Emma has changed the course of business for us. We are now party planners/invitation designers. We appear to have quite the talent for party planning and this new direction has been met with company wide enthusiasm.

We are also now professional (well we’re not being paid for it, but we have found a mutual interest in) doll makers:

Emma Doll - Note: No weird cheeks

Alexi doll - I am now wondering what occupation she is really interested in?

In one of those funny nostalgic moments where I remembered back to those days when I was a teenage girl and online doll making hadn’t been invented so I became obsessed with boy bands… I got a ticket to Westlife.

This is my biggest online confession.

And I’m now unbelievably excited. Thanks goodness I have friends who understand…

So tonight, you will see me and a group of equally nostalgic females throwing our knickers at a group or Irish middle aged men. This should be interesting!

Please don’t laugh at me!

I regularly attend the Asiana Cooking classes. This is in an effort to become somewhat of a domestic goddess and be able to cook without the aid of a can or jar. So far my attempts without the backup support of two highly trained professionals have proven that I will probably never master the art.

We have now developed quite a cool routine of:

• Purchasing cheap wine
• Watching the cooking demo
• Racing each other to see who can finish first
• Compare our variations on the recipe (burnt bits, raw bits, extra bits, hot bits etc)
• Eat and drink waaay too much
• Head to the Hawthorn Lounge to partake in some marshmallows by the fire and a NEW development is Car playing (I have proven to be quite the card shark last night)
• New development 2. Is leaving the Hawthorn Lounge with the intent on going home, but instead winding up at another bar

But that is beside the point. The point is actually that both cooking class and the Hawthorn Lounge are what Seth Godin would call Purple Cows.

I have always wanted to open a bar because I think they are kind of done wrong. There is never anything unique about them, which is why down Wellingtons main drag, they open up and shut down with such frightening regularity and generally you don’t even notice a new bar in the place of the old one. They are same same.

The Hawthorn Lounge Changes this. It’s like stepping back into the early 1900’s, the bar tenders wear cute waistcoats, they have a big open fire and like 4 leather couches and card tables. You grab a yummy cocktail and a pack (or three) of cards and make yourself at home… Then dash to the fire every few minutes to roast some more free marshmallows. It’s so soothing and cosy and hidden away. Despite the fact it is kind of out of the way, the place is always jam packed (but comfortably packed because they don’t add more seating so you kinda just have to leave when you arrive and it’s full).

Most people I know bemoan the fact the only thing to DO in winter is go to a bar and drink away the dismal weather sorrows. Cooking class provides a cool other option. For $35 you get your food prepared for you, dishes done and a place to learn something new (like for example, if you go to a restaurant with us that offers Roti now, you’ll here ‘Oh my goodness, they are charging for this, I KNOW how to MAKE IT’ in loud obnoxious voices). It’s kind of quirky and a cool activity (I got tickets for Brooke and Ben for their engagement present). They are so popular that the classes fill up about 5 minutes after they are posted.

It’s cool to see such innovation on mundane themes.

One thing that become very clear to me all of a sudden this morning is that I no longer feel obligated to help people who don’t deserve my help.

This is an important step for me, as in the past I have, out of a misplaced sense of obligation, dropped my work and customers to sort out stuff that was simply not my problem. I didn’t get thanked for it, I didn’t get acknowledged for it. I just got mucked around and now asked to do it again by the same people.

One thing I have quickly learned since being alone in this business is how valuable my time is. In the past, I have allowed people to take advantage of my time and this led to me de-valuing my own importance.

The reason I am writing this, is because it shocked me this morning that after a couple of months of not having that expectation, I have come to give myself more credit and now find it insulting and rude that people think they can ask this of me.

Confidence is cool.

I have been talking to the owners of dollspace.com about potentially working together.

This has led to a mild breakdown on my side due to it suddenly hitting me that I am not only NOT a teenage girl, but I know NOTHING about them. We have kicked into serious market research mode and spent half of Emma’s birthday Pot luck dinner quizzing people about online doll creation, avatars, sparkles and slideshows. It’s, like MySpace, totally beyond me.

Last night, post lack-of-concentration tantrum and pre freedom (which led to me wandering a beach in bare feet at all hours of the night and now having no voice), I made an internet doll.

I think I kinda got it.

What I am beginning to understand about teenage girls (outside of this weird fascination with growing up waaay to quickly and then offsetting that with playing with dolls online), is that they are vastly different from anyone who is NOT a teenage girl.

Usability doesn’t matter so much.

I am sad to say my doll is nude because I literally didn’t know how to dress her. I didn’t understand the wizz bang widgets that kept popping out everywhere. She is lucky to have a nose because adding her face had me stumped for 10 minutes. I am wondering if teenage girls like the fact that they have to spend the first week on the site learning the site. It makes it exclusive.

Your content is NOT king. Theirs is.

Initially I was appalled at the content on some of the websites I looked at. But then I realised the people adding it were the teenage girls. This is a boy free zone, there is no one to impress, the website owners aren’t putting words in their mouths, they come up with it on their own. I believe that the freedom to ‘own’ the website and make it theirs is key to teenage girls. You just can’t control their space. Which is probably why the hideous layouts on MySpace are so popular. No corporation told those people what their site should look like.

Girls will be girls

Despite all the media messaging, social pressure and everything else that is telling girls to grow up quick, they wont. If they LIKE dolls and fashion, they will hunt down ways to get involved in them. This actually reassures me a lot. I also like how the doll websites have dolls of all sizes and colours, big noses, small noses, weird eyes, silly expressions and everything that people tell you you shouldn’t be. (Don’t use my doll as an example, I fell into the trap of wanting a petty one). Unlike work related applications, this stuff is there for fun.

It was the first time in my life I’ve signed up for a user account and faced the fact I am too old to have my date of birth recognised. It was the first time I have played with dolls for years. And despite my embarrassment at admitting this, it was actually quite a hoot. I suspect this will become the new office fad.

It’s been one of those weeks.

Everything is an emergency, everything is behind, I started the week with a cold and haven’t got my energy back…

And today I can’t get my act together. Actually as of last night when my friend informed me that ‘Happiness too, passes” and it hit me that life simply wont be this good all the time, I slumped.

I am taking tonight off.

Tomorrow is another day. Next week is another week.

I know it sounds kinda funny after a year at PlanHQ to think an organisation dashboard is a revolutionary idea… But I’ve been thinking recently about how to ensure we never get behind in a small business where none of us ever have any time or inclination to put in more than a minute to track our progress.

Yesterday, while I was at a morning seminar run by the Results Group, the idea of a quick business dashboard came up. I LOVED it. I am gong to make one. I know it can be done in a web app, I know there are probably a million startups working on it right now. But I want it on my wall, so I’m not buying.

We’re going to get some big colored dots and list all our tasks and then every week change the dots around so that we know where we are on everything.

You can have dashboards for measuring anything, and what I love about paper ones is that you can completely customise them to your business AND that they glare at you from the wall when they are covered in red and orange - The idea being that simply SEEING where you’re going wrong, leads to an automatic re-adjustment to set it right.

Don’t laugh at it’s simplicity, I just saw a roomfull of business owners fall in love with the idea.

A customer of mine and I have been waging a 2 month long battle against a domain registrant over a domain name he has owned for several years.

Through one reason or another, the domain expired and he didn’t notice until after the grace period. I rang up and the nice lady said that the domain was about to be auctioned and to email a particular email address and ask if we could have an exemption due to the mistake and the length of time he had owned the domain.

No reply. After about 12 emails from me, 12 from him and numerous phone calls from both of us, we still could not get through to anyone who was responsible for the domain.

Now, I assume coinciding with another grace period expiring, he has received a very polite email from “Brian”, and I quote:

“Our client owns this and current asking price is $22,788.

Please let me know if you’re interested in making a purchase.

Kind regards,

Brian”

I have a sneaky suspicion that they refused to talk to us until this time because they knew once it had passed they could resell him his domain name for this much money. (They actually can’t is only reaction was to laugh).

Is that unusual/wrong/dodgy or just one of those lessons you have to learn about domains?

Every now and then, I get a letter in the post from the Mt Victoria Resident’s Association about Brothels in Mt Victoria.

I have a bone to pick with these people in the first place, because I am dead certain one day when I was walking up Majorie Banks street in bare feet after swimming, the lady that followed me up berating me was a card-holding member of the Association.

Last night I received a petition, complete with newspaper cut outs from the ladies advertising their services in OUR neighborhood. Claire and I wondered who would go to this extreme to keep brothels out of our area.

I have various moral qualms with prostitution, but the fact that it is or isn’t in my street doesn’t really affect me.

For some reason, it sparked my interest. After quickly calculating the economics last night:

• Prostitutes probably work 5 day weeks like the rest of us
• In each day, you’d probably hope to see about 3 clients (I think this is conservative, but am thinking that their work is somewhat more demanding that most of ours
• In a month, this gives you 20 clients per prostitute. (UPDATE: Actually this is 60. I am unsure where I got 20 from)
• How many would be repeat customers? I have no idea, but lets say once a month is average
• Now for this ‘commercial sized’ brothel, we are petitioning against, you would assume, there must be about 4-5 prostitutes working? That’s like 100 unique people a month

Would the customers be local or not? I assume that convenience is probably rated lower than discreetness with this form of client, but you never know. However, given that rents are so high in my area, you would assume any brothel in Mt Vic is fairly high class.

Lets say 100 people a month visit the brothel. Lets say they are all fairly wealthy individuals, given the area (This is an assumption). Chances are, they know a lot of people in Mt Vic (for goodness sake, you bump into everyone you know in Wellington weekly). Would you still go to the brothel?

I suspect people probably would. And I suspect the reason the rich residents get all up in arms is because they can no longer pretend there is this social underbelly they are not part of.

So I welcome Brothels to my backyard. I hope they set up shop and shutdown myths we have that allow us to close our eyes to their existence.

I also hope that as good neighbors, we watch out for the people working in them. They are not the problem, they are simply fulfilling a demand.

And because of my own, personal beliefs, I hope that the fact they are situated in among families makes people who use them think twice before entering, about what they are doing and why.

I played (and won) a poker game in the weekend. There were about 8 of us and we all put $5 kitty into the middle, which we then turned into several thousand dollars worth of poker chips each. The stakes were high ($40) and as the tension mounted, I realised that poker games create a mini economy.

Forgive me for reading waaaay too much into a simple game.

In poker, we all start equal, but in the end, there is only one winner. Some people safely amass wealth, others kind of tick along for a while, some make dramatic wins and losses and all our morals and ethics were brought into question.

As I started to win. I started to feel guilty. Here I was with all this money that I knew I had won through a mixture of making good calls, but more importantly, large doses of LUCK. As you get further into the game and convince yourself this is real life, it is hard to see people lose everything, through a mixture of bad calls and BAD LUCK.

So, we introduced charity to poker. This was started by someone who had relatively little. She felt bad for the guy who had even less and put aside a large portion of her wealth for him to buy back in. While I ended up putting more in, proportionately, I didn’t feel nearly the same hit as she did. This makes me wonder if it is the poor who are the most generous. Maybe because they know that life really is lived on the roll of a dice and you gotta hope that when yours goes the wrong way, there will be someone there to back you. The rich just see the dollars they give, even though the dollars they give don’t even make a dent in their own wallets.

Some people were annoyed that by helping others, we were reducing the other winner’s chances of winning the whole game. This, to me is capitalism. We LOVE losers, because, that makes us winners. The class gap works for them, because it is better to be lower middle class if there is a lower class, than it is to be lower-middle class when that is the bottom rung. These people did not take part in the charity aspect. This is where it gets weird though, because in real life the ring wing conservatives of the game are some of the most liberal people I know.

Others claimed that the charity side was merely providing a fish, rather than a fishing rod, and was doing absolutely nothing to help those who were struggling (The fact that one of my charity cases ended up a close third, I feel broke apart that myth). But it was interesting that I could give the same amount to two people, and one made a go of it, while the other crashed and burned equally as badly as before. This to me, suggests that sometimes, people will never get ahead, other times, they just need a little lift and they will sort themselves out. It is, after all, a game of luck.

Because the game quite quickly turned into a question of what was right and how the world should work, I was accused to only doing PR work for myself - I had huge amounts of poker chips and if I was truly a good person, I would just give them all away or divide them equally among the entire table. The fact that I gave away money was not enough, hat only made me look good, but didn’t really mean that I was a good person. I realised that my heart is not as pure as I would perhaps like. Because I LOVED being rich and I didn’t WANT to give the others my money. Despite the fact I know I only got it through luck and I knew I didn’t deserve it. I wanted it.

The funniest part was that in the end, the two with the most wealth, were me, who had played a fairly conservative game, but had good luck, and Verity, who had awfully bad luck the entire time, but took massive risks and managed to bluff her way into wealth.

She lost it all on the last hand.

I reckon she is more the type to become a Richard Branson or such like, while I am destined to live in the comfortable security of moderate risk.