Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Day 1352

I went to a business networking breakfast this morning. About once a year this networking group invites me to join them as a prospective member. Even though I'm not a morning person, I always go to these meetings, because breakfast at The Park Cities Club, where the meetings take place, is fabulous. Once I arrive, the group quickly realizes how unbusinesslike I am, and I don't hear from them again for months at a time. This has been going on for years. After a while, they forget and invite me to join them again.

Although I am very good at what I do, I am definitely out of my league with this bunch. Almost everybody in the group is a CEO, CFO, or COO of a major company. I guess I'm a CEO too, but my only employee is a dog. The guy sitting on my right at breakfast told me that while he was staying at his vacation home in Hawaii during the financial crisis in 2008, he noticed how far real estate values had plummeted and stared buying up distressed beach properties. His definition of a distressed property was anything under $500,000.

I'm still a bit baffled at why this group would be interested in me as a prospective member, but I could definitely learn a lot by joining. I've never seen a more motivated bunch of people in my life. Most of these guys have already made several thousand dollars before I even get out of bed in the morning. I don't know if I made a better impression than I did at previous network breakfasts, but I may actually become a member this time. They're interested in having me create a website for them.

Dot did well during her acupuncture session today, but she couldn't go in the water therapy tank because the vet said she had the beginnings of a staph infection on her skin. Evidently only blemish free dogs can go in the tank. Dot is supposed to get a bath twice a week with a special medicated shampoo until her skin clear up. This ought to be interesting. A bath once a month is once too often for Dot. She hates getting a bath.

The neighbor's dog got loose today and attacked Dot and Dash while we were walking. I knew this would happen eventually. The dog is very dog aggressive and goes nuts whenever we pass by the neighbor's fence. The dog bit Dash and was trying to go after Dot when the neighbors arrived and got the dog under control again. Luckily, no damage was done. Dash got nipped in the but, but the bite didn't break the skin and Dash was back to normal as soon as the bad neighbor dog was taken back inside.

I found some vector art on the Internet and did the print job I screwed up yesterday all over again. When I was looking for good stock images, I thought I'd apply to join one of the stock sites as a contributing photographer. I'd forgotten what a pain it was to become a contributor to a stock agency. I had to submit ten high resolution images and add lots of meta-tags and technical information to each image before I could even submit it for review. I did this once before with another stock photo agency and only made pennies from the sale of the images once they finally accepted me. Ironically, I think it will be much easier to become a member of an elite business networking group full of high powered CEO's, than to have my photos accepted by a stock agency that will pay me pennies per image at best. That's life though. I've learned over the years to leave no stone unturned. We'll see what happens in both cases.

Mandy is today's Dalmatian of the Day
Watch of the Day