Home, Mountains, and Family

Home, Mountains, Family.  Those are the things that motivate me, the things that give me purpose, and I’ve been away from them for far too long.  Home is Colorado, and it’s time to go home. 

Anyone who has moved across the country knows that the logistics can be difficult.  Sometimes it seems like a sliding puzzle, where every move must be preceded by a dozen others that set up the play, click, clack, click.  We’re in the process of selling our home, of course, but first we have to replace some carpet (click) and paint several rooms (click).  Then we have to get all of the stuff we rarely use out of the house and into storage (clack), which means cleaning out the attic (click).  Sometimes is seems like half of the stuff we lug around with us never comes out of storage. 

The biggest piece of the puzzle for me right now is finding the right job in Colorado.  Finding a job that lets me use all of my talents seems daunting sometimes, and it’s the main reason I’ve stayed with my current job so long.  I’m a bit of a Web geek.  I love exploring all of the neato Web technologies that are constantly popping up–social networks, Web 2.0, whatever you want to call it.  But I also love the artistic side of my job.  I do lots of graphic design and have a huge portfolio of brochures, programs and catalogs I’ve designed for print, as well as Web design and layout.  I love photography, and I sometimes get to integrate that into my work.  I even like to do voice-over work and have done a bit of podcasting with my husband and for my current employer.

Anyway, I was at a technology conference for nonprofit organizations last week and it occurred to me that I’d been playing around, exploring the online social networks, but I hadn’t really been putting them to work for me.  It’s funny that when you’re nose-to-nose with technology, it can be so easy to lose sight of its purpose.  I love learning about these things, but I don’t always have time to really use them.  I sign up for each one, but then it’s time for work and school and the everlasting list of home-care tasks that make being a grown-up such a delight.  And the thing is that all these technologies are great–huge, in fact–but none of them can do more than leverage the human network.  They don’t create value of themselves, they just make already-valuable things more valuable.  They’re all about the people who use them. 

So, here’s my point – we all know about the 6 degrees of separation. We’re all connected to the right place, the right person, the right job, maybe by one degree, maybe by 6, and that’s what social networking is all about. I’m asking you, the reader, whether you are a friend, or a relative, or a complete stranger who stumbled across this by accident, that if you know someone who might know someone, please forward this and ask they do the same – this is my social networking experience – my leveraging groovy Web technology and the compassion of friends and strangers. To those of you who choose to forward this, I thank you.

I’ll keep you posted on progress and results, just keep dropping by my blog.