Are You Looking For A Remarkable, Loving Pet?

(post by Anna Hadley)

About Rico

Our family got Rico a couple weeks after he was born. We were so excited to finally have a dog in our home! He’s so playful and energetic. He was perfect for the whole family. He never barks (even when he was a puppy) and he never nips at people (even strangers) or anything like that. He’s cuddly, he loves to be petted, and he is well mannered when he takes walks with you.

He’s friendly to all kids and adults, and you’ll be his best bud if you give him a treat.

Why We Need To Find Rico Another Home

We have decided to give Rico to another family because we can no longer take good care of him. Our family is getting smaller since my brothers have moved on to college and don’t live here any more. Rico is such a social dog and we don’t have the time to spend with him. He looks bored, lonely, and sad a lot of the time because he doesn’t get enought interaction with people. He needs to be around more people and/or other dogs.

Now, I am the only child at home and with school, other activities and volleyball practice, we think it’s better to give him to someone who will pay more attention to him.

We will miss him SO much, but we will happy FOR HIM knowing that he is with a family that will love him and spend time playing with him.

Is Your Home The Right Home For Rico?

If you think you may want this wonderful pet, please comment below. We will be notified as soon as you comment. You can leave us your email address and/or phone number and we will contact you. Or, you are welcome to email my dad at (jack at lava7 dot com).

We are located in Orem, Utah.

Note From Anna’s Dad, Jack

We have taken EXCELLENT care of Rico since the day he was born. He has had all of his shots and is regularly groomed and cared for. He is extremely healthy. He sleeps quietly through the night. We keep him indoors at night in a large cage. We are willing to include the cage. During the day, he is used to staying outside—even in the winter. However, when it is really cold we let him come inside his cage in the house off and on throughout the day.

Thanks for helping us find the best home for Rico. If you know somebody else that may be interested, please pass the word along! Fill out the application!

NOW SEVERAL MONTHS INTO THIS LITTLE EXPERIMENT I’m still trying to consistently use Viddy to better journal my life. I don’t record a video every day anymore, but I try to do it at least a few times a week.

If you’d like to know what this is all about, read the first post here on this blog.

These videos have only one objective—to trigger memories of significant things that happened in my life during these months. They aren’t meant to be pretty. They’re meant to be functional.

Here’s the third one:

EVERYDAY I FEEL BLESSED to be able to do what I do for a living—AND to be able to work with all three of my sons AND my son-in-law. They are all highly creative. Each brings a unique set of skills, tools, interests and perspectives to the table. Really, I kinda have the ultimate dream job. My wife, and my two daughters, Anna and Teryn, are also very creative. I just don’t get a chance to work with them each day.

Now, I know this will sound partial—like a bragging grandfather—but my grandkids are equally as creative. Take my 5-year old grandson, Jack...

I think it’s because they have creative parents who nurture their creativity. This morning my son-in-law, Rob, showed me a couple of stop-motion videos that my grandson, Jack, created (with help from his dad). They were shot and edited on an iPhone4 using a $0.99 app called StopMotion. Enjoy:

OVER THE YEARS I’ve tried to take each of my five kids on a number of short, 3-day-2-night, one-on-one mini vacations—usually starting when they are about 10 or 12 years old. At one time I was trying to make it an annual affair for each of them... But that got to be too expensive and difficult to do.

Before the digital camera age, I would typically buy a couple of one-time-use cameras, put one in my pocket and give the other to my son or daughter. When we got home, I would take the two cameras in to have double prints made, then create two albums—one for him or her, and one for me. I treasure each of those little books.

I recently had a business trip scheduled to New Jersey where I was to spend a day in a dental practice teaching their team how to use the new social media marketing tools we had built for them. It looked like a great opportunity to combine a business trip with my first mini vacation with my nearly 12-year old daughter, Anna.

On Tuesday, July 5th we flew from Salt Lake City to Newark, New Jersey and spent the night in a small motel near the dental practice where we spent most of the day on Wednesday. By late afternoon we were on our way into New York City to check into The James Hotel in Soho for three nights.

We spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday kicking around the city. We did a lot of subway riding, a little shopping on Fifth Avenue, and a lot of eating at fun places! Our hotel was fun and hip with a nice view of the city’s hustle & bustle below.

On Thursday night we had great tickets (dead center, 10th row or so) to see Wicked. It was really a lot of fun. We both loved it.

Anna is a big “Cake Boss” fan. On Friday we took a bus out to Hoboken, New Jersey to visit Carlos’ Bakery! As we were approaching the bus stop nearest the bakery it dawned on me that there may be a line to get in. I was relieved to see that the line in front of the bakery was short. As we approached the bakery, I asked someone in line which end of the line was the end. The woman laughed as she said, “This is the SECOND line. You have to stand in the first line to get a ticket to stand in the second line.” She pointed down the street to a line that stretched for blocks...

We stood in line #1 for about 3 hours to get our ticket to stand in line #2! We had fun and visited with some of the others in line. About half way through the wait, somebody said that a TV crew was behind the bakery filming an episode! So, we took turns with another family holding our place in line while the others went star gazing behind the bakery. We had a great time.

Of course there’s so much to do in New York that we’ll have to go again. Love you, Anna. I had a lot of fun.

WHEN YOU WASTE TIME, DO YOU WASTE IT WELL?  When you waste time, do you savor the “downtime, experimentation and joy” (as Seth Godin says) that can result from having done so?

My opinion is that one day we’ll all be held accountable for time wasted poorly.

How do you waste time well?

NOW, I AM A FEW MONTHS INTO THIS LITTLE EXPERIMENT.  I’m using Viddy in an attempt to better journal my life.

If you’d like to know what this is all about, read the last post below.

Again, these videos have only one objective—to trigger memories of significant things that happened in my life during these months. They aren’t meant to be pretty. They’re meant to be functional.

Here’s the second one:

I AM A COUPLE OF MONTHS INTO AN EXPERIMENT.  I’m using Viddy in an attempt to better journal my life.

It’s nearly impossible lately for me to find time to write in a journal. Even quick blog posts have been few and far between. So, here’s what I am trying to do...

Every day or two I just pull my phone out of my pocket and capture a 15-second Viddy. My self-imposed rules? No retakes. No editing. No fretting about quality or art direction. In fact, Viddy knocks down the resolution for quick upload and storage. With one touch on my phone I can upload the 15-second video to YouTube for archiving.

These videos have one objective—to trigger a memory of something significant that happened that day. They aren’t meant to be pretty. They’re meant to be functional.

Every month or so I’m planning to drag the next batch of 15-second clips into iMovie and export them as one video. The total amounts to about seven minutes a month. That means over one year I will have created about 1.5 hours of video (in 15-second snippets) that visually captures my year. At that point (or someday in the future), I may add an audio track to the video to narrate and add detail.

Here’s the first one. I’m about ready to do the second one. Good idea? Techy goofy? Both?

MY SON, BLAKE, ACTUALLY GETS ALL THE CREDIT. Earlier this week he found 1000memories.com. I set up a page for my mom and invited family members and friends to join and share. After talking about it on Facebook, there were several other friends who found the service and loved it. Word of mouth advertising works.

If you knew my mom, please contribute. And if you didn’t know her, you may just enjoy the page.

MY CHILDHOOD FRIEND, RICH, AND I BUILT OUR FIRST photographic darkroom when we were both about nine years of age in Sherman Oaks, California. We bought some heavy visqueen plastic sheeting, found some 2x4s, nails, a hammer, and a heavy duty staple gun. The outside back wall of Rich’s garage served as the “stable” wall, and the rest was a sort of “lean-to” structure that often fell down when there was a breeze. The darkroom floor was the back lawn. It was about 10 feet square and worked a lot better at night than it did during the day.

We borrowed Bryce’s enlarger, easel, and safelight. Bryce was about 12 years old and had a lot of “experience”. He was cool—showing us 8x10 black and white glossies of spider webs and stuff that he had shot and printed. Rich’s dad had a long orange extension cord that we strung from Rich’s bedroom window out through the back yard.

Golly, we had fun.

From the age of nine until my mid thirties I’m certain I shot tens of thousands of frames of black and white film. I developed all of the film myself and made contact sheets in my various darkrooms. I also printed hundreds and hundreds of black and white prints. Sometimes, I would use tints and washes to color or antique them.

I also used the same camera all of those years. A basic Pentax Spotmatic. The only bell and whistle it had was an internal light meter. Nothing else was “auto”. In many ways, that camera was my closest friend as I grew up.

At some point in my thirties, life got harder and busier. I shot less film. My eyesight wasn’t as good either, making it harder for me to see through the viewfinder of my Pentax to focus each shot. I pretty much stopped using my camera. For the following 20 years there was a photographic hodgepodge of stuff—mostly drugstore prints from one-time-use cameras that I didn’t have to focus.

Yesterday I had a few hours to kill walking around downtown Philadelphia—iPhone in hand. With help from a couple of easy-to-use apps, my iPhone is not only a decent camera, but it’s also a darkroom, art studio, archive, and publishing/sharing platform.

In a very short time I took a few dozen shots, then developed, cropped, uploaded, and shared them online—all from my phone (images above).

The process wasn’t better, just different.

But the best part about it was, at least for a couple of hours yesterday, I felt like I was nine years old again—sweating out prints in my visqueen darkroom.

STUDENTS IN MY CLASSES AT BYU KNOW that I’m a big Seth Godin fan. If you don’t subscribe to his blog, you should—even if you’re not into advertising and marketing.

I’ve pasted yesterday’s post from Seth Godin below. I’m committing my students to go through BYU kindly prompting and encouraging every professor they meet to help them make their university experience relevant and powerful. I’ve told them to push me too. I don’t mind.

Pushing Back On Mediocre Professors (by Seth Godin)

College costs a fortune. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.

When a professor assigns you to send a blogger a list of vague and inane interview questions ("1. How did you get started in this field? 2. What type of training (education) does this field require? 3. What do you like best about your job? 4. what do you like least about your job?") I think you have an obligation to say, “Sir, I’m going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way...”

When a professor spends hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook, I think you have an obligation to repeat the part about the debt and say, “Perhaps you could assign this as homework and we could have an actual conversation in class...”

When you discover that one class after another has so many people in a giant room watching a tenured professor far far in the distance, perhaps you could mention the debt part to the dean and ask if the class could be on video so you could spend your money on interactions that actually change your life.

The vast majority of email I get from college students is filled with disgust, disdain and frustration at how backwards the system is. Professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field. Professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. And most of all, about professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt.

“This is costing me a fortune, prof! Push us! Push yourself!”