAbout.com site design and platform. It's scheduled to be launched at the end of April, and I think we're going to make the deadline.

The first 19 months of effort on this 28-month effort had to be abandoned. I went down the wrong path, and wasted a couple of tens of thousands of dollars. I bought the wrong software platform, "worked" with people who couldn't care less and didn't really listen to what I needed, outsourced some of the custom work to India because I couldn't afford it here, went to a seminar in New Hampshire... and got nowhere. That system was really meant for people who had an IT staff.

But last summer, the company that hosts my current site was reorganizing at just the time I needed to switch directions, and offered me the opportunity to hire them to build the site from scratch, in an open-source software platform called Drupal. I have worked with these people for about 8 years. I always liked working with them, but it took a little bit of oomph for me to jettison all that I'd invested in the other project. As soon as I made the decision, I felt that warm glow of relief that told me I'd done the right thing.

This definitely ranks among the best business decisions I've ever made. Planning was in the fall, programming started in earnest in December. I worked like heck at my regular consulting business for the second part of last year and the last several months so that I could put all I made back into this software development. And I am working like heck nowadays with what they've already put into the site, making the content ready for launch. I'm thinking April 28.

We're actually farther along than I thought we'd be at this point. The programming team has taken my ideas and my general logic and made it into so much more than I ever envisioned. Not only will I be able to extend KOA to other cities and manage it all here from Rochester, but it will let me make money almost without trying. Organizations that post their activities or resources to KOA will be easily led through how to upgrade their free listings with graphics, logos, mission statements, Facebook and Twitter links... and they'll be able to see these enhanced listings. They can design their enhancements, play around with them, then if they want that to be what everyone sees, they just CLICK to purchase that enhanced listing through PayPal/credit card, for basically pocket change per month.

I've never before worked with a small, dedicated team of brilliant people who all work fabulously together and will put their brains toward creating something that will really succeed, much less something that I designed. I've always worked alone. Since being burned about a decade ago, I've always thought it was best to work alone. But this...this is an amazing experience. For example, last week, one of the programmers suggested a small alteration that will end up saving me tons of time and reduce the amount we'd have to spend on sales efforts. It will make it much more obvious to the organizations how they can enhance their listings, without needing to get the KOA admins involved at all.

I'd almost pay all of the money I'm paying them for this sort of experience alone, even if it doesn't end up making any money. But it will. Look out, America. First Rochester, then (later this year if all seems to be working well) Buffalo and Albany, then moving onward and outward. There are some great folks I've been talking with casually who are interested in serving as editors, and this excites me. It's an entirely new model for web sites... not just a calendar of events, but a richly guided tour that celebrates the great stuff in each community, that promotes cultural literacy, that gives parents easy access to the tools to help their kids learn to think.

And makes me rich? Maybe. That'd be nice. (Anyway for me, "rich" is probably a lot less than what other people would call rich.) More important, it will be a real positive mark on the world. And, it will be a LOT of fun to manage.

The girls think I have the best job in the world. I do. And I think it's only going to get better.

David's WSJ letter to the editor

David has a letter to the editor in today's Wall Street Journal, responding to Chester Finn's op-ed last week advocating Saturday school and a lengthier school year. Finn is a former assistant secretary at the Department of Education.

Here is the original article.

Outlook for Monday: Death and taxes a certainty

My broker was depressed on Friday, called me, and advised me to reduce the percentage I have in the market because he was convinced this travesty would happen.

I drank too much champagne last night so I would have to go to bed early and be unaware of it all.

Now I'm up.

Now I have to finish doing my taxes.

If you have something to the cheer me up, now's the time, bring it on.

Ode to Joy

The piece, planned in advance was "Ode to Joy." It really was.



Henry, Madison, Max, and Ella

Photos

Today, we went and had "photos with the bunnies," which we did five years ago. I wrote an article about it. Because the photographer does this every year and when I link to it I get a fair number of hits, I thought it would be a good idea to update the article and take the kids this year. The kids get to play with live, snuggly bunnies while being photographed.

The photographer was a little late today, so while Madison was getting changed, I took some very-amateur photos of Ella fooling around on the set -- sans live bunnies, of course. Wish I could have gotten some of Madison, but the photographer showed up before she was finished getting dressed.




Here's a nice photo of Madison with me on the couch:

Quick video: Ella's Birthday of the Day memorization

Yesterday's Birthday of the Day was Gustav Stickley. This is the way Ella chose to memorize her facts. Chock full of personality, that Ella.

Finally, the Penn degree means something

Over the weekend I was doing some research on the literary agent who had just requested the full MS of The Frontier Team, and found out that he went to Penn at the same time I did. I went back and forth over whether I should contact him again and tell him that. I finally decided to do it, and 10 minutes after I sent that email I got this back:

Wow, I wonder if we were in any classes together--­I was English/creative writing and took 19 classes, and grew to have a pretty intense love/hate relationship with Bennett Hall (which I understand has been completely renovated and even has air conditioning now!)…

I look forward to reading your book.

Best,

Josh

To some people, though not to me (wouldn't do it again), it means a lot to have gone to Penn. That's what made me come down on the side of sending the agent a short email to that effect, even at the risk of it seeming that I was bugging him (agents hate to be bugged). So, it was the right decision! My fingers are crossed, although not too tightly because then I couldn't type.

Then something went... BUMP

I have been so busy working on the latest release of KidsOutAndAbout.com, and keeping up the current KOA, and homeschooling, and whatnot, that it would have been tempting to lay aside my fiction projects, both the writing of the new book called Food Fights, and the marketing of my Frontier Team manuscript to agents.

I had been discouraged by the Summer of Rejection 2009, and had done what I thought was the sensible thing (and it was): I essentially laid aside the Frontier Team, stopped working on Book 2 because the agents who had seen the project hadn't been interested, and turned my energy to a new book, a project I love. Here is the one-line summary of that book: Food Fights: An Organic Revolution, about a girl’s War for Dietary Independence from her father’s food fad obsessions. The book is much more hip than the Frontier Team. I had been told by the Hip Agents I talked with that the Frontier Team was "too wholesome" for their lists. Well, this one is anything but wholesome... it actually promotes rebellion. I am enjoying the writing immensely, when I can get to it.

Anyhow, when the New Year turned, I realized that just because I wasn't working on the Frontier Team any more, and just because my new project would be so much more appealing to agents, didn't mean that I shouldn't keep, at least casually, trying to pursue agents for the Frontier Team. So I had lackadaisically been sending out queries, a couple every few weeks.

Well, a query that I sent out the second week of February just paid off: An agent from an old New York firm had read the first five pages and was interested in reading the full manuscript! Now, I had had fulls requested before, but only from agents I'd met in person, none from someone who had actually read the beginning and wanted more. So it looks promising, at least more promising than the rest. The agent's turnaround time is 8 weeks. If it takes that long for him to get back to me, it's likely that I'll have the Food Fights first draft ready by the time he is done.

This means that if life weren't busy enough, I'm now working head-down full-speed-ahead on the Food Fights manuscript... there is a conference in May that I want to attend in Boston if I don't hear back from this agent soon, and it would need to be ready by then. Last night I worked really hard and finished the outline, which is kind of complicated because each chapter title is an event in or aspect of the American Revolution, and metaphorically corresponds to the events in that chapter in the book. (Examples of chapter titles: 1. Lexington 2. Concord 3. The Olive Branch Petition 4. Common Sense 5. Declaration of Independence 6. Battle of Brooklyn 7. Crossing the Delaware ... all the way through Chapter 16, Treaty of Paris.)

So, I'll try to keep up here, especially about stuff the girls are doing, but I'm likely to be in Push Through and Ahead mode for the next couple of months.

And, frankly, any encouraging words would be welcome. What I'm trying to accomplish in the Food Fights book is kind of daunting. It's really ambitious. All kinds of themes and messages are being woven together while I'm keeping the pace and plot fast and the characters engaging... it's the kind of book that I hope kids will find something different in each time they read it. The kind that I'd like sixth grade teachers to assign as book report books because there's just so many nuggets of gold in there. The kind that speaks to both kids and adults and makes them think at the same time as enjoying the characters. The kind that wins the Newbery.

While I am hoping that the plan works, I am not positive it will. So I'm just focused on getting that Perfect First Draft done. (As Anne LaMott says, "Every first draft is a Perfect First Draft.) I have discovered that it's really easy to have my fiction writing enthusiasm squashed, especially when there are all kinds of other things I have to work on. Right now I need cheerleaders rather than skeptics. I love to edit, and I'm sure the second draft will be very different from the first draft, once I see how it all hangs together. But if I lose momentum, I won't have the first draft at all.

Momentum = mass times velocity

Hmmmm. Well, that gives me no insight at all. I'd hoped it would, but it didn't. I had to type it out first and see it there, and then know that I must edit it out.

Momentum = mass times velocity

See? The first draft is a Perfect First Draft. I'll never know how to edit if I don't get it on the page first.

Wish me luck.

Play -- the verb -- in The Balance

It's all a balance, and sometimes I wonder if I'm teetering.

Yesterday, I played in the snow with the girls for over two hours, building a fort/snowslide:



It was tremendously fun. The snow cooperated like no other snow I've seen: It was perfectly sticky, but not slushy. If you needed to scoop up some snow to reinforce up one of your "blocks," well, it behaved like clean, white clay. It wasn't too cold. No one got bored. We all got lots of exercise.

Here's the thing: When was the last time I went out and played with the girls? I can't remember.

We go on hikes, sure. We do projects. We get Out and About as few others do. But we don't play together that much. No, their play time is my work time. And I guard that work time carefully.

I tell myself that this is good, that they have to learn to play together independently, without me. All true. But still, I realize that I have turned away from play. I'm really poor at pretend games, for instance, whereas they are masterful. They have a new fantasy game they play in the car, which they call the Phone Game. They have two of our old, broken cell phones. Madison plays the role of Mission Control giving verbal directions and clues to Ella, who is out in the field in some mystery adventure in a fairyland world. They describe to each other what is happening, as if they were on the phone.

It's an incredible thing to listen to from the front seat. They have such imagination, such mental agility... a facility with making up stuff on the fly that I can't come close to replicating. I even find it arduous to play with them, walking their dollhouse people through an adventure. I remember doing this with ease as a child, but now I think my inhibitions are totally in the way.

I never want them to lose this.

Almost three years ago, I wrote on this blog about how grateful I was that the girls still played "chirp and peep" with me. It's the one pretend game I'm still good at... I'm the Mommy Birdie and they're the Baby Birdies. The mommy birdie says "chirp" and the baby birdies say "peep." And do you know, we STILL do it. Sometimes we have an entire game of it when I'm snuggling them into bed, but sometimes it's just a quick chirp-and-peep check-in when we're out and about. It's our special language. When I want to say "I love you," I whisper to one of them, "chirp" and she whispers back, "peep."

I feel as though I've been too busy to incorporate enough play into what I do with them. Maybe we play "at school" -- and I guess we sort of do, I try to make it fun, and we usually have a good connection. But it's not the same as play-without-a-particular-point, which we did yesterday. I will admit that my mind kept drifting off into "shoulds" -- I should be doing my taxes, I should be reconciling my accounts, I should be writing reports, I should be doing laundry, I should be making dinner -- and I kept having to yank myself back to just BE.

Unscheduled time to just PLAY -- with the girls. It's a radical concept, and I'm not sure where it comes into The Balance.

Really looking forward to this

I played cello from age 8-20. I wasn't very good, but I wasn't bad, either. I certainly was no soloist. It wasn't even that I liked the music I made as an individual cellist; I could see where I lacked in ability and technique even back then. But I loved playing in orchestras. It is one of the few childhood/teen memories I have that remains completely unsullied by crap. I don't think I met one single crappy person who played in orchestras with me. And, I loved, truly loved, what we were able to create by working together. I think I felt this first when I was about 14 and playing Beethoven's "Mount of Olives." When I first read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and my teacher taught us the concept of "epiphany," that was the experience to which I related the word.

Yesterday, I found out about a "string camp for adults" at Roberts Wesleyan College for four days in the summer. SCOR is meant not for performance professionals, but for people exactly like me: Those who either played a stringed instrument as a child but not as an adult, or who play for their own enjoyment as an adult. What a great concept! I love that there is a market for this kind of thing, and I just. can't. wait. Before I checked out the registration form, I thought to myself that I didn't care how expensive it was, I still wanted to do it. Yes, it's pricey, but what is the point of being middle-aged and having purchasing power if you can't put it toward something that makes you count the days between February and July, right? People travel from all over to come to it, and here it is, 20 minutes away.

And, it will make a great article, because, after all, the mission of KidsOutAndAbout.com is partly to inspire parents to demonstrate to their kids that learning and self improvement never stop. Tax deduction, here I come!

TRM Results

The area under the overhang used to contain the futon. Or, the futon FRAME to be exact; the futon made its way upstairs to the new mission-style futon because we weren't using this room down here much. I'm getting another futon mattress. Soon. Anyway, I kept whacking my head against that overhang. I hated that overhang. But now, we have a workspace there. The table top looks yellow-beige because it's reflecting the lights, but it's really white. Don't you just want to come over and work here?



My first thought had been that we should try to enclose the entire area, floor to overhang, with back-to-back tall cabinets. But the quotations I had gotten for custom-building cabinets were expensive, and to my mind not worth it. Then I had Mike the Ukrainian in, and he suggested that to save money I could *buy* tall cabinets, put them under the overhang, and he'd trim them in. That sounded good, but I couldn't find anything to fit, either online or locally. Then it hit me: I could use those Closet-Maid 31.5" cabinets (I already had a couple) and put a table on top of them for a workspace! So I just had to purchase four more and arrange them back-to-back.

Then, I visited ReHouse -- an architectural salvage store -- in Rochester, and found a perfect-sized flat door for $10. I went to the Home Depot on Saturday night, and lucked into Brian. Brian, whom I never met before, but whom I now know intimately -- I know all about how a customer banged a door into his left hand in November and broke two of his left knuckles, I know the name of his PA who is helping him get over the injury, I know what radio stations he listens to. Oh, yes, it's good to be female when one has a project in the Home Depot.

Anyway, Brian suggested that to cover the table, instead of using the countertop laminate I was planning ($45 per 4 x 8 sheet and hard to cut), I use the same dry-erase whiteboard that I was purchasing to replace the current dry-erase boards in the frames that the kids had written on long ago with permanent marker (only $12 for a 4' x 8' piece) to cover the table. Brian expertly measured and sliced everything for me. He spent an hour mitering corners for me in two kinds of trim. I expertly admired his work.

And these photos are the result! I still have to find a way to anchor the countertop to the wall, and I still have to find the oomph to take apart the whiteboard frames (not in the photo) so the kids can have dry-erase boards.

And I still have to do my taxes. Maybe I'll use the Cool New Workspace.

P.S. The ultimate triumph: One of those cabinets underneath is EMPTY! That's right... I was able to purge and organize enough that we have room to spare! And everyone knows where everything goes! I keep looking around doing the Happy Dance.

Jazz and toleration

Yesterday afternoon, we took the girls to see a jazz quintet called the Jeremy Pelt Quintet. The group was brought to Rochester by a local small company called Exodus to Jazz, and they packed one of the ballrooms at the downtown Radisson. We went as David's birthday gift.

The group was really good, for what it was, which was more bee-bop than traditional jazz. You could hear the bee-bop end of Miles Davis in there. The thing is, bee-bop isn't particularly our thing, but the Quintet was technically very good and transmitted the sense of fun they had playing it to the audience. I loved their slower ballads.

I had mentioned the show on the radio on Friday morning, and the producer sent me an email telling me that he had reserved us a table, which was nice of him. In one of those common-in-Rochester coincidences, it turns out that the producer's wife works down the hall from David, so they recognized each other.

The girls were the only kids in the audience. (I guess that's usual for these things, but I'm trying to change it!) They tolerated it well. Ella didn't need to tolerate it, actually, she positively liked it. She's a jazz-Latin-rock-and-roll girl, while Madison is emerging as a classical aficionado. But Madison was very polite, and I was proud of them. Now I know we can take them anywhere. I wish I could take Ella to their next show, which is called "Gabriel Alegria and the Afro-Peruvian Sextet," but it starts at 8pm on a Friday night and she'd never make it through.

I am *mostly* finished with TRM. I still need to find an inexpensive futon mattress for the futon, but we showed David our new schoolroom last night. He was impressed. Will post photos soon.

The TRM Wall

I am finding I have hit an unexpected wall during TRM (Total Reorganization Mode).

The schoolroom looks great. So great that all I want to do is sit in it and USE it. But I'm not done. That's the problem. I have stuff in OTHER rooms of the house that need to be sorted and put away or thrown away. I have 600 books that need to be sorted and distributed to the six charities for which Schoolhouse Rock sponsored the book drive. I have a huge stack of my own stuff to be filed -- oh, sure, it LOOKS fairly neat sitting in a high-sided black basked under my desk, but it will take some work to get it done. And I have to find some way to anchor to the wall the door-covered-in-dry-erase-board-with-fancy-trim-on-top-of-six-short-cabinets that has become an awesome new workspace for me and the girls.

And then there will be taxes.

Sigh.

Better get to it. I think I'll have some John Rutter playing on YouTube to get me in a serene and mellow mood.

This afternoon, the four of us are going to see the Jeremy Pelt Quintet (jazz, featuring trumpeter Jeremy Pelt) downtown. My goal is to have it all done by 3:30, before we leave.

Bootstraps

When you hit a slump, you have to put your head down and plow through it.

And then, if possible, you mix it up a little.

We've been so busy what with Schoolhouse Rock and all of the activities, and I've been so busy getting the new version of KidsOutAndAbout.com going (release date of April. April, damn it. It's going to be April) that we hit a kind of slump.

As I said, first thing was head down and try to plow through it.

But now I'm in Total Reorganization Mode. Specifically, the basement (school room that we haven't spent time in because it's been too cold and it's just become a dumping ground) and Ella's bedroom. And the books.

It's Winter Break here in Rochester, and the girls don't want to "do school." We WILL do school later this week, but right now all of the printers are disconnected because of Total Reorganization Mode so I can't print out their to-do sheets. Good excuse. So this morning they'll help me organize and then we'll go see The Lightning Thief movie. Tomorrow we're doing something called the Challenger Mission at the Rochester Museum & Science Center, which has the kids (and two parents, including myself) run a simulated space shuttle mission. And then Thursday afternoon we'll go play laser tag and roller skate at Horizon Fun FX.

But back to reorganization.

Oh, and hey, I was on the local news last night. Here's the link.

I am practicing. No no no no no.

I mean: No thank you. I am flattered to have been asked, it really is an honor. I am always glad to help in a limited capacity. But no.

No, I can't serve on another nonprofit arts organization board of directors.

Make sure I don't give in, people. Help me be strong.

Racing

I think you could describe the pace of our life lately as "racing" -- fulfilling, yes, but definitely racing.

I've been doing okay on making sure the girls get enough academic practice at things. They're both making some progress on math. I'm in a period where we're practicing some more basic skills there so that they'll be able to make some bigger leaps soon. (Madison is practicing the mechanics of isolating a single variable in equations like (1/4x - 28)/3 = 4. Ella is working on borrowing with unlike fractions, as in 7 1/6 - 1 4/5.)

I guess the biggest academic news, one that is a real relief to me, is that Madison can suddenly just spell, well and accurately. I am positive that this is not because I've been diligent about the word lists in Romalda Spaulding's The Writing Road to Reading (although indeed I've been more diligent this year than I have in years past). No, I'm positive that it's because of all of the writing she has been doing. She hates the little red squiggly underlining that Word does when one misspells a word, and she's taken pains to correct it, and to notice the good spelling, each time. The beauty of this is that it happened completely naturally, and without much effort on her part. YAY YAY YAY. I'd been questioning my decision, for the past while, to leave her be on spelling. While it's true that she would have spelled better much sooner had I forced the issue, WHO CARES? She is there now. The girl is 10, can spell, can write, and is HAPPY.

The lesson is learned.

Tonight, Ella cried because she had to put away her chapter book (yes, another one of those blasted fairy books) before she finished it. Yes! She cared! She wanted to keep reading! I will take these baby steps where I can get them. Wouldn't it be wonderful if by the age of 10 Ella is a voracious reader? Maybe it can just happen naturally, as Madison's spelling did.

But back to racing. Madison's Schoolhouse Rock performances went great this past weekend, and we have one more weekend to go. Due to my sending out last-minute press releases on Sunday morning, which basically read, "If it's a slow news day here in Rochester, please consider sending a videographer over to the Auditorium Center, especially if he or she is a child of the 70s," we got both News 8 and News 10 to film the kids and put the show on the nightly news. That should finish up bringing them in for next weekend. (At least I hope.) Here is a photo of the cast doing "Circulation." Madison is in green.


This week, we're still racing. I am on the Fickle 93.3 bowling team for "Bowl for the Cure" next Friday evening, and this morning Marti (the DJ) and I practiced at Bowl-a-Roll. Then we raced over to bring Ella to another of Adrienne's fabulous "Picturing America for Homeschoolers" sessions at the Webster Library (this one was on the Brooklyn Bridge). I would have raced to bring Madison to writing class in between, but she is quite congested from a cold that developed this weekend, and I figured that the rest of the parents would prefer that my kid not be blowing her nose in close quarters next to the 6 other kids in the class, sharing pencils and the like. So we raced to BJs and other errands instead, and raced home and finished our academic work for the day.

Tomorrow, a school concert with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in the morning, then back home for schoolwork/my work and instrument practice, then flute lessons, dance lessons, and a final run-through rehearsal for Schoolhouse Rock.

My fingers are too tired to type out the rest of the week's schedule, but suffice it to say that a large part of my mental energy is avoiding burnout. Really looking forward to next week when things slow down just a little!

I've been working really, really hard on the development of the new KidsOutAndAbout.com web site so I can expand this year and achieve World Domination next year. Can I give you the coolest sneak peek into the new design? Here it is:

Don't do this

If out of the blue you have a weird dream about a casual friend of yours... you know, the nice lady with the cute kids and sweet husband... to the effect that she's suddenly divorced and at a play with her new boyfriend... don't send her a Facebook message saying, "Hahahaha, I had this crazy dream last night, you'll never believe it..."

Don't do it. Take it from me. Just. keep. quiet.

If I had bet on this, I would have lost

"We're not in a big rush. We'll pause," Pelosi said. "We have to know what our possibilities are."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/21/pelosi-votes-pass-senate-health-house/

Juggling two shows as of this week

Ella is now Jellyfish #1 in a show The Little Mermaid, for ages 4-9.

Rehearsals start Thursday and are every Thursday evening through the end of March.

I'm having her do this partly because she wants to, and partly to see for myself what this program is like.

Hope she gets a decent costume. She's all about the costumes, that girl.

Pre-puberty

I think we can count pre-puberty as officially hitting our household last week. If this is PRE-puberty, well, let's just say that while I think I know how I'm going to handle puberty with the girls, this will be a good study-and-plan period with plenty of material.

She's 10.36 years old, just for the record.

Hold on to your hats, it's going to be a wild 6-or-7-year ride!