In Honor of Two Great Men

Two of the most influential educators in my life left this mortal coil in 2009. Professor James Gremmels and Dr. Raymond Lammers. My English and Theater professors at the University of Minnesota, Morris, MN.

I took a class my freshman year of college that the two of them co-taught. It was a critical thinking class topically based on Theater and English.

It was one of the most important and transformative experiences of my life. However, it was not just that class that I have to thank them for the gifts of the educators in our life are vast.

Raymond J. Lammers

Dr. Lammers always had faith in me. He pushed me. He challenged me. He made me feel that I could be great. I was encouraged to dream but also to work to make that dream come true. He instilled in me a sense of the discipline it takes to truly make your creative vision come true.

James C. Gremmels

Professor Gremmels was important in a different way. I worked with him at the old time letter press. We would spend hours setting type and printing on an old fashioned printer. His patience during those hours and his guidance taught me that life was not always going to go my way. I had to work with it. His teaching was also very important. His classes were filled with his love and energy of the subject. He breathed all kinds of life into old text and his love of Moby Dick gave me a perspective on the work of Melville that came from a scholar who loved his work.

In honor of all the people that make a difference in your life, I am grateful to both of these great men for the gifts they gave to me. I honor them by remembering them.

And a Happy New Year

Of course I had to get a blog post in before the end of the year. I thought I would do this instead of sending out the holiday letter. The holiday letter is a good tradition as it makes you sit down and review the past year.

The big trend I resisted this year with regard to blogging was the fact that people kept saying, ‘people don’t blog, they micro-blog now.’ I was resistant. I kept saying, ‘it’s not true!’ Well, it happened to me. I saw my behavior change. I used Twitter more and more – pretty much daily – and left my blog behind more often than I would have liked. But this is a guilt free zone, I’m mainly just observing the behavior.

The year was full of lots of adventure. It was a year of planning. We created plans for a house remodel. I created plans for the next IA Summit in Phoenix. I created plans for how I want to grow with EightShapes. I created plans for how I want to grow my photography work. On all fronts things have moved forward. It’s been kind of insane-but that is life and it’s about living it.

January was a big month. We started Gumption, LLC. After one year of being a co-owner, it’s been easy to see that we should have done this a long time ago. Even though I took a job with EightShapes later in the year, I’m still part of Gumption doing my photo work.

February was spent planning and preparing for the IA Summit and lining up all kinds of speaking sessions for the spring. It was a big year for ‘social media’ and I got out there trying to help ‘demystify’ some things for people. It struck me that I was seeing the cycle in play. 10 years ago people were experiencing the same level of overwhelmedness about the Internet. You’ve seen what the past ten years have brought. In ten years, ‘social media’ won’t be something we talk about just another way that humans connect.

March was the big IA Summit. Memphis was the city. Graceland was the fun activity. The rest was all about meeting peers, colleagues, co-conspirators and coming together to learn and share. The Peabody hotel in Memphis was a beautiful and amazing place. It allowed all the IA people to gather in the lounge before and after dinner and during breaks. It was an amazing experience to be on the other side of the event as well as I stepped in to help Samantha Bailey who was the 2009 IA Summit Chair person.

April was a whirlwind of speaking about social media, supporting clients and recovering from the IA Summit. However, recovery did not last too long as planning for 2010 needed to get started.

May brought on changes as well. A trip to San Fransisco for Google I/O and visiting San Fransisco friends. Another very exciting change: EightShapes offered me a full time job and I officially joined ranks.

June-September – well it was summer and it was as usual a great few months of epic dog walks, long days and all the joys of summer.

In September, after a trip to Chicago to hang out with the lovely and amazing Tesia, I attended the IA  Institute IDEA conference for the first time. It was exciting to finally make it to the event after years of not being able to go. I like the format and found it to be a lovely and intimate setting to meet up with colleagues, learn and discuss.

October brought one of my most exciting events of the year. The Photography Salon that I attend, hosted by local Minneapolis photography artist Wing Young Huie, put on a show. 23 Salon members gathered on a Saturday to hang our work. A week later we gathered and welcomed the public to an opening that brought out over 500 people. The show hung for a month. It was an incredibly important milestone for me in my artistic photography career.

Experimental Alice Photos

November and December brought the rush of holiday and family and crossing things off to-do lists. The end of the year is a marker and it makes us do crazy things for closure, for renewal, to give us a sense of a fresh start.

The end of a year. The end of a decade. I’m looking very forward to the ’10′s.

Happy New Year + New Decade World! Let’s use all this new-fangled fancy technology to do some good in the upcoming decade and beyond. That is my wish for the world.

Peace out.