Monthly Archives: May 2017

Having Fun is Hard……

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I have been working diligently on my new website as well as doing a wonderful amount of speaking engagements for the last three months. I am so happy with my work right now.  I think I forgot how old I am, having fun is hard.

I was fortunate to get a free pass to the party of the season, the Kentucky Derby, two weeks ago. This was between some intense prep for speaking and trying to work on two online classes I’m taking to be a better speaker, a booked speaker and an entertaining speaker. Steve Martin is one of my teachers. I got an email from Steve today asking me where the hell have I been? How do you expect to be funny if you don’t show up for Steve’s class? I was working on it while having fun. I did my best at the Kentucky Derby to be hilarious. Just ask my friend Jim, who saw me trip in front of 158,000 people and still keep my hat on.

 

See, Steve. Jim is laughing.

Last night at a dinner party, I was doing my best to wow the crowd with the antics of my mother and her kleptomania.

You can’t be trying out new material while taking a class, Steve.

I’m procrastinating right this minute as  I’m supposed to be practicing my talk for tonight. In an effort to ramp up my hilarity, I have changed my talk completely, added props and new stories, mostly because the venue doesn’t have PowerPoint capability so I had to come up with some new crutches. Since Steve is my mentor now, I thought emulating him would be my best effort.

I don’t know how to make balloon animals and I didn’t have time to go find an arrow like Steve’s but these turkey legs were just hanging around my house. I hope I can find just the right words to integrate this into a talk about the legal and practical issues confronting caregivers.

Never be chicken to laugh at yourself!

Perhaps it will be funny enough that I will bring a free package of Depends as a door prize for the participant who laughs the hardest.

See why I’m tired? Having fun is really hard.

By the way, that picture is with Jim’s mom. At least I have two fans!

“You Just have to Laugh…..”

©2017 Cathy Sikorski

The Fountain of Youth Sucks

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I have found the fountain of youth. And it just may kill you. I now know how to turn a 60-year-old into a 22-year-old.

I crashed my website. On purpose. It looks somewhat the same to you, but trust me, all this recreation makes me think I understand what God did in seven days. As so many are finding out, things we’be never done before, “are much more complicated than I thought.”

I also added a new page to my web address, with an additional WordPress Theme, new widgets, videos, photos, icons and things I don’t even know what they’re called.

I’ve had to contact my hosting company forty thousand times. By telephone. Which freaks them out because no one in this age group solves problems on the phone IRL (In Real LIfe…which also took some critical thinking time to figure out IRL).

Each time I call these poor guys, I explain to them that I am a Baby Boomer with no real skills.This conversation should be explaining how you’re going to teach a 5-year-old to do this. I don’t get a chuckle, a soothing response or an ‘atta’ girl’. They just jump right in going to

What I’m doing…

dashboards and domain thingies, and install buttons……. oh, good lord. And even when I have done every single thing they’ve told me to do, step-by-step, the problem we are trying to fix persists. In the meantime, I myself have figured out the following:

I have actually written HTML code with some help from my millennial kid to get cute icon doohickeys on my new web page.

After fighting with a widget for three hours, I just got ballsy and created my own custom widget that actually worked better.

Then, because either I think I’m invincible now, or I’m a glutton for punishment, I decided to try and create a 2-minute video for this website from an app I put on my iPad. It took me three hours to figure out that I couldn’t keep two minutes, I had to delete 58 minutes.

What I want to be doing….

Sixteen hours later, I called in the cavalry.

After crying to my daughters about the literal pain of technology (my headache was now slicing a rivulet through my cortex which met the pain searing down my neck and shoulders) they told me I was stupid. “Call your brother.  He does this for a living. He’s supposed to help you.” Which he did,  in no time. But I’m still taking credit for scrapping 58 minutes of unusable footage.

If I haven’t lost my mind by the end of this week, I’m sure I will live an earthly existence with all my marbles and some of other people’s marbles, too because I will know how to code them into my DNA.

I have not had one drink since I started because I have to create and finish a PowerPoint presentation for a client before I go to the Kentucky Derby.  If you watch the Kentucky Derby on TV, look for the red hat laying on the ground, I’ll be under it with a smile on my face and a mint julep in my hand returning to middle age with a big swig of gratitude.

Here’s the link if you want to see where all this has taken me…go ahead, you can be honest. In fact, send me an email from the “Contact” box, at least I’ll know it it’s working! You can’t say anything I haven’t already said to myself every single day.

www.cathysikorski.com/Speaker

“You Just have to Laugh…..”

©2017 Cathy Sikorski