Fresh reminders this weekend that life is short, and as I blogged about recently, you need to find beauty in each day:

• a cousin just found out she has ovarian cancer after it had spread to her lungs.
• a good friend’s mother, diagnosed recently with a brain tumour and given a few months to live, passed away this weekend in even less time.
• another friend is in limbo waiting for a biopsy after suspicious cells were found during a Pap test.

We tend to go through life at full speed, taking for granted that the people we love will be there tomorrow. We don’t say “I love you” often enough, assuming the other knows how we feel. We don’t celebrate (or sometimes even see) our friends enough, figuring there’s always next week or next month. But sometimes there isn’t.
So, go forth and hug your parents or your significant other or your friends or all of the above. Treasure the time you have.

There’s a horrible ad airing on the radio these days for the Toronto Rhinoplasty Clinic (they do nose jobs). It starts off talking about how many friends you have, how you’re the favourite child and how good you feel about yourself, or words to that effect — and then slaps you in the face with the thought that your nose may be keeping you from looking as good as you feel.

This is just so wrong! If the person feels that good about himself or herself, why would you introduce the thought that his or her nose needs fixing? The writer really missed the mark on that one, don’t you think?

One of the best presentations I’ve been to in a long time happened last week, and I apologize for taking so long to blog about it. The topic was “How to make a speech sound like music to their ears” and the speaker was IABC colleague John Watkis.

John is a freelance speechwriter specializing in motivational, inspirational and persuasive speeches for business and community leaders. His talk linked effective speeches and memorable songs to the elements that go into music, such as rhythm, mood and chorus. We laughed, we learned and we even talked John into singing for us.

Check out John’s podcasts for a sample of his lovely rich voice.

The first wave of comment spam was actually mildly amusing, but in past weeks it has just become incredibly tiresome. The top two types of content in the comment spam left on my blog are various generic and brand-name drugs and alluring words related to porn. I know there are ways to avoid having to even SEE this trash, but for now I’m continuing to moderate comments and remove it myself, at arm’s length and with my nose pinched.

So I’m encouraged to see in this Economist article that social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are overtaking pornographic sites in popularity. We can only hope that will spill over to the spam world, and we’ll see the volume and stench of spam start to decrease. A girl can hope, anyway.

Two things about the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech:

1. I have a son in university, and it chills me to think the same thing could have happened in his school. My heartfelt sympathy to the families and friends of students killed or injured; for those left behind, life will never ever be the same.
2. This is probably the first crisis where the use of cellphone cameras, blogs, e-mail, FaceBook, text messaging and all the other tools of new media have been so much in evidence as the communications vehicles of choice.

A post by Seth Godin led me to the transcript of a discussion on April 9 with Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten. The topic was an experiment Gene conducted to discover if violinist Josh Bell (incognito in a baseball cap) and his Stradivarius playing in a transit station could stop busy commuters rushing to work. As you might expect, almost nobody stopped, and the discussion touched on how sad it was that people missed a moment of beauty in the rat race to get to work.

I like to think I would have stopped. Life is short, and we need to seize those moments of beauty when we can. When walking my dog on a frigid but clear night, I look at the stars and appreciate how many more chances I have to see them, even though this has resulted in having to wear a ski jacket for half the year. When my kids were small and would come in with grass stains on their knees, I would think of my favourite quote from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons by Bill Watterson: “I say if your knees aren’t green at the end of the day, you oughta seriously re-examine your life.”

How do you make sure your knees are green at the end of the day?

It’s difficult to proofread your own writing. You’re familiar with the words and you can easily slide right over small mistakes. But don’t let difficulty stop you!

I just received the monthly newsletter from my professional association. The front page article included two run-on sentences, a missing word, a missing apostrophe and a few other errors. But the best one, repeated twice, was “peak their interest.” No spellcheck will flag this, but the word should be “pique.”

I debated pointing out the errors to the writer. Perhaps I shouldn’t, because other people would have seen and pointed out the errors. Perhaps I should, because maybe we all assumed the same thing. In the end, I sent him what I hoped was a gentle note, coming from the same spirit of telling people that they have spinach or lipstick on their teeth. If everyone assumed you knew, you’d go home at the end of the day and wonder why no one bothered to tell you.

In a situation where your words are going to be read by many people, and in this case, many people with an interest in words, do take the time to proofread carefully. Better yet, show your article to someone else and ask for feedback.

Writers should never fall in love with their own words, because the pleasure in capturing exactly what you wanted to say can disappear faster than a jerky treat in front of a Lab. I was reminded of this when my client called with the bad news that Big Executive wanted a (last-minute) rewrite of a story I had done related to customer satisfaction.

Now, every company is concerned about keeping customers happy, but it can be difficult getting employees to read about the latest program. You also don’t want to talk about problems you’ve had in case potential customers see it and worry you can’t be trusted. But people are human and things happen. So I used what I thought was an engaging, human-type lead: “Big Company is rewriting Murphy’s Law — you know, that one that claims ‘whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.’”

The line made it past the person in charge of the customer satisfaction program being launched, her VP, the CEO and several others. However, another Big Executive decided it was inappropriate. He threw accusations of “airing dirty laundry” and “doesn’t look like we do anything” and “looks like we haven’t been working on this long.” My client defended the article as clearly not being guilty as charged, but was overruled and I rewrote the intro this morning.

I would love to do a comparison with Big Company’s employees and say, “which one of these first sentences would encourage you to read more of the article? ” It could be that neither one of them would get more than a yawn, but I’d put my money on Murphy’s at least by a nose.

Happy Easter! Although the calendar says it is officially spring, the local weather is decidedly unspringlike — factoring in windchill, it felt like minus 9 C (about 15 F) on my one-hour walk this morning with my dog. So although I have put away my skis for the season, it reminds me that I promised to share some thoughts about my recent trip to Beaver Creek, near Vail, Colorado.

There are definitely some differences between Beaver Creek (vertical rise 4,040 feet or 1,231 metres, 148 trails, 16 lifts) and Blue Mountain (vertical rise 720 feet or 220 metres, 34 trails, 13 lifts). My husband and I stayed in the gorgeous Beaver Creek Lodge, which understands that when you are paying high-season prices, you might want to feel like you’re getting more than just a hotel room. There were lots of extras at Beaver Creek, from the luxurious (fake fur throw on a big, comfortable bed and a Bose wave radio/CD player) to the practical (mouthwash, terry robes and slippers, body lotion and a pack of two Tylenols to combat the headaches that can be brought on by high elevation). Check-in time is 3 p.m., four hours earlier than my eventual check-in at Blue. Check-out was noon, an hour later than Blue.

Another simple thing: Cold weather activities typically make your nose run. Beaver Creek had greeters at the entrances to lodges on the mountain, handing out tissues, and there were boxes everywhere — washrooms, restaurants, hallways. Excessive? Maybe, but it speaks volumes about how the resort understands and treats its customers. Those of us running small businesses should think about how we can do the same.

You may have heard the recent radio ads for Workopolis (“Canada’s biggest job site”), featuring various people talking about “the job that changed my life.” I think this is a great series, with both inspiring tales of jobs that led to interesting careers and inspiring tales of bad jobs that led to a change of careers. I also love the tagline: “Your life awaits.”

Of course the job that changed my life is the one I’m in now. Those wild rides on the rollercoaster aside, I have the balance in my life that lets me be more effective as a writer, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a friend — and in whichever order happens to be most important at the time.

Are you in the job that lets you live your life or is your life waiting? What are you going to do about it?