The MORP

There are plenty of downfalls to teenagers being surrounded by technology 24/7 but there are also some pretty huge benefits.  In Atlanta 350 Beta Club students met for a conference, 30 of those students were from NGHS (our old alma mater).  At the conference they introduced a concept to raise money for Relay for Life called MORP (reverse prom).  They got all the students there to wear neon and taught them a dance to take back to their schools.

When I was in high school all of the kids at the conference would have loved it but honestly it would have been much harder to take it back to our high school.  Here are two key obstacles we would have faced: beta club was not considered cool and there wasn’t an easy way to share the idea with the student body (our options were pep ralies, morning announcements, or flyers).  Fast forward almost 10 years (man I’m getting old) and it’s a whole new landscape.  There is now a social respect level for doing well in school to a certain extent (sadly, people continue to be hard on nerds).  I think this is partially due to how competitive it is to get admitted into state colleges.  The other key element is wider reach.  Facebook and YouTube have made it incredibly easy to take a concept and make it viral.  This applies to both positive and negative messages. 

So those 30 NGHS students came back home and decided to make MORP a highly anticipated event for the student body.  They made this YouTube video and the kids are getting really excited for this event.  The best part is that they will raise a ton of money for Relay for Life in the process.  Kyle and I will be chaperoning the event with several of his team teachers and we’re excited to see such a great concept in action.

Secrets of Adulthood

I’m reading the Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  As part of her yearlong happiness project she created a list of Secrets to Adulthood.  Here is my list which combines my favorites from her list as well as several of my own:

·         The days are long but the years are short

·         What is fun for others may not be fun for you and vice versa

·         We all become our own doppelgangers (a version of our self that looks the same but has completely different behavior)

·         Sometimes it feels great to be super cheesy and cliché

·         Disney is just as much fun for adults (if not more fun)

·         Anticipating Fun/Happiness often exceeds the actual fun experienced during an event

·         Trying New Things Keeps Us from Getting Stuck in a Rut

·         Over Processing/ Over Thinking Things is a gift and a curse

·         Most people prefer thoughtful gifts to expensive ones

·         A hand written note will always feel more significant than a text/ email/ Facebook message

·         If you post something on the internet you forfeit your right to privacy for that information

·         Time spent doing something you love almost never feels like work

A Precious Hour

I read about this concept on the Rands in Repose blog.  The blog entry can be read here http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/02/29/a_precious_hour.html.  The first part of the article that talks about being in the zone versus being in the faux zone is particularly relevant in my occupation.  It was fascinating to read his analysis on being busy and the juxtaposition with being production, I often feel the two are highly correlated but sometimes that just me giving in to the seduction of being busy. 

This concept really got me thinking about the way I use my time each day.  The concept is to carve out one hour each day for building something.  I use the word carve because in order to make room for this something else must be scaled back since we are all confined to the same 24 hour day.  This could be used to build a relationship, build a skill set, build a knowledge base, build a healthier lifestyle, or actually building something (like a blog/ website/ product etc).   Since I am already taking on my book challenge I want to incorporate it into the precious hour concept.  Here are some of my initial thoughts on how to approach this concept and apply it in my own life.  In order to increase my chances of success I’m going to allow myself to break my precious hour into two semiprecious half hours if needed.

Precious Hour Activities:

·         Blogging

·         Reading

·         Exercising

·         Organizing/Cleaning

·         Writing

·         Crafts (painting, scrapbooking, making bath products, etc)

Reduce Time Spent on these Activities:

·         Watching TV/ Netflix/ Hulu+

·         Surfing Online (including things like Facebook and Pinterest)

(2) 7 Dresses

As the beginning of wedding season 2012 approaches for us I was reminiscing on some of the weddings we have been a part of over the last few years.  I have been honored to be part of some incredible weddings.  Each one has been beautiful and unique.  I have some really incredible memories from these events.

·         Emily & Jack Bell                             9/8/2007

·         Erin & Cameron Clack                     6/14/2008

·         Our Wedding                                   6/28/2008

·         Elizabeth & Matthew Sinesi            7/18/2009

·         Cal & Dana Fallaize                         10/11/2009

·         Stephanie & Juan Moreno               8/27/2011

·         Alyssa & William Lamberth            10/1/2011

Hitting the Books (Again)

In an attempt to increase our personal reading, Kyle and I have decided to start visiting our local public library every few weeks to help expand our reading repertoire.  The beauty of a library book is that you can browse the shelves leisurely and take home anything that catches your eye.  You get to keep it for three weeks and then it goes back to find a new reader. We are both big fans of owning books, but that gets down right expensive and we have noticed that it can really limit what we choose to read since when purchasing books we tend to stick to the same authors and genres.  We are also running out of shelf space in the loft, this just further motivates us to have a home library one day. 

My goal for this endeavor is to average reading at least one book a week for at least a year.  I’m hoping that during this next year I will reignite my passion for pleasure reading and rebuild my old habits of devouring books.  When I was kid I read about 2 to 5 books a week for fun outside of class work and I loved escaping into different worlds or characters.  It is certainly more stimulating than TV, which works well since we’ve been free of cable television for about a month now.

I’m sure I’ll blog about some of my favorites as we go but at the end of the one year period I’ll post an update with the reading list and something that I took away from reading each book.  Some of the findings will be serious and some will be silly but I am really excited about this project.

I grabbed five books to start: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr, The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank by Willy Lindwer, and Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade by Guy Browning