In keeping with my annual tradition, this Samhain Eve I’m reflecting on everything that’s happened this year. (I wrote this on the 31st but scheduled it to delay posting until the following Monday.)

Samhain is the end of the old year and the beginning of the new; a perfect time for reflection and introspection. This post is different from all the other posts in our blog; it’s a glimpse into the whole of our year, not just the bloggy or businessy bits. I don’t give a lot of context here, so feel free to ask if you wish.

In November, in fact through all of November, December, and January, I was vegan. We began our Communication for the Holidays telecourse, which ran all the way up to Yule. It went well! We chose the subtitle for The Usual Error: “Why We Don’t Understand Each Other and 34 Ways to Make It Better”. I dealt with my depression by making a habit of happiness. Kyeli and I celebrated our 4th anniversary of being together, Marty finished the cover art for The Usual Error, and Megan finished the design.

In December, at long last, after three years of work, we published The Usual Error. This was when we published the limited edition: the one with the orange cover. We sold all 100 of the limited edition copies within 4 days! I helped organize the Triiibes Blog Project. Kyeli’s grandfather died. I went to Dallas to be there for her during the funeral, and there was some Conservatives vs. Lesbians drama. We came home and put together a fun Yule quest for Dru, and I arranged an elaborate multi-step Yule quest for Kyeli. This is also when Dru started going to counseling.

In January, I joined the Kitchen Table, Havi stayed with us for a few days, we celebrated Dru’s 11th birthday, Dru started his first semester of co-op (school for unschoolers), and we published the unlimited edition of The Usual Error (the one with the blue cover) on Amazon. We started sharing chapters from The Usual Error on our blog, one per week. I wrote down everything I learned about self-publishing. The heartspace side of me and the headspace side of me had a beautiful conversation. Kyeli and I took Iron Pentacle class with Kira and Helix, learned and grew a lot, and shared a lot of what we learned.

In February, we tried a 30-day trial of eating only raw food. It failed spectacularly for many reasons, one of which was that our 30-day trial overlapped our move from our apartment to The Chalk. Other than Heather and Stuart’s wedding (at which we gave a blessing of communication), that pretty much consumed our February. Oi.

In March, we shifted the focus of our business (which was, at the time, PaceAndKyeli.com) from communication coaching to alternative relationship coaching. Not long thereafter, we had our first paid relationship coaching call! We first heard about the tapestry thing, the you-never-make-a-mistake thing, and I took a couple of slices out of my stress pie. We went to SXSW, saw a Jonathan Coulton concert, and hung out with Naomi and oodles upon oodles of other lovely and amazing people. We went to Sea World where Dru fell in love with the orcas and decided he wanted to be an orca trainer, we went to Houston to see Kyeli’s grandmother’s house before they tore it down, and there was a fist-sized hailstorm that totalled our car. (Kyeli stopped me from rushing outside to bring the car into the garage. Thanks, hon, I could have been brained!) And we celebrated Kyeli’s birthday! Yay! I got her a very slow shoe.

In April, we started posting Freaky Thursday and Revolutionary Tuesday video entries on the blog, as lead-up to a big announcement. This and the preparation for the big thing took up most of our time.

In May, Kyeli and I celebrated Beltane by playing Chuzzle on the moon! We were afraid our website had been hacked into sending spam, but it turned out to be just SMTP header spoofing. We had lunch with my friend Nick right before he moved to Portland (like everyone else we know). On May 11th, we dropped everything to follow our hearts. We completely redesigned our business and our website so we could lead the Freak Revolution. In less earth-shattering news, I got to Inbox Zero for the first time in 14 years. Oh, and we went to A-kon!

In June, we launched the Freak Revolution Coffee House (our forum), we were mentioned on ishmael.org, we switched to a cash-based system for managing our personal finances, and there was the big hullaballoo about politics.

In July, I finished the Heart of Money course. Since then, our financial situation has been about eighty billion times less stressful for me, and that’s not even mentioning the life-changing spiritual epiphany. Other than that, our life consisted mainly of working like crazy behind the scenes on the Freak Revolution Manifesto. This was also the month that Kyeli got overwhelmed and had a retreat, I got overwhelmed and had an emergency retreat, and Dru quit Aikido.

In August, we continued to work like crazy behind the scenes on the Freak Revolution Manifesto. My team at my day job came in first at the scavenger hunt, a long-term loan was finally repaid in full, and Kyeli and I had the “Pace, don’t smush yourself” conversation. I wrote a guest post for Copyblogger, defended closed-mindedness, and Kyeli broke her foot.

In September, we finally finished posting all 34 chapters of The Usual Error and released the entire e-book for free. I finally passed Paranoia Survivor, a very fast DDR song that I’ve been trying to pass for what, 4 years now? I ranted about how one person could have saved $450,000 from scammers, and hurt a good friend’s feelings. I finally got my updated passport that actually says I’m female, we went to the hot air balloon festival in Dallas, and our pseudo-nephew Eli was born. We saw Wicked, and pronounced it The Official Musical of the Freak Revolution! We started getting excited leading up to the manifesto release, and the Freak Revolution Manifesto launched on September 28th! Amanda won the Change the World in One Minute contest.

In October, we celebrated the ongoing success of the Freak Revolution Manifesto! We asked for feedback about the contest, and responded to it. Kyeli’s foot got better, her cousin Nicole died, we met Destry, I had a great 30-second birthday, and our good friends Bre and Amit got married, at which Kyeli gave a speech comprised of 80% Beatles lyrics. Kyeli and I spent a superb weekend with our dear friend Lynnivere in the boonies of East Texas, and we released the Usual Error audiobook.

In 2009 we enjoyed Full Moon, Star Trek: The Next Generation (seasons 1-3), and Poirot. We played Aquaria, Dokapon Kingdom, Persona 4, Trilby, Tales of Symphonia, Machinarium, and we were judges for IFComp 2009. I re-read all the Miles Vorkosigan books. We played a full year of our Mage game, Kyeli and I roleplayed two Risus murder mystery mini-campaigns with each other, and we played our first family Risus game, the Catoblepas campaign. (That was Dru’s first time participating in a roleplaying game.)

2009 was a year of growth. Growth in our business (which went through quite a few twists and turns, learning at each step), growth in our relationship (continuing to heal from our codependent past to create a more and more healthy interdependent future), and growth in spirituality (I began to practice Remembrance, and learned the value of humility and service).

As the old year closes and the new year opens, I open myself to the growth the new year has to offer.

I open myself to change.

I open myself to new challenges.

I open myself to joy.

I open myself to peace.

I open myself to comfort.

I open myself to love.

I open myself.

Hey, everyone. Kyeli is feeling a bit shaky and introspective lately, so I’m handling the business and technical side of things to give her space to process. Writing is a big part of her process, so I’m sure she’ll be sharing some of her thoughts and feelings with the rest of us, too.

But today, I want to correct a misunderstanding about our newsletter — it’s not just email versions of the blog posts. (If you want to get the blog posts emailed to you, here’s the link for that.)

In the newsletter, you’ll read inspiring thoughts, ideas that motivate, and awesome treats on how to make personal, life, and world-changing improvements! You know, kind of like our blog, except shorter (usually 1-3 paragraphs), more focused, and less frequent.

The newsletter also contains, well… news! We talk about all the neat things we’re planning and what’s going on within our community. Like, for instance, upcoming product releases. Newsletter subscribers get the news first and we also offer newsletter-only discounts.

We’re releasing 52 Weeks to Awesome later this year and a surprise for you next week, so I wanted to make sure that everyone who wanted the newsletter-only discount gets the newsletter-only discount. (:

So if you want to, you can join by clicking here, and if you don’t like it, it’s easy to unsubscribe.

That’s it from me; now back to your regularly scheduled Kyeli. (:

My cousin Nicole passed away last Friday morning.

She went into the hospital three weeks ago to have a baby. She was sick. That plus complications in birth lead to her death. This means she left behind a newborn baby boy. She also left behind a nine-year-old daughter.

I saw Nicole last Christmas at our family party. She looked wonderful; she was in love and happy, and seemed better off than she ever had before. It’d been ten years since we’d last seen each other, and we spent a little time reconnecting. It was nice. Not epic, not like long-lost-friends or anything, but good.

And now she’s gone.

And I just can’t believe it.

And now, the memorial service is over, and we’re all going back to our regular lives, whatever that means.

I’m so sensitive. I barely knew her as an adult, and I’m crushed. I keep seeing the faces of her children when I close my eyes. I keep thinking about all my other cousins and family and people I love but rarely see. People who might not know how much I love them. People who I don’t even know how much I love them.

We’re funny fragile creatures.

And now I’m supposed to return to my life, but I’m scarred, scared, trembling.

Being an entrepreneur is one of the most important things in my life. This blog and my readers (that’s you) are on my top priority list. But I still haven’t learned how to work through a tragedy, how to keep going when my heart hurts so much, how to push through when I’m moving in a fog of sleep deprivation and sorrow.

This post is posting late. I haven’t queued anything up because I’ve been in shock for over a week now, since she went into ICU.

Lessons all over the place. I hope I can find them.

You gave us your feedback about this blog, and we’re listening.

You asked for more open and vulnerable posts. We’ll do our best.

You asked for more audio and video posts. We’ll continue posting those occasionally.

You said that the community updates were the posts you most often skimmed or skipped. So we’re cutting down on those. From here on out, we won’t post community updates weekly; we’ll only post them if we have interesting and/or important news to share.

On the Fridays when we don’t post a community update, we’ll post something about communication, how to be awesome, or revolutionizing the world instead. So our blog schedule, starting next week, is:

Monday: something awesome and unscheduled
Wednesday: Book Bonanza Wednesday
Friday: Community Update or something awesome and unscheduled

How does that sound? Leave us a comment if you have something to say.

Thanks for experimenting with us and finding out what works best!

I’ve been super stressed out and overwhelmed and weary lately. In a fabulous and much-needed conversation with the Marvelous Ms M, I realized (for, like, the 50th time) that I’m trying to wear far too many hats at once.

I eventually came up with the perfect solution to all my problems: All I need to do is hire a Hydra.

So I wrote a want-ad.

Wanted: one fully grown, well-trained Hydra for assistance with small business, in a Personal Assistant-type role. Weary woman has far too many hats and needs extra heads to share burdens.

Please contact me if interested; position needs immediate filling.

I’ve posted it to my creative writing site, and also on Craig’s List.

Maybe I’ll find one. Can’t hurt to look, eh?

I just spent an hour figuring out whether our website had been hacked into sending Viagra spam, so the least I can do is to share what I learned.

The panic started when Kyeli and I received 30 emails in the space of 5 minutes, all of them things like “Out of Office autoreply” or “Delivery failure notification”, you know, like what you often get when you send email to a nonexistent email address or someone who’s busy or on vacation. But the emails were all sent to random email addresses like 9asinine@freakrevolution.com, apparently as autoresponses to emails from random email addresses like 9asinine@freakrevolution.com.

Kyeli panicked and thought we had been hacked. I told her not to worry, that it was just email spoofing, that it happens all the time, and that there’s nothing you can do about it.

But how could I be sure? If our site was actually hacked, we could get deindexed, and it could totally hose our website and our business. So it deserved some investigation. Here’s what I found.

1. Don’t panic. 99% of the time it’s just spoofing, not hacking.

2. Check your sendmail logs.

Sendmail logs are in different places depending on your web hosting, so I can’t tell you where they are or how to find them on your hosting service. But if you’re hosted with a company that doesn’t let you access them directly, you can ask them to check the logs for you.

3. Check the mail headers of the emails sent “from you”.

Look for the Received header and see if it’s from your hosting company (e.g. something.lunarpages.com) or from some random place, in my example vorlagen.domain.invalid (h199.244.19.98.dynamic.ip.windstream.net [98.19.244.199]).
This will only work if some of the autoresponders are kind enough to include headers when they bounce back the email to you.

Thanks to @kristinab, @FontSiteDiva, @rose_w, @soupwiththefork, and @soniasimone for helping me figure out what to do and/or helping me stay calm. (:

People get me and Kyeli mixed up all the time. We work together so closely, it’s easy to do. This morning, Jessica Van Hove made a great suggestion to help out with this. (Thanks, Jessica!)

You know those speech bubbles at the bottom of each post with the picture of whoever wrote the post? We added those to the website so it would be easier to tell us apart. But lots of people read our blog via an RSS reader, and because of the way Wordpress works, the speech bubbles and pictures only showed up on the website, not in the RSS feed.

Today I did some Wordpress hacking and finally got it to work! YAY! *happy dance*

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you’ll (hopefully) see my smiling face at the bottom. I’d appreciate feedback on how it looks for you!

We interrupt Iron Pentacle Friday for a special bulletin:

Today is Kyeli’s birthday!

(For those of you not playing along at home, Kyeli is my lovely wife. We’ve been married for three and a half years, and they’ve been the happiest and awesomest years of my life. So far. I’m sure the ones to come will be even awesomer.)

She’s a brilliant star, and this is her day to shine. She’s sweet, passionate, intense, fierce, brilliant, creative, powerful, gorgeous, clever, sexy, and caring.

And so, on this special day, I could do no less than to hire a potato to send her special birthday wishes.

When Google Chrome came out, I was inspired. I read the comic and thought to myself, “This is awesome. This is what a web browser is meant to be.” So I switched. I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser since it came out, and I’ve only been using Firefox for FireFTP and a couple of finicky sites that don’t work perfectly under Chrome.

Chrome is slick and fast. It made me feel cool to be using it, because it’s Google and it’s a geeky thing to do. It also made me feel good about myself to be using it, because I was supporting design principles I believe in.

Today I switched back to Firefox. Here’s why.

1. Add-ons. Tab Mix Plus (Duplicate Tab!), Greasemonkey, Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, All-in-one Gestures (Right-drag to go back a page!), Googlepedia, Word Count Plus, the Remember the Milk extension, FireFTP, and many more.

Each one of these add-ons makes my life a little simpler and a little more pleasant. I’ve been getting by without them. But I’m breathing a sigh of relief now that I’m using Firefox again. I’ve been choosing the browser that was better in principle instead of the browser that’s better in practice. Today, I don’t need the browser that best supports good web development standards. Today, I need the browser that best supports me getting my work done efficiently and happily.

2. Compatibility. There are a few sites that don’t work perfectly with Chrome, like the registration for AmazonConnect, Neilsen BookData, and the pop-up window at the Kitchen Table. I sometimes ended up having both browsers open when I visited one of those problematic sites. But I’ve encountered zero sites that work with Chrome but not Firefox, so I won’t ever be using Chrome again, unless I really can’t remember a password I created during the last few months. (;

Chrome made me feel cool.
Firefox makes me feel happy and productive.

It’s like I’m dumping my glamorous, glitzy, Gucci-wearing girlfriend for a woman who wears overalls and has some dirt on her knees, but knows how to wrestle a pig to the ground, solve differential equations, paints watercolors in her spare time, can kick you in the face with her mad Krav Maga skills, and does a little sysadmin work on the side.

That woman is hot.

I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you, baby. I’m back.

12:12am, January 7th, 1998.

The most anticipated moment of my life, after 10 months of pregnancy and 17 hours of labor, my son was born. The tiniest, most intense, most amazing blue eyes I’ve ever seen met mine and we quietly regarded each other while the world kept spinning. Doctors, nurses, family members came and went, and we were oblivious, watching each other. He gripped my finger like his life depended on it. My breath and his synced for a moment, and I’m sure our hearts did, too.

My world changed forever. “Welcome to the world, Dru,” I whispered.

Today, he is eleven years old. The most amazing, whirlwind, exciting eleven years of my life, and I thank the gods every moment of every day for this kid. He’s my best friend, my sweet baby, my not-so-wee-anymore little man, my rapidly-growing-up son.

Happy birthday, Dru. May all your days be filled with light, may every pain bring a lesson, may every step take you where you want to go.