Tuesday, February 15, 2005

ORMUS Day 6 Not much different. Tamara couldn't sleep last night, so she got up and worked. She will have to sleep through the day today. My hemmorhoids started to bleed again yesterday. Too much sitting? Today is tax day (first of three!). I hate this shit. 2:30:50 PM

Monday, February 14, 2005

ORMUS Day 5 I swear Tamara is having fewer hot flashes.  They really seem to have faded lately.  Maybe ORMUS is helping? My hemmorhoids haven't bled at all in days. I've felt a little dozy today, I think because I only got 6.5 hours sleep.  Usually I need 8. I seem to be pretty good about keeping on top of my tasks lately.  For a while, I was just getting overwhelmed and didn't want to do anything, but I seem to be over that. 10:27:36 PM

Sunday, February 13, 2005

ORMUS Days 3-4 It was a funny day yesterday.  I gave in to the pressure to "panic overeat" at breakfast and it really ruined the whole day.  I was immediately sleepy and unmotivated afterward, and the feeling lasted for 4-5 hours! Guess I won't do that again.  Maybe the ORMUS contributed to that. Don't overeat!  Okay, I get the message. Ate a lot better today and I feel good. Tamara was very surprised today. Usually she gets a sinus headache whenever we get a big weather change, which in Ohio is about every fifth day.  Today we went up twenty degrees, but she didn't get a sinus headache.  She also said she is getting much fewer hot flashes.  She has been using her progesterone cream regularly, so that may be a major factor.  We'll see what happens this coming week, because this will be her week off the progesterone. I had a strong feeling of gratitude last night.  I had to write a bunch of stuff in my gratitude journal. So far, both of us have been diligent in taking ORMUS everyday.  We take one dropperful once a day. 5:46:27 PM

Friday, February 11, 2005

ORMUS Day 2 I might end up with two blog entries today because I didn't enter last night's. I noticed something very big. Two nights in a row, I haven't had to "panic overeat" like I usually do at dinnertime. If we have a regular size dinner, I've always had to rush back to the kitchen right afterward and get more food. I could not seem to give myself time to digest and feel satisfied. The past two nights, I had that little feeling again (bad habit) but I didn't do anything about it. I just sat and worked and the next thing I knew, I was feeling very satisfied, not overfull, but not hungry. We've started a habit of drinking our apple cider vinegar + honey drink in the evenings. It serves as an excellent "dessert-type" ending to our meal. We usually brew it up an hour or two after dinner. For more info on that drink, go here. I've noticed that my hemmorhoids haven't bled for the past three days. That happens often, so it's no big thing yet. If I go for a whole month without bleeding, that would be something. My mind seemed overly active yesterday, but I just drank too much green tea. I usually have one cup, yesterday I drank 3 cups. Too much for me. I have actually lost weight. I started tracking my weight January 1 (cliche, I know) and I've lost six pounds. This is unheard of. I haven't lost weight in years except when I've been sick, and even then I gain it back immediately. Most of this loss must have occured in the past two weeks, because I weighed myself in mid-January and there was no loss. I haven't exercised at all in several days, just been too preoccupied with work deadlines. In a different area, the hits on my company's Website continue to skyrocket. I think my tweaking to the Google ads made a difference, but Wow! this is a big increase. Now I need to set my intention to have more sign-ups to the courses. Fifteen people in each of the three Web-based courses. That's it for now. I'll try to post again tonight about what I noticed today. 1:12:43 PM

Thursday, February 10, 2005

The ORMUS Experiment - Day 1 My wife and I started taking ORMUS, a substance considered to be halfway between matter and energy. There is lots of info here. I'm going to use this blog to record our experiences. First day! For me, I slept pretty well the first night. That wasn't that unusual. Before going to sleep, my legs itched like crazy. This was just like when I was fighting a candida infection in my gut. I had the same problem. This came on all of a sudden. I partly attribute it to the chipwich and Dr. Pepper I had earlier that day. Sugar was the main problem with my candida before. However, it was weird how strong it came on. Healing crisis? I was also unusually hot when I woke up. I had to throw off the covers for about fifteen minutes before I cooled off. I'm usually hot when sleeping, but this was the hottest I had ever felt. I'm still coughing most of today. That hasn't improved. It was interesting because neither Tamara nor I could get up this morning. We both had to sleep in about two hours longer than usual. We just couldn't get moving. The postman even came to the door with two parcels. Tamara got up to open the door, then came straight back to bed. That never happens. Usually, when she's up, she's up. The cat was unusually affectionate with Tamara today for a while. Tamara had a good dream last night. That is REALLY RARE. She always has awful dreams, either boring or scary. Usually she just hates her dreams. This one was really interesting and exciting for her. A guy did a magic trick for her in the dream. He dived into a pool, the lit a piece of paper while underwater, then swam for a while with the fire going underwater. Then he emerged from the water in front of her and blew the flame out. Impressive! Also, my Website got a lot more hits today. About 50% more visitors than usual. I thought of some really great tweaks to my Google ads which probably did the trick. There is something about ORMUS that is meant to affect the "manifestation of intent" so I'll be watching that too. Oh yeah, and a person bought my e-Book after taking my free e-mail course. Lots of people have bought the e-Book before, but this was the first person to buy it after taking the e-mail courses that I started a few weeks ago. It was very gratifying. It's exactly what I had wanted to happen. So far, small things have been noticeable. I'll check in again each day and itemize what's happening. 1:54:42 AM

Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Wednesday Nights Are Always Late It seems like every week I wait too long to make the updates to the classes for the upcoming week.  Then Wednesday night I need to stay up all night to make the final touches on the next week's Web-based class material. Why do I do this?  I guess I have a lot of other stuff going on.  The Health Freedom Coalition of Ohio is heating up, and I'm getting a ton of requests for the free e-mail newsletter and the free e-mail courses. 11:41:21 AM

Monday, January 31, 2005

Time to Take a Step Back Whew! What a month January was! I'm glad it's over, but I'm also glad that things worked out pretty well. I feel good (after being sick), in fact, better than ever. Maybe I can tackle my taxes now. Bleech. I started using dotproject, what an incredible piece of software. Open source, of course. I needed a nice project management package, because the number of projects and tasks I've got going on is becoming too much to handle in OpenOffice Calc. dotproject does the job. 1:32:52 PM

Friday, January 28, 2005

Disaster Solved Those guys are so good to me! I told the magazine about my problem (another ad got glued to the face of my full-page ad in their mag) and they absolutely bent over backwards to fix it. They offered to place my link on their home page and also on another two Websites that they manage. I feel great again. The online courses are going really well. People seem to love them. I might have my first guest instructor! Someone who teaches divorce education for women. 7:14:28 PM

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Major Disaster Well, it had to end sometime. My natural high from last week has come down HARD. I was banking on a significant response to a full-page ad that I placed in a major massage magazine this month, coming out next week. I got an advance copy of the issue today and...my ad has another ad glued to the front of it. I'm not kidding. There is a blow-in ad for OneSpirit books that is glued to the face of my ad, so people will have to peel off that ad to even be able to read my ad. Does that suck or what? I think what the universe is trying to tell me is that I shouldn't be putting so much of my expectations into that one ad, and that I should be continuing with the links campaign and even placing Web ads on various high-traffic holistic Websites. I didn't get totally depressed when I saw the screw-up, but still...it was hard. On we trudge! 5:05:35 PM

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Caller From Cloud Nine... Hi blog readers. Today was an amazing day. If you've been following my story, today was "Go Live Day" for all my online classes. What a run-up! I had to do a trip out of town last night, then when I got back at midnight I went back to work on finishing the last bits of my class material online. By nine o'clock this morning, I was finally finished, so I took a nap from 9 to noon. Woke up at noon and started answering people's questions about logging on and certain questions people had. And you know what? It was great. I couldn't be happier. My hope was to have fifteen people in the classes, and I ended up with fourteen. How much more perfect could it be? The students seem to be loving the setup and they're diving right in. I love life right now. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, please log in as a guest here. 9:01:49 PM

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Marketing Books Suck I'm sorry to report that the books I got from the library two posts ago suck. Well, that's not entirely true. Attracting Perfect Customers is a great marketing book. I'm reading it for the second time, so I knew that. But the other two suck: Marketing Without Megabucks Love is the Killer App I had my suspicions about the Megabucks one, because it's so outdated, but it is just really bad. Love is the Killer App seems great in the first two chapters, but then you realize that there isn't going to be any more new information coming. In fact, if you read the flap of the dust cover, you've got the entire premise of the book. Here it is: - Read lots of business book and tell all your associates, friends, bosses, customers and competitors about them. - Network with everyone, and give away all your contacts. - Have compassion for everyone in the workplace. At first, I thought this was cool because I was already practicing all three diligently in my work life. But then I realized that this was really a magazine article masquerading as a book. When he delves into the details of "how to take notes while reading a book" I was hit with the knowledge that this wasn't going to go anywhere. Too bad! Starts with a bang, going for 120 pages with a whimper. The Perfect Customers book, on the other hand, is a truly different way of looking at marketing that relates to many New Age and metaphysical ideas. I love it. You can see their Website and join their e-mail newsletter at www.perfectcustomer.com. 4:50:23 PM

Saturday, January 15, 2005

You've Got to Investigate This for Yourself I just attended a seminar on this interesting discovery today. You need to read about it and run the experiments yourself. I'm going to water our lawn and trees (especially our lilac tree) with this stuff. 8:56:49 PM

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Some Good Marketing Books, Hopefully... I hope I got my hands on some good marketing books today at the library: Attracting Perfect Customers Marketing Without Megabucks Love is the Killer App I know the first one's good, I've already read it cover-to-cover. I just needed to use it again to add info to the Marketing Planning class. The second one looks like it might be a dud. It was written in 1993 and doesn't mention anything about the Internet in the table of contents. The third is going to be cool. Several people have told me that I HAVE TO read this book. Now I realize why. This is how I do my own marketing. It is a perfect fit to what I teach, but more so, what I do. I'm worried that they'll be worthwhile, because I borrowed ten marketing books last week, and eight of them sucked. I mean really blew. They went on and on about the COLA WARS! Honestly! And these books were written in 2001, some of them! What the hell, hasn't anything happened since the Cola Wars?? Plus, everything in marketing is so goddamn product-centric. Hey fellas, 70% of the U.S. economy is driven by SERVICES. And marketing services is ZERO like marketing products. Wise up, will ya?? Should be fun reading these new books. I'm doing these stretches for my hamstrings where I lie down on the floor and put one leg up vertically against the wall and the other leg flat on the floor through a doorway. I try to do twenty minutes each leg. That can get really boring, so I read! What a great time to get forty minutes of reading in! 9:34:43 PM

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Still Can't Get Myself to Videotape Myself I still can't convince myself to fire up this nice new videocamera and start doing the video shots for the class. Why not? I don't think I'm too vain. I know I'll look like crap on camera - who cares? It just seems like I have one excuse after another. Wait until I shave. Wait until I get a haircut. Wait until I shower. What's going on here? 8:31:50 PM     Being Disconnected from the Results Today I'm trying to be totally disconnected from the results of my labors. Y'know, Buddha and all that. It's hard. I'm really trying though. That first paragraph was written this morning. This evening - whadya know? I got two sign-ups for classes! Dang! Love dat Buddha! 8:26:49 PM

Sunday, January 9, 2005

Gotta Get Back to Storyboards and Moodle The links campaign is a lot more fun than I thought it would be. It isn't like door-to-door sales at all. If someone wants to ignore my e-mail, no hard feelings! And for the people who want to link back, it's very gratifying. But enough on the links campaign for now. I'll have to get back to it after January 20. Right now, I have to concentrate on my storyboards for all five classes, and be developing them in Moodle. I'm using the "Lesson" format in Moodle to do the technology checklist. Do you have Adobe Acrobat? Do you have Word? All that stuff. It is so helpful. 5:11:47 PM     Pinguecula - The Final Story Well, I didn't have pinguecula after all. I finally went to an opthamologist who diagnosed my problem as a conjunctival sist. Essentially, it was a "pimple of the eye." Gross, I know. He suggested that we do surgery. You know my take on drugs and surgery, but this problem was irritating me so bad I said "Let's do surgery!" Plus, this opthamologist is very holistically-oriented, so if he suggests surgery, you really do need surgery. The surgery turned out to be very minor, although extremely frightening. He put some eye drops in my eye to restrict the blood vessels and then other drops as anaesthetic. Then I leaned my head against a metal frame, and he used the strong magnifying glass on the frame to watch what he was doing. Then he took a pair of tweezers and pulled on the sist (like the head of a pimple) and then went underneath the sist with a tiny pair of scissors. Yes, that's right, folks, this guy was coming at my eye with a pair of scissors! Yikes! I sweated out about a quart of water in the next ten minutes. I was scared beyond belief. But there was no pain the entire time, except when he put the blood vessel restricting stuff in - youch! Anyway, the surgery was successful. My eye was quite red for about a week afterward. Remember, this "pimple" was on the white of my eye, not the iris or cornea. But the redness went away and now, my eye is just a tiny bit pink on one side. And it feels better than it has in twenty years! I've always had problems with air blowing on that eye, but now, no problem! I suggest this type of surgery. The doc said that people in the Midwest hardly ever develop pinguecula, that only happens in the Southwest. If you're in this area of the country, it's probably a conjunctival sist. I hope this helps explain things better for all the people coming in searching for pinguecula! Good luck with your eye problems, folks. 5:08:33 PM

Friday, January 7, 2005

More Links, But I Need to Shoot Some Test Video Okay, the links stuff is going extremely well. I just hooked up with a massage table vendor online (www.massageking.com) who wants to use the articles on my Website for his resources section, plus I get links on his Websites. Alexa says that his Massage King Website is very highly ranked. But, my big task is begin shooting some test videos. Why am I so nervous about doing this? I guess I don't want to look like a dork on video, which is pretty inevitable anyway. It's just going to take practice. I want to use video for introductions to the courses, plus to explain certain things that require a talking, face-to-face, hand gestures or whiteboard explanation. 2:31:45 PM

Thursday, January 6, 2005

Links Campaign in Full Force Well, the links campaign is going. I'm basically visiting Websites where people who might enjoy my classes might be lurking. Doing links is an arduous business. I need to find out the more popular sites (using Alexa) and then surf to their site and try to find out if they do reciprocal links. Sometimes I can just fill in a form and they'll post the link (after some evaluation by a human). Other times they ask that I e-mail them and then they'll put a link on their site, under certain conditions. Sometimes, like with the AHHA, they won't do links at all, but they will allow people to submit articles on-topic for their audience, and then the article can have a link back to my site. Lucky thing I like to write! My goal is to contact 100 link candidates before Jan 31. Whether they respond to me and post my link or not, I have no control over that. My goal is to contact the 100. I've already noticed more traffic, even after only having a few links posted so far. The site AllOrganicLinks.org is a great site. They have tons of traffic and they've been pulling people in for me already. 6:32:02 PM

Tuesday, January 4, 2005

Coaching I went to see my new coaching client today. They are about 2 hours out of town, and run a bed & breakfast there. It is integrated with a wellness center. They first found out about me at a holistic health fair I sponsored and attended in May of last year. We had an excellent conversation. They had a lot of little "wellness baskets" sitting around with different themes: Woman's Thyme, No-Worries, Detox, etc. I used those themes to explain to them how they might theme their full packages, including their bed and breakfast services and the wellness center services. It was a lot of fun. Our next meeting will be a phone call, because it took me 2 hours each way to drive out there. It looks like another great client. 9:30:10 PM

Monday, January 3, 2005

Signups Are Pretty Slow Signups for the online classes are pretty slow so far. I have one person signed up for each of the Web-based classes and one person for the teleclass. I hope that as I continue the links campaign, write articles for other Websites, do the e-mail newsletter, etc. that we'll get a few more signups. My goal is to have5 in the teleclass, and 10 total for the two Web-based classes. That would be a GREAT start. 2:14:57 PM

Sunday, January 2, 2005

Open Source Software Packages I Love Here is a list of the open source software I love: Moodle - online courseware OpenOffice.org - office suite (like MS-Office) Firefox - Internet browser (like Internet Explorer, without the bugs and security holes) Inkscape - easy-to-use vector graphics (like Adobe Illustrator) The Gimp - full-featured (i.e. harder-to-use) graphics software (like Adobe Illustrator) Povray - 3D graphics (like Maya) OpenFX - 3D animation (like Apple Motion) dotproject - project management software (server-based) phpWebsite - Website content management software (server-based) MySQL - SQL database engine Apache - Web server Thunderbird - e-mail client JBoss - Web application server Linux - the open source operating system that started it all I'm sure I'm missing millions of things. I'll just come back and update this list as I think of them. 4:25:10 PM     Muddled Post For some reason, my last two posts just merged. The previous post "Povray" is mean to end at my "personal message of thanks..." to all the open source developers. 4:09:17 PM     Povray I'm always amazed when I find another high-quality open source software tool. Where does this end? I just stumbled across the Povray software, an incredible 3D graphics package that can do really nice work. Be sure to look at the gallery of 3D graphics work done by people using Povray. Some of it is breathtakingly beautiful. My personal message of thanks goes out to every open source developer who produce this incredible software. We love ya! Developers of OpenOffice.org, the GIMP, Povray, Inkscape, computer systems, the others in holistic health. I just exchanged e-mails with the president of the American Holistic Health Association (www.ahha.org). She said they don't do reciprocal links, but if I write an article they'll post the article (if it's good) and link back from my site from there. I offered to write an article on health insurance, HSAs and holistic health for them. Haven't heard back yet, but I think it will be a 'go.' But if I didn't like to write? I'd be sunk. 6:38:32 PM

© Copyright 2005 Copyleft. Last update: 2/15/05; 2:31:14 PM.