Truthful Politics

I am going to do a non-political post today and discuss Evernote, a wonderful free (you can upgrade to a premium account) utility to help keep you organized. If you are not familiar with Evernote please check it out. If you are like me and have paper bits all over the place; notes on napkins, business cards, receipts, any and all lists. How about when you browse the internet and find a snippet of something very interesting and want to remember it? or in an email?

Here are two examples of my favorite personal uses for Evernote. My husband and I love to tour our local vineyards and there are quite a few here in the Piedmont region of NC. We limit ourselves to purchasing two bottles of wine at each vineyard. If we find a third or fourth that we love I will take a picture of the wine label and send the label to Evernote and put it in my Wine Notebook. I also take a picture of our wine rating sheet so I can remember which ones we did or did not like. That way if I am in a restaurant that features local wines I can go to Evernote and look up my rating sheet. I do the same for videos that I might see on the shelf somewhere that I think we would be interested in seeing. Then the next time I go to my Netflix account I pull up my Evernote Notebook titled Movies and I have a few I can choose from.

For business uses Evernote is invaluable. I do a lot of research on the Internet, so I created a Research Notebook in Evernote to save my clippings. Not only will Evernote clip what I need but it will save the URL for me. I like to have my receipts sent to me via email, the Apple Store will do this, also anything I purchase online sends the receipt to my email account. I can save these receipts right from my MAC email to Evernote.

Recently there was a wonderful discussion on Chris Brogan's blog about the uses of Evernote and it seemed a few people commented that it would be great if Evernote had a way to save emails from MAC's email client. Here is a way this can be done.

Go to the email you want to save. Go to the upper left corner to File and in the drop down menu click on Print.*

A Print dialogue box will open with a button called PDF on the lower left. Open this box and scroll down to Save PDF to Evernote.

Once you click on this your email will now be in Evernote, a sweet program for organizing all the things you do on the computer or off.

*Click image to make larger

Saturday, September 26, 2009 at May Memorial Library from 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. will be a local author fair. The Friends of Alamance County Public Library is sponsoring this event which will give you the chance to meet local authors, who will be reading from their books and answering questions about writing and publishing your book. You will also have the opportunity to browse and purchase their books.

May Memorial Library is located at 342 South Spring Street, Burlington, NC. For more information regarding this event you may call 336-229-3588,

What is going on with this country lately? We have people wearing guns to political meetings, especially ones where President Obama is in attendance. We have a Senator disrupting our President while he is giving a speech, Kanye grabbing the microphone, from Taylor Swift while she is giving a thank you speech for winning an award, and giving accolades to someone else. Now we have a hanging of a man who survived non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, was a single dad, worked two jobs - one being for the government as a census taker.

Bill Sparkman 51, was found hanging in Daniel Boone National Forest. Mr. Sparkman at the time was working in this rural section of Kentucky taking the census, and whether this is related to what he was doing or just a means to distract for the real reason, the word "fed" was found written on his chest.

There is speculation that the reason might not be political but that Mr. Sparkman happened upon one of many drug areas in the region and saw something that he shouldn't have. If this was the case it really could not have been one of the smartest moves a drug dealer could make, as a census workers is a federal employee and hence the FBI gets involved instead of the local police department.

I am not suggesting one way or the other, I actually have my own ideas but will not mention them here. I am only putting forth common commentary (what few there have been) of various news channels. Only time will tell us what happened and hopefully they catch who did this horrible thing.

Earlier this month I headed to San Diego, Ca., to attend the Creative Freelancer Conference. This was my first conference since my aunt passed away and I made the decision that I was going to get serious about my freelance writing business.

I was not sure what I was getting into but something told me that I was going to benefit immensely. I am glad that I listened to that little voice (something I need more confidence in doing), as not only did I get to meet some wonderful people, I heard awesome people speak, and I learned a lot.

I took away wonderful information from June Walker during her tax seminar. She explained about the myths regarding deduction for a home-based business during her session Money Saving Tax Solutions for Creatives. She was such a wealth of information that I bought her book Self-Employed Tax Solutions, a must read for any freelancer.

The Communicatrix aka Colleen Wainwright, was very knowledgeable and extremely funny. If you aren't following her please check her out, she has wonderful ideas on how to increase your communication skills.

Michelle Goodman, another great speaker, was a wealth of information. She gave a seminar on "Dealing With Nightmare Clients," and a round-table on getting your work out to mass media. Since she is a fellow writer and an author, I definitely had to pick up her book which has the same name as her blog Anti 9-5 Guide, and a wonderful read.

Petrula Vrontikis was hands down the best speaker at the conference. Okay that is opinionated but she really was great. Her session What Will Your Freelance Business Be When It Grows Up? on how to nurture your business and get it going in the right direction was the first session. It motivated not only myself, but many of the participants, and set the tone for a conference that beats all freelance conferences.

There were other wonderful speakers who were chock full of advice, Ilise Benun, Peleg Top, Lee Silber, just to mention a few more. The full list is on the Creative Freelance Conference site in the right hand column.

I stayed in San Diego for another two weeks after the conference visiting family. This conference had me so inspired and fired up that those feelings are still going strong today. So much so, that I created a home office and bought an office TV (to keep up with daily news), I am working every day researching articles along with questions asked in my comments. I am also in the midst of gathering names of publishers, editors and magazines to submit articles to. This conference has me not only motivated but thinking professionally regarding my business.

If you are a freelance designer, writer, fiber artist, photographer please check out CFC and join us next year.

After further research I found out that it was a contract company updating the signs. This means that our tax dollars were not used to pay overtime for a NC employee. It seems that the contract company is under deadline to put up the signs by October 1st.

Sunday September 13, 2009 we were driving down Interstate 40 around the Fayetteville Street exit when my husband happened to notice someone fixing a road sign. He immediately turned to me and said 'look someone working on a Sunday.' I turned to see someone wearing an orange pinny working on a road sign.

I called NC DOT's Communication Division and spoke with Bridget to see what division would be fixing the signs and if they are NC employees or contract employees. That would be the maintenance department and it turns out it could be either a state or contract employee.

If it is a state employee I have a question for our state officials, or better yet, head of maintenance; was there a potential dangerous situation regarding the sign that we needed a worker out there on a Sunday? Was it absolutely necessary that someone was out there on a Sunday? Was that person on NC payroll or do they work for a contract company?

I know NC received $735.5 million in formula funding from the federal government for Highway Improvement and if, only if, this was a NC state employee, do we really need to be wasting this money on Sunday pay?

Check back to see if I can discover if this person was a contract or NC employee.