The Sixthman offices are on a relatively busy street connecting I-20 to a few different neighborhoods. Every day, at least once, sirens of some sort interrupt a meeting or phone call–it just comes with the territory.

So today when the sirens started, for whatever reason, I started counting the number of police cruisers flying by with sirens blaring and finally stopped at 12. I thought I was so smart, proclaiming that it must be a rolling road block for someone important–seemed like the Pope was cruising through Atlanta based on the attention. 

But lo and behold…Kelly, who knows all, is listening to the police scanners online (I never knew that was possible!) and everyone gathers to discover it’s a high speed chase going through Atlanta. The sirens pass us again after the criminal did a U-turn and the office stops. Everyone is waiting and listening to see what happens. He’s in this neighborhood, his crime was this, he turned left, does he have passengers, he’s driving this car, etc. It finally ended with minor injuries to the police and the villain in a place I know well–the beloved shopping center with the shoe outlet. 

I can vividly remember having just moved to Atlanta when the big OJ car chase happened. We hadn’t unpacked yet and watched the entire thing sitting on the floor of our new apartment on some crappy black and white TV that would eventually be traded in for a better model. Everyone was glued to the TV to see what would happen. I would be willing to believe most people who are old enough can also remember exactly where they were when they found out about Princess Diana (I’m not old enough to remember Kennedy being shot, but you get the picture). 

I am always frustrated by highway backups that seem to pop up for no good reason and that frustration is only increased when we figure out that everyone is slowing down to look at an accident or simply someone pulled over for speeding. Growing up, we called this rubbernecking–not sure what the term is these days. 

So my question is…why can’t we not look when something bad is happening? Why do we remember the situation we were in while watching something horrible vs. wonderful…or do we just not notice the wonderful moments at all since we’re over-exposed to the bad?

Red

Recorded live from the Bluff Plantations in Augusta, GA, Steve and Andy of Sixthman sit down with Stephen Kellogg, Ryan Newell of Sister Hazel, and Pat McGee to discuss their experiences with the Sixthman Sessions.  All three artists discuss their writing styles, how each song came together, and have a really good time doing so.  A special live performance of “Peaches,” a song concepted, written, and recorded at the Bluffs, closes out the podcast.

 

 Sixthman Podcast #2 [15:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (189)

I know it’s super short notice, but I’m going to Houston and Austin this weekend and have made almost no plans for when I actually get there.  There are a couple things I’ve been told that I MUST do:

 *eat at Lupe’s Mexican restaurant in Houston – supposedly houses the best fajita’s on this side of the border

 *eat at the Salt Lick in Austin – it’s a bring your own beer bbq joint that serves to the table family style…sausage, brisket, mac and cheese, I don’t think Austin can screw this up.

 *float down the Guadalupe on a tube with a beer raft in tow – hopefully after the Mexican and BBQ

*go horse back riding in Austin – this was my idea – hopefully before Mexican and BBQ…

So that’s all I’ve got.  And I have 9 days to fill up with life changing memorable activities. Anybody have any advice on what is a MUST DO in these Texas cities??

Help!

Melissa  

Some people say I have ADD and I would argue with them but, by the time I think of a decent defense, I have forgotten what we were talking about.  I asked my doctor about it and he said he was hesitant to prescribe medication because he felt like I had learned to deal with it.  Then I told him about all the people in my life that it takes to help me deal, and he still refused.  Anyway, I am convinced that my alleged condition is irritated by the daily task of managing my inbox.  The constant barrage of messages, some new and some continuing to stare back at me waiting for me to take action or put them out of their misery.  It’s just cruel.  Well I think I might have made a breakthrough and I am happy to share it with anyone who also suffers from inbox overload.

I aspire like the rest of us to have an empty inbox which, to me, is achieving perfect harmony in life. Also, it seems like the re-reading and re-opening of emails over and over again only to remember why they are still there wastes a lot of time.  So I created “The  Focus Box”.  When an email comes in I either reply to it immediately if I can, delete it if it needs no further action, or move it to a folder called “The Focus Box”.  So for the last month, my inbox has been empty and I spend all my time managing “The Focus Box” and to my surprise, it is actually working.  There are only 10 or so messages per day that need real attention and if I can’t knock them out that day, I can attend to them the next morning.

As is the case with most people who suffer from ADD, these strategies rarely last but I am hopeful that I can keep the dream alive and be one of the few people at peace with their inbox.

Since summer began we have had guests coming and going every week. We have cleaned for guest to arrive and then clean when they leave before the next group pulls in…which is difficult with a 20 month old. I am seriously thinking about turning our house into a bed and breakfast. Before we had our son we lived at the beach and no one ever came to visit, maybe two people a year. But now we live in the middle of nowhere and I mean nowhere and we never have a weekend to ourselves. We have nieces and little sisters coming for summer vacation, parents and siblings visiting, friends wanting a break from the big city or just to hang out. All of this entertaining is really beginning to drain me. We have purchased enough food in the past two months to feed an army and the troops are still piling in. I love having guests but it seems this summer we are getting bombarded with company. Neither my husband nor I are from Atlanta so most of our friends and family have to travel to come see us and now that we have a son everyone wants to come and spend time spoiling him. Wednesday morning I dropped off my sister-in-law after a two week visit.  Now it’s Friday and I am off to the airport to pick up the next arrivals. Who will leave on Monday and guess what we are doing on Tuesday….Yes, you guessed it, cleaning for the next group of friends stopping by on their way home from the Little League Baseball World Serious sometime next week depending on how long their sons winning streak lasts. And I would say after that we are done but no then my mother-in-law and her daughter are coming in August for two weeks.

Age is a funny thing. I don’t mean funny ha ha, like how it’s funny to laugh at old people when they can’t find their reading glasses and ask you to read the menu or how it’s funny to stand outside of movie theaters and taunt teenagers turned away from the latest R-rated sexy gore laden cinematic masterpiece. Both activities are favorite past times of mine, but I’ve taken the day off of laughing at others (except for Jana of course, I’m always in the mood to laugh at Jana). Today I am in a rare philosophical mood, if you need to step out for some fresh air while I pontificate, feel free—it won’t take long and I’ll still be here in the internets waiting for you when you get back . . .
Age is a funny thing because it is one of the few things that we all have in common, no matter how different our backgrounds our lives all follow the same basic trajectories and milestones. The number of candles on your last birthday cake defines you in the eyes of others while serving as a jumping off point for how you judge the people you meet everyday.

As you may have already guessed today we are celebrating yet another milestone birthday at Sixthman. Our favorite office manager a.k.a. the keeper of the candy bowl, Kelly, turned thirty today. Because she takes such good care of the rest of us on our birthdays, we thought we’d be nice and return the favor—thirty-fold.

When I say we, I really mean the rest of my co-workers as I took the day off of making fun of others. The rest of Sixthman took no such day off. This morning as I surveyed Kelly’s desk in anticipation for her arrival, counting the thirty rolls of toilet paper, thirty tubes of chapstick, thirty cookie cutters, thirty bars of Irish Spring, thirty plastic army men, thirty mini traffic cones, thirty pictures of Angelina Jolie, and God knows what else the benevolent birthday fairies left thirty of, I reflected on where I want to be in my life when I turn thirty in less than three years.

If you had asked me what my life’s goals prior to turning thirty were five years ago I’m sure they would have had something to do with publishing my first novel, traveling the world and maybe starting to think about marriage. Now with only 3 years before I join Kelly on the other side of 30 (when she’ll still be older than me) I’ve come up with some really good ideas for several novels and cruising in the Caribbean as a part of my job is awesome but not exactly the world travel I imagined. Oh yeah, and about that maybe starting to think about marriage thing—when I turn thirty I’ll also be celebrating my five year wedding anniversary.

So, Kelly, is thirty what you thought it would be?

What about everyone else, did your parents do the down and dirty resulting in the beautiful you less than thirty years ago? More than thirty years ago? Double thirty years ago? Not telling?

What was your life like when you were thirty? If you’re thirty now, is it how you imagined it when you were twenty? What are your life’s goals before you turn thirty?

-Joy

I recently bought my first home…well I’m almost there.  We close tomorrow morning.  The process has been intense for sure (who ever said buying your first home was fun must either have had someone else doing all the leg work or been able to buy anything they wanted), and at this point we are just crossing our fingers and hoping we did the right thing.  But I digress…

 Buying a home is not the thing that lets me know I am now a grown up.  You know what is?  Boxes. 

The sheer volume of boxes it is taking to pack up our apartment is absolutely overwhelming.  How much can two people cram into a little 2 br / 1 bath?  We realized last night while we were packing, that before – even when we lived together in NYC – we never settled anywhere for longer than a year at a time.  Which means we never bought enough, collected enough or for that matter lived anywhere big enough to have to pack more than 10 boxes and a few suitcases to move.

Well we’ve been in Atlanta now for SIX YEARS!  That is literally the longest my husband has ever lived anywhere and the longest I have lived in one place since I was growing up in the middle of nowhere.  We have gone from 10 box people to……drum roll please….almost 40 boxes, with I bet at least 10 more to go.  And that is after purging several boxes worth of items to Goodwill.  It’s a little bit astounding to us and a little bit upsetting.  The couple everyone said would never settle down anywhere, seems to have put down roots.  Well, for now at least  

Anybody else had that moment where they looked around and realized they had unexpectedly hit a milestone in their life?

Roller derby is what keeps me going. When the stress of life, work, family, whatever, gets to me, I know that in a few days, I’m going to be able to go to practice and beat the crap out of someone, and they will thank me for it when I’m done. We have a saying in derby- You hit the ones you love harder. It’s true! Whenever my close friends hit me, they don’t just hit me. They try to take me out so I catch air on the way down. I would lose respect for them if they tried to take it easy. However, all that “love” adds up.

About a week ago, I was playing an intense game of derby, and I did what we call an accidental sexy fall. It involved doing a split, and my foot went one direction and my knee went the other. I got up, walked it off (or skated it off, as the case may be) and got back in the game. I couldn’t walk the next day.

So, I went to the doctor. As far as doctors go, I love mine. His office only smells a little bit like death and antiseptic, and he never yells at me for doing stupid stuff. He is sending me for an MRI tomorrow, and it makes me very nervous. He is worried that I might have a torn meniscus. All these things are running through my mind- What if I have to have surgery? What if it doesn’t heal right? What if I can’t skate for six months? Or longer?

Sounds bad, right? It gets worse: I found out I gained sixteen pounds since February. SIXTEEN POUNDS! And I’m supposed to lose sixteen pounds with a torn meniscus? I won’t be able to exercise until it gets better, so I guess I’ll just sit here and… eat?

Anyone have any cardio exercises I can do without straightening my leg or really using my knee at all?

-Babs

So an esteemed business associate sent me a book last week called Work Sucks and I read the entire book in 24 hours. The premise of the book is that work is something you do instead of a place where you go, and lays out a theory called R.O.W.E (Results Oriented Work Environment). Best Buy has put this practice into action over the last 3 years and it appears to be working. I reached out to a colleague at Best Buy for comment and, according to him, it is very effective and leads to more productive and happy associates.

The way it works is this: In a R.O.W.E there are no set office hours, vacation days or required meetings to attend. Each team member is given clear direction on how they can impact the company and the freedom to complete tasks within a certain window of time. If you don’t complete the work, you are released.

After reading the book, I realized why we haven’t seen something like this before. For it to work, pressure and accountability are placed upon on the leaders to establish and cast a vision to the team in a clear way. In a R.O.W.E. environment, associates are encouraged to challenge their managers when invited to attend meetings in order to make sure the goals of the meeting have an impact on their tasks, and to push back when asked to put out a fire that should have been anticipated by the manager. If you think about it, most managers limit their team’s success because they don’t effectively lead the team.

I bought some copies to share with the Sixthman team last week and we are going to have some conversations about how we can learn from this concept. It will certainly mean that the leaders here will be spending some time looking in the mirror and reflecting as to how we can rise to the challenge of casting a clear vision.

-Andy

Blogging is weird. Recently I read an article about blogging in Newsweek or Time or something like that, that raised an interesting observation about blogging. There are different forms of blogging. Some provide personal commentary on certain subjects or raise awareness to new ideas. This appears to be the form that Sixthman members prefer. Others, however, serve more as on-line diaries, chronicling people’s lives in real time. According to the article I read, this is the more prevalent blog type. With the advent of the internet and social networking sites as open forums, the freedom to spill any and every personal revelation is not only easy, but so common that most people don’t even stop to think twice about how strange this phenomenon really is. From mood-indicative smiley faces on a MySpace page to personal websites entirely devoted to tracking one’s daily experience, the invitation to share the intimacies of your life is open to the public.

So why do people so willingly and so enthusiastically take advantage of the opportunity to spill their guts to the world, and what are the consequences? We all know that posting the sordid details of your Friday night drinking binge can get you into trouble at your next job interview, but what is intriguing is the finding (referenced in the article I read) that posting your private thoughts for the world to see is actually a healthy exercise. For instance, daily blogging has helped dieters in their quests to lose weight by giving them the sense that there may be others out there holding them accountable. And for the junior bloggers out there who are getting younger and younger by the day it seems, places such as MySpace offer kids a chance to develop a sense of personal identity at an age earlier that ever before.

Taking all of this into account, I actually considered doing a personal diary of sorts for my blog today. Would I get some sort of satisfaction from sharing my day as I experienced it with all of you, whoever you are? Would anyone care that I had an egg and cheese bagel for breakfast, almost ran out of gas on the expressway, and think that my hair looks abnormally good today? Well, I have already used up enough space for today so I guess you will just have to wait till next time to find out what happens next. Until then, my private life is staying private.

-Nora