Just Faydra Deon – Page 7 – My thoughts. My ideas. My opinions. My life.

Out of the abundance of the heart…

When I was in eighth grade, I was sent to the principal’s office for uttering a profane word in band class when I dropped my flute.

Apologies, Mom and Dad, for never telling you about this. I think I’m still alive today, because I was able to keep this from you all. 🙂

When the principal asked me to explain myself, I told him, “I didn’t mean to say it.”

I begged him profusely not to call my parents. I knew I’d get into so much trouble for using profanity.

He agreed not to call my parents, but he made me write “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks,” 200 times, and I was instructed to turn the sentences in the next day.

From that day, I never forget that sentence. It stuck with me, even though I wasn’t totally sure what it meant.

After I gave my life to Christ in 1994, I came across the sentence in the Bible. I had no idea back in eighth grade that my principal had made me write a Bible verse!!! I thought to myself, “How cool. That dude dropped a seed on me that’s finally blossoming.” You may not think it’s cool, because of the whole separation of church and state, but I did. Let’s not get into a debate about that.

Anyway…

I just saw an article on Yahoo! about a radio show host who has been suspended for calling someone out of her name.

Of course, like all the other people, he apologized and said how wrong he was and that he’d never do it again, but I’m wondering at what point these people’s careers should be completely over in radio and television if they can’t keep a civil tongue.

I interpret “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” to mean whatever’s in you will come out of you. These folks aren’t just speaking off the cuff. They’re not just slipping and using these derogatory and profane words and phrases out of the blue.

Their intention may have been to NOT allow the “general public” to know what’s really on their hearts, but darkness always comes to light. We’ve seen it time and time again.

What do you think? Should these folks be excluded from the radio and/or television industries once they’ve proven they’re unable to control their emotions and their mouths?

A clean compromise

OK, so with five days invested in my house-clean-up-and-out project, there is one room that’s totally clean.

Woo-hoo!

That may not seem like a lot to you, but when I show you the before and after images, you’ll understand my excitement.

I have dubbed my helper the “Room Whisperer,” because he goes through each room to decide what needs to be done next.

On that note, we hit a bit of a snag…just a bit. However, since my Room Whisperer was willing to compromise with me, we’re good now.

His suggestion was that we clean up two rooms on the top level, but I wanted to clean up/out another room on the middle level; the room next to the totally-clean room. Tomorrow is trash day, and I know that room has a lot of paper that can be shredded and put out for the truck to pick up.

My Room Whisperer didn’t see the value of that, so I explained to him my reasoning, and we decided on a compromise.

Instead of trying to clean out and up the two rooms on the top level, we’re going to clean out all three rooms.

What that means is we’re going to simply go through everything in all three rooms and only concentrate on things that need to be thrown away or shredded. We’re not going to worry about anything that stays, should be donated or should be sold. We’re only focusing on trash and papers to shred.

This way, we accomplish a lot and I get to have a say in how things are done, even though the Room Whisperer has the ultimate veto.

I also got him to agree that we don’t have totally clean one room before starting on another, because there are going to be little odds and ends that can’t be decided on right away. That’s why it took five days to do one room; because there were odds and ends to deal with.

Anyway, I wanted to make sure you all don’t get the impression that my Room Whisperer is a total tyrant. Haha.

On that note, let me get back to the task at hand before the not-so-total tyrant starts ty-ranting all over me. 🙂

Uh, where does this go?

Now that I’ve hired someone to help me clean and organize my home, I find myself asking this question more and more:

“Uh, where does this go?”

It’s just amazing how many levels of stuff are in each room, and I’ve narrowed down the answer to my question to one of five responses:

1. It goes someplace in this room I’m cleaning but not in this spot where I got it.

2. It goes in the trashcan/recycle bin.

3. It goes in another room.

4. It goes in the donation pile.

5. It goes in the sell-and-try-to-recoup-some-of-your-money pile.

For me, the third answer is the most dangerous.

When I leave the room I’m suppose to be concentrating on cleaning, to take something to another room, I want to stay in that room and see what needs to go from that room into another room or into another one of my categories listed above.

Thank goodness for my Organizer, who yells, “Hey, what are you doing? It doesn’t take that long to move something from one room to another!”

When I come back to the designated room carrying something from the room I just left, he says, “Nope! Take that back where you got it from. You’re concentrating on this room now.”

I’m like, “But…”

And he’s like, “Did you hear what I said?”

OK. Why do I feel like I’m 11 years old all over again. Haha.

Sigh.

I’ve almost gotten one, whole room cleaned. There are odds and ends that have to be dealt with, but this room looks a zillion times better than it did two days ago.

OK, let me get back to work before he comes yelling.

Don’t be too proud, ashamed or cheap to PAY for help

Back in February, when I decided to be self-employed again, one of my reasons was because my house is a mess.

There’s unopened mail and books and printed-out papers and receipts and shoes and computers and boxes of books and unused printers and electronics everywhere!

Let’s not even talk about all the clothes left in laundry baskets all over my bedroom. Goodness!

I was so busy working for someone else over 15-16 hours a day that my house just got out of control. Cleaning the kitchen and the bathrooms was really my only priorities, because I didn’t want to be living with pests and penicillin.

Anyway, this place is a mess, and I got tired of living in the whirlwind.

I’ve tried taking it a little at a time, but I’m always left feeling like I didn’t accomplish anything, because a little just isn’t enough.

My bottom line is that I need peace in my home, and I’m not going to get it trying to do it alone.

Thank goodness for other entrepreneurs!

A friend of mine, who’s also self-employed, agreed to my payment terms (and said I have to put in cable,which I did) to come stay with me for awhile and help me get my house cleaned up and out. I told him he doesn’t have to actually clean anything. He just has to help me stay focused.

Dude is taking his job seriously, too. Ugh.

Anyone who knows me well knows I’m a control freak. I want to do it when I want to do it how I want to do it. He’s not even thinking about what I want. 😀

He’s doing exactly what I’m paying him to do; keep me focused.

When I start trying to drift into another room, instead of the designated area we agreed I would clean, he reels me back in despite my whining.

When I sit down in front of the computer for too long, he tells me to get up and get back on it.

When I complain that my back is hurting, he tells me to get over it.

It’s only been a couple of days of this, and I want to ask him, “Aren’t you ready to go home?!?!”

I’m very glad he’s here, I’m having to learn some discipline because of it, and that’s not a bad thing.

If I could do it my way, it would have been done by now. Obviously, I need his help, so I’m sucking it up and allowing myself to be directed.

I really wish I didn’t have to pay for help, but I do. That’s point blank and period. I need help. I’m thankful to be able to pay for help, and I’m thankful my friend is willing to help me.

In the end, this house will be peaceful, and I will be at peace when I’m home. Peace in the home is priceless, so I’m getting a great return on my investment.

Ooo! Here he comes! I have to go!

Ramping down the repeat tweets

I get asked all the time why I repeat the same tweets over and over.

What I’ve learned about Twitter I already knew from teaching eighth graders…

People see (hear) the same thing typed (said) over and over at their own time.

There are different people on the grid at different times all throughout the day and night.

Even when I’m off the grid, Twitter never sleeps. When it’s night in my neck of the woods, it’s day somewhere else in the world.

Because of this, I repeat my content over and over so that anyone and everyone who’s interested in knowing what’s going on in my world has an opportunity to see it without having to go to my timeline and scroll through a bunch of updates they’re not really interested in.

Again, different people see different tweets at different times throughout the day and night. I know of times that I’ve tweeted the same update every hour, on the hour for at least three or four days and someone will tweet me saying they saw it for the first time on the third day. With hundreds of updates going by on your timeline, it’s easy to miss a lot, not just the things I’m tweeting or repeat tweeting.

Anyway, I have a lot going on over here in my neck of the woods, so I have a lot of updates going out regularly on Twitter.

The repeat tweets help to spread the word, but I know there are a lot of them. If I continue with the repeat tweets, there are going to be many more, because I’m creating more and more content every day.

So I had the bright idea of creating a list of all my Twitter accounts and setting up a repeating tweet about the list.

This will significantly curtail the number of tweets that go out from all my Twitter accounts, but it will still allow me to share all my information with those who are interested in it.

The list is called The Faydra Deon’s Digest.

This method will keep my tweets from filling up your timeline, and I think this is really great solution.

Is your PayPal account sending payments you don’t know about?

First of all, don’t go blaming PayPal for the information I’m about to share.

This is not a PayPal glitch, and PayPal could not be making payments on your behalf without your express authorization.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way. This is what you need to know…

If you’ve used PayPal to pay for certain services, and based on the vendors’ terms of service (that most of us don’t actually read), you may have automatically set up recurring payments and/or subscription payments without being aware that you have.

How can you determine if you have recurring/subscription payments activated?

This is the quickest way:

Log in to PayPal
In the Search field, type preapproved payments
From the search results, click on My preapproved payments

If you have any recurring payments set to deduct money from your PayPal account, this is where they’ll be listed.

You can click on each one to view the details and to cancel any recurring payments that you don’t want PayPal to pay.

Hopefully, this will keep you from having to dispute charges and spend time on live chat or the phone to get your money back.

Obama birth drama. Spare me.

There is really not a whole lot to say about the whole “birthers movement.”

This is the bottom line…

If it could have been credibly proven, without a shadow of doubt, that Barack Obama was not born on United States soil, he would have been confronted with the information right about the time the television series, “24,” became popular, just to make sure he didn’t get any grand ideas.

If it had been that simple to get rid of Barack Obama before he was ever able to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, they would have done so before he even took his first breath to speak the words, “I want to be President of the United States.”

If President Obama does plaster his birth certificate all over the world, and it’s a million times proven that he was born in the United States, then the next irrational ploy will be to determine if he was born in Hawaii before or after it became a state.

When it’s determined that he was born in Hawaii after it became a state, then the next unreasonable tactic will be to determine whether the date Hawaii became a state is valid or not.

Once the actual, true date of Hawaii’s statehood is validated, then they’ll be trying to determine if his mother’s citizenship in Kansas abridges President Obama’s right to call himself a US citizen when he was not born in the state of his mother’s resident, which will then get blown up into a debate of whether “anchor babies” are enough to keep immigrants in this country, and so on and so on and so on…

It’ll just be a never-ending, nonsensical cycle of some sort.

So…

Those of us who are reasonable and thinking individuals, let’s move on and leave the nonsense to the birthers.

I mean, if they’d do that to my Jesus…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a reader of Holocaust literature. I also watch as many documentaries and/or true-to-life movies on the subject as I can find.

Other human-upon-human tragedies that have captured my attention, and have me reading and watching everything I can get my hands on, are the two civil wars in Liberia, the genocides in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Sudan, just to name a few.

In all that I read and watch, there is a common thread of consensus that many who have survived and/or lived through these horrific situations seem to agree on…

Over and over I read or hear them say, and I’m paraphrasing (of course), “I just didn’t think that humans had the capacity to do such terrible things to other human beings!”

That idea always amazes me. I wonder to myself, “Have you not been paying attention to human history?”

Don’t get me wrong, I do not in any way blame victims for being victimized; not at all whatsoever.

That’s not what I’m saying.

I would never, ever fault anyone for wanting to believe the best of humanity.

It’s that believing the best of humanity, however, that lulls so many into a false sense of security.

For me, as a follower of Christ, who studies and meditates on the Word, I don’t put anything past people!

I mean, if they’d crucify my Jesus just for wanting to bring back the abundant life that Adam and Eve forfeited for us in the Garden of Eden, why wouldn’t they burn babies alive or chop children with machetes or rape righteous little girls or torture teenagers trying to protect their mothers?

On this Resurrection Day, when I remember the stripes Jesus bore for my sins, so that I can have eternal life, I also remember the other victims of human tragedies and pray for humanity.

For more information on Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection, read Matthew 26:1 – Matthew 28:20.

Book Review: Satan’s Sisters by Star Jones, Esq.

satans-sister-cover — Buy the book by clicking the cover.

The great thing about having a Kindle is that you can get books the first day they premiere, and that’s exactly what I did on 22 March 2011 when Star Jones‘ book, Satan’s Sisters, hit the stores.

I would have finished the book in one day had it not been for other things I had to get done. When a client wants his/her website finished, s/he’s not going to want to hear me say, “See. What had happened, right…”

When I first turned on my Kindle to start reading Satan’s Sisters, I was about to take a nap. I was so ready to get started with the book that I said to myself, “I’ll just read it until I start to nod, and then I’ll come back to it later.”

Child, please!

The book was so good from word one, I almost forgot I was supposed to be taking a nap! 😆

I had to force myself to put it down and get my nap out, so I could get back to work. I was on chapter four by the time I made myself stop.

Star doesn’t waste any time getting right into the heart of the action. You are drawn into the story from the first sentence.

Satan’s Sisters is a book about a book.

Before I go any further, let me give you a bit of advice: Do NOT try to replace the two words, Satan’s Sisters, with the two words, The View.

While it’s only natural that Star may have gleaned some descriptive material from her double decades in television, working on different shows, Satan’s Sisters stands on its own merit, and it is a brilliant work of fiction by a brilliant writer.

If you start reading the book, trying to match the book’s characters with real-life people, you not only do a disservice to Star’s stellar writing, but you’re also going to be hard-pressed to make the preconceived connections you think exist in the book.

Having said that, let me give you a brief overview of what you’re in store for.

Satan’s Sisters is centered around a day-time television show co-hosted by five women. A former co-host, who was forced off the show, has written a tell-all book about why she left the show and all the dirt she was privy to when she was on the show. As you can imagine, this sends everyone connected with the show into a tizzy about what’s in this book. All those who think they may be affected are trying to do damage control before the damage hits the fan. The people most vulnerable are the five ladies who now sit “on the couch” and talk about politics, current events and the mess in other people’s lives.

So who’s on the couch?

There’s Maxine, the lead host, who’s worked her way to the top of television royalty by kicking much butt and taking many names. She’s a long way from her family’s sharecropping past, but she’s got to do some serious legwork to keep it that way.

Then there’s Whitney, a well-respected journalist, the mother of four and the wife to a husband who’s getting his salacious sexual needs met in a way that no wife wants to come face-to-face with.

Shelly is a former wild-child, super-model with an Ivy League MBA, a taste for the night life and the sense to know that common sense and intelligence are more of an asset to her than her bangin’ body and phat bank account.

Dara, the double-degreed Latina, is the baby of the bunch, but she will be no less affected if her biggest secret is revealed before she has the opportunity to reveal it herself.

Funny woman Molly, is the comedienne on the couch, but what she’s dealing with in her life is no laughing matter whatsoever.

The rub? The former co-host with the tell-all book knows all their business, and she has some unfinished business of her own to deal with.

The strength of Satan’s Sisters is that even the sub-characters have substance. While all the ladies on the couch have their own dramas to deal with, Callie, Josh, Riley, William, Ginny, Eric, Channing, Lizette and Karen are vital to rounding out the plot, sub-plots and sub-sub-plots. 🙂

Overall, I’d say Satan’s Sisters boils down to the most amazing quote from the book:

“You have to be the author of the only dictionary that defines you. You can’t allow anyone else to write that definition because when it changes—and believe me it always does—you won’t know who you are.”

Satan’s Sisters gets Faydra Deon’s 5-star “Beyond the Bomb!” rating.