Day 208: Wanderlust!

You may have seen, if you're my Facebook friend (and I'm assuming that you are) that I wrote this cryptic status:

Now to explain! Oh, and just bear with me because it might take time.

Doo do doo...where to start. 

Umm...Atlanta Yoga Scene. Yes, so I started said website as Atlanta's first city-wide event calendar for yoga, with directory of studios and master schedule of classes too. It's pretty ballin'. People are excited about it and the community is growing pretty well.

Now, Wanderlust. Wanderlust is an annual nationwide 3-day yoga and music festival, held in California, Colorado and Vermont. It draws about 14,000 people per event, so it's no Woodstock, but it is one of the biggest events for yogis. This year, Wanderlust is hosting mini-Wanderlusts called Wanderlust: Yoga in the City, one of which will be in Atlanta.

For the exiciting part: the coordinator of this event, after seeing the Atlanta Yoga Scene website, and otherwise totally out of thin air CONTACTED ME to select teachers and top studios that could be leaders and studio partners (respectively) for the event. AND, to thank me for my help, he's MAKING ME A SPONSOR OF THE EVENT FOR FREE!!!

WTF?? EEP!

I guess, on Day 208, I became influential. Or something??

All I had to do was pick the headlining yogi (easy peasy), and get the coordinator in contact with the studio owners that I know (easy peasy). It was a little time-consuming, writing up all those emails, and doing it all in one day, but so totally amazing that I, me, lowly, nobody Leah, was able to influence decisions for a national event, based on the reputation I built from the fruits of my own ideas and my own hard work. 

It feels phenomenal.

I'm not making money on this, and I'm certainly putting in a lot of hard work, but I feel like only good things could happen as a result of it. Potential advertisers will trust my influence, studio owners and teachers will trust my influence, students will find AYS as a helpful resource for them, and I hope word of mouth spreads to the point where I could actually make a decent profit in doing something meaningful.

I totally understand if you don't "get it," but imagine...if you were really into music, and you wrote a blog about the national music scene, and the coordinators of South by Southwest contacted YOU to get the skinny on your opinions for who the leaders should be, and YOU got to HAND-PICK them, you'd be pretty stoked too. It's like that for my passion :) 

I'm just tickled pink.

Day 117: SNO-M-G!

Today I saw more snow than I've ever seen in my entire life. Due to global warming and it's effect on polarizing our weather systems--hotter summers, colder winters--we get the pleasure of being snowed in tomorrow for work (and maybe even the next day).

Snow is a huge deal in Atlanta because we are so humorously ill-equipped for it. Our tires don't work in snow, our roads aren't made for snow, our snow plows are brought in from neighboring states, and children are taught from early on that a single 1/4 inch layer of snow on the ground means that the city shuts down. Our brains shut down in the snow.

But today trumped it all...2-3 inches of snow inside Metro Atlanta, 4-5 in the 'burbs and freezing rain in the morning? Snowmaggedon. Seriously.

So what were Mark and I to do, but take a late-night stroll through snowpocalypse. Luckily, we're stocked up on homemade beef stew, Snyder's Nibblers, plenty of peanut butter and a bottle of champagne, so all is well.

My car!!

Mark's hand--all consumed by the snow!

Roads that are already beginning to ice over...

Pool chairs, blanketed in powdery white beauty

Irony--little green sprouts coming up out of the snow :)

Day 81: Failures at Comic Con

Sometime earlier this week, Mark sent me a text message that read: "Saturday, Comic Con 2010?" Upon further investigation, tickets were only $5 on the website and I was rip-roaring and ready to go try this New Thing.

I hate to say that I only wanted to go to see how adults dress up and act, but it's kinda true. Please remember from previous entries that I oftentimes learn something, even just a little something, when I try New Things. So, while I wanted to go to this event, possibly, just to have really great pictures of people willing to show up wearing (to me) goofy attire and relishing in an adult forum for escapism, I was also genuinely looking for astute observations to convey to you readers about the human condition, life and art, etc.

Mark and I arrived at Comic Con, fully prepared to buy our tickets, when we were told in the most hopes-dashing kind of way that the computers weren't accepting credit cards and the tickets were a rousing $30 for a one-day pass. Bummer. Should have bought online--except for the $30 part.

Now, if your website is going to lie to me, please oh please, don't make it an 83% mark-up. It makes me angry and puts me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Yes, it has that impact on me.

It ended up that we weren't willing to shell over the money to make this New Thing happen completely, when all we really wanted to do is some good old fashioned people-watching, so we hung out a few more minutes, saw some costumes of characters I couldn't identify, decided that I was too afraid to ask people to take pictures with me (the layperson in jeans, a long-sleeve tee and bright pink glasses), and walked our way out of Comic Con.

You can't win 'em all.


But I did catch a blurry picture of this ghostbuster in the hallway:

Day 35: Life Lessons from Adam Carolla

Today, I saw the Adam Carolla do stand up live at The Punchline. Obviously, I can never relay how funny it was and how much I loved being at the show, but I can tell you that at the end, he slapped us upside the head with a life lesson. Carolla went through his Social Security report from when he graduated high school to around 2004 and showed the audience how terribly he lived, never making more than $22,000 a year before he turned 30. After that time, he secured spots with The Man Show, Loveline, and other career successes, making between $300,000-2,000,000 per year for about five years; clearly, he found his stride. With this showing of pursuing his goals no matter what the return, he advised the audience, "If there is any kernel in you that says, "I wanna do, what I wanna do," I hope you go out and f***ing do it."

This so deeply inspired me (maybe it was just the two lemon drops I consumed beforehand, or just the point of life I'm in right now), to pursue everything I love, that in addition to being the funniest show I've seen to date, I will count this among the best live shows I've ever attended.