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How Vegetable Gardening is like Business

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How vegetable gardening is like business Each morning this week, as I’ve surveyed the leaves of my vegetable garden, I’ve noticed a different caterpillar. First it was my baby tomatillo plant. I found the green bulbous body hanging on to the stem of one of the sprouts. I think I shrieked. It was my first encounter and, clearly, this was the culprit who ate holes out of the leaves while we were on vacation. I extracted him onto my garden shears and marched him straight down to the waste bin. I brushed my hands off and thought, “Good riddance. You won’t make a mess out of my plants again!” Then, yesterday afternoon it was my romaine lettuce. A thick green slimy belly weaved his way between my plants.  He looked similar to the tomatillo terrorist but he was even bigger (like 2 inches long)! After researching caterpillars, I believe that he and his friends are some sort of moth caterpillars. A moth had to have found my greenery so pleasant that it felt the need to leave...
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Tuning My Song

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Today, I'm working on the third edition of my newsletter, The Aha Moment. Last month, someone commented that publishing this newsletter takes guts. I wholeheartedly agree. Developing an email newsletter can be a daunting task and I am not immune to the vulnerability that seeps in as soon as I hit the SEND button each month I saw a cartoon the other day that sums it up pretty well. You think you have a good idea, you get inspired, and so you create. You create, and then you share/publish/show your creation to the world. Immediately, self-doubt sets in. You think about how immature, irrelevant, unprofessional, and/or unworthy your creation is compared to the thousands of others out there. Why would anyone find your creation to be of interest? That is the vulnerability I'm talking about. But thankfully, my guts, in the middle of the swarm of butterflies, say, "What's the worst that could happen? If someone unsubscribes it's okay. It's feedback. It means you...
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Fresh eyes

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“Place your forehead here, turn your head, and position your eye over the hole. Push your face gently against the bumper and look for the light to turn green. Now open your eye as wide as you can” Then the doctor’s assistant clicked the Optomap’s camera button and a huge flash of green light crossed across the screen. My retina had just been captured on film. After a few more space age machines puffed air into my eye to measure pressure and tracked my eye as it found a flashing red light, I was taken to a private exam room, where the assistant asked me questions regarding why I was there that day. It was the first time I had had an eye exam in more than a decade. I explained I’ve had an eye twitch for several years and am suspicious one of my eyes is stronger than the other causing strain and possibly the twitch. I can see fine, and I can read but heavy computer use followed by driving is a major strain. I feel squinty all the time. She had me hold an eye occluder over m...
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The bad idea of "that's not a bad idea"

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We have some dog treats that Sadie doesn’t like; she seriously spits them out. Standing in front of the refrigerator, I say to my husband, “should we just throw them away?” “No, we’ll get rid of them little by little by throwing a few over the fence into the neighbors’ yards for their dogs,” Richard says with a sly grin on his face. “That’s not a bad idea” I say. This is not the first time I’ve used that phrase, and I’ve been catching myself using it more frequently with friends and family. Why do I say that’s not a bad idea rather than actually acknowledging a good idea, or dismissing a bad idea? As per my nature, I took to the internet to see if I could find some clarity on the origin or psychology of “that’s not a bad idea” but instead I was barraged by headlines and copy that used the phrase: “Paying Attention to PC Makers is Not a Bad Idea” Motley Fool June 12, 2013 “Tao of Pooh? Doing nothing not a bad idea in this market, says GMO’s Montier” InvestmentNews...
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Summer of the bean

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Last week I declared to my husband that this will be the summer of the bean. I will be inspired by beans. I will eat beans whenever possible, either by cooking them myself or ordering them at restaurants. Richard agreed but couldn't help following it up with a Bean-O joke. So go ahead and crack your jokes, I can handle it. But the fact is that beans are good for us. Or I read it somewhere anyway. Beans are a great source of protein and since my husband mainly only eats fish and soy proteins, I’m looking for something else that I can sink my teeth into on a regular basis when I eat dinner with him. Something nice and earthy with a crunch or a mush. Something that can go in salads, soups, stews, casseroles, or as a standalone dish. Something that can sit for hours in my crock pot. What’s better than a bean? To prepare for this, I beaned up late last week and bought every bean I could find at Safeway, except not the red kidney beans because I read that they are toxic unless p...
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Lucky the Penguin gets his own Tevas.

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TerraCycle: Recycling Profits

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Named the No 1. CEO under thirty by Inc. magazine in 2006 for his innovative approach to fertilizer and recycled goods, in the two years that followed (2007-2009) Tom Szaky went on to write about 30 blogitles for Inc. and a book that surely has more than 30 pages – Revolution in a Bottle . Now it’s 2011 and he’s still under 30 but he’s worth at least 30 times 30 more than he was at the start of 2006. Tom, a Princeton drop-out, is a man on a mission to run a fully sustainable company. While he was still in his dorm room he was dreaming up TerraCycle, one of the fastest growing private companies named by Inc. magazine in 2009. TerraCycle started with an idea, 5th place in the Princeton Business Plan Contest, and a venture capitalist who believed in the organic fertilizer Tom stumbled upon while working on a “better tomato” project (worm poop packaged in used soda bottles). Canadian Home Depot and Wal-Mart were the first bites in the major retailer business but that is all history now...
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