Day 10 - Friday, January 30, 2009 - Like Mentos In Diet Coke

It's been 15 days since my husband has been laid off; our Toyota's catalytic converter needs fixing, (fancy that, with only 237,000 miles on the odometer!); and, as to be expected in this downturn, there are no recruiters calling - not even the young and the restless. So my attention has started to shift to our tiny educational software company and the possibility of actually increasing our sales - maybe even to $50 a week! We've been in business since 1992, selling software matching games in dribs and drabs. (Someone once said that often we tend to "stretch out our work to the time allotted.") Perhaps that has been what I've been doing with our company all these years - merely limping along in the time allotted.

I think it's time to "alot" the business no more time to succeed, we have to do it now! So today I think I've come up with an ingenius (at least semi-plausible) idea of how to make that happen.

It started with listening to Dr. Laura when we were driving to the post office to mail off our one sale of the week. While my politics is 180 degrees left of Dr. Laura's "hoo-ahh" army militaristic bent, I do admire her higher-ground approach to relationships. So in between reiterating her "proper care and feeding of husband" philosophy to Jane in New Jersey or somewhere, she reminded her audience to visit her web site. Well, there it was! A recycling of my old entrepreneurial idea that we can customize the games we design to match the content on websites. Dr. Laura needs our Java Applet on her site. I'd submit a prototype to Dr. Laura's people by Monday!

The afternoon wore on, however, and news that President Obama invited a bi-partisan group of legislators to watch Sunday's Super Bowl with him, switched my focus from Dr. Laura to President Obama's staunch supporter, Oprah. Oprah's website would be a much better match for our game - besides like Barack Obama, Oprah is a sister in handedness - the three of us, Barack, Oprah, and me - left-handers all! So after spending the rest of the day getting a feel for Oprah's site and trying to customize our game to match what Oprah's web people might think very useful, I was full of hope once again.

It's a funny thing about hope - it's like mentos dropped into a diet coke. It produces a surprising effects, maybe even as spectacular as the "dancing waters" in this youtube video. So here's to hope - and Oprah and me.