Category: Ruminations and Crackpot Theories

Observations on life in general.

Self-Help Review: Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do

Why Good Girls Don‘t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do by Kate White is probably the best self-help book I have ever read. And re-read. And studied. Analyzed. Used to get a raise.

It’s an older title–1996. Someone in my local RWA chapter gave a presentation on the book, and I was fascinated. At the time, I was still working in local TV and still on my Big Business Career Track. The book is full of sound advice. Years later, I still offer its wisdom to my husband when he’s perplexed by something at his Day Job.

My copy of the book is dog-eared and bulging with sticky notes. The pages are a rainbow of colored highlights because something new struck me each time I read it.

Yes, the book is geared toward “executive” women, so there’s a lot of “delegate it downward”attitude, but there is also a lot about how to hoist yourself out of the crap pile.

I loved this book so much, I bought the author’s next self-help book and was disappointed. It seemed more about how wonderful she is. When she spoke at an RWA PAN session, I purchased the recording, and while I’ve listened to her speech innumerable times, again I was struck by her almost smug attitude. She should have quit while she was ahead.

Still, the nine “secrets” revealed in the Good Girls book are solid advice. Skimming the pages as I write this inspires me to read the book again: “The secret is to stop trying to do everything and start concentrating only on the essential steps that will allow you to achieve your goal. Anything more is a waste of valuable time and energy.”

Amen.

Office Update

I have big plans to renovate my office. Huge plans. The idea came when I saw a rug online. My soul insisted I needed this rug. So I bought it. The rest of the room will transformed around this

The first step involves getting my husband’s two bookcases out of my office. I already know where they are going to go. It’s simply a matter of making the time (and recovering from a knee injury) to unload the overloaded shelves, then moving the furniture. One is going into my son’s former bedroom. That will be the first one moved. The second one is going into the hall where I currently have our printer set up. The printer will move into my office. I’ve measured. This will work.

Paint (I have colors in mind), new blinds, new light fixture, dry-wipe calendars I can reach. A white board. An altar.

I am very excited by this project.

It’s Alarming

Last year I indulged in a new alarm clock. An atomic clock, which means I never have to set it again. The numbers are enormous, making it easy to read without my glasses. It not only shows me the time, but also the temperature and humidity of the room, the day, the date, and the moon phase. It also has a USB port for charging my phone. How could this be a bad thing?

The moon phases are always off a little. I should have realized this before I purchased the clock. The clock runs on a man-made calendar, while the moon phases itself on a (shocking!) lunar calendar. This is not a deal-breaker.

My phone started acting up whenever I plugged it into the clock to charge. Every day at 1:08am, 2:08am, 3:08am, 4:08am, 5:08am, 6:08am, 7:08am my phone vibrates twice. I am a light sleeper. This seriously impacted my sleep.  I checked every alarm, alert, etc. on my phone. I asked my co-workers, most of whom are much more tech savvy than I when it comes to smart phones. Nothing.

After months of frustration I finally figured out why my phone was vibrating at eight past the hour every hour. For some bizarre reason, the clock face goes completely black on the hour in the AM. It comes back on eight minutes later, which causes a power surge in my phone, making it vibrate. That mystery solved.

Now if only I could figure out what’s going on with the eight-minute blackout.

 

Digging in Upstate New York

Digging things up was a minor trend in upstate New York back in the 1800s.

Joseph Smith Jr started it in 1823, when he dug up a buried book written on golden plates near Palmyra, New York. This discovery led to the establishment of the Mormon religion. 

Throughout the summers of my youth, local TV stations ran a Public Service Announcement for the Hill Cumorah Pageant, a reenactment of Smith’s adventures on the hill. Once, at a writing conference, an editor said to me, “Oh, I’m from upstate New York, too, a small town outside of Rochester you’ve probably never heard of. Palmyra.” I responded “Hill Cumorah Pageant.” “That’s the one,” she replied.

Twenty or so years after Joseph Smith did his thing, George Hull and his cousin Stubbs Newell decided to play a hoax on the American public. Hull commissioned some folks in Iowa to create a “petrified giant”, which he then buried on his cousin’s farm in Cardiff, New York.  A year or so later, his cousin commissioned a couple of people to dig a well on the spot where he’d buried the petrified giant.  And thus one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American public came into being: The Cardiff Giant.  PT Barnum, when he couldn’t buy the original, commissioned his own and made a fortune off it.

The Cardiff Giant isn’t nearly as well known as Mormonism–but it does have a niche following, and people tend to co-op the name on a regular basis. There’s a baseball team in Cooperstown, NY (where the real giant currently resides, a folk-rock band out of Indiana, a wrestler, a winery, and a bar in Brooklyn.

Yet the place where he was disinterred barely rates a roadside marker, unlike Hill Cumorah.

I know, because I grew up next door to the farm where the giant was unearthed.