Let's BlogOff

It’s been said that the most powerful sense is the scent. It has been used by retailers to enhance the shopping experience, by perfume-makers to make you feel more attractive and restaurants to enhance a dining experience. Smell even stole the show in the movie Annie when she was saying goodbye to Daddy Warbucks for what she thought was the last time. She pressed her face into his coat and said, “I’m making a memory.”

What smell brings you back to a time and place?

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, February 14th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets. The editors reserve the right to accept or decline any submissions.

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Around the Let’s Blog Off offices, we’ve been reading a lot (and talking a lot) about the Great Depression and the huge body of literature produced during the years after the stock market crash and the beginning of World War II.

Most of us around here had grandparents who lived through those years and we grew up with living reminders of what it’s like to be comfortable and then have that taken away. The generations that lived through those years were marked for life. Some people came out of it stronger and some people were simply broken by it. It’s easy to get nostalgic about past generations but that’s a trap. Life was as hard and disappointment as bitter as it is now.

It got us thinking about intergenerational relationships and how elders influence the generations that succeed them. So our question for this iteration of the Blog Off is this: What stories from the generations that proceeded you are the stories you hold close? What story your grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt or elderly neighbor stands out for you? How do these stories affect your daily life now?

If you want to delve a little deeper, what stories are you leaving the younger people in your life? For all of the technology available today, human culture’s still passed from generation to generation verbally.

So where do you fit into that?

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, January 31st and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets. The editors reserve the right to accept or decline any submissions.

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Maybe I’ve read one too many “letters to my 16-year old self” or perhaps the pangs of regret have been nipping at the heels of my mortality as I feel time rushing by at double-time each year I age, but this struck me as a great theme for a Lets Blog Off when I found myself whispering it into the unresponsive darkness at 3:27 am last Monday.

Yeah, I know. A bit melodramatic. But man, if I could turn back time to 3:26am on Monday…

What would you change if you could turn back time?

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, January 17th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets. The editors reserve the right to accept or decline any submissions.

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Between now and Tuesday, enjoy the earworm this theme has been giving us. And no, we have NOT been blasting this video at ear-shattering decibels throughout the LetsBlogOff offices…. maybe…

It’s a new year. Just like with every year, January brings with it the promise of a new way to go about doing things and a new way to look about life as you know it.

January derives its name from the Roman god Janus. Janus had two faces, one that looked forward and and another that looked backward. It’s difficult to look ahead without assessing the past or at least taking stock of where you are now. That’s the function Janus played –he looked forward and assessed the past at the same time. That was his role in the Roman pantheon, the abilty to look back and ahead concurrently.

He guided over transitions and was the patron god of doorways; be they literal, abstract, sacred or profane. Janus looked over both plantings and harvests and his control of time ruled even Jupiter.

Excuse my segue into classical mythology, but what does Janus hold for you this year? One of the most interesting aspects to Janus is that his influence wasn’t considered to be automatic. Janus required the active participation of everyone he presided over.

Janus is gone these days of course. However his legacy continues in the sense that modern people look forward to a new year with an eye on where they’ve been. Every new year brings with it a new opportunity to change the way things are. What’s going to be different this year from the way things are now as you look forward?

Honestly and without invoking any old and discarded Roman gods, what are you looking for in this new year? How are you going to change life as you know it and make something different happen in the next 12 months?

What accomplishments are you looking forward to this year and what milestones do you expect to pass? How are they going to be different from the accomplishments and milestones you’ve already passed?

Join the rest of the Blog Off gang on Tuesday, January 3rd and weigh in on this topic. Let us know what the new year has in store for you and more importantly, what you have in store for the new year. There’s a difference you know.

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, January 3rd and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets. The editors reserve the right to accept or decline any submissions.

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Life’s full of hidden costs and one of the most common is the one alluded to in our headline. Restaurants in the United States externalize their labor costs and the prices listed on a menu actually cost at least 15% more than they appear. You can rail about this all you want, but at the end of the day the person who brings you your food needs to be compensated for it, and the responsibility for that compensation rests on the shoulders of the restaurant patrons.

Not knowing this and not living up to that obligation is a big no-no, just ask anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant.

It’s not just restaurants of course, when you get a great price on a bicycle, a lot of times that great price hinges on your willingness to put it together. Great prices abound when you’re willing to bag your own groceries at Save A Lot or assemble your own sofa at Ikea.

This is not to say that externalized costs aren’t so much a “gotcha” as they are the true cost of a bargain.

Similarly, expenditures that don’t involve any externalized costs will require you to spend more money and allow you to save your time to do something else. Time equals money, whether its yours or someone else’s. Where people run into trouble is when they expect the cost of a full-service good or service to be the same as a no-service good or service. Clearly, hiring a contractor will cost more than a DIY project.

This topic is about hard costs, not emotional costs or costs of any other kind. Where do you fall on this line of hard costs –internalized versus externalized costs? If you’re a professional do you get thrown into competition with businesses that sell DIY projects? Are you a professional whose services are sold as a value added proposition? How difficult is it for you to show your customers the value of your services?

Finally, do you behave as a consumer the way you expect your customers to? Are you willing to pay for services or do you expect low prices at the same time you expect high levels of service? That $1 bottle of shampoo costs more than you think it does. Or does it?

Now’s your chance to weigh in on an economy in transition. How do we accommodate the Ikeas and the Wal-Marts of the world while at the same time making a living? Where does price stop and value start?

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, December 20th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets. The editors reserve the right to accept or decline any submissions.

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Have you ever seen something and brushed right on by without giving it a second thought, but then later on — maybe even years later — it comes back into your mind? How about something in your your day-to-day routine that suddenly caught your eye and made you stop and think more deeply about it?

“That’s funny,” you may have said to yourself. “I never noticed that before.”

From then on, you’ve never been able to see that thing the same way since. Maybe it affected your relationship with other, your career path or just your general attitude about life. Maybe it did not affect your behavior at all.

This LetsBlogOff theme is about taking a deeper second look at what appears to be an everyday common object or occurrence where something happens that makes you look at it in a different light. It could be an object, person or place. Or something entirely different.

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, December 6th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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We have a new batch of interns at the Let’s Blog Off building and they’re aren’t prepared for what awaits them this week now that Thanksgiving’s here. This is our official holiday and we plan and plot our Thanksgiving preparations every year with the kind of care most people reserve for weddings.

Every day this week, the Let’s Blog Off commissary will turn into a Thanksgiving wonderland as various staffers try to outdo one another with their culinary prowess. After we’ve finished eating, our tradition is to tell stories about Thanksgivings past. Obviously, not a whole lot gets done around here during Thanksgiving week. But we’re food people. When we’re not making it, we’re talking about it.

But that’s OK and frankly, we see Thanksgiving as the ultimate holiday. It’s a day set aside to be grateful, to eat good food and to tell stories. So this year, we decided it might be fun to let our favorite bloggers get in on our office traditions by telling us about some of their own.

So what’s a good Thanksgiving food memory for you? Tell us story about memorable Thanksgivings past or pass along a recipe or two. What’s on your table every year that makes your Thanksgiving yours?

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, November 22nd and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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Did you notice that we are on the tail end of another year? Yeah, it came up rather suddenly on us too and we are looking forward to relaxing a bit during the Holiday Season. If anything, it gives us all an excuse to slow down a bit before we turn the corner on the new year and start sprinting down the track of our life plan again at full speed.

You do have a plan, right? Are you still working on the thing you wanted to be when you were a kid? Or maybe you are already all grown up? Still getting there?

Did you start off with a plan? In short, the question of this Lets Blog Off is: what did you want to be when you grew up?

If you had a plan, we hope that you either achieved it or are well on your way. In any case, tell us about your journey.

Join in next Tuesday, November 8th when bloggers from all over weigh in on what they wanted to be as a kid.

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, November 8th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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I made it back to the Let’s Blog Off offices this morning after a month of roaming around the world. It was good to be back, but it didn’t compare to sleeping in my own bed and being surrounded by my own stuff when I got home at the end of last week.

I love to travel, which is good because I do so much of it. Ordinarily, I never want to come home once I’m gone, particularly if I’m out of the country. However this time was different. I woke up in a hotel room in San Francisco last Thursday and all I wanted was to be home. It was an odd thing. I missed my neighbors and I missed my passing hellos with the mail man and I missed being known.

It got me to thinking about how I see home. What is home really? As a US citizen who’s found himself abroad a lot this year, my travels have shown me that I am an American through and through yet at the same time, being away has made me better at being here. It’s a bit of a paradox but I could never see my home country clearly until I started leaving it so regularly.

So to ask the question again, what is home?

Is home being surrounded by my stuff regardless of my location or is there something more to it? I can convince myself that I belong anywhere but at the end of the day I never really feel like I belong until I’m back in St. Pete, sitting on my sofa and staring into my laptop. The US may be lost politically and Florida can be enraging but at the end of the day, this is the only place I fit so perfectly.

So there’s my take on home in a nutshell. What about you? What makes home home to you? Is it your family? Your mailman? Your neighbors? Your stuff? Where’s home and what makes you feel like you fit?

Join in next Tuesday, October 25th when bloggers from all over weigh in on what’s home.

Publish on your blog anytime on Tuesday, October 25th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (or fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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During one of our endless staff meetings last week, we were discussing new Blog Off topics. One of our interns suggested that we take a big step backward and ask our Blog Off community what they look for when we announce a topic. What motivates someone to participate in a given Blog Off?

Our intern brought up a great point. Every time we come up with a topic, we wait anxiously to see what kind of a response we’ll get. It’s never the same and that novelty is part of what keeps us doing this every other week. But as we head into our second year of existence, we’ve yet to figure out how to select topics that invite a lot of participation. We’re endlessly grateful for the folks who come back every two weeks, don’t get us wrong here. But what can we do to get wider appeal? Are our topics to specific to one industry? Do you like it when we get esoteric, like the topic from a couple of weeks ago, “Thumbtacks.” Or, should we stick to more practical topics?

We could have just run a poll but we thought it might be interesting to throw it out there as a topic instead. So what do you look for in a Blog Off? Good or bad we can handle it. Just let us know what this thing means to you and what motivates you to participate or not.

Sound good? Join us on Tuesday, 11 October and weigh in on what is a Blog Off?

Publish on your blog anytime on Tuesday, October 11 and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (or fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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