Jan 4

Resolutions—But Not Really

Pretty much everyone either makes some New Year’s Resolutions or has a particular stance as to why they do not. I thought that I would write some and post them in my blog, but I’ve found that it’s been more helpful to handwrite them so that I can figure out what I’m actually resolving to do.

While 2012 was a good year, it was rough in many ways. By the end of the year, I was completely drained. I’m still suffering the residual effects of stretching myself too thin combined with a nice case of the SADs. I am always tired. It would be hard for me to commit to some “go to the gym” resolution, and I wouldn’t want to be at a gym with a bunch of other people who made that resolution because people, ew. In 2013 I want to avoid getting to this point, and hopefully be able to start 2014 off in a much better place.

Debbie Downer, much?

My New Year’s Resolutions in my journal read like a manifesto. In one sitting, I wrote five pages. It’s not enough to simply have a big over-arching goal like “eat healthier.” That’s not attainable. It’s too general and too easy to talk myself out of it. That can serve as a header and then subheadings will be things like “cut back on then cut out Taco Bell.” This will be the year that I say goodbye to the Volcano Burrito if I obey my own rules. These smaller goals will help me get there—miniature to-do lists with timelines. If I feel like I need some accountability, maybe I will share them.

The last time I set small goals, I did pretty well. I was also unemployed and could dedicate a lot more time to bettering myself. Perhaps one of my headings for 2013 should be to focus on finding that work/life balance. Blog more. Write more. Read more. Etc.

But I’d rather take longer than a few days to think about changes and make plans for change then come up with a list of things to set myself up for failure.

Dec 31

The Year in Review

This is the first time since I graduated college that I’ve had the same full-time job for an entire year.

Should I feel shame? Growing up, I expected to be in a much different place by the time I turned 28. But after college, things changed. Plans were made and fell apart multiple times. But without all the bad, I would have never made it to the good.

I’ve been unemployed, underemployed and a substitute teacher. I went back to school and I know I could be a great English teacher if I hadn’t found my gig at my alma mater. Working at WAC makes me happy, though. Even if it can be incredibly frustrating at times, and even if I pour too much of myself into it, I like what I’m doing and the doors it has opened for me.

Through my job at WAC, I’ve had amazing opportunities to meet new people and learn new things. I’ve traveled to Vermont and Chicago. I’ve been heavily involved in a huge project. I’ve learned a lot about myself.

In addition to working at the same job, I’ve lived with Dan for over a year now, too. Sometimes it’s difficult to be confined to such a small space—especially as only children who brought a bunch of extra stuff. I’m pretty impressed that we haven’t killed each other.

We managed to do some fun things this year, including a week at the beach with my cousins and mom and a few days at our favorite spot in Cambridge a few weeks ago (maybe I will actually post about the fun we had there today or tomorrow). I’m glad we had the opportunity to do those things, and we may do the beach again this coming year.

Overall, 2012 wasn’t terrible. There are parts that could have been better, but it was a rebuilding year—a year to grow and learn. I foresee some changes coming in 2013, and life has the potential to improve greatly.

A Resolutions post is coming soon…

Nov 29

Easy Mac: Pinterest Style

I had pinned this recipe for mug o’ mac awhile back, knowing eventually I would crave Mac & Cheese and not want to dirty a pot to make the box stuff. Because my appetite is much greater than her daughter’s (and because I’d only eaten lunch and got home to Maryland around 9 p.m.), I doubled the recipe and used fridge leftovers around 9:30 to make this awesome dinner.

This delightful bowl cooked up in no time and really hit the spot.

Ingredients
2/3 cup whole wheat elbow macaroni
1 cup water
2 tbsp skim milk
1/3 cup shredded cheese
dash of Frank’s hot sauce

Combine the macaroni and water and microwave until the water is all soaked up, stirring every 2 minutes. This took about 6 minutes in my microwave, which could fry your face… So, it’s going to depend on your radioactive strength. I added the cheese and a bit of milk and set the microwave for a minute—I think it took about 30-45 seconds before it started sizzling. It took a bit of stirring to make it look that wonderful. And I added hot sauce, because it makes everything better.

Enjoy!

Nov 18

Dinner: Jazzing up Leftover Ingredients

a collage showing dinner in progress

I don’t generally blog about food, because I don’t do a ton of exciting stuff. I pin a lot of recipes on Pinterest, but most of them turn out blah. Tonight, however, my jazzing up of leftovers made for some colorful pictures… So I thought I’d document it here instead of just on Instagram.

Last night I was on my own and I had the overwhelming desire for pizza bagels. This required I open some sauce, and I chose a can of Hunt’s garlic & herb that I’d purchased on sale. I loved this sauce when I was younger, but Dan is not a fan. So rather than using half a cup and letting the rest get moldy in the fridge, I had to figure out a way to get Dan to eat it.

How did I accomplish this near-impossible task? Well, my first compromise was buying linguine, which he prefers to spaghetti. It actually worked well—very hearty. Then I added a bunch of fresh goodness to the sauce and made a nice meat sauce that will be great as leftovers this week. Noms!

Continue reading »

Jul 24

CASE in Burlington

I was lucky enough to spend 5 days last week in Burlington, VT for a CASE conference in marketing and communication. This was my first overnight conference experience since I started working in higher ed and it was… a lot. A lot of fun, a lot of information, a lot to think about. If I could draw an Alot made out of inspiration, I would—but inspiration is intangible, much like the product that we are tasked with marketing in this business.

While I’d love to cover the plethora of information I jotted in my notes with a single blog entry, I’m just going to hit the highlights here.

Ask Why.

You cannot solve a nonexistent problem. To understand fully what is required of you when someone says, “Make me a Facebook” or “create a new print piece for incoming students,” it is necessary to ask him why. Why do you need a microsite? Why do you need this mailer? Who is your audience? It may not always be the easiest thing to determine all the details before diving into a project, but it will make your work easier—and probably improve the quality.

Also, never accept “everyone” as answer to “who is your audience?”

It’s Okay To Stay off that Bandwagon

Social media, aka a large part of my job, is full of shiny objects. It’s okay to sit on the sidelines as you determine whether a social medium is worth your time—especially if yours is a small shop. Being “fashionably late” is acceptable for trends like Pinterest. Why invest time if you’re not sure your audience will be there?

It is advisable to get everyone on the same page. We’re starting to do this through the Social Media Users Group on campus, which I hope will continue. Social media users need to know the brand and live the brand, especially if the voice of the medium is institutional.

Good Service is Important in Higher Education (Just like Disney!)

In education, we don’t sell a tangible product. Tuition dollars buy a promise that is revealed over time. The intangible education itself has evolved, too. It’s no longer one-size-fits-all but rather a personalized experience tailored to students’ interests and goals. How do we, as an institution, maintain the trust in the promise?

I really enjoyed Susan Mesheau’s comparison to the customer service model of Disney. Why can’t an educational institution follow the Disney ideal that highly values the customer’s experience? Our customers—students, parents, alumni, donors, etc.—are the heart of our institution. We must be able to make their time with us something they enjoy and value.

Vermont’s Weather Isn’t Always Perfect

 

While the humidity for the first few days of the conference was comparable to Maryland weather, I enjoyed my days spent in the air conditioned Davis Center. As I mentioned, these are just a few “aha” moments from many pages of notes, and they are possibly most applicable to my current position. The conference also helped give me an overview of the bigger picture, and I’m hoping that helps me in my role as well.

In between meetings this week, I’m going to compare the notes I took with the goals I set before I left for vacation and this conference. I’m hoping to create some serious goals and steps to attain them as we were advised to do in one of our Web sessions. Just a to-do list won’t be enough; there needs to be a plan!

Jul 4

Independence Day, or What My Brain Does with a Midweek Day Off

So I wanted to write about something, and I thought that perhaps just ranting about how much I dislike Flickr would be a poor choice. Therefore, you’re getting some reflection on my life with Higher Ed Social Media so far, and some hopes and goals I have. Maybe I will actually accomplish some of these things if I put it out there for the world…

I am slowly carving out a voice for my College in the social media world. Since I started last fall, I’ve moved from away from posting just press releases to interacting with students and posting about the social aspects of college life. However, I feel like there’s still more I can do to make our social media more engaging.

Attending conferences is one of my favorite perks of this position, and I always come home with five million ideas that I have trouble implementing. Often I feel like people want me to have my paws in every single social medium, but I know that what’s best for our campus would be to connect well with students where they’re at. But how can I determine where they’re at?

I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a SurveyMonkey thing, and maybe I will be able to do that at some point. I just have to prove to others that it is worth the time. In the meantime, I’m catering to the main outlets—Twitter and Facebook—and giving a few folks on Tumblr and Instagram something to look at, mostly for my own benefit (I figured my personal Instagram friends were sick of seeing pictures of campus). Still, I feel some pressure to be on Pinterest and Flickr. But what do I pin for an institution on Pinterest? Especially an institution with a goose dressed in colonial garb for a mascot… And don’t even get me started on Flickr. I just do not like the interface, which is probably Yahoo!’s fault.

On top of maintaining institutional social media, I would love to reign in the explosion of created-then-forgotten Facebooks and Twitters and offer support to the groups who felt the need to try social media. Again, this would probably involve some sort of survey. I also need to help bloggers help themselves, because I know our department doesn’t want to create content for them. We’re moving toward distributed authorship in general with our new CMS, so we are definitely trying to teach departments to fish.

Possibly my greatest goal? Energizing a group of students to help me tackle all things social. We already have a few social media gurus out there, so it’s just a matter of reaching out to them—I hope. I was very inspired after hearing about Etown’s Eteam (not just because it’s Dan’s alma mater), and I would really like to have something similar happening at WAC.

Jun 25

No Vacation from Technology

Cake batter with peanut butter cups, peanut butter with oreo & third trimester (peanut butter, chocolate and bananas).

The ice cream cone in question.

Maybe it’s because part of my job is to be on social media, but I have a hard time putting my iPhone away during vacation. It’s nice to be able to post things on my personal site and participate in something with a hashtag instead of trying to spearhead the hashtag for the incoming freshman class. So this weekend in Rehoboth, I participated in the event we attended via Twitter and Instagram and tried to best my friends’ scores on FourSquare. I also tried to make my younger cousin who was Instagramming from a school trip to England and France jealous with a picture of boardwalk ice cream. It totally worked, but I’m much more jealous of her picture at Stonehenge.

While my boyfriend is sometimes annoyed by the constant attachment to my phone, he understands that it has its benefits. For example, Dogfish Head had some surprise beers at their Analog-A-Go-Go event, and I tweeted back at the announcement to find out where they are. Boom: instant delicious returns! Another huge benefit that we will reap throughout this summer is parking in Rehoboth Beach via Parkmobile.

Beatles Record at Analog-A-Go-Go

I didn’t think to take pictures of the meter, so here’s one from Analog-A-Go-Go

We saw the QR code on our last trip, but it was night time on a dark side street memorial day weekend, so we couldn’t scan it and didn’t have the patience to deal with it. Today we swung in, thinking we would read on the beach for a little bit before coming home (that’s another story for another time—one doesn’t simply sit on the beach when the weather is gorgeous and the water is a nice temperature!). Rather than feeding the meter with quarters, I scanned the QR code and quickly set up an account with his license plate (and credit card).

Normally this wouldn’t merit a blog post on its own, but we got back to our car right as the parking enforcement officer was working her way down the block. She complimented us on entering our license plate correctly, because apparently it is fairly common for people with speciality plates that have small letters at the beginning or end. This particular officer said she tries multiple formats to make sure people didn’t just accidentally mess up and leaves a note on the car (rather than a ticket) if someone does. Other officers aren’t so nice. (Honestly, I probably wouldn’t be nice about it either. How do you not know your license plate number if you’re standing by your car? And specialty plates aren’t that hard.) I tend to be wary of anything with a QR code, but the officer assured me that Parkmobile was quite popular so far, especially on side streets like where we parked, where meters can go up to 12 hours.

Even though we were already gone by the time our meter was up, the service sent me both an email and a text message 15 minutes before the expiration time. I could have easily added more time from wherever I was. Since half the time we are in Rehoboth to hang out at Dogfish Head or play on the boardwalk, this feature makes my lazy self very happy.

I think this technology will definitely benefit us this summer, and from looking on their website, there are other locations where we might use Parkmobile in the future (hello, Richmond!). Plus, it’s an excuse to carry my phone with me…

Jun 22

Ch-ch-changes

So what big changes have inspired me to start over? Even though I’ve been living with Dan for a year and at my current job for over 10 months, it hasn’t felt real. Maybe it was partially due to the fact that I was still doing graduate work at Saint Joseph’s University, or because my job involves monitoring social media for the College, which is essentially what I did when unemployed, only with more purpose. Anyway, it just hasn’t felt real. Then in May, I graduated with a master’s degree and suddenly found myself with free time to read for pleasure and ponder the meaning of life. The latter happened more and more as things at (what I still considered to be) home started changing, too.

For nearly two decades, I’ve called 15 Willow Avenue home. My mom and I moved in there when I was nine. We inherited the house—and all its contents—when my stepfather passed away. We lived there because we couldn’t afford to fix its problems in order to sell it, and because we had no place to go. But then I left, and mom was there alone. Her life has taken its own twists and turns of late, but the biggest and most recent concerns her father/my grandfather. He is sick. The man has been a fighter for years (he’s had so many bypasses his heart is like a beltway), but cancer is so much harder. Mom has seen what cancer and all of its medications can do to a young person, and she worries about what it could do to him. She doesn’t want to be so far away, and her sense of duty lies with family. I don’t doubt that I got my Tully-like qualities from her. Family. Duty. Honor.

The house has to go before she can, and first we have to get rid of all the stuff. Last weekend, we sold a good deal of 15 Willow Avenue’s contents. From the vinyl dating back to the 1920s to my American Girl dolls and Polly Pockets. (Where would I possibly keep these things in our tiny apartment?) The house doesn’t feel emptier, because much of this junk lived in the basement or the eaves, but it is emptier. And it’s one step closer to being sold. How can I refuse to support her in this venture? I understand that she has to go to Oklahoma. I think it is the right thing to do. The selfish side of me, though, objects furiously. Thankfully my logical side triumphs in this round.

The fact that I may soon lack a home base in PA makes me sad. I love going up there to grocery shop and see my friends and cousins. Nothing compares to Dutch Way Farm Market or Horning’s. Having Hersheypark in my back yard was always nice. I guess knowing that Mom (hopefully) will soon be far away is making the fact that I live in a different state now sink in even more. It’s bittersweet, really. And it’s making the change seem even more permanent. There’s nowhere to run to after this.

Jun 20

Starting Over

I figured it was an appropriate time to relaunch this blog. Previous versions of Silverfire have housed everything from high school angst to reflections on my graduate work, but I’m on a new journey now. In fact, I’ve been living this new life for almost a year.