Lights Out for Earth Hour - March 29, 8 pm local time

Earth Hour: What is it?

What if everyone on Earth shut off all non-essential lights for one hour? What would the effect be?

You may remember some startling photos from last year's Earth Hour in Sydney, Australia. This photo was taken by NASA but I was unable to find the original photo. The photo here is from this website. For one hour last year on March 29, 2007, Sydney, Australia turned their lights out.

This year many more locations are joining Earth Hour and here in my household we are joining as well. Want to join in? Just go to the website and sign up. Then, on March 29, 2008 at 8 p.m. local time turn off your lights for one hour. Not sure what to do in the dark? Click here for a list of unplugged ideas.

Silly Peep(s)

Ok...I should have known I would stumble upon something like this. If you like Peeps (tm) they you should check out the Washington Post "Peep Show". Very funny...which one is your favorite? I think "Peeping Peeps" is funny but so is "Say Anything". Here is another contest. I like "Harry Peeper at a quidditch match" (#4).

Mini Mini Retreat

Friday was the day I planned for my mini retreat. I did not get 4 hours in, only 2 and they were far less productive than I'd hoped. I thought, in 4 hours, I will have everything figured out! Then, I only gave it two hours. The interesting thing was, it was a LOT more complicated than I had anticipated. At first, I was thinking that I was going to figure out what I was going to do with my many blogs. Then, after a conversation with B, it seemed worthwhile to think about my career. When I sat down, I was overwhelmed to say the least. What I realized was that both answers to these questions were related to my personal goals. What kind of life do I want to live? Where do I want to spend my time?

Many years ago I dated someone whose extended family created yearly goals. At that time (can I blame it on my youth?) I found the idea laughable. A few years later, I found myself creating my own goals. In the past few years, I stopped creating goals as I was just trying to survive. The exercise on Friday brought it all back. I can't just look at one area of my life separately because they are all connected. For example, spending time on blogging may positively affect my need for writing and creativity but may negatively affect my time with family and friends. (I am not saying it does I am just trying to show how it is all connected).

On Friday, I found myself going back to the basics of recreating personal goals. In the past I have chosen to create a goal or goals in areas such as career, creativity, health, finance and relationships. What did I accomplish on Friday? I worked only on the finance goal as this topic is something that I have been thinking about quite a bit. Creating the rest of the goals will take some serious time and I think that spending 2-3 hours each session seems both doable. My plan is to set aside 2 -3 hours every other week until I have created all the goals. (Also, this means once I am done creating the goals I will have a continuing appointment with myself to work on the goals).

One thing I have to do with the finance goals is prioritize them and set actionable next steps. What is the point of having a goal if you are not going to work toward it? Right? I will keep you posted.

Sources of Inspiration for Writing

I didn't realize this but Leo, who writes Zen Habits also has another blog called Write to Done. On it he posted a nice blog post that included 31 sources of inspiration for writers. Some of them seem obvious but others might surprise you. The one I found most surprising was number 3. Which one did you find most surprising?

Mini Retreat Planned

A few blog posts ago, I mentioned that I really needed to think about the future of this blog. I was telling my "might as well" be my sister about this idea and she immediately thought I was talking about doing a mini retreat to think about my career. Hmm. This was not a bad idea especially considering some of the things that have been going on at work.

I set up time in the next few days for a mini retreat. I will definitely let you know the results.

Last (blog) words

Today I found a blog post that gave a tip for creating a truly compelling blog post. The idea is that you write as if the blog post were your last. Ever. If you could leave your readers with one thing, what would it be? Of course this brought up rather morbid thoughts for me especially after watching a video segment of Oprah where a dying professor is giving his last lecture. (You will need to click on a link to watch the video).

Warning: Don't watch this video in a place where you can't comfortably cry. Like work.

Trash Talk

How is this for a crazy idea? You get someone like Phoenix Suns All-Star guard Steve Nash to work with you on creating an environmentally friendly shoe. Then you take your manufacturing waste and craft it into a high performance basketball shoe and send it on the court. This is what Nike did when they created their "Trash Talk" shoe. Check out the photo closely and you will see that the upper is made from many tiny pieces of scrap leather stitched together. While this isn't exactly closed loop recycling, it does reduce waste overall and turns those scraps into green.

Thanks to M via A for forwarding the story.

P.S. The Suns won the night Nash debuted the "Trash Talk" shoe.

(This was originally posted on my internal blog at work.)

Over achiever

I enjoy blogging and I enjoy several other people's blogs. But I have a problem...and it revolves around being far too willing to say yes to blogging opportunities that come my way. I have this blog plus my accidental blog. I also own two more blogs at work plus occasionally posts for a group blog. (They are all internal to my company so I can't share them with you). All this adds up to a lot of fragmented blogging. I have struggled with finding my voice on this blog and on the others and I think that struggle is intensified by my schizophrenic blogging behavior. Sigh.

My friend Stuart says I am an over achiever (because I had to go and have twins instead of having just one baby at a time) and I think that it is applicable here - with this blogging thing. One of my favorite bloggers don't even stick to one particular topic but has an umbrella that many topics fit under. The name of my blog, Creation Halt, was chosen because it reflected my need to get away from creating more stuff. It also worked when I was doing a lot of decluttering last year to get rid of the stuff I had. But now I don't know what it means to me. It is like I need to go on a mini retreat to figure it out. Hey! That is not such a bad idea...I will plan to do that in the next few weeks.

One thing that W does that I don't do is that he uses some of the same posts inside our company and on his personal blog. Ok, I am seeing an action plan forming right now. Here it is...

1) Plan and execute a mini-retreat (let's say 4 hours) on the future of this blog. On this retreat, I would a) make sure this is what I want to be doing with my time (for me) and b) find something to focus on (for the sake of all of you readers).

2) Share some of my work posts here.

3) Do more simple linking posts once I have figured out where this blog is going and what I want to communicate.

Ok. I feel better now.

As always, thank you to whomever is reading this and thank you for your patience. Now I am going to quickly share a post that I wrote at work.