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

This is just an amazing story on how relationships and serendipity all play a part in our lives.

On an Oprah show airing today, December 12, 2008 (check your local listings for time and channel), she is with Tom Cruise at his home in Telluride, Colorado. They are in his mudroom when Oprah spies a pair of really cute ladybug shoes; Tom tells her that they are Suri's favorite ladybug shoes. This is where the story begins!

You can click on this image to see a larger version.

Katja Presnal from Skimbaco helped a Cruise family friend put together a gift basket for the Katie, Tom and Suri Cruise's Christmas 2007 celebration at their Colorado home. Inside the basket were many fabulous gifts for Tom, Katie and Suri, which can be seen here at Skimbaco gift items, scroll down the page. Among the guests at the Cruise's that day and witness to the gift opening was none other than Armani. Included among the many gifts were the ladybug shoes Oprah picked up and commented on in the show.

The shoes, known as Little Lady MJs in the ladybug design, and footwear apparel, are the brainchild of Jenny Ford from Monkey-Toes. Jenny lives in Colorado, near the Cruise's, "a hop, skip, and jump from my Casa" as she describes it. Here she lives and plays with her husband and two daughters. Her designs are fun-filled animal-themed footwear that would make even the finickiest of feet happy. Jenny reports that when she thinks of Armani himself, being there, and seeing those shoes as part of the gift basket, it gives her chills.

You can see what Katja's is up to at Skimbaco Lifestyle, can you tell this lady loves to ski? Katja also has another website called Ladybug Landing, a PR, social media, marketing site where her premise is "businesses do not do businesses with business. There is always a person in a company doing business with another person." Jenny Ford also blogs at Monkey-toes Monkey where she uses that forum to talk about business with fellow entrepreneurs.

Besides the serendipity, I also find the ladybug connection interesting.

You can follow these ladies on Twitter, their IDs are KatjaPresnal and Monkeytoesshoes.