The Reasons I Love October...

Here are the top reasons I love October -

- The haunted house we went to in our tiny mountain town last night. Those kids worked so hard - it was awesome.
- Pumpkin-flavored candles
- Fires in the fireplace
- Soft pine needles all over my driveway
- It's cold enough to eat a lot of soup again
- Sweater weather!
- the light is all golden

And finally -
The new designer handbag line at Target is being released this Sunday (technically November, I know, but I spent all of October looking forward to it...)

Getting started following my bliss

I got all reinspired when I was in the UK, and am committed to making it work so that I can live there part-time. To do that, I probably need to work for myself. It's not something I want to do just yet, but I do want to start getting things moving so that when the economy improves, and when we can sell our house and move back to PA, and everything gets in alignment, I can get right on the stick and step into this dream. So I'm starting to make things happen.

My big three passions in life are music, the internet and marketing, so I'm trying to figure out how to combine those three things. I'm starting by writing to musicians and finding out what their needs/wants are with their marketing - I really want to put together tools to help them do it themselves guerilla-style rather than just charge $150/hr to manage their web presence for them. So I've started writing to friends, friends of friends, everyone, just to see what people think. I'm committed to having 50 conversations with people before the end of the Introduction Leader's Program (the Landamark program I'm on right now) which is March 19. I think from that I should be able to put together some ideas that I can start working on, and make it happen. Moving slowly and gently, though, and not rushing into this. It's like when I first started dating Jonathan. I'm going to have the rest of my life to work on this project, hopefully - I don't have to rush into it and figure it out right away...

So that's what I'm working on these days. Go me!

Halloween

We're all in the Halloween Spirit here. I'm actually not that much into Halloween, but I love fall, and Halloween comes in the fall, and so through using the transitive proof, I love Halloween. If Valentines Day came in the fall I'd love that just as much. But it doesn't, and so it's Halloween.

Yesterday we carved pumpkins, on display here. Mine is the happy one. J's is the skull and crossbones. We used a stencil kit from Target - I wish we could claim that much skill ourselves. We watched The Nightmare Before Christmas while carving. Today I worked on a new episode of my Renaissance English History Podcast - the history of Halloween. I'm loaded up on the candy corn and am officially ready for the trick-or-treaters!

Was on vacation the past two weeks - back to the grind on Monday. Oh well, it's been nice. Went to the UK and got myself all reinspired about figuring out a way to split my time there. Thinking about the things I love - marketing, the internet, classical music - and how to put them all together. Lots of ideas floating around in my head, and thankfully I have a lovely new Muji notebook from Carnaby Street in which to capture them all.

The first thing I need to do is start talking to musicians, particularly classical musicians, about their needs and how I might be able to fill a gap in the market. I'm envisioning some type of membership based website with an accompanying book or something like that to help musicians market themselves better online, but I'm not sure about how great that need is. So I'm going to start talking to people, seeing what might be possible, what they'd consider paying for, etc. One thing I'm clear about is that I can make this happen. So yay for me.

Then J and I went up to the giant sequoia trees, a place I've been wanting to see since I came to California. It's pretty humbling to stand in front of a tree that is 2200 years old. That tree was already big when Jesus walked the earth. Crazy.