Les Potter, communications guru and visiting instructor at Towson University, blogged the other day about the loneliness of the solo communicator and the importance of regular social interaction with fellow professionals. He quotes a couple of songs (“One is the loneliest number”) and then after a few comments, both on the blog and off, posts his own hilarious “Sole proprieter blues.”

Woke up this morning
Lord I felt so bad
Another day alone
Done billed all the work I had…

(Enjoy the full verse in the comments on his original post.)

Les makes a good point. It can be lonely as an independent. You do need to work on developing ways to make up for the lack of on-site colleagues that come with working for a company. And you do need to be able to handle all that time working alone.

When I launched my solo business about 17 years ago, I deliberately looked for like-minded people in IABC and another association geographically close to me. I’ve been active with both, particularly in the area of member communications. These days, indies have targeted support with IABC/Toronto’s Alliance of Independent Practitioners. Those of us living and/or working west of Toronto can network closer to home with another sub-group, IABC/Toronto Westend. I highly recommend both!

The discussion Les and I had highlights another way today’s solo artists can overcome the feeling of loneliness: interacting with others on blogs, social networking sites, discussion boards and other online spots. So really, you have no excuse for feeling isolated and alone in a home office. Get out and network in person every chance you get, and network online in between. Go for it!

If I have to write about another “enterprise-wide end-to-end process” or “methodology,” I may scream. The good thing is, in a home office, there are few in earshot to hear the noise.

You’ll be glad to know I am working hard to not include any of the offending words in the article. After all, I do want employees to read it!

So it’s the first night without the Olympics on TV, and I have to say I kind of miss them. I did not slavishly follow anything, but left whatever event happened to be on as background while I read the newspaper.

The journalists covering the events were a sharp contrast to those I read in newspapers and online, who were sure uncomplimentary – especially when it came to swimmer Michael Phelps. Quite a few used the term “freakishly large” or “freak of nature” or similar. I also saw “hugely talented but mostly uninteresting.” Really, could we not just admire his talent and leave looks out of it?

All I can say is when you’re really good at what you do, you make it look easy, and maybe that opens the door to (jealous?) sniping. I hear all the gold medals Phelps earned resulted in a $1 million bonus from his sponsor, so I’m sure that prevents the names from hurting.

All summer, I kept working away on hot days, even with a pool coolly beckoning. “I’ll finish this project now and swim late in the day,” I told myself.  I can’t tell you how many times a glorious sunny day turned dark as rain swept in about 4 p.m., just about the time I was going to take that promised swim.

So today, with the air around 28 Celsius (high 80s F) and the sun shining, I came home from walking Jake and looked at that pool. Off came the solar blanket and in I went. It was heavenly. I’m back at my desk with renewed energy.

The clouds are rolling in although it isn’t supposed to rain today.

Summer is my season, so even though I enjoy different seasons, this time of year always makes me feel a little down. I’m expecting to feel a little bluer than usual just over a week from now, when our youngest heads off to university.

Many people talk about how glad they’ll be to “get rid of” their offspring when they go to university. That’s not me.

When we dropped Son #1 off at his dorm, I managed to keep my chin up. It helped that he would be home just two weeks later to celebrate his grandfather’s 80th birthday. It also helped that he’s only about a half-hour drive away. When I miss him, and I do, I can always skip out and take him for lunch when he has a spare period (a key benefit of my flexible freelancer schedule!). It also helped that Son #2 was still at home.

Now, Son #2 will be gone too. He’ll be an hour’s drive away, which still isn’t too bad; I’ll be able to take him for lunch, too, if our schedules work out. But still.

I’m excited for him, because I know it will be an enriching, amazing experience. But I’ve had both sons home all summer, and I’ll miss them.

From my “Damn, I wish I wrote that” files, I have a long-ago column from the Chicago Tribune. Writer Barbara Brotman talks about her daughter going off to kindergarten, saying, “It has come too soon, her first step into the world that will carry her away from me.”

She goes on:

“It is a lousy system, parenthood. We are built to swoon with joy when we hold our babies tightly, to sigh with pleasure when we nuzzle our children’s plump necks, to delight in every kiss and tickle. Then we are supposed to let them go. Not right away and not all at once, but still…Kindergarten is the start of the foot race toward independence. Here, the walk turns into a trot. Someday, it will be a run. Can it be that eventually I will be no more than a weekly phone obligation?”

Oh well. Given the economic realities and the growing number of boomerang children — who move out and move back — I am sure they’ll be back.

Is this a new HR term? I’m talking about “scrum” as a way of describing a manager (sorry, “leader,” as this particular client now calls the management level)/employee communications session.

The old use of scrum relates to rugby. I’ve seen it described as a way to restart a game after an interruption (say, a minor foul) or when everyone acts together to move the ball down the field.

Another common use is “media scrum,” when a group of journalists surround public figures like politicians and ask questions “in an impromptu or loosely organized way.”

When a colleague asked about the meaning of scrum, someone shared a link to “an agile software development method for project management.” It’s not clear reading the “about” page whether this involves software, or just a process, or something else. (Just for fun, I ran the page through Word’s readability stats; it came out with a reading ease of 39.9% vs. the desired minimum of 60%!) Here are just some of the buzzwords that attempt to describe Scrum, the thing:

• …it’s an iterative, incremental process
• …it produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration
• …it’s a wrapper for existing engineering practices
• …it’s a team-based approach to iteratively, incrementally develop systems and products
• …it’s a process that controls the chaos
• …it’s scalable

If you were playing Buzzword Bingo, you’d have your card completed in record time! The funny thing is, it claims to be a way “to improve communications.”

You claim you’re trying to quit. You sneak off to furtively indulge in just one more. You check your pockets often to make sure you have your secret vice with you.

In the old days (the Dark Ages, as my kids would say), you’d be a smoker. These days, you’re a BlackBerry user.

That analogy has been out since an article in USA Today in 2006, and probably even earlier, but I just fell over it the other day. Writer Patricia Pearson (hey, she’s in Toronto!) says she will not meet friends in a restaurant or bar “unless they promise to switch off their cellphones and BlackBerrys.”

I don’t have a BlackBerry, but my husband does. He claims to hate it, but is often spotted at odd moments during an evening or weekend, BB in hand, scrolling through messages. (It’s never at the dinner table, though!) We had lunch with one of his clients recently, who has one too. Twice during the lunch, the client took the BB out, looked, put it away; he was courteous enough to ask if we minded, and then explained he was expecting results from a son’s sporting event.

I think that’s the biggest thing: courtesy. As a solitary endeavour, checking your BlackBerry is fine. You’re connected with the people, places and projects that need your immediate attention, no matter where you are. But when you are with someone else, that’s the person who needs your immediate attention.

So put the BlackBerry away with your cellphone. Let both devices take a message. After all, you need to send a message yourself: You have a life, and sometimes it actually takes place offline.

So IABC has renamed their annual international conference. It’s now going to be called the “world conference,” to “better reflect the organization’s global reach and mission.”

Um, sounds like pretty much the same thing to me.

A colleague in one of my networking groups, Rob Clark of The Elusive Fish, once likened social media to being at a party. He suggested that just as we would at a party, we need to get out and talk to people.

Jean Gogolin (in her WordTales blog, found through links from other bloggers), suggests basically the same thing when she encourages those of us who lurk on blogs to comment. As she says, comment to learn, to become part of a community, to meet compelling people, to add your point of view and more.

I can’t tell you how many times another blogger has (virtually) introduced me to someone else I have found to be funny, smart, interesting, entertaining and with plenty of wisdom to share. Why wouldn’t we let those people know how much we enjoy their words? Why not let them know their words aren’t wafting silently through cyberspace, unseen and unheard?

I was already following Copyblogger and Seth Godin, two of the blogs Jean cites. But she introduced me to the hilarious Naomi Dunford and her Ittybiz (“Work from home tips to help you stay sane”), where I found and ordered Naomi’s cleverly named How to Become an SEO Ninja. I can’t remember where I heard of Danny Evans’ Dad Gone Mad (“this is your brain on fatherhood”) or Quinn Cummings’ QC Report, or Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist (“advice at the intersection of work and life”), but I thoroughly enjoy all of them.

I’ve probably doubled the number of blogs I follow based on mentions from other bloggers or people commenting on them. That’s both a good thing and sometimes not so good, as in when I get distracted from my appointed tasks by reading, following links and, usually, having a good laugh. However, you could say that’s good, too. What day isn’t enriched by a good laugh? And I’m pretty focused when I have a deadline to meet.

My friend and colleague Donna Papacosta at Trafalgar Communications is always very good at commenting, even when I happen to know she’s crazy busy. So I promise to work on my tendency to lurk and do likewise; comment where I have something to say.

Did you know that there is a column in The Atlantic where Barbara Wallraff posts reader requests for words that don’t exist but should? What a delightful idea!

Word Fugitives gathers suggestions for things like “a husband’s uncanny ability to ask his wife if she needs help with a household task at the exact moment that she’s finishing it.” The chosen word: afterthoughtful.

You have until Aug. 31 to come up with a word for the “seemingly universal, irresistible impulse, when faced with a dishwasher that someone else has loaded, to rearrange the dishes.” I think the impulse itself might be called “obsessive impulsive disorder” or “reorganitch,” and the impulsive person perhaps a “back-end loader” or “restructural loader.” I admit to being one, but only so I can fit in more dishes and thus not have to wash any by hand. Not that I am lazy, you understand; purely for the environmental benefits of washing a full load. Yeah, that’s it.

Enter here.

Thanks to Dan Santow’s Word Wise for pointing me to the site!