Ever so gently kissed

By love-warmed memories

Alive in our hearts.

Cold grains of sand race to find

Warmth between its toes.

The tide rushes out…

Only vague shadows remain

Marking time’s cruel dance

——

Help me create something wonderful, Lord!

Are you afraid?

Yes. I am very afraid.

Help me create something wonderful, Lord!

Will you resist?

Oh yes. I will resist. I’ll resist a lot – especially when I get scared.

Still…help me create something wonderful, Lord!

Will you find excuses?

Excuses? Of course!  I will find lots and lots of excuses.

Please help me create something wonderful, Lord!

Will you look for things to divert you from your dreams?

Sure. I always have. I’ll look everywhere.

But still…help me create something wonderful, Lord!

Will you minimize who you are and how much you can achieve?

Oh yes! I will doubt myself all over the place.

Oh PLEASE help me create something wonderful, Lord!

These things only have power as long as you let them stop you.

But by seeking help

And by daring to move forward anyway

Step by tentative step

As long as it takes

As daunting as it may at times seem

Despite doubts and fears and countless diversions

Learning and growing as you go along…

Well then my dear tortured human being

The magical creation process has already begun.

And even if you can’t see it yet…I can! 

With love,

The Lord

—–

(Please note: This imagined conversation was conceived and intended in a totally secular way. I have yet to knowingly receive any direct messages from a greater power. )

Like fuzzy question marks

Pointing the way.

vvvv

Even a smidge like bacon

We’d all be healthy!

***

Tee hee. Happy and healthy holidays!

Ronnie Ann

Work Coach Cafe

Ever so quietly

She tip-toes back.

There is no fanfare.

No warm embrace.

Just the click-clack

Of well-worn keys.

She is home.

In the meantime, please stop by and visit my other blog:

Work Coach Cafe

xxxxxx

Peace in and out.

Ronnie Ann

This has been a fun ride, but I have Work Coach to take care of (as I mentioned before it may be going commercial) as well as a new baby blog I’m trying on for size. Still, other than Work Coach, I really do think I’m pretty much blogged out for a while. We shall see.

Thanks for all your support and for helping make Out of My Head something I’ve really enjoyed. I hope you did too. I’ll keep it open just in case I ever need to pop back for whatever reason, but as of now, it’s gone fission!

Change is good. The river flows. New adventures await.

Namaste y’all!

Ronnie Ann

I’ve been thinking of braving the commercial blogging world for my Work Coach blog. Yes…I’ve read the forums and know I may soon be raking in pennies rather than megabucks. But then again…ya never know. Plus I think it will motivate me to grow the blog into something even more meaningful for me – hopefully still keeping it warm and welcoming.

Although I’ve been a huge fan of WordPress.com, moving to WordPress.ORG just seemed to be a little scary. Where would my lifelines come from? I decided to look for a place that promised more hand-holding and less need for a techie brain. I’d already tried Blogger and wasn’t a big fan, although I know many are happy enough there. A friend told me about TypePad, where I am now taking advantage of their trial period.

While I think TypePad’s a pretty good place for an absolute beginner or someone who’s never sipped at the WordPress well, I found it clunky and less than user-friendly when it came to navigation. For instance, there’s no edit link on your posts! Now I did find a jerry-rigged fix that involved some CSS in Advanced Template, I think, but quite honestly…I just had visions of my whole blog blowing up. And the TypeLists were just not as easy for me to work with as our good old widgets here at WordPress.com.

And so, although I had dismissed WordPress dot org as something way beyond me, I started looking at it again. It actually appears to offer an amazing amount of cool code and generous geek user support out there. Also cyber-friends using it assure me it is the way to go. They just love it.

If you’ve been reading the message boards of late, you’ll see a lot of really pissed users raking the WordPress gang over the coals for 2.5. Migration glitches aside (I’ve worked on major system implementations and migrations to new platforms and it’s often a rough ride at first), we’ve got a good thing going here. And it’s all free to WordPress dot commers. While I would have appreciated some notice and maybe a bit more input on things, I gotta say that what we have here runs rings around the other two biggies I looked at.

And so…ever so gently and with some trepidation still remaining, it looks like I’ll probably be moving my Work Coach blog to WordPress.org. I still have a lot to figure out, but having found Blue Host (they have an easy handy-dandy download of WP 2.5 from their site, or so I’m told), I feel pretty good that going with them will be one of my first steps toward the oft-reviled and yet temptingly multi-faceted and hopefully exciting world of commercial blogging.

Thoughts. Advice. All appreciated. Wish me luck!

NEWSFLASH (4-14-08): I’m reconsidering this move after spending a whole day checking out 3-column WP.org themes and what it would take to customize them for my purposes. Not sure I have the desire to get that far into code and I am not crazy about any of them as is. TypePad has its pluses and minuses, but I see WP.org does too.

And so my research continues. Hopefully I’ll know within the next 9 days when my free TypePad trial expires! But even if I do wind up at TypePad, I think WP.com is an amazing place and will probably keep one or two blogs here too.

Will update this again when I know for sure what I’m doing.

—–

FINAL DECISION ON TYPEPAD (4-19-08): No way! Even though I am not in love with any 3-column theme I’ve found yet for WordPress.ORG (I’m still looking), in all other ways WordPress runs rings around Typepad as far as I’m concerned. Although I know TypePad is a fine platform for many people (especially beginners who want to have ads), it doesn’t offer the flexibility, administrative navigability and (visual) comment differentiation I want, need and have come to love using WordPress. (TypePad does have a nice clean look though!)

Not even sure if I want to take Work Coach commercial any more; part of me wants to keep it as something I do from the heart – not that earning a few dollars would change that part, I hope. But if I do go commercial, I’m most likely going with WordPress.org and Blue Host.

Just had a thought. To be fair and to make sure I’m not missing out on an obvious good alternative, before making my next platform choice, I’m going to give Blogger another chance. It’s been over a year since I tried it and, with Google being who Google is, I’ll bet it’s had some cool changes with more to come. Here I go. Stay tuned.

Later this same day: I was wrong about Blogger having changed much at all since I last tried it at the end of 2006. Wouldn’t you think Google would bring it up to the 21st century? It’s ok, but it’s no WordPress.

Most critical to my decision, Blogger doesn’t allow me to edit comments. Since my comment responses often contain advice/encouragement and I often go back and add more info or tweak my words after I post the comment, I need to be able to edit them. But ya can’t. (I do understand that it protects others from having their words changed which is an understandable design decision, but I at least need to be able to edit MY words on my own blog!)

And so Blogger is OUT!

Ok. Gotta say it. WordPress rocks. It’s an amazing system, no matter how many things needed a little fixing after the implementation of the new 2.5. Implementations are often a little rocky at first. But what they delivered is phenomenal compared to anything else that’s out there. And I am NOT paid to say that.

—–

NOTE: I’m still officially on break here. Just had to share all this.

If you wonder where I’ll be spending some of my time, I have another blog called Work Coach where I offer work-related thoughts and advice. Lately I’ve been getting a nice flurry of Dear Work Coach questions, and have had the pleasure of realizing a lifelong dream of having a Dear Ann Landers type advice column. Well…kind of.

I actually hold myself back from those snappy, in-your-face “Wake up and smell the coffee” remarks for which she was so well known. I do try my best, as she did, to give caring and practical advice – but without the famous one-two punch. But truth be told, at times I feel myself channeling Ann and, when I do, I have to wrestle those snappy-answer demons down by remembering there’s a real person on the other end who might need to be treated with kid gloves.

I love when someone writes back and lets me know my advice helped, although often it’s not much more than some comforting thoughts. Nothing make me feel better than to know I made someone else feel better. And it really does make up for all the tempting wise-ass remarks I had to let go.

So if you’re curious about some of the questions I get and want to see how surprisingly restrained and civilized I can be, you might want to check out the post where I get the most questions:

How to Tell If a Job Interview Went Well

And should you catch me being mean or snappy (at least on THAT blog), you have my permission to give me 40 lashes with a wet noodle! (Ann Landers would be so proud.)

See you after my break!