I don't want a woman president!! (Or a black president, or an old white guy president ...)

Driving around today, I had NPR on and a caller in to the Diane Rheem show was talking about her disappointment in the outcome of the Democratic race to date. Turned out she was a Hillary supporter and her comments were - "I really wanted a woman president. I wanted to see that in my lifetime."

Wow. Anyone else have a problem with that comment?

My first thought was - are you not expecting to live four to eight more years? Seriously. People act as though the fact that Hillary didn't get in this time means the end of women's chances to hold the highest office. Even if Obama wins and there might not be a serious chance to take the space for eight more years, it just means someone other than Hillary will be up there. Had you heard of Obama eight years ago? Just because you might not have a name right on the tip of your tongue right now (Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius, Janet Napolitano, Susan Collins, Carly Fiorina to name a few from both parties), doesn't mean someone won't rise up in the next four years to be a viable choice.

But the main thing that got me irked was the whole fact that her preference and desires were caught up in having a woman president. A woman president. Not a good president, not a strong president, not a thoughtful president, but a woman.

Now before you get your knickers in a twist, I'm certainly not saying a woman president couldn't be all those things. But when you get caught up in the label, you might compromise on what's really important for the job. So I don't want a woman president. I don't want a black president. I don't want an old white guy, young white guy, any-demographic-label-guy president.

I want (and will likely not see in my lifetime, sigh) a thoughtful president, one who lives in the same world of gray that I do because he understands there are very few absolute truths in our world. I want a strong president, one who will do what is right for the country above her own political ends. I want a constitutional president, one who understands there are hard boundaries that the government shouldn't cross no matter what anyone says.

The best part of this wishlist is that it is completely separate from the label you put on a person. It could be a woman. It could be a minority. It could be an old white guy. The traits that are truly crucial to leading the country are independent of the parts of a person they can't change - age, race, gender. Basing your vote on these rather than wanting to see a woman or a minority in the White House makes you truly non-sexist, non-racist, non-elitist. Which is how I'd prefer to be labeled.

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What does the choice of Biden do for Sarah Palin's chances?

Thank you, Joe Biden!! Or maybe Obama. Either way, the selection of the Delaware senator as the Democratic VP has caused a firestorm of interest in Sarah Palin again and traffic to my Squidoo lens is going crazy now. (Which means it's time for some updates!)

Actually, the traffic is pretty indicative of what's going on on the web right now in general. Lots of blog posts talking about Palin, some of them more seriously than ever before now that Biden has been officially named and the Republicans have an actual target to shoot at. (See here, here or here for a few from today alone.) She's already on the schedule to speak the same day as keynoter Rudy Guilani, which may or may not mean anything. It could just be the GOP getting as much mileage out of her popularity as possible and showing that they have women too.

Personally, I think it would be awesome to see her on the ticket just because I'd love to have her set up to run for president in 2012. A small part of me thrills to think of a woman in the highest office. (Not that I'll be voting for her. I'm a libertarian. Which means I eat liberty. I just find politics kind of fun. Sometimes.) But I'm still on the fence as to whether I think she'd be McCain's best choice. But given his (limited) selection, he could do a whole lot worse.

So what do we think? Does she have enough overall experience to keep McCain from looking a smidge hypocritical on his slams of Obama? Would she help bring in any Hillary supporters given that her stance on just about everything is the opposite of Clinton's? (Leave comments here or head over to the Sarah Palin lens to vote in the polls there.)

Reflections from one year at Squidoo

Today marks my first anniversary at Squidoo. My green chile lens is one year old today and I've made a whopping $10.41 in that year on it. Whee!! But you know, I had absolutely no clue when I started about the money-making aspects of Squidoo. For me I just saw it as a place to finally do something with all the research I did on various topics. And a place to write again. And have some fun with web design and layout.

But in the past year, I have gotten so much more out of this experience than I ever would have dreamed possible. As I hit the first birthday of my first lens, I started pondering just what I have learned and where I was going to take it from here.

SEO
I think I knew what SEO stood for just because I always ended up being the website guru at work. But that didn't mean I really understood what it meant. In the past year (really more like six months), I've gotten a crash course in keyword research, on-page optimization, developing backlinks, meta tags and all the various elements that help make a website more successful. I learned I have fairly good instincts on how to do some of this, but that making my writing SEO-optimized just goes against my natural style. (Really, who repeats a keyword phrase like Sesame Street birthday that many times?)

Much of my actual learning in this regard has come away from Squidoo, although I was introduced to the concepts I needed to learn about via SquidU. I'm still rather unsystematic about my SEO but have definitely seen results as a result of paying more attention to these particular points.

New HTML and CSS skills
I actually started learning HTML way back in the ancient days of the internet, right before there were WYSWYG editors like HotDog and FrontPage. So I had to learn the hard way by hand coding everything. I remember having a cheat sheet at the time to help me with all the language before it became second nature. This has stood me in good stead over the years (making me the default website person wherever I work), but I have really picked up the skills since joining Squidoo. CSS has particularly been a new one for me, but I'm getting to the point where I can actually read and understand my blog templates enough to make tweaks and changes and not crash everything. Many thanks to Glen and Tim for their fabulous lenses that make things so much easier!

Affiliate marketing
I will admit that before I started on Squidoo, I had no idea just how this worked. In fact, I looked down on links that I could tell were affiliate links. I would purposefully go to the URL and type in the address rather than click on your link so that you wouldn't get credit for anything I did. I know! Where did that come from? I have no clue. But I was quite down on them. So here I am now, a member of five different programs with numerous companies each that I now promote. Ha! So I probably am suffering from bad karma I sowed before when I don't get clicks or sales, right? So what I've learned is that it really doesn't cost you anything in any way to click on someone's affiliate link. You aren't getting a different price, you aren't going to get shafted in anyway. In fact, using the links they provide when you're interested in what they're talking about makes it possible for them to keep sharing with you long term. You're helping to pay their salary by buying through them. I just never understood this before I started doing it myself.

Along with that, I'm learning that while I'm great with the marketing copy for work, writing sales copy is a different beast. I have a tendency to back pedal or leave out the call to action. But as I'm learning about internet marketing, I think I'm getting better at this point now.

New friends
My favorite thing about the past year? I have so many new "friends" from all over now. And I put it in quotes because I've never actually met any of them. We don't chat on the phone. We don't interact on a truly personal level for the most part. But I know if I were to show up in Arkansas, Susan would welcome me over, and Glen has a place for me to stay in Australia. And I know people in England, Seattle, the Phillipines, Florida and Maine now as well. This has been the most amazing thing to me, despite the fact that I've been involved in online communities for more than 10 years. I don't think I've gotten this entrenched into any of them before.

New online places
Thanks to the SEO lessons, I've been introduced to all kinds of new places around the Internet that I might not have visited otherwise. I have a (neglected) Gather account and a (soon to be used) Hubpages account where I can actually do more straight writing work. I started a Facebook page that has helped me connect with high school and college friends and people who can help me restore my Norton. I'm on Twitter (and tweeting up a storm!) and FriendFeed. I've even done an online video profile. None of this would ever have happened (or would have happened much more slowly) if it hadn't been for Squidoo and pushing myself to find new ways to interact with people online. Oh, and I started blogging again! I now have nine of them! Stop me now!

Things I can use for work
One of the big things for me is the ways I've been able to take all this knowledge and use it for work. I am able to have intelligent discussions with my web design people and fend off the three to four calls a week I get from SEO companies. (I scare them because I actually understand keyword research, meta tags and on-page optimization.) I am able to take what I'm learning online and translate it into the copy I write for work and my management of our web pages. I'm able to make wiser choices about how I spend my marketing budget and my time. And I'm able to suggest new ways that we can use the web to do our marketing. (We have a Facebook page for our accounting firm! Wow!) I'm still quite haphazard about how I utilize it, but I'm starting to get my legs under me on this one.

As a side part of that, I also am putting what I've learned to work helping my husband promote both his Track Addict forum and the application he's developing for the iPhone. (Don't worry, you'll hear about it from me when it goes live.) I love that I can be a part of helping him be successful as well.

So that's my year. I've shared many of the milestones on this blog during that time – first lens of the day, charity lens of the month, Giant Squid, 100 lenses. This has been a fabulous creative outlet for me at a time when I had few thanks to most of my crafting and sewing stuff being packed away for the remodel. Thanks to those of you who have been reading along with me since this blog started last November. Where I go from here? Improving my skills, utilizing them in ways off of Squidoo like my husband's ventures and my blogs and hitting my earning goals. I'll do another post after I ponder the future a little more.

(This is officially the longest blog post I have ever written by a factor of four.)

Texas Tuesday: Mosey on down to Sea World

I have always loved animals. My shelves were lined with horse and shark books when I was a kid (that's a different story) and I toyed with the idea of being a vet. Specifically? I wanted to be the vet at Sea World. I realized in high school that this was a very limited field to get into - there were only two Sea Worlds at the time. Kind of a specialized field there.

But, I still love Sea World (and sharks), so I'm thrilled to get to share with you a new lens to the Texas group over at Squidoo. It's a fabulous look at Sea World in San Antonio. If nothing else, the pictures alone will make you want to pack up the truck and head on down. But wait! There's more! Great details on the rides and shows and pretty much everything you ever need to know to make your day there fabulous. So go enjoy a little Shamu love!

Upcoming season for Women's Chorus of Dallas

I just finished putting all the dates on my Google calendar for our upcoming season for The Women's Chorus of Dallas. And I'm pooped now. We have so much going on this year!

It's the 20th anniversary of the chorus, so that of course means a lot of celebration. In fact, we're having a whole weekend of it in October with former singers coming in and a big commemoration concert.

Following closely behind that is our annual Gifts & Glitter fundraiser. We're still going to be doing the silent auction (so let me know if you have something to donate for it), but instead of the live auction, we're having a casino night. Now, I'm just a little sad about this. I didn't register for the auction last year and wish I had as there was some cool stuff like a trip to Tokyo that I wish I had bid on. I just didn't really understand everything that would be available for bidding. Now we won't have that part at all. And I'm not much of a casino girl. But, everyone's excited and convinced that this will be a better fundraising option for us. (And given that we just finished our previous year in the black, we want to keep it up and raise as much money as we can!)

Our spring concert will be in April, which is a nice change. We typically have two concerts, one during spring break and another for Mother's Day. It was always tough learning all the music for each and people inevitably had schedule conflicts. So this should work much better.

The two really big new things for the season though are that we will be singing on a Carnival Cruise in June going out of Galveston and recording a CD! My plans are to go on another mission trip next summer, so the cruise is out, but I'm stoked about the CD. It sounds all glamorous, but I know it's going to be a lot of hard work. Like one never-ending dress rehearsal. :-)

You'll be hearing more from me on this topic as the season progresses, including how you can get tickets!! (Hint, hint!)

Getting giddy about ... mascara?

I remember as a young girl desperately wanting to wear make-up. I read the magazine articles about how to apply eyeshadow to make your eyes look more open or the proper location for your blush. (Irony was that I really a pretty tomboyish girl.) But I really wanted to be old enough to wear the stuff. Now, I'm not that in to it really. In fact, I quit wearing it for several years.

But age is cruel and then there's that whole professional-looking thing. So I've gone back to wearing make-up, at least during the week at work or whenever I get dressed up to go out fancy. And I was still pretty much sticking with some of the classics, including my old favorite, Great Lash mascara from Maybelline. When I started wearing make-up again, it just never occurred to me to even try anything else. It still gets rave reviews; why change?

I had read about Exact Lash from Cover Girl ... well, somewhere. I don't remember. But they had lovely things to say about it, I had a coupon for Cover Girl, I thought maybe I should consider it. So I bought some. And forgot about it. Never even opened up the package. Until recently. It was time to replace my Great Lash (you do toss mascara after three months, right?) and the new tube just would not open. Would not. I staved off panic when I remembered that I had the Exact Lash and that I might as well try it out.

Wow. I can't even begin to say enough good things about this stuff. The brush has lots of really fine bristles that keep your lashes separated even when you put on several coats. I have yet to get out the eyelash comb yet when using this stuff. My lashes actually look long, curled and perfect without a lot of fuss. You just have to try it. It's amazing.

(Bonus? Get a cool deal when you order from drugstore.com through the end of August. That's my favorite place when I can't find things locally. And you wouldn't believe what you can't find in Dallas.)

What's up with Oscar the Grouch these days?

You tell me - what's wrong with this picture. I'll give you a minute.

Tick, tick, tick. Time's up.

Yep. Oscar has a huge smile on his face. What's up with that? Has he changed his last name or something? Is he no longer grouchy?

If you watch the show, then you'll know they have softened Oscar a bit over the years, but he's still a cranky guy. So what's with the big smile on these stickers? I don't get it. Maybe it's trash day?

What's with the desire to whitewash things? Doesn't Oscar provide opportunities to talk about unacceptable behavior and how to deal with it? After all, not everyone around us is constantly sunny. (Thank God. I might have to hurt them.) Next thing you know, they're going to make Eeyore happy. And thus the world will end.

iCarly - getting the look for back-to-school

(UPDATE: Looking for the shirts Carly and Sam wear on iCarly? Start here for some ideas. And go here for iCarly merchandise including shirts with iCarly logos.)

iCarly continues to be good for me over at Squidoo. I mentioned previously about my various iCarly lenses and plans for more. Well, I got the first of those kicked off with good results in terms of traffic (and even one sale!). It's all about how to dress like Carly and Sam and it's a bear so far! I've struggled to find the exact items on the show - outside of Sam's backpack - but have lots of cute things that are in the right style. But the poll shows kids want the exact items, so I'm shopping. A lot. Looking. Wow.

It's actually kind of fun. Just makes me jealous that I can't dress like that all the time. I love the layered t-shirt look Sam usually sports, but I can only pull that off on the weekends. During the winter. It's not really a look for 109-degree days here in Texas.

So check it out. If you're looking for back-to-school, there are a lot of good deals and sales going on at the online shops where I found items. And I have a huge list of new things to add now. And please, let me know if you think of anything I need to add or should look for. I need more eyes helping me!!

Thinking ahead to Halloween with Tinkerbell costumes and Jelly Belly treats

I've never really been that into Halloween. I came of age at the time when the razor-blade in the apple stories were raging and we weren't really allowed to go trick-or-treating. But over at Squidoo, they have a special template they came up with last year just for Halloween-y lenses, so I thought I'd try my hand at a couple this year.

First up was one on Tinkerbell costumes. Discovered that they're actually pretty popular, as are Peter Pan ones. And wow. There were a lot of them to feature. And several different versions of official Disney costumes, too. All the way from baby to adult.

The second one was on some really cute Halloween food ideas using Jelly Belly candies. Did you realize they made candy corn, gummi worms and licorice? Who knew? But there are all kinds of cool ways to decorate everything from cakes to cookies using them. I went a little crazy with my pictures, but they so make you want to make these for your Halloween party!!

Skelanimals shop does a split

Well, I've had my Skelanimals shop going for a while now, but it was just getting too unwieldy. There's a lot of cool Skelanimals stuff out there and it was getting out of control. Not to mention the fact that while the toys and gear stay pretty static, the shirts go in and out of the stores so quickly. (Case in point - the t-shirt I wanted to picture here has sold out. Aargh! Time for another cleaning! And yes, that's whats-her-name from the pink Goth Amazing Race team.)

So enter the new store that has just Skelanimals clothing items in it - t-shirts, hoodies, pants, shoes, socks, wristbands, totes, wallets - you name it!! There are tons of cool items from stores like Hottopic.com.

There are lots of new Skelanimals items coming down the pipe that I'm waiting for to add to the shops - red key caps, purple zipper pulls, a red Jack from ComicCon (I hope!) and more. So keep an eye out for them!

PepperJam Network - Get $10 for signing up!!

So if you're looking for a way to make money online, you've probably considered signing up to be an affiliate with one company or another so you can promote their products and earn a commission. I'm actually working with quite a few (in my efforts to reach that goal of $200 a month) with a variety of products.

The most recent one I've signed up with is Pepperjam Network, an affiliate network created by people who were affiliates themselves at one point. To that end, they've tried to create an affiliate friendly program and so far, so good. I've actually gotten responses to my emails, which is way better than I've gotten with most of the other programs. Good communication is a big seller with me.

So I signed up last month under a friend and got a $10 bonus just for doing so. They've decided to extend the promotion, so I'm passing on the gravy for you to sign up. Just click any of the links here and get signed up with PepperJam.

To get your bonus, you have to become an approved PJN publisher (new, no fair signing up for a second account!) and the rest is then up to you! (As a side note, the money didn't automatically show up in my account. I ended up having to sign up for the PJN referral program to get it, but there's nothing in the material they sent me that says you have to. Let me know if you have a problem after signing up or just contact them directly. They're really pretty good about getting back with you!)

Andy's Airplanes

OK, I'm always on the lookout for cool gifts for kids because, well, I like being aunt of the year every year. So I recently stumbled upon something I think one of my nephews will like, particularly the paper plane of the month thing. It's a cute little show called Andy's Airplanes that's only on DVD. In each episode, Andy travels the globe, meeting new people, experiencing new cultures and learning about a different plane. In the first episode, Andy gets to meet the Blue Angels and learns about the F-15 fighter jet.

I have more info on my lens (of course I made one!) or you can go directly to the show website for more information about the show and the fan club. You can buy the DVD directly (and only) from Andy's Airplanes Official Store, along with other Andy gear.