At nearly 58 years of age I have seen many of my people die. Well not literally, but I have been to many funerals of both family and friends. We are currently waiting for Death to finalize the loss of our sister Sue Trabert and that is what prompted this rather morbid post.

Susan Jane Trabert was born April 26, 1960; the last child born to parents Mildred Hope (Puchner) and Leo Paul Trabert. She was preceded in birth by three brothers: Michael Paul born 1953, Charles John born 1955, and John Eric born 1958. Life was good for awhile.

In 1975 at age 15, Sue was diagnosed with Friedreich’s ataxia after noticeable heaviness in her feet and legs.  Her loud footsteps alerted her mother that something wasn’t right, and thus began her life-long struggle with this disease and the havoc it caused in her small body.

On Monday, February 7, 2011, Sue apparently choked on some food while eating her breakfast. It had become increasingly difficult for her to swallow yet she refused to eat “mush” or pureed foods. She was determined to live her life as “normally” as possible  and had ample German stubbornness and a temper which fully supported her adamant refusal to do as she was told.

The lovely group home she lived in had only one aid on duty that morning and when she discovered Sue had stopped breathing she initiated CPR and called 911. The paramedics arrived and continued resuscitation then ferried her to the nearest hospital for immediate attention.  And although Sue had placed a  ’do not resuscitate’ order on herself for any hospitalization, this wish was not known or followed on Monday morning.

After testing and consults it was determined that Sue had suffered extensive brain damage and had lost all cognitive function. She was on full life support in ICU without hope of regaining any level of consciousness. She was in a vegetative state and her already contorted dysfunctional body would have to be tube fed and could remain in suspended animation indefinitely.

The feeling in the immediate family was that Sue would not want to have her body kept alive if she was no longer present.  I believe she left her body on that Monday and is now free. Her brothers and we two sisters-in-law gathered at her bedside on Wednesday morning and notified the ICU staff of our wishes to turn off all the machines keeping her alive. Later in the day she was extubated. After assessing her continuing body functions she was moved to another floor under palliative care and as of this writing her body continues functioning.

Sue trained her body to survive the many surgeries, the strokes, the heart problems, the diabetes, the bowel resection and colostomy, and all the other problems which accompanied her underlying disease. It is no surprise that her body continues to survive even after she has gone.

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Update:  Susan Jane Trabert passed away on Tuesday evening, February 15, 2011.

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Life is part of death just as death is part of life. We gather and remember. We comfort each other. We share our stories and listen to others. We laugh and cry and appreciate our time together.

When death interrupts our daily routine life changes immediately. Getting back to “normal” doesn’t seem to happen easily. Waiting for death was in some ways harder than the end of life.  And even knowing there was no hope, having her body “alive” was not as bad as having the word that death finally came.

Since my last post on August 10th I have been immersed in a short training phase to get back to the website creation model I actually began back in 2002-2003 when things were still rather free and easy online.

After getting into the client side of my previous service model I found it was just a little too much like having a job. I also found my time was not appreciated no matter how well-intentioned anyone was. That was impetus enough to see the need to change course. There are no shortcuts to success when it comes to planning for success either.

The products I am creating as a direct result of this course change are website focused. I build websites specifically for affiliate product sales. Right now my total focus is on Christmas as that is always the most profitable time of year for both AdSense and affiliate product sales.

I use XSitePro for several of my main sites and just love it but last year I lost the backup files for one of my main sites and now I see there is no recourse but to go in there and set it up again as it was by hand. I want it to be the same as it is right now but there is no shortcut to get it there since I no longer have the needed backup.

Thus the idea came to me that there are no shortcuts to success. It will take me the rest of the day to do it, but do it I will. There is a plan in motion now. Action is being taken. Energy will flow and wallets will be opened. I will stand directly in the path of commerce with my best foot… er, websites…  forward. There will be happy, satisfied customers just like the one pictured below (which was found through Google images).

During my meditation this morning I tried an exercise suggested by Frank Kern in a video he did with a guy who has developed a site called “Mind Movies”. Frank was introducing this guy to the world at large primarily because Frank has found that visualization has worked well in his life. His method was discovered by accident one day when he decided to write out what his perfect day would be like.

So in my little exercise, I wrote down what I saw while playing my meditation music. I wrote down the images that came into my mind while in meditation. It was an interesting thing to do but I’m not sure about the results. The visions I saw while meditating have little to do with my current life. Still I’ll share one example from the fourth movement:

The winds blow fiercely outside our warm and dry cave dwelling. The seasons change. Crystals in the breezes. Harmonic sun beams wisp by on the flow.  We greet the morning with open arms and smiling faces, ready to embrace the day.

We waft on the breeze as if trees dancing. We revere the sunrise. We glorify the beauty of existence as we greet another beautiful day we have to share with each other.

We look at each other, clasp hands, turn our heads and smile into the wind.

It is hope of a better tomorrow that keeps me focused and working today. It is the possibility of bringing greater happiness to myself and those around me that makes my work worthwhile.

Hope requires action. The act of hope requires optimism. Optimism requires an understanding that things can always get better or stay wonderful once true happiness is achieved.

The happiness of hope is a state of being where optimism permeates deep into the unknown future.  We are like children again and can’t wait to get out of bed to see what joys and pleasantries each new day will bring.  This is one result gained from “The Internet Lifestyle” when everything is going right.

A hammock in silhouette against a beautiful sunset on a quiet bay along the shores of Lake Superior. This is the happiness of hope in action. There will be other happy days spent there in appreciation of life while contemplating the smallness of man.

From 2005 to 2008 I created an army of working names; many continue to represent me on sites created during that stage of development.  Some are kind of embarrassing like awkward relatives on an extended visit, but others are dear to me and amplify the best bits of my psyche.  They are only names but they speak with a unique voice.

Do I need to have a recognized name to be successful online? I don’t think I do. God knows I have found obscurity with this blog which no one is interested in but me. In many ways that is a good thing but it would be nice to have other people in the conversation once in awhile. I can talk to myself without posting here.

So the basic question is: Am I doing anything that will benefit from name recognition? And the simple answer is: Not at this time. I’m not sure I want name recognition on any of my other websites. I have put my real name on a few of them to see if it made any difference and have not seen any change in the numbers to indicate good or bad. But I feel better knowing I can create anonymous income. There is nothing to prove to anyone else. (Except Uncle Sam, of course.)

I’ve had 15 minutes of fame a couple of times but I did not enjoy the rush. I like being a wallflower. I enjoy observing more than being observed. I like a good distance between me and those who fabricate another reality.

So heading back out to the trenches this time, resolute and faithful to my goals; I feel stronger. I feel ready to accept the benefits of my achievements and I am grateful for the obscurity that swirls around my actions and my virtual real estate holdings.

I am the conductor. Obscurity is just another whistle stop on the long road to my final destination.

Tickets please…

I will use new tools recently purchased on several new mini-sites currently under development, and I plan to capture what I’m doing with Camtasia 7. I may be able to edit my raw recordings into a step-by-step process within the system being demonstrated. This is important because I will need to train others how to do what I do, exactly the way I do it. This is the team I aim to develop.

Once I can afford a better webmaster than myself, that person will record new processes using better techniques, tools, and a more streamlined website development system than I could ever devise.

There are several techniques I plan to try right away such as the mini-net and/or link wheels I recently heard about from James Jones. I’m a huge fan of James Jones. He is as down to earth as Grandma’s peach cobbler yet seems to know a huge amount of information about a wide variety of website tools and techniques that have personally benefited me.

I have and use his own two tools; Micro Niche Finder and The Ultimate PLR Article Collection. But James knows a lot of other marketers from his many years of Internet business and regularly offers wonderful webinars featuring developers who have fantastic new products of benefit to website creators. I am James Jones’ ideal customer. I don’t buy every product he recommends but I buy a lot of them after attending the webinars and being able to ask questions that are usually answered.

It was because of a James Jones webinar with John Jonas back in early July that I didn’t join ReplaceMyself.com after making the public decision to do so. I had set up the funding and put enough cash aside to pay for 3 months of the membership site at $97 a month and an additional $1200 which would give me 3 months to pay up to $400 a month for my first worker hired through OnlineJobs.ph.

And I was excited to purchase the course through James Jones’ link because I like to reward excellence whenever possible. But when I got to the site and attempted to make the deal, all of a sudden I was given an option to pay a one-time fee of $797 for lifetime access to ReplaceMyself.com. I stopped and figured it out; I would pay more than that in less than one year of regular membership fees, so it seemed like a really great deal.

But it had taken me months to budget everything based on $97 a month for the membership site and $400 a month for the first worker. Even though I had enough money set aside to pay for the one-time membership fee, I wouldn’t have enough money left then to pay more than $350 a month for only two months. The choice stopped me dead in my tracks and I haven’t restarted in that direction again. I still may join at some point but right now it seems like I may as well get all my systems in place first.

And if I’m going to do that, then maybe I don’t need to pay $97 a month or whatever for a service that is designed to do the training for me. It sounds like a fast solution, and I’m sure it has a great deal of value, but what if it’s not teaching what I’m doing? I’ll still need to create my own training videos to teach people how to do what I want them to do so it just makes sense to do it all. It’s not like what I’m doing is all that complicated.

Since it’s my system, the training is limited to what is necessary to do, when it needs to be done, and how to do it. Nothing more, nothing less. I can’t say for sure that this is what I could expect from having someone else responsible for training the people I retain for my team. So call it the paralysis of analysis if you like, but if I can teach while I learn, such as learning to use all the features in Camtasia 7; then I can train people to do what needs to be done, the way I want it done.

And maybe there is some commercial potential to this sort of system down the road. Like after I have hired a better webmaster who has completely scaled up my little systems so that everything runs more efficiently with superior results.

BTW, you don’t need Camtasia 7 to make training videos to help your team. (I just want a reason to use it!) But TechSmith has made a wonderful tool called Jing available for free that lets you record short videos in much the same way as Camtasia does.

You can teach while you learn by just recording what you do and then editing out the mistakes. Keep the right stuff for demonstration purposes and test it on your team. See what else you need to do to help them understand your processes better. Refine and polish; tweak and streamline. Efficiency is beautiful.