I’ve been thinking about picking up a Lensbaby for a little bit now. What I’ve heard is that people either love this glass, or hate it. Personally, I wanted a few more options for creative compositions. So I got myself a Composer today, and ordered some accessories to boot. Here’s my first shot:

Looking forward to breaking this out when I go to Fermilab next week.

When we moved at the beginning of the year, we had decided not to put the girls into daycare for the time being. Marcy was not going to be working and we were looking for ways to keep our spending down. As a result we ended up looking for enrichment activities for Bella and found Curiosity Zone. Parents of young kids know it can be difficult to find good activities for children under the age of 5, so their Little Lab program was exactly what we needed. The night when she goes to her “science class,” as she calls it, has quickly become her favorite day of the week. So much so that we immediately signed her up for the entire year after her first day. She learned about geologists, engineers, astronauts, and other professions during the last session, and this time around it’s backyard science, where they’re learning about backyard animals, weather, and other fun things.

I can’t possibly overstate how proud it makes me feel that Bella loves science so much, and I do everything I can to encourage that. We have color crystal kits and prisms for her to play with at home. While she’s tending more towards her dolls lately, blocks and Tinkertoys and LEGO have always been the favorites. I take her to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center to look at the planes, and her favorite exhibits are the space artifacts. I selfishly don’t want my mother to ever move from the condo she has in Boston because it’s right next to the Boston Children’s Museum. Bella’s imagination and creativity is astounding, and when you combine that with wanting to learn how things work it’s going to take her far.

Partly because of her interest in the space displays at the museum, and partly because I have never been able to see it, we wanted to plan a trip this fall to go see one of the final Space Shuttle launches. Who knows when there will be a replacement program, and there’s something about seeing the Shuttle launch, especially knowing there are people in it, that is more amazing than a rocket launch. The STS-133 (Discovery) launch is now scheduled for November 1st, the day after our planned Walt Disney World trip ends. That, much to my boss’s chagrin, has turned our trip into a 2 week vacation to Florida. We are renting a condo right on the Indian River in Titusville, directly across from the Kennedy Space Center, for the month of November. That way we have somewhere to watch from even if the launch slips by a few days (or a few weeks). Of course, we’ll spend plenty of time at KSC doing tours and seeing all the exhibits as well!

I’m also getting a little treat just for me. Several of the high energy physics labs, including CERN and Fermilab are hosting photowalks for amateur photographers on August 7th. I was able to get into the limited group going to Fermilab (only about 50 people per site are allowed). We’ll get to see one of the accelerator tunnels, the antimatter factory, and a few other sites. I just hope I’ll be able to get some good pictures, since I’m only just picking up the hobby again after a long hiatus. The last time I took any serious pictures was in college.

I would not call myself a black belt with GTD by any stretch of the imagination. After almost a year, I’m just now getting to the point where I am very granular about my actions for computer projects. Where I used to have actions that were essentially “Write all the code for this project”, there are now a dozen actions in a project that are “Add this single function.” Despite that, even when I started up again last summer I had enough written down that I was able to keep track of most of what needed to be done. Especially considering how I was trying to bounce between being a business owner, a homeowner, a father, and a full-time systems engineer, if I didn’t have a single list I would have dropped the ball on everything.

I put off setting up my upper horizons for a while. Actually, until I attended one of David Allen’s excellent Making It All Work seminars. Shame is a powerful motivator, and I spent the train ride into DC doing my weekly review because I knew that I couldn’t face David if I didn’t have that done. That prepared me for setting up my horizons during and immediately after the seminar. At the time, I didn’t think about the horizons that much after I set them up.

It’s surprising to me now that when I sat down to look at the business finances that Friday night in October, how I didn’t think about the horizons directly, but just knew what fit with them. I wanted to be able to spend time with my girls, explore my hobbies, and not spend as much time thinking about work. Dream Dinners was never going to bring in enough money to allow me to quit my job, at least not alone. And the time required was making it such that I had no time for Bella. Not only that, but I was getting short with her far too often. We were pouring every dime we didn’t have into this business, and it wasn’t taking us where we wanted to be. The house was a little less clear, because I know it was a good place to raise the girls. At the same time, we needed to spend so much time on maintenance that there was hardly time for anything else. My daily drive was 90 minutes each way, which meant that when I got home all I wanted to do was go to sleep. And the finances just didn’t add up.

There’s a kind of comfort that comes with making that big a decision and knowing with absolute certainty that you are right. It doesn’t make it easy, but it does mean that there is no second-guessing. The only way to get there is to have a clear map of what is important to you. What your principles are, and a vision of where you want to be down the road in 5 years, 10 years, and beyond.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go review my horizons of focus.

Summer is a particularly tough time for the meal assembly business. Many people take the summer off, and trying to retain customers is difficult. Combine that with the state of the economy and no cash reserves, and that made last summer our first and last. We didn’t actually close our doors under mid-October, but the writing was on the wall. I won’t go into the gritty details, but I will say that we made the decision very quickly, at a point where we could pay our employees, refund or provide food to our customers, and help out some of the other Dream Dinners owners nearby. So we no longer own Dream Dinners in Hagerstown, and that started all of this (unless you count me knocking up the Boss earlier in the year).

Then comes Kaylee Elizabeth. Our second beautiful daughter was born on October 22, and she is as sweet as her sister. I never did think I wanted kids before I met the Boss, but I think being Daddy is the best, and this little Kaylee-bear makes it even better. Life was a little rough for the first few months, as she was colicky and had a bad case of acid reflux. Now she’s cutting her first teeth, working on her first word, and crawling everywhere. She is quite chatty, which is no surprise if you know Bella.

While we were adjusting to life with Kaylee, we were still dealing with the financial implications of closing the business. We had a 10 year lease, a $220k loan, outstanding vendor invoices, and royalties, all of which we had to personally guarantee. This meant that declaring personal bankruptcy was a foregone conclusion. Maybe in the near future I’ll talk about that process a bit, but the wild card here was that we also had over $370k in mortgages on a house that was worth much less. Combine that with a 90 minute commute each way, all the time and money costs of home ownership, and the Boss and I had a very hard decision to make. The bankruptcy gave us a chance to walk away from the house, and we did. We moved back to Virginia, just 8 miles from my office, into a rented townhouse.

Needless to say, this has taken a bit of adjustment. We’ve gone through several rounds of getting rid of stuff that we didn’t need. We still have a garage and a storage unit full of boxes. We miss our big kitchen and yard, but we don’t miss having to take care of a house that was poorly built. Not to mention that it takes me 15 minutes or less to get to and from work. There is just no price I can put on getting back 10 hours a week of my life. Even this close to these hard choices, there is nothing in the world I would trade for 2 hours a day with my girls.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here. There is just so much to talk about, and my head is finally clear enough to do it. Yes, I am still going strong with GTD, and I have that to thank for being able to make most of these decisions and know for sure that I am doing the right thing. Expect to hear more on that soon.

Let’s start with some quick definitions:

Sucrose is what comprises table sugar. It’s naturally occurring (sugar cane or sugar beet), but is typically refined and that is what the white sugar we use so often is. It breaks down to glucose and fructose in a weak acid environment (like the stomach).

Glucose is basically fuel for cells. It can be metabolized for energy by most of your body, including your brain.

Fructose is the other part of sucrose, and can only be metabolized by the liver. Typically, it’s considered a problem as excessive fructose consumption can lead to a host of different problems.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is a commercially produced sweetener that contains fructose and glucose. HFCS 55 is 55% fructose and 45% glucose (basically the same as table sugar), and is mostly used in soft drinks. HFCS 42 is 42% fructose and is used in most other foods. HCFS 90 is 90% fructose, and is pretty much just combined with HFCS 42 to make HFCS 55. Food manufacturers like HFCS because it’s cheaper than sucrose.

So why do food manufacturers even bother with HFCS if it’s so similar to sucrose? A small part of the allure is because it’s a liquid, which means it blends easily. But the big part is that it’s cheaper than sucrose. This is primarily due to tariffs enacted in 1977 that greatly increased the cost of imported sugar. Combine that with government subsidies that make it more lucrative for farmers to grow corn and it’s easy to see why HFCS is so popular in the US. If you look at the EU, they have production caps on HFCS and it only accounts for less than 2% of the sweetener production there.

So why do people hate HFCS so much then? Now we get into rhetoric, politics, and some bad science. Everyone’s got studies. Everyone’s got anecdotal evidence. But what’s the truth? One would normally thing that the folks at HowStuffWorks would have gotten this all right, but they seem to be just about as tilted as everyone else. I deal in facts, so let’s take a look at the major talking points and see where they break down:

There’s a direct correlation between the increased use of HFCS and obesity rates in the US. Repeat after me – correlation does not imply causation. Just because two things happened at the same time, that does not mean that one caused the other. I could just as easily show that the obesity rates map to the use of computers, video games, and the increase of “knowledge work”. If this is going to be the argument, you need a causal relationship. Many think that some of the next points provide it.

There was a study that showed that fructose caused mice to get fat. Yes. That was fructose alone, and it was not HFCS. Not the same thing.

HFCS messes with your body’s natural satiety response. There are two hormones responsible for the satiety response. One is ghrelin, which tells the brain you’re hungry. The other is leptin, which tells the brain that you’re full. Glucose triggers the response (less ghrelin, more leptin), while fructose does not. But HowStuffWorks got this one wrong. HFCS has both glucose and fructose, and there have been several studies, including one by Melanson et. al. (yes, I know that’s a CRA website. You can also find it here) that show that there is no difference in the satiety response between sucrose and HFCS. It’s been metioned that PepsiCo paid for part of that study, but it also hasn’t been disputed in the almost 3 years since it was presented.

Fructose is only metabolized by the liver, and the liver can only take so much before it starts making triglycerides. This is absolutely right. However, HFCS is no different than sucrose in this regard. Sucrose is broken down into glucose and fructose in the stomach and small intestine, and from there it’s absorbed. Fructose makes its way to the liver, and it doesn’t matter where it originally came from.

If HFCS really isn’t that bad for you when compared to sucrose, why are we so fat? The problem here is that people don’t want to hear the hard answers. People want to blame someone or something outside of themselves for all their troubles. It’s the CRA’s fault, because they’re pushing this cheap, refined sweetener on us. If we can just get rid of this, we’ll all be healthy. Won’t someone think of the children???

Honestly, I thought I was going to write the other post. I thought I was going to write about the evils of HFCS. Right up until I did my research and took a critical and unbiased (as much as possible) look at the information available. The answer is just not that simple. But I’ve got a few good ideas. I’ll tell you about them tomorrow.

For those not familiar, Getting Things Done (aka GTD) is a methodology for capturing, defining, organizing, and reviewing every aspect of your life, from where you want to be in 10 years to what you need to pick up at the grocery on the way home.  It’s not tied to a specific tool, and the concepts involved are generally things you already do, just not with enough regularity.  If you want to know more, there are dozens of people out there who can explain GTD better than I can.

This is actually my third time trying to implement GTD. The last two times I lost control of my system and then just stopped trying because I was not doing regular weekly reviews and I was disregarding the “hard edges” of my calendar by trying to plan out when I was going to do things, rather than keeping my calendar to the “must do” things for a particular day and working from my context lists. But both times taught me the joy of clarity. Do you have any idea how amazing it is for someone like myself, who works in computers, to be confronted with a completely empty inbox?

It’s very easy to remember when I started working on GTD this time around, because it was two days before I registered this website. Like the previous times, I took a work day and went to Starbucks instead of the office. For the serious brain dump I needed to do, I have to get out of the office where I can be interrupted, and I can’t be at home where I’m distracted. But once I got everything that was on my mind down into the computer, I decided I wanted to start writing. I quickly came up with the site name and several topics that I wanted to write about. Which, of course, created new projects in my GTD system. A very clear example of how the human brain is made for having ideas, not holding them. Once you relieve it of having to hold onto things, it can get back to what it’s good at.

So why did I just take over a month between posts, if I’m so organized and clear? Life, that’s why. The whole reason I started up again is because things were getting out of control. I have a full time job, a full time retail business, a house, and a 3 year old. I got myself together, but June and July threw a few curve balls. I felt like I had to let a few things on my list slide while I dealt with whatever the current crisis was. Everything was still in my system, though, so I was able to look at those things and say “not today.” I actually came up with the topic for this post a month ago, but I wasn’t in the right place to write it until now.

OK, so why write it now? I realized this past week that I’ve caught up on many of my stalled projects at work, simply because I had clarified them and had discrete actions available for each. Meetings that I had been putting off scheduling suddenly got on the calendar because I put an action on my list first to write an agenda for them. When I was in a mood to take care of things that I had been ignoring, I was able to because I was adhering to the GTD concepts and I knew what all the actions that were required were.

It doesn’t stop there. I’m picking back up on projects around the house, and around the business as well. It feels so good to check the actions and projects off my list that I want more of that. Clarity is addictive, and I wonder what else is going to flood in to fill the void when my head is clear.

One of my friends, Snipe, wrote an excellent, if slightly crass (you just need to know her) article about the concept of a Social Media Marketer. These are people who are supposed to be experts on social media, and are supposed to coordinate a company’s presence in the online social realms. Too often, they’re also the ones tasked with being the sole representation for the company in this space. I can’t even start to describe how far from reality these companies have strayed. There is no one person in a company with two or more employees who is completely conversant on all aspects of the business, otherwise there would be only one employee. This means there is no one person who can represent your company to all people. So if you’ve created a position of Social Media Marketer, what you’ve done at the very least is set that person up to fail. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve completely destroyed the credibility of your company in the social space.

Years ago, before Twitter and Facebook were even a thought, I read a book that should be required reading for all leadership teams. The Cluetrain Manifesto describes very clearly how the traditional public presentation of a company, through public relations, official spokespeople, and very rules for employees that keep them on a very short leash when talking about anything to do with their work, is an antiquated notion and entirely wrong for the Internet. Even before 140 characters became the new standard for a message, it was obvious that the ability to connect with anyone in the world instantly forced a change in the way companies communicate. People don’t want to talk to corporate entities. They want to talk to other people. They want to know that the person at the other end of the conversation is not just working off a script that has been handed to them. If I have a question about the meaning of something in a document, I want to talk to the author of the document. What I don’t want is to talk to someone who is either trying to give me an answer without the knowledge it requires, or is trying to be a middleman for a conversation with the person who does have the knowledge.

This is not to say that there is no place for corporate communications and public relations. Press releases need to go out, the mainstream media needs definitive information, events need to be arranged, and all of this needs to be done by professionals. This means that there’s certainly a place for an official Twitter stream that is branded, or a Facebook page that is run by the communications department. And there are some excellent people out there who do a wonderful job putting together campaigns that utilize social media or are potentially viral. But that is not social media, even if it uses Twitter. It’s another extension of corporate communications, and you should not expect it to be anything more than that. Social media, by definition, is between people. That means that you have to let your people speak for themselves. If you hamstring them in any way, other than providing very general guidelines about what not to say (like internal financial figures, or confidential project information), you will never have success in social media. People can spot a phony even over email.

It may be surprising to hear this, but most people like, at least in some way, what they do for a living. Sure, there’s always office politics, or the task that nobody really wants to do but everyone knows has to get done. But in general, your employees like their job and like your company. When someone outside asks a question about the company, they want to answer and help people. When someone puts up incorrect information, they want to correct it. Nothing frustrates them more than management that has told them that the only people who may speak about the company are those who have it in their job description. You know what? It’s everyone’s job description to help the company succeed, so let them. Because if you go the other way and hire someone to “handle” social media, you’re going to reinforce that only the official company spokespeople are to be talking about the company. The market will recognize this as well, and you will have done nothing but remind them that your company is nothing but a faceless entity.

Do you want to do more about social media? OK. Hire a coordinator. Hire someone who will encourage employees to get on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and anywhere else they can think of. Find someone who run internal classes about what not to say, and make sure they tell everyone to say as much as they can as long as it’s not confidential. Set up a peer group where your people can quickly check a fact about the company or find the right person to answer something they came across. There’s nothing special about it. Just tell your employees to go out and be the people they already are.

And read a book.

Basically, the ARC program provides loans to viable businesses up to $35,000 to be used for principle and interest payments.  You can use the money to pay other loans (within certain limits, credit card debt, capital leases, notes payable to suppliers, and even personal mortgages or home equity lines if you can show the money was used for your business.  But the best part is that the loans are 100% guaranteed by the SBA, payments are deferred for 12 months, they have no fees, and no interest to the borrower.

Let me repeat that again, because I’m not sure you got it.  It’s a 5 year interest free loan that you don’t have to start paying back for a year.

Now, what’s a viable business?  This is where things get confusing.  The basic hard criteria are that you have to have been in business for 2 years, you have to have been profitable (or had positive cash flow) for at least one of the last 2 years , and you have to have quarterly projections for the next 2 years that show you will have sufficient cash flow to meet your debt service.  Once you’ve got that, they’re going to look at both your business and personal credit and do a calculation (which they’re not sharing).  But that’s not a fixed criteria.  Even if your credit score doesn’t quite match, it just means they’re going to take a harder look at your business numbers.  The loan plan is very flexible in this regard.

Since the loans are 100% guaranteed, banks should be very willing to make loans.  Collateral is not required by the SBA, but your bank might want it anyways.  And there’s a little something in it for the bank, as well, as there is actually interest on ARC loans (to the tune of prime plus 2%), but it’s being paid by the SBA.  So that’s how you, as a borrower, get an interest-free loan.  The bank has some discretion on how the funds will be used and paid, as well.  The guidance from the SBA is that the proceeds must be used in the best interest of the borrower, and not the bank.  So if you have a vehicle loan with the bank, and a high interest credit card balance somewhere else, it’s probably in your best interest for the credit card to be paid off, and the bank has to do that instead of what is in their best interest (which would be to pay off the vehicle loan).  The bank can also either pay out the entire loan up front, or space the payments out over 6 months.  Again, it’s whatever is best for you as the borrower.

There’s a good bit of information on the SBA website about this program, and one of the best things there is the ARC Loan Procedural Guidance document.  This doc may be a little dry, but it’s exactly what the banks will be working from in determining eligibility.  It’s also worth noting that even if you don’t qualify for ARC, there have been other changes to the SBA programs lately that will benefit business owners greatly.  One of the biggest is that the 7(a) loan program has been changed from a 75% guarantee to a 90% guarantee (which means less risk for your lender), and the fees have been reduced.

Dream Dinners is doing well for us.  Since we opened almost eleven months ago, our sales have rapidly trended up.  April was a fantastic month, and we nearly made it to profitable month over month.  Then came May.  We knew that summer was a traditionally slow time for the meal assembly business, and we thought we were ready for it.  And the truth is, compared to other franchise locations across the company, we are still right in line with our trend.  But when you don’t have enough money in the bank to pay all the bills, and you need to start deciding whether you’re going to pay the employees or the suppliers first, it doesn’t really matter what the trend looks like.  One of my few buttons is money.  When it’s tight, I get stressed easily.  I have the tendency to just shut down for a while, and that’s exactly what I did.  Add to that the fact that my day job was giving me a bit of a headache at the same time.

Then I got my head back in the game.  There is no way I am going to give up and walk away merely because we’re having a hard time finding working capital.  While I’m willing to make the decision to stop throwing good money after bad if it ever comes down to that, I know from looking at the financials every day that that is not the problem right now.  As long as the trend holds, the fall is going to completely blow up for us.  We just need to get to the fall.  So we have a problem to solve, but it’s not a show-stopper.

I’ve got a plan ahead of me.  I may have gotten shot down in one phone call today with our current lender (who now has a minimum loan amount of about 8 times what we need), but I immediately followed that up with phone calls to the SBA, another bank, and the local development council.  Tomorrow I’m taking some time to go and talk to people in person, and there’s a meeting tomorrow night about the SBA’s new loan programs.

What they say about success is absolutely true.  It’s 90% perspiration.  Bring it.

My love of food is more about the social aspects than anything else.  Certainly, I love the taste of a delicately prepared dish.  But if I’m not sharing it with at least one other person, it’s hardly worth the time or effort.  My favorite memories of meals are ones that I shared with a group of friends.  Dinner with a group of like-minded geeks at a Brazillian churrascaria.  Exquisite meals at Victoria & Albert’s and Laboratorio del Galileo with another couple we love so dearly.  And that doesn’t even begin to cover holiday meals and family cookouts.  There’s a reason why, when I’m traveling on business, I can most often be found at a burger joint.  If I’m not sharing a meal, I just want something quick, cheap, and reasonably tasty.

There’s really no wondering why The Boss and I chose to open the business that we did.  Dream Dinners is all about getting the family around the table for a meal.  It’s so incredibly important to do, and so often set aside for a quick meal at the drive-through between sports practice, music lessons, grocery shopping, and collapsing on the couch in front of the TV.  There are a ton of studies that show that kids who eat dinner at the table with family communicate more easily, do better in school, have fewer behavioral problems, are less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, and are generally more healthy.  Most people don’t realize that until you tell them, and then it seems like it’s so obvious.  We have to make family dinners a top priority, and schedule around that.

Think back to your childhood.  I bet most of us will remember that dinner time was 5 PM every night.  Everyone sat down together, we ate together, and we talked together.  It seems like we take it for granted now, but it’s such a critical part of growing up.  And now we’ve got two-job families, and we feel guilty that we’re not home to cook dinner.  And when we can manage to get everyone home at the same time, it’s hard to manage more than pizza or a bucket of chicken.  It’s definitely better than nothing, but we’re “not doing our best job,” as my Punkinhead so often says.

I put it to you as a challenge.  Make the time over the next week to get the entire family together for a meal, whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner, at least 4 times.  Set at least 30 minutes aside to sit at the table together, outside of what it takes to prepare the meal.  Turn off the TV.  Talk about whatever comes up: work, school, what’s in the news.  For extra credit, involve at least one other member of your family in preparing the meal.