While playing mahjongg with friends, they started talking about a book that I ordered as soon as I arrived home. On Saturday night, I read half of Stuff Happens (and then you fix it!) that came in my mailbox earlier in the day. Fate may have intervened when all this happened.

The next day, I went to Fort Worth for my dad’s unveiling. He passed away on December 25, 2007. His tombstone displayed his birth date of February 5, 1931 and his death date. Other than the stone saying, “Beloved husband, father and grandfather,” strangers passing by won’t know anything about him.

Stuff Happens discusses the dash that appears between people’s birth date and death date. Everyone comes to Earth and everyone dies. It’s that time between the two dates that make up who we are.

I decided to speak and referenced the book’s mentioning the birth and death dates. Then I told a Cliff’s Notes version of my dad’s life (paraphrased and added notes I forgot):

He was born in Brooklyn and loved the Dodgers, which rubbed off on me even though the Dodgers were long gone from Brooklyn when I arrived. He loved sports and excelled at it that he earned a football scholarship.

He ended up going into the U.S. Air Force instead of college and served during the Korean War. He was stationed at Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base at the end of his four-year service where he met and married my mother in 1955, the year the Dodgers won the world series.

He had three children and four grandchildren, which of course, he bragged about all the time. Dad ran a successful life insurance and financing business for years and still managed it part-time just before his stroke. He also volunteered right up to then especially at Dallas-Fort Worth airport as an ambassador.

Everyone here [at the unveiling] stands as a testament for the kind of person he was. You cared about him and share many memories of him.

My son mentioned that Grandpa could imitate Donald Duck to make many children laugh. My niece talked about him taking us to baseball games. Both said he was a kind and nice guy. Dad had an office full of Donald Duck mementos thanks to his children giving them to him as presents for birthdays, Father’s Days, and others.

If Dad can hear me, then I would tell him to be very proud of his “dash.” He lived a full life in both enjoying his life for himself and doing for others to make the world a better place.

So, do you want to act as a victim of everything that goes wrong with your life (the economy sucks, lost retirement funds, lost job, can’t get a raise) or do you want to fix it and move forward in making your dash more meaningful?

One hour ago, I walked my youngest of three and his older brother to the school bus. They headed for their first day in kindergarten and fourth grade. While one kid went off to his first day of elementary school, the oldest headed to high school for volleyball practice and starting her first day of high school.

I sit here enjoying the silence not knowing what to do with myself though plenty of work waits for me. It’ll take a few days to return to the swing of things and follow a regular schedule. I can’t help but recall the the birth of my youngest and my excitement about the first day of third grade (I don’t know why I remember that particular year) that I took out my newest dress and shoes the night before.

Birth. Infant. Toddler. Pre-K. Man, I graduated high school 20 years ago this year! And here I am the mother of a freshman. I can’t be old enough for this can I? Where did the time go?

Despite new beginnings, I don’t feel different. Things just come and you go with the flow. But that’s not how it goes when I start working on the first assignment for a new client. That makes my stomach flip as I want to please the client. Be the more work I do for a client, the easier it becomes.

The 2008 Olympics end. I miss not having the TV on waiting for me to catch the next game, race, or performance. My sons took an interest in the games, which was nice as we all rooted for USA, of course. I remember watching the 1984 Olympics from a Texas A&M dorm while attending basketball camp. Hated to see them end last night with the final blow out, but all good things…

Joanna Young has a new beginning of her own. She moved to a new home and had to take a long break from blogging (10 days). We’re glad to have her back in our community and hope she enjoys her new home.

Any new beginnings in your life? How do they make you feel? How do you deal with them?

Karen Putz asks how I do it — balance full-time writing and being a parent to three kids. I should be asking her how she does it — she interviews Marlee Matlin!

As I mentioned in my how I became a writer story, the whole thing started as a part-time venture while managing a part-time corporate job (for most of it) and three kids. I believe writing on the side while holding down a corporate job is a better route than chucking it all for the freelance life.

Yes, life is about risks, but you’re more likely to succeed by building up instead of starting with zip. Had I chucked it all back in 2000, I would’ve had less than a part-time amount of work and no health benefits. My spouse got laid off in 2003, right before #3 came along. We would’ve been in deep trouble had I chucked, which would’ve been more of an upchuck (holds back from the woodchuck routine).

I also volunteer and sit on several PTA boards. My mom was a full-time volunteer for the second half of my childhood. I wanted to be like her. Living a balanced life is important to me. My kids will grow up, so I need to enjoy them NOW.

Prefer to be all about your career? You might want to read Wake Up, Damn It! If your career makes you happy, then go for it and ignore everything here.

So how do I manage all of this? Not without a little insanity and stress at times, but these tips help make it easier:

1. Enroll younger kids in pre-school. Keeping them at home isn’t doable (unless you have a nanny). My youngest has learned amazing stuff he would never have learned had he stayed home. He enters kindergarten in the fall (sob).
2. Rely on a personal information manager complete with contacts, calendar, and to do lists. The Palm desktop has been my trusty sidekick since 1995. Use Outlook. Use any of the many online web-based applications.
3. Balance your schedule for the week. Non-work appointments take too many of my slots this week. I’ve rescheduled two. I try to spread out appointments, but that doesn’t always work and find a week becomes overloaded. So when I realize it, I start moving things around where I can. I review the week ahead sometime between Friday and Monday to ensure balance or to do something about it.
4. Accept working off hours. While I work a standard work week, appointments and kid events can cut into my work time. So I make it up in the evening or on weekends, but never at the sacrifice of sleep bring us to the next point…
5. Get sleep. Everyone requires a different amount of sleep to function well. If I stay up late working on something, I’m hurting more than helping my clients and business. While I might get something done late at night, I’m useless the next day and lose an entire day. So better to sleep and finish in the morning.
6. Avoid waiting until last minute to do work to make deadline. To avoid late nights, I make sure I have room to meet the deadline. This prevents racing the clock or sacrificing quality to make a deadline.
7. Make “No” part of your vocabulary. Or else, get stuck with deadlines close to each other, overload your schedule, and turn yourself into a stress machine (which affects your health). I believe, “When mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” So parents, it may feel selfish to say, “No,” but your family benefits.
8. Drop stressful clients. I’ve dropped a client or two because I didn’t enjoy the work and dreaded working on their projects. Add these together spells energy drain. Worried about replacing them? Writers should always include marketing a part of their job.
9. Balance your kids’ activities. Who says they need to take music lessons, play sports, dance, and do scouts all at once? Kids need a break, too. Try to limit younger ones’ — who are trying things to find what they like — current activities to one or two. When one ends, you can try something else. After all, fewer activities means fewer chauffeuring jobs for parents.
10. Use your “I can’t write now” time wisely. When we find ourselves unable to write or work, we can easily fall into the trap of needlessly surfing the Web or doing other wasteful activities. When I’m in a stupor, I fold laundry, exercise, play games (that I need to review) — Things that benefit me.

How do you balance your writing life with your personal life?

Stephen Hopson of Adversity University asks how people deal with adversity. The following lists ten ways I attack adversity.

1. Perseverance.

2. Do it. You stare at blank page. You can’t decide whether to accept a scary new assignment. Instead of dwelling on fears and roadblocks, do something. I recently accepted a writing assignment that scared me. Rather than worry about the beginning of the article — I just started writing what I knew and little by little, more content came in.

3. Do something tedious. Sometimes I can’t get past something or get in the right mood. Rather than wasting time, I move on to an easy and mindless task. Accomplishing the mindless task sometimes motivates me to return to what I couldn’t do before.

4. Accept things as they are. This is a biggie especially with my deafness. I know I’ll always meet a kid who makes fun of my speech or looks at me in a weird way. I’m used to it and accept that it happens. I don’t like it, but I let it go. Recently, I mustered up the courage to talk to second graders — it wasn’t their making fun of me that concerned me, but the reflection on my son.

5. Try it. I had the opportunity to write news articles five days a week for a Web site. That’s not the hard part — the hard part came in getting two original quotes from sources. This meant making lots of phone calls since not everyone checks e-mail multiple times a day and I needed these quotes before noon. Rather than thinking about the barrier of making phone calls (a tedious process through the relay service), I tried it. It didn’t work out. But I gained experience and learned from it.

6. Educate / speak up. People act the way they do because they don’t understand something. Teaching them makes a difference just like I taught the second graders about deafness. I’ve met people who thought I was a snob (among other things) because I didn’t respond or ignored them. I educated them and their thinking changed.

7. Use tools. Technology and knowledge give me the power to do things I might not have done before. Instant messenger lets me chat with family, friends and colleagues. Knowledge such as I know I can’t lipread from far away — so I sit in the right place to ensure I can follow the speaker. I also learned that some speakers like to walk and talk — with this knowledge, I ask speakers if they walk and change seats accordingly.

8. Find the heart of the problem. Many of us argue with others and that argument slowly moves further and further away from the real issue. If this happens, I stop and return to the heart of the problem.

9. Practice. I’ve always been determined to show that I am just as good as anyone else whether it’s sports, school or work. Practicing helps a person improve. This entry on creativity shows how lack of practice hurts.

10. Honesty. If I discover that I can’t do something well enough after trying, I face it rather than fake it. I’d rather admit my fault than turn doing something subpar.