I’m dreading the day my pacifist daughter makes a right turn down a road I’d rather she didn’t follow. We all have these nightmares as parents. And we never know what might trigger them.

There are many roads I worry about, but then I have an over-active imagination. It comes of being a fiction writer and envisioning scenarios of people in circumstances of just about anything I could…well, imagine.

Right now her big love, other than being in art college, has been and continues to be animé, Japanese animation. Think Pokémon, Digimon, Fushigi Yuugi and the like.

Every moment of her spare time is filled with brainstorming fan fiction stories. So for now, I’m not really worried. As long as she doesn’t start sporting tattoos and body piercings or asking for me to buy her the latest MMA clothing because she’s suddenly into mixed martial arts big time, then I probably don’t really have anything to worry about. But without something to worry about, what’s a long-distance mom supposed to do?

One of the most powerful selling techniques is scarcity. This was brought home to an online friend of mine recently when she attended an Internet marketing training held near her home. This event was not only close by, but was free.

Naturally there was a big catch, but she didn’t know what it was going to be until about three-quarters of the way through the day. The main focus was on converting everyone there from Linux web hosting to asp.net web hosting. And if anyone signed up that day at the event, he or she would get a steep discount on a year’s service.

My friend rushed to sign up. For a time all was well. Then the sales pitches for add-on services started coming. She couldn’t cancel her email subscription without canceling the service which she was now committed to for a year. It’s so true. You get what you pay for.

How do you think that people like celebrities get lingerie, clothing, or makeup lines when they have no experience with design or manufacturing?

They work with those who produce that item to either design what they like or choose from a pre designed line of items that they can slap their “name” on. It is done all over the world and from small companies to large multinational corporations.

Wholesale lingerie as well as private label cosmetics are easy to find if you know where to look and what to look for.

This is even somewhat how it works within companies that are really large. Victoria’s Secret probably has an army or at least a hand full of designers who come up with ideas just for their lines. But maybe that same designer has other ideas that don’t work for VS at the moment. He could potentially sell them to another company.

Sometimes there are exclusive rights involved, that means one company gets sole rights to a particular design. This option probably costs more in the end though.

During the past few months, we have purchased a number of real estate properties that we are looking to flip.  So, we have been doing renovations on most of the houses, including building a couple of wood decks.

As we get closer to completion, we still have a few tasks left.  One of them is picking which deck stains to use.  Unfortunately for us, my partner and I have different ideas when it comes to what we should get, so we will need to come to a compromise.

We are also looking at hiring a deck cleaning crew to take care of the rest of the properties that have decks that don’t need work, so that the properties look pristine when we go to sell them.

Even though we still have quite a bit of work left to do, it is a good feeling when you are getting close to completion.  Now, if we could just decide as to which deck stain to buy… everything would be perfect.

It’s getting to the point that I’m leery of trying new food products when they first come out. I must be living in a test market and if the test fails, the product is withdrawn from the shelves — whether I liked the taste of it or not. It’s happened to me with turtle-style refrigerator cookie dough, with garlic and herb swirled cream cheese spread and with the most delicious butter toffee hard candies I’d ever tasted. All have disappeared from shelves.

So if you’re developing authentic Indian food products, I don’t care how good your Indian recipes are, don’t let them be sent to my local Wal-Mart or Kroger stores, because if I end up liking them, they’ll end up failing. I guess I’m a jinx.

My policy now is to wait until a product is advertised on TV or has been on the shelves for over a year. Then I’ll try it. That way it won’t disappear on me. Hopefully.

In my industry it is extremely important to hire the best service people we can find. We are concerned about the levels of privacy and customer care that the company can provide. You see, I run a PR company and my clients depend on me to find the best people to support them.

I had an event in Philly recently and I hired a Philadelphia limousine to take care of my high profile client and his caravan of people. He is a musician and needed good security on top of the best equipment in the cars.

Our client was very happy in the end with the limousine service because there have been threats against him recently and the company did not leak any information to the press. We were able to obtain plenty of cars for the entire group of security people and assistants too.

We will be hiring them again because they provided the level of service that is required of my clients.

Last fall, my husband quit his job to start his own business from home.  It has taken off far more than we ever thought imaginable and he has even had to start outsourcing some of his incoming work to keep up with the demands of his clients.  I am not complaining, but this is just something that we did not expect.

With the success he has had in his business we are looking for new investment opportunities that would make us a lot of money and it would put the money that we made to good use.  It would be nice if we were able to retire early and I know that looking for bigger opportunities would further us towards this goal a lot quicker.

I can only hope that the business continues to do as well as it has in the past few months, as I know if it continues to go as it has, our quality of living will greatly increase and we’ll be able to afford some of the luxuries that we were not able to afford in the past.

Some of the fondest memories I have of childhood were the ones from summer camp. These memories have stuck with me throughout the years and I made many friends there that I am still friends with today.

One of the great things about the camp that I went to was that my grandfather built all of the cabins himself. At the time, it never really dawned on me how much time and effort he put into making it a place for families to go to relax in nature, but as I look back on it now, it is incredible what he did for all of us.

I wish that I would have realized this before he passed away and could have thanked him for the incredible legacy that he left for the rest of us. He was an incredible man and I can only hope to become half the person he was. I will always remember summer camp and the loving hands that made it possible for me.

I found a blog tonight that I wanted to read, but I couldn’t understand.  You see, from what I could gather, it had information pertaining to some new cutting edge OLED display technologies.

I tried to see if there was an English version available online, but sadly, none were available.  But I knew that there had to be someway that I could read it - I just had to look a little harder.

After doing a search for "translation service" I found a website that offered a free service online.  I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try it out.

After running the site through the translator, I was able to finally read what I had been looking for.  Sure, the English wasn’t perfect, but it was more than adequate for me to understand.  It was nice to finally read some cutting edge information about OLEDs instead of reading old news.  From now on, I will gladly use translation services if it allows me to read sites that I cannot normally read - they sure work better than I would have thought.

I was doing some research for a high school health class on drug rehabilitation. I learned so much during that research about a topic that I had really known very little of. I knew that there were many people in the class that dealt with these realities on an everyday basis and I suddenly understood a little bit more about who they were.

In fact, when I asked one of my classmates where he got his excellent drug rehab info, he told me that he got it at the facility that he had stayed at the summer before. We talked about his addictions well into the night and it was like I had a window into a life that I previously knew nothing about.

I was sorry that he had gone through that and even more sorry that I had judged him before getting to know him. We became great friends and, though he still sometimes struggles with temptation, he said that I have done so much for him by being accepting and being an ear when he needs it. I got so much more out of that class than I had ever hoped for.