Prior to this year, we had kids at 2 different schools. That wasn’t too bad. But this year with the 12 year old in middle school, I’ve got kids at 3 separate schools – a high school junior where school starts at 7:45 but she has to be on the bus at 6:40 because our transportation department is ridiculous (plus she has to transfer busses at the other high school); a 6th grade middle schooler who starts at 8:15 and the bus arrives at 7:45 to pick him up; and 2 in elementary school who have to be on the bus at 8:50, transfer busses at one of the other elementary schools and finally arrive at school at 9:30, which is a full 10 minutes late.

It was very nice having a quiet house to myself, though! Kinda makes up for the chaos of busses and transfers and bell schedules. Just don’t get me started on making high schoolers be at school so friggin’ early! Seriously. Do not get me started. My mom and I already had this conversation once today.

Oh – plus it had been raining all day. Rain, on the first day of school. Totally sucks.

But you know what’s really, really, really cool?? Remember one of the blogs I told you about in my last “Around the web” post called Advanced Riskology? Well, Tyler, the writer over there, had a giveaway to win one of Chris Guillebeau’s (from another of the blogs I posted in that list) new book “The Art of Non-Conformity – Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want and Change the World” . . . and I WON A COPY! Yahoo! I’m so excited!!

And thank you, again, Tyler! Even though you pulled my name randomly, you still are the one who got a copy of the book and the one who is sending that copy to me. So, thanks a bunch.

That’s all for now. I have to go play the logistical nightmare of transportation to 3 schools again this morning. Oh joy . . .

Until next time .  . . keep blazin’!

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In addition to redesigning the logo and the header in the past week, I’ve added an “Archives” page and the Categories list to the sidebar. Hopefully this will make it easier for you to find old posts. There are almost 600 posts on the blog now and finding things can be difficult. While there is the search at the top of the sidebar, sometimes you just really don’t know what keyword you’re looking for and browsing the archives can be more useful.

So, check out the Archives link up there in the navigation menu as well as the Categories links in the sidebar. Let me know if you find any posts you think are really cool. I’m thinking of putting a list of the top posts in the sidebar and/or on the archives page.

Anything else you think would make things easier to navigate and find here? Please let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas. I’m always open to improvements. This blog is more for you than for me, after all and I want it to be a place you enjoy visiting and sharing.

Post your ideas in the comments! And I’ll be back soon to let you know how the first day of school went.

Until then . . . keep blazin’!

Copyright © 2008 Annie Anderson | Blog. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact annie@anniandersonblog.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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But let me tell you one of the organizational things that does make life a little easier during the school year – weekly menus. I kinda do away with them during the summer when there are few deadlines in our household. During the school year it’s an essential task, though. And since school is starting this week, the menu is returning.

It’s not only for organization’s sake that I use a menu – one of the biggest benefits is a shopping list. And the biggest benefit of a shopping list is that it actually can save money on your grocery bill. This is because you already know exactly what you will need for the week since you’ve planned out your meals. Having that meal plan and grocery list helps you stick to a budget as well. Plus, instead of purchasing things you’re not sure you need in the first place, you cut down on food waste, too, as well as on those impulse buys. Not to mention, meal planning can also help you eat healthier instead of just grabbing those easy, box type or frozen meals.

Anyway, I’ll be spending this last day of summer vacation planning this week’s menu and grocery shopping, getting last minute laundry washed and put away and making sure everybody is ready come Tuesday morning.

I don’t think I’ll be posting my menus unless, of course, you’re seriously interested and even then, I may not. But I do have the menu sheet I use posted here if you’d like to go download it. The menu has plenty of room for writing in each meal of the day plus 2 snacks. It covers one week. I usually plan out a couple of weeks at a time but I go shopping weekly so things stay more fresh.

I think organization is an essential skill. Now I’m not talking about being so over-the-top that your house looks like a museum or something – just organized to the point that your household runs smoothly. It’s simply amazing what a quick little thing like a weekly menu plan can do to help alleviate some of the daily stress.

So, tell me  - what kinds of things do you do to help keep your family organized? And if you’re not very organized, what is one thing you CAN do this week to start becoming more organized? Tell me in the comments (or shoot me an email if you’d like) – I’d love to hear your ideas!

Until next time . . . keep blazin’!

Annie Anderson is a freelance copywriter and graphic designer specializing in the small business and real estate markets. Her tagline “Making your business, my business” means that she’ll take the utmost care when creating words and images for your business – just as if it were her own.

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If design is not your cup of tea, then feel free to skip these kinds of posts. (Please don’t skip the other topics, though, ok?  )

Some of the tools I use

So, first, I generally use a fairly well-known program called Adobe Photoshop CS4 when I create logos and what-not. Sometimes, if I am creating a vector drawing, I will use another program in the Adobe CS4 Suite called Illustrator. If I’m designing an image specifically for the web, I may use yet another program called Fireworks. But I actually like Photoshop most out of the 3. If I’m designing primarily for print, I use a combination of Photoshop and another Adobe program called InDesign that’s kinda like a hybrid between something like Photoshop or Illustrator and Microsoft Word.

Anyway, my second tool is a MacBook Pro laptop, circa 2006. It has 2gb of RAM and a 120gb harddrive running OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard). The machine is powered by a 2.33ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It’s one of the first MacBook’s with the Intel processor and I’ve been very happy with it, especially since it still runs just as fast as the day I bought it. I also have a 750gb external harddrive where I store the majority of my files as well as a Wacom tablet that I use when drawing something.

Why I chose these elements for the logo

My new personal logo is quite simple in terms of elements. It consists of 2 images (one a vector drawing of a coffee cup and the other is the phoenix).

When I design something, I like it to have some personal significance. And I chose a coffee cup because, if you know me, you know that I never go anywhere without my coffee! In fact, I’ve had the same mug since I was a junior in high school. It’s a special mug that was given to me by a very good friend at the time and I still use it every day. Although my actual mug doesn’t look like the vector coffee mug, it signifies my love of coffee and that special cup.

The phoenix is an element I have loved since I first learned of it while studying mythology in junior high. I think my love of drawing fantasy and mythological characters was born out of that study and is one of the things that solidified my choice of becoming a designer in the first place. I think the phoenix is particularly special because it signifies a variety of things I’m currently experiencing – change, rebuilding, continually moving forward no matter what. And it just reminds me that everything is happening in perfect order.

Putting it together

I actually started the phoenix quite some time ago and it’s one of those designs I keep coming back to again and again trying to get it just right. I played with a lot of color variations before I finally settled on the pink and blue gradient.  One reason for the pink is that, you may remember, that’s the color I chose way back in January as my part of my theme for 2010. The blue is simply because it looks good with the pink! No, really – blue is one of my favorite colors and it just does go good with the pink – but it’s also because it makes it kinda look like the phoenix is coming out of a fire, which is what the whole story of the phoenix is all about – renewal.

When I first decided I was ready to change my logo, I knew I wanted it to be simple. The old logo is quite simple as well – just my name, the coffee mug and a dark red background with rounded corners. I also knew I wanted to incorporate the phoenix and of course, I *had* too keep my coffee cup in there! I use that coffee cup everywhere online and it’s one of my “signature” styles. So, there was no way I was going to leave it out. It’s even at the bottom of each page of my design website.

And I wanted to keep my name in there as well – it’s a personal logo, after all. But I wanted to use a more creative font. The font I chose for my name is called Phonetica and I like how simple and yet creative it looks without being too frilly or unreadable. The font for the tagline is simply the very basic, standard serif font, Georgia Italic.

I played around with the flow of each piece in a variety of ways before I finally curved my name around the phoenix’s wing. Once I did that, I knew I’d found the right style. It was then a matter of playing with the placement of the cup and the tagline. I found the cup went perfectly just below my name and almost made it look as though the name was the steam from the hot coffee! After moving the tagline around nearly 50 times, I finally left it in a block of text and snuggled up against the other side of the phoenix. It took a bit of adjusting to get to a good size but I am happy with the way it turned out.

Changes to the initial designs

In the original mockups I posted the other day, I used a black circle as the background but when I began playing with the new header design, I found the black background for the logo just didn’t work very nicely. I didn’t like the way it looked in the header. As you can see, I ended up removing that element and going with a transparent background. It looks white here on the blog since the page is white. You’ll also notice in the final header design that you see the header background behind it. That’s what transparent means in design – it means that element is effectively see through.

Final thoughts

The base color of the phoenix is actually a dark red with the gradient colors applied over top. (In fact, that’s why the blue middle looks more on the purple side of the color spectrum rather than totally blue.) The reason for the main color underneath to be dark red is that there way be times I want a more simplified version and this way, it’s still in keeping with the overall look of the blog and my other places around the web. I can change it fairly quickly and without causing a lot of hassle as you can see in the new header above. I enlarged the tagline to make it more prominent but the core of the logo is still intact.

I hope you enjoyed learning about how I came up with the logo and how I put it together. While it’s certainly not very in depth, I do hope it gave you some insight into the basics of creating graphics. We’ll talk more about design again soon. Perhaps next time, I’ll tell you all about creating the header. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts! I’d love to hear them, as always.

Until then . . . keep blazin’!

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Tell me what you think –

I also have redone the header. I created so many variations trying to find just the right combination of the old and the new that I lost count. LOL But the new one is live on the site. Go check it out if you’re reading this in a reader. And let me know what you think of it as well.

I hope you’re enjoying your weekend and if this was your kids’ first week back to school, I hope it all went well. For those of you starting next week like us, good luck!

Until next time . . . keep blazin’!

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I know that many times the situations I’ve gone through are not just for my own learning process – they are so I may become a testimony for someone else who may be walking in those shoes and need help to get through it.

And last night as I was reading, I came across a mantra I’ve heard time and again that I want to share with you -

You are not defined by your circumstances.

That really struck me this time because I had been thinking earlier in the day about how much has changed for many people over the past few years as our economy has gone through some radical changes. I was thinking that just because things might be tight right now, that doesn’t mean you’re any less of a person, any less valuable, less smart or whatever. It doesn’t diminish your abilities.

But I’ve seen so many people who clearly believe they are their circumstances. They throw themselves pity parties on a regular basis, always blaming some external source for their discomfort, and in the process, they just keep repeating the same mistakes.

Well, guess what?

You are not defined by your circumstances!

Your situation does not define who you are. YOU define who you are. Your gifts and talents define who are you. Your attitude defines who you are. And let me tell you – if you have a crappy attitude, you’ll have a crappy existence. Now I don’t about you, but I don’t want to live my life every day as though I’m a victim.

Yeah, maybe your circumstances have hurt you. Maybe someone else has hurt you. Maybe you hurt yourself. Whatever the case may be, you have the power to change it. Just like you had the power to create it in the first place.

Each and every one of us has value. Each and every one of us have the power to live life through one of 2 ways – as a victim who can’t  move beyond the victimhood or as an empowered person defined by love.

The choice is yours.

As for me, I choose to live as empowered person defined by love because when the victimhood falls away, when I learn from my mistakes, when I remove the doubt and jump through the fear, I know I can be, do or have anything my heart desires.

“Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.” ~Wayne Dyer

And that is a grand way to blaze new trails!

Until next time . . . keep blazin’!

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So, if you came here sometime between about 8pm (pacific time) last night and 10 this morning, you might have seen a blank hosting access page or gotten nothing. I apologize. I am trying to change my primary domain to another account and things got kinda wonky. No worries, though – everything on AA|Blog is back to normal! (Though, if you do find anything out of sorts, please let me know.)

We’re spending the next few days getting last minute stuff finished for school, which starts next Tuesday in our neck of the woods. I think the kids are kinda excited about a new school year but wishing summer wasn’t quite over yet. I know how they feel!

Yesterday was my 12 year old son’s orientation for 6th grade. Well, the actual orientation was Wednesday but as is typical of autistic kids, he doesn’t do crowds very well, mostly due to the noise level and stuff, so the counselor made special arrangements for him to visit the school yesterday when everything would be quiet.

Now, I’ll admit – I had to bribe him to get him to go but I’m happy to report – it went very well! I am so glad for that. He is not a very verbally communicative person – he mostly “talks” through body language – and I was worried that the teachers wouldn’t “get” him. We’ve had serious issues all through elementary school with teachers not understanding his needs and disciplining him for “not listening or answering” when the REAL problem was that the teacher didn’t pay attention to his non-verbal queues.

The cool thing is, by the end of the tour, he was actually talking – in words – to the counselor! That was exciting. All of his classes are in the same corridor so he won’t have to travel too far between classes and even though he’ll have 6 classes plus a special advisory period with the counselor, he will actually only have 3 teachers (plus the counselor). They start the day off with the advisory period which is 20 minutes long and then he’ll have 1st and 2nd with the one teacher, 3rd period with one teacher, lunch and then 4th, 5th and 6th periods with one teacher.

Even he is getting excited about the new school year. After we left the school, he told me he thinks it’s a good school and he thinks he will like it a lot. He’s never said that before. In fact, for the last 2 years, I’ve practically (and sometimes literally) had to drag him out of bed, to the car, out of the car at school and to his classroom to get him there. It’s been very stressful for both of us. So far, it seems like perhaps this year will be a lot less stressful! (Finally) Yay!

The end result is that bribing a 6th grader with a cheeseburger from Burger King is how you get him to orientation day. That, and taking him to pick out a new lego set. But that was a surprise he got for doing so well and an incentive to get him to go on the first day. Especially after the counselor mentioned to him that they’re starting a new Lego club at school this year. I think he’s excited about that too.

Anyway, enough rambling for today. I’ll be back soon with more interesting posts. I hope those of you in the US have a happy and safe Labor Day weekend!

Until next time . . . keep blazin’!

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But you know what? Fear isn’t a bad thing . . . unless you let it be king and rule your empire.

While fear might be your biggest problem to overcome, it’s not worth letting it stop you. It doesn’t necessarily mean being fearless . . . instead it means, work through the fear and just go for it anyway.

One thing I’ve learned is that if I can just push through the fear and take a leap into the unknown, the net will appear to catch me. When I come out on the other side of that fear, I feel like a champion – like I rule my world. And that’s a good feeling that will help propel me further forward.

Fear doesn’t have to rule you. And neither do other people. You don’t have to lead your life based on other people’s expectations.

Let me tell you something – regret comes not from what we’ve tried, but from what we haven’t. It’s because we tried and gave up instead of trying one more time. When you fall down, get back up and try again.

The bottom line is . . . .

Don’t just deal with life – make life deal with you.

Until next time . . . keep blazin’.

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How on earth is it possible that I have an almost-17-year-old-daughter going into her Junior year of high school already??

And who gave permission for my baby, who just turned 6 a couple weeks ago, to start FIRST GRADE??? Who?

I want to know!

On the other hand . . . Hello September! I thought you’d never get here.

Elementary open house tonight, jr. high orientation tomorrow and school starts in a week! Hooray!

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Let me know what you think! (And which one you like!!)

Version 1 –

Version 2 –

And Version 3 — (which I think I like best)

What you can’t see, is that version 1 and version 3 have borders around the outside just like the pink around version 2, only it’s white so it’s unnoticeable on this white background.

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