Squirrels, squirrels and more squirrels

I hate squirrels. They're everywhere in our pool porch. The little rascals have eaten through every crevice near the roof, made a house in the beam above our pool and have even eaten the lightbulbs hanging around the pool roof. We've tried everything to get rid of them, including seeking our two doberman pinchers on them. The squirrels just tease the dogs and run out of their reach.

But they keep coming back. My husband Ken decided it was time to start trapping them last week. So he baited two traps with peanut butter and pecans. Lo and behold, the next day we had a victim.

Now, we have had some long discussions on what to do with the squirrels once we catch them. My friend Kim Rose had a similar problem at her house. Being the good researcher that she is, she found pages of advice on the Web about how to humanely dispose of critters. The general consensus was dropping the cage in a trash can filled with water was the best way to send the creatures to heaven. We confirmed that advice with our neighbor, Tom, who is an animal researcher. He said, "yeah, drown those little suckers."

So with squirrel in cage, Kenny delicately dunked the cage into a trash can filled with water yesterday. To his horror, the critter came swimming up through the water, pressed against the cage door and flew out the cage, into the nearby tree and headed straight back to the pool porch. Note to Ken: put the cage door in first, next time.

After that trauma, Ken set two more traps and this morning we had two more victims. "It's going to be double-death Tuesday," he said. But after thinking it over, Ken decided he couldn't handle another drowning episode. So he asked a handyman who was working at our house to do the deed. He couldn't face the squirrels either, so they took a trip with him to High Springs.

If you have any ideas for getting rid of squirrels, please let me know. I don't know how many more squirrels we can transplant!

Things that drive me nuts!

Like every communicator, I have a list of spelling and grammar errors that send me over the edge. I swear I was put on the earth to campaign against these errors. So read on and feel free to respond with your list. Maybe we can change the world.

--Commas and periods ALWAYS go inside quote marks. The only exception is if you live in the United Kingdom. They do it differently there. Question marks and exclamation marks fall according to sentence usage.
--When referring to numbers and quantities, the correct term is "more than" not over. You jump over a wire. You collect "more than 50 signatures.
--Barack Obama does this one correctly. It is not only, but also. We have not only moved to a new state, but also to a new city and neighborhood.

An 11th thing that I have learned

I talked about the top 10 things I've learned in 38 years in the public relations business. But, there is one important lesson I learned that I didn't include in my top 10 list. So here is lesson number eleven: don't take yourself too seriously!

I remember a comment from a dear colleague, Debbie Meyers, who is now Director of Stewardship and Donor Relations at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg. Back in the day before computers, Debbie used to help out with typesetting at PRO iNK. One day when I was commenting about someone being too busy, she said, "Heck, everybody's busy. Saying you are busy is just a way to stroke your own ego."

Debbie had a good point. The even bigger issue is we all tend to think our industry, our world, our career, our worries are the most important things in the universe. Debbie would probably say -- get over it! Find the humor in your life and take all the seriousness in the world with a grain of salt. If we can find a way to laugh or even be amused at some of our daily activities, think how much better life will be.

Debbie, thanks for the advice. I'm passing it along to my pals, too!

The top 10 things I learned from 30 years in business

Last week, I spoke at the Florida Public Relations Association's Gainesville chapter meeting. I shared with them ten of the things I've learned over the past 30 years of running a small public relations firm. Here is item number 1.

1. Keep your overhead low. I can remember an ad agency that was here in town about 25 years ago. They had a beautiful office in a restored Victorian home. I have no idea what their rent was, but I remember hearing they paid $3000 a month to heat the office during the winter. Boy, did that scare the begezus out of me.

Luckily the building we paid next to nothing for from the murderer’s father, has served us well. Even though it’s in an industrial park on the East Side of town, it’s paid for and it sure helps keep us in business when we don’t have a huge mortgage or rent payment to make. And now it’s even cool to be on the east side, so we’re proud of our location, too.

We've come a long way baby!

I spoke at yesterday's Florida Public Relations Association meeting of the local Gainesville chapter. In my talk I shared some of my experiences being a woman in the public relations field some 30 years ago. The biggest gasp from the crowd came when I told of how my husband had to be interviewed for one of my jobs. It seems like only yesterday that women were so unusual in the workplace that men hadn't figured out how to treat us, let alone how to work comfortably with us. But yet we have come a long way. That's not to say there isn't progress to be made. Women are still paid less than men in comparable positions. Very few women are CEOs of Fortune 500 firms. (Maybe after all the financial crisis of the past week, we should think seriously about more women steering our country's business.)

Whether we are where we need to be in the US or not, we are certainly ahead of women in many other parts of the world. I can not forget standing at a ticket counter in Morocco, waiting to be assisted. I finally figured out the woman behind the counter was assisting all the men first. That's when I signaled my husband to take my place, so we could be taken care of. Young women may find these stories shocking, but I hope they honor the women who blazed trails to make today's workplace a better place for women.

How do our schools weather these economic times?

After this week's Wall Street troubles and current projections for even more doom and gloom in our nation's economy, it gives one pause to think about all the non-profits who will be facing ever tightening budgets and resources. Our local school board has already experienced a significant budget cut and I learned today at our Alachua County School Board Foundation meeting, that more budget cuts are coming.

How do we continue to fund education properly in light of a faltering economy? Our local school board is proposing an increase in our property taxes for four years that will bring back media specialists, music, art and counselors. The average Alachua County homeowner will pay $10 per month additional taxes if this initiative is approved. This initiative seems like one solution. Another will be a serious lobbying effort by parents, teachers and community leaders to our state legislators. Legislators need to understand the importance of education to our citizens and therefore to our state. Well-educated young people are essential to build and grow our economy.

Who can you trust?

Today at Rotary we had a speaker from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He told us how safe nuclear power is, how wonderful it is and how it could remedy our energy crisis. Although he seemed like a nice enough guy and was probably right on all counts, I found myself questioning his statements for several reasons. First, he cited one of his resources for his talk as the publication of the John Birch Society. Now, I'm as open minded as the next gal, but what does the John Birch Society know about nuclear power? Heck, I didn't even know they still existed. My second reason for questioning his talk was the almost "off-color" stories he told. In addition, he flew through technical data that most of us didn't grasp and then appeared entirely too flippant about his subject. In the end, I kept asking myself, "is this another government propaganda campaign?"

After all this country has been through in the past eight years, how do we know when to trust government spokespeople? How jaded has the general public gotten about any message from government or large organizations? How do we instill trust when we deliver a message? For those of us in the communications business, we have some interesting challenges ahead as we craft and present messages on behalf of our clients.

A Tribute to Charlie Wellborn, professor extraordinare

Charlie Wellborn was the first professor I met when I enrolled at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. We became instant friends. I took three of his classes and he became a life-long friend until he died in the early 1990s. Besides being a huge cheerleader for everything I ever tried, I credit Charlie with teaching me some of the most important things I learned about good communication. For those of you in the bz, here are Charlie's words of wisdom:
--Run logos behind type once. Get it out of your system, then never do it again.
--Remember the line length rule. Designate your type size (say 10 point), then keep your line length the same figure in picas to double that figure in picas (10 picas to 20 picas), with the optimum at 1.5 or 15 picas. For 20 point type, your range is 20-40 picas, with the optimum line length 30 picas.
--When you reverse type out of a solid color, always go to a heavier weight type so the type is easier to read. If you are using a light face in your main copy, use a regular weight in the reversed out box. Or if you are using regular face in main copy, go to a bold face in the reversed out box.
--Remember that large blocks of italics or all caps are difficult to read.

Trial post

Mark, thank you for setting up such a lovely blog. I think I can figure this out without too much difficulty, but I just love what you've done so far. I don't know if I can be as intelligent and funny as you are -- but I'll try to be inspired by what you've constructed! Very cool. I especially like Daisy's photo and editorial contributions!

Today is the birthday of my dear god-daughter Sandy Shewey. She is 20 years old today! One more year and you are legal, dear girl! I promise to be more intelligent in future postings. I have to get my mind around this exciting new venture.

Design Ideas

Once Terry gets more and more comfortable with posting and we start to integrate some more design thought into this we might want to do something like Aaron does: Each daily post has an image of the same size width. Right now this is set to 410px which is about 10% bigger than the 380px he's using (just for comparison's sake).

This is a test

How does this look? This is a low-res view of a poster one of our staff, Mark, made after the Boston Celtics won their 17th World Championship.