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For the last few months our primary income has been Kathy’s unemployment checks. Because of red tape issues, we had to file unemployment through California.

As you go through the weeks of getting benefits every so often you reach another weekly limit. For example: When you go from extension 1 to extension 2, California stops your payments for a week or so and then makes up the time. You are told in advance that you will be approved and then the paperwork comes for the missing weeks. Things get tight for a while but even out after you catch back up.

The only effective way to communicate with California unemployment is to use their automated phone system. Sometimes, due to budget issues the phone system is not manned. Other times they simply do not have enough staff to handle the calls. When this happens they put you through about 10 minutes of phone menus then they tell you to call back as they are too busy and hang up.

This February, Kathy’s unemployment changed from the normal California unemployment to the federal extension. This changed the process a little bit but we were told we would be extended for another 22 weeks at least. There was the normal delay and then we got the paperwork for the federal.

This worked basically the same. We filled out the paperwork and got the deposit. We figured we were good for a few more months. One other change occurred at this time. The phone system went to 100% too busy to accept calls.

We kept getting paper work but the money stopped coming. There was no way to contact them. Looking back on it we also noticed they had skipped a couple of weeks back February. As this has gone on we have gotten behind on bills.

Yesterday afternoon, we finally heard from them. Because we live in Arizona and this is not a state that qualifies for the federal extensions, we do not get any more checks. They knew about this in February but did not see the need to tell us till now.

We are going to be selling off most of our collected belongings over the next few days. If you want to know what is for sale, let us know. We will post on this Pinterest board as big things go on sale. Friends fly free… If we have something you want/need, let us know.

Because of this we need to leave Arizona before the end of the month. We hope to come back from time to time. It is time to start over and go back to basics.
Thank you for your love and support.
Bruce and Kathy

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Tomorrow morning, I fly to Seattle for this year’s MVP Summit. For the week, I will be enjoying talking with and connecting to the people I never see. Playing around with things I can’t talk about. Sharing stories. Having a blast. Exhausting myself.

The MVP Summit is sponsored by Microsoft every spring as a way to get the MVPs, the product teams, and the MVP team itself re-connected. This year over 1400 community leaders from around the world will descend on Bellevue and take over campus. Microsoft puts us up at hotels in Bellevue, we pay for the rest of our travel ourselves.

Anyone going goes through the same basic pattern of preparation:

• November: When is registration opening?
• December: What hotel are you staying at? Do you have a roommate yet?
• January: Sessions, sessions, have we got sessions yet?
• February: Who’s going to be there when? Who wants to share an airport ride?

For Bruce and I, this trip may be a scheduled event on every annual calendar, but it doesn’t mean it is stress free. For some reason known only to the monetary gods of the world, checks are always late coming in the second half of February. For some reason, my health always takes a dive during that same period. Stress city. So, Bruce and I take it out on each other. We gripe, we post about each other, we complain.

Then, the brownies happen. I start figuring out who already knows they are getting brownies and who doesn’t know yet. We have the annual fight about how to pack them.

No, I can’t just take a big pan of them in my suitcase. I need to be able to hand them out as I see people. I need to set aside some for my MVP lead, some for the PPT crew, some for the OneNote crew, some for myself, some just for. The image you see here is about half of what I will be bringing. Why? Because I can’t imagine not taking them.

So, Bruce bakes. And as we pack the brownies to go in my suitcase, we come back together. We stop not talking. We admit we will miss each other. I can relax and go. His annual contribution to the event is so much more than a couple of pans of brownies. It is the love and care he sends with them. It is the understanding that: This too will pass. This too we will survive. I always get to this point and find myself torn between “Why can’t we do this without the fights” and “How lucky am I to have someone who understands and supports me in this?”

I fly to Seattle tomorrow. Some of the crew is already there. (55 of them helped out at the local food shelter yesterday at an event called “GeekGive“.) Most of us will fly in tomorrow, and visit with each other at informal events. I want to be at all of them, but have three on my schedule: the Women in Tech Lunch, the Evangelists open house, and the PPT crew Indian dinner. Tuesday and Wednesday will be spent learning fun stuff I can’t share about PowerPoint. Thursday will be spent doing the same thing with OneNote. Evenings will be dinners and parties and conversations. Friday will close with more informal sessions, an outing of some kind, and a flight back to Phoenix.

Come Thursday night when I am fully exhausted and at the last evening’s event, I will start to miss him. I will start saying my MVP goodbyes and start looking back towards Phoenix.

Friday evening as I get on the plane coming home, I will know that another Summit cycle is over. I will be glad to see Bruce’s smiling face at the airport as I leave security.

As we get home, I will merge myself back into the everyday world. I will work as best as I can. I will wait for April to hear if I have been re-awarded and get to go through it all again. And I will know: I am blessed to be an MVP and to have so many people who understand and care.

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As my parents get older, they don’t need things. It gets harder and harder to buy them presents. This year, I wanted my Dad to know that I appreciate what he has done for me and meant to me.

My Dad is an engineer. His dad was one too (even if he didn’t have the degree). My dad spent his life managing projects that helped people – he worked as site manager for a number of the nuclear power plants that used Westinghouse turbines. His dad worked on power plants for Babcock and Wilcox, including the Hoover Dam.

From them, I got a love of science. A love of puns. A love of tinkering. More than a bit of wanderlust. And a love of doing things for others.

Both did major stints as treasurer of local churches. (In fact, my dad still does.) I don’t love numbers the way they do, but I do understand a balanced budget for a non-profit because of them. I understand that a balanced bottom line for organizations isn’t always based on money. Many times it is based on the services done for the money received.

My Dad traveled a lot when I was a kid. Besides the regular (and irregular) moves, he also went places. Twice a year – spring and fall, he went for site managers meetings elsewhere. (As a kid, I didn’t understand why Green Bay wasn’t picked for one of those. Now I do.) Because “fall” was November, that meant he was gone for my birthday more times than not. That’s ok – I got cards from him that I saved for years.

I love to travel. I know that came from the two of them. I know that my wanderlust came from them. I also know that a realization that family wasn’t just blood came from the trips he took and the people we knew because of those trips. Family was what you made of it – the neighbors, the members of the church, the other people he worked with (at plant after plant – so we new them well).

That doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate my blood family. Visits from my paternal grandparents were well anticipated. For one thing, it meant both Dad and Granddad in the same place at the same time.

Because my Dad’s job was pretty intense, my sisters and I looked forward to family vacations. Camping trips to Green Lake for a weekend or a week. Door County for long weekends. Longer trips to Fond Du Lac or Mackinaw Island or Akron. Time where Dad wasn’t in touch with work so we got his attention. Even better – Akron meant visiting the grandparents and learning about his life as a kid.

My Dad loved his tools. Whether it was the garage full of gadgets, hand tools, and power tools or the basement with the train set, it didn’t matter. It kind of boggled my mind that he could make things from nothing and that he was willing to show me how to do so too. My Barbie had some pretty unique furniture because he made some and he showed my sisters and I how to make some too. One of the best gifts I got before going to college was the hammer he had gotten when he went to college. It is still around here and in use.

I think one of the biggest things my Dad taught my sister’s and I is one things he probably regrets the most. He taught us to think for ourselves. To make up our own minds. To look at the world and decide our place in it. That means we don’t always get along. We each live our own lives. We argue and disagree. But behind it all, we have the gifts he has given us.

And in the end, isn’t that what matters?

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As Mother’s Day 2011 winds down here in Phoenix, I find myself doing the usual round of Mom calls. Each call brings with it a set of memories; many quite wonderful. The occasion prompts me to put fingers to keys and share some of those thoughts and memories with you.

Talking with my mom makes me remember the love of words and history she bred into my sisters and I. The early games of Scrabble. The constant new books to read. The trips to learn about local, state, and national history. The online word games we still play all the time. The word of the day I post – that’s also because of her.

Talking with my stepmom reminds me how much she loves my dad. Reminds me how I wish that we were closer to them (in distance and in relationship). She, like my mother and my mother-in-law, hasn’t always had an easy life. Strength – a common thread in the women in my life.

Talking with my mother in law reminds me how lucky I was to meet and marry her son. She raised four boys. Where she found the strength to put up with their antics I will never know. She gave them love and love of learning. She helped them all to love the outdoors. She is the reason my husband cooks. But even more, she is a friend and a listening ear.

There are others in my life who have mothered me. One of my favorites is my best friend’s mom. She is recovering from a stroke right now and we all wish her the strength to keep fighting for progress. She gave the world my best friend, who in turn brought my goddaughter into the world.

Then there are the memories of being a mother on Mother’s Day. Getting a stack of ZIP disks for my first Mother’s Day as a mom. Loving that my son and husband had thought to get me something that would rock my world and would make me think. Other gifts from them through the years have made my day too.

As time went on, I became a mother who didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day. For several years, it hurt too much. Now that we are back in contact with our son, the day didn’t hurt. It was a day of love and laughter. Someday, I will even hear from the son on Mother’s Day again.

For now, I live with the memories. The knowledge that there will be more Mother’s Day surprises to come as my son continues to grow up. The Mother’s Days to come as his son becomes a part of my life.

For I am now a grandmother. Our son has a son. Born near my birthday in 2009, we were told of him last weekend. I look forward to getting to know him and his mother. Of teaching him the things my mothers taught me. And watching him grow to a man I can be proud of.

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I have created a new daily paper.li for WNBA news. Why a #WNBA page? Two reasons. The @PhoenixMercury made it to the Western Conference Finals and I wanted to try out paper.li’s service.

What’s Paper.li?

It is a site that gathers all the stories tweeted with a particular hashtag from around the web. (In this case, the hashtag #WNBA.)  Paper.li automatically goes through the links posted with that hashtag and finds the original stories published in the last 24 hours. It pulls them together in a “Front page” of stories and images. (You can get to the full list of articles and posts mentioned with the #WNBA hashtag from the top of the paper.li page.) Once the stories are pulled together, the page is published and shared daily.

You can set up to get notified by email when the daily issue is available. Since Amplify lets me create posts by email, I have a notification set to be sent daily to my Amplify posting address. This way, when the new issue is available, it gets automatically shared with Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the web.

You can also create paper.li pages from Twitter lists and individual Twitter members and their followers.I plan to create a list one to test that functionality out soon, but don’t know what list to use yet.

I learned about paper.li from several of my friends over at Amplify… There are a couple of people there who have created paper.li pages which re-publish content curated and created on Amplify. I like this use of the site. I also like the flexibility of the entire process.

Creating a paper.li page is straight forward.

Create an account (or log in if you already have one). At the upper right of your page, there is a link to “create a newspaper”. Click that link and complete the source information for your paper.li. If the term or list is already being tracked, you will be taken to that term’s page. If not, you will see a page indicating that the content is being curated. Once the content is pulled together, the new page will be created.

If the item you want to follow has not content, you will be told that and prompted to come back tomorrow. This happened when I tried to create one for OneNote. It seems that people share on OneNote, but don’t hashtag the information. If the page starts to populate, I will start to share it more. (If you want to see the empty page for yourself, you can find it at http://paper.li/tag/onenote#)

My thoughts

So far, the page looks interesting. It seems to be catching the big stories. I don’t think it is catching everything… It didn’t add my story from this weekend, even after it was tweeted. I don’t know if it will catch this one.

The ability to curate content based off of Twitter links is a great idea. I miss the ability to connect and hold a conversation there on the page, but I understand why the company decided to go that way. They see the site as a content consuming site, not a content creation site.

If you have a paper.li you recommend, let me know in the comments.

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Bruce posted our sugar free chocolate sauce recipe over on Mindlessfluff just a bit ago. I shared it via Amplify and had my first ever sharing fail. Ironically the chocolate sauce recipe didn’t autopost from amplify to anywhere else. (To make things even better, the report of it not posting did autopost everywhere I sent it…)

This recipe was developed years ago during one of my bouts of severe hypoglycemia. I always have it, but it gets worse when I am stressed, not watching what I am eating, or the phase of the moon is weird. This great version of VitaminCH was developed when I was having an extended bout of very low blood sugar. The doctors put me on a no sugar diet. Bruce immediately went to work to find a sugar free chocolate sauce that actually tasted good. This recipe is the result.

Sugar Free Chocolate Sauce

Note: This recipe must be done in the order shown.   Read it carefully first. If you skip steps you will get yuck results.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cup Nonfat Dry Milk

5 level tbsp. Cocoa

2/3 cup Water

6 level Tbsp. Nutrasweet

1. Measure Nonfat Dry Milk and Cocoa into a small sauce pan. Mix together dry until blended.
2. Add water.
3. Place over low heat. Stirring constantly, heat to 125 degrees F.
4. Remove from heat. Continue to stir until there is no risk of burnt
   chocolate. At this point, mixture is thin and has a dark brown color
   when stirred. When not mixed, a light brown film will appear.
   Beware: When tasted, the mixture will taste bitter. This is because no
   sweetener can be added while the mixture is warm!
   1. Place mixture in fridge to cool. Mixture should be at least room
      temperature before you continue.
   2. Once cool, add Nutrasweet two tablespoons at a time, stirring in as
      you go. We found 6 tablespoons tasted best, but play around to find
      the sweetness level you like.

Bruce has a non-dairy version of this somewhere that uses non-dairy creamer.  It isn’t quite the same. If he finds it, we will share it as well.

(Now watch… Since I am hand sharing it, we will end up with two copies here on VitaminCH.)

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The regular season for the WNBA is over, as is the first round of the playoffs for the West. Phoenix has beaten San Antonio in two straight. Seattle has beaten LA in two straight. Next up? Phoenix vs. Seattle for the Western Conference championships.

Yes… I know.. The East is still playing too. But which ever team wins the West is most likely to take it. That’s not bragging, that’s just the way it is going this season.

Seattle wrapped up their playoff spot clear back in July. They had first place in the West the whole season. To many, that means they are THE team to beat in the WNBA this year.

I am here to put forth a different view: Phoenix might just take it all. Here’s my thoughts.

Phoenix is rocking it right now. They wiped San Antonio in both games. It wasn’t even close for more than a few moments either game. The Mercury players are rested and healthy. They play well together. They know each other and how to win together.

Phoenix has the highest scoring record in the league. No one else can compete with their shooting percentage. They shoot and run. That is what they are known for. In fact, our average score against Seattle during the regular season was more than 85 points per game. If you look at everyone else in the league, the average score against Seattle was just under 72 points per game. (We scored more than that every time we played them.)

A lot has been made of Phoenix’s slide at the end of the regular season. But in two of those games, Diana didn’t even play. In one of them, neither Diana nor Penny played. Not because of injury. Not because of problems. Because Coach decided to rest them. Seattle hasn’t had that chance.

Phoenix has depth. We have the 6th Woman of the Year on our team… For the second year in a row. We don’t have to play the same players every minute. It doesn’t matter which of the main players are on the floor, there are still too many to guard. Who can the Storm ignore? Diana Taurasi?  Penny Taylor? Tangela Smith? Candice Dupree? Temeka Johnson? DeWanna Bonner? Kara Braxton? Ketia Swanier? Or our three “bench warmers”, Sequoia, Brooke, and Taylor? (“Bench warmers” in name only. They all have skills and can outrun most of the rest of the league.)

Seattle, on the other hand, has starters with skills. But, 5 players don’t make a team that can beat Phoenix 2 straight games. Those five are really good. I don’t question that. I question whether they can keep up with a rested Phoenix team long enough to beat them.

Which brings me to my last point: minutes. Phoenix has kept Seattle on the floor more minutes than any other team in the league this year. Phoenix played Seattle not once, but twice. That included a triple overtime game where both teams scored over 100 points. (By the way, Seattle only scored over 100 points twice all season. Phoenix did it 12 times.)

So, how does Phoenix beat Seattle? Simple. Run. Gun. Rebound. Play to win. Make Seattle keep up. If we play our game, Seattle can’t play theirs.

If Phoenix can beat Seattle, they should be able to beat anyone. I am not saying it is a sure thing. I am saying that it should make for some great basketball and that I believe it is possible for the Mercury to #doitagainin2010!

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