A Catterpillar, a Butterfly and Swarms of Contractors

With the help of a couple of new inhalers, I've finally broken through to the other side. With the weather turning and being able to breath more freely—not having a fever is always nice too—I feel a bit like a butterfly crawling out of my cocoon.

And speaking of insects, just outside my cocoon is the remainder of the swarm of contractors that have been doing everything from replacing old galvanized plumbing that looks like the arteries of someone who really loved bacon and mayonnaise, to replacing a dangerously outdated electrical panel, to pruning some giant walnut trees that were shedding more branches than leaves throughout the year. The latest swarm just wrapped up putting in some countertops. They let us know just as they began the installation that we would have to wait 24 hours before the plumbers to come and hook things back up (the plumbers we already had scheduled a week out to come and hook our sink fixtures and disposal back up that afternoon). I always enjoy hearing that sort of thing at the last minute. Luckily my plumbers are good guys and aren't going to charge us for leaving them hanging for the 1 o'clock that we'd blocked out early in the week.

One unfortunate side effect of my bout with the flu is that my meeting with my web designer got pushed out 3 weeks, which puts it in the last week of May. It is driving me nuts to see my site falling further and further out of date. But I am grateful to have this blog. And at least I can keep those of you who check in here up to date til the site in humming along again.

I continue to be very excited about the effect that the effect that the Getting Things Done approach is having on my stress level. This is by far the most organized, and comfortably so, that I've been in my lifetime. I'm finding the approach helpful enough that when I'm able to update the site again, I am going to be describing some coaching focused on dealing with the email and "To Do" flood, and the treadmill that so many people feel like they are on that is going just a few notches faster than they can comfortably keep up with.

What I'm finding in my practice is that as skilled as people are in their interpersonal relationships, and no matter how dedicated they are to them, it is hard to enjoy them when the taking care of business aspects of life continually feel out of control. The idea is that in conjunction with parent coaching or individual counseling, many clients would enjoy having the option of learning some practical, proven methods of dealing with the pile of information they have to mine for the nuggets that can be found throughout.

Well only a couple more weeks until my meeting with the web designer. So check the blog in the meantime and watch for site improvements and new coaching offerings toward the beginning of June.

Enjoy Parenting Again, Again

It is hard to believe, but it has been about seven years since my friends Amy and Reese designed my Enjoy Parenting Again logo and my website. They did it back when I started up teaching parenting classes again, toward the end of my graduate work at Lewis & Clark in Counseling Psychology. Over the years since Amy and Reese first got me launched Erin did the maintenance on the site for me, attaching new PDFs to the resources page and updating the speaking events page periodically to show what was coming up and where I had completed events. She even created new navigation buttons when I added new pages or links (for this blog for instance). Maybe not so hard for web design folks, but working 50 hour plus at the time, and doing that site maintenance for me after wrapping work in the evenings was challenging and appreciated.

Well Erin recently got a new job, and the software she had used to maintain the site is gone along with her commute to Hillsboro (thankfully) and her old laptop. The inability to keep my site up to date is about the only downside of her new job. So I explored some web design software options to see if I could maintain the site as it is. After making my way through more trials than you can shake a stick at, none of them look like they'll do what I'm looking for properly. The template based ones like iWeb and RapidWeaver just don't have a look that fits with the feel I'm after for the site. The more powerful ones that can create the sort of look I'm after, like Dreamweaver, are more complicated than I'm able to allocate time for to learn the software.

So the next step is meeting with a web designer next week to explore options to make the changes needed to give me control of the maintenance, while at least keeping up the current look, and maybe giving it a refresh.

So keep checking back. In a few weeks, there will definitely be new info on the site—I'm looking forward to being able to post pieces as soon as I've written them—and there just might be a new look if the price seems reasonable. I'm hoping that Chigo over at Dogpaw is going to be able to help me out.