For over three years, I started most every day pouring my thoughts, torments, and emotions on some blog.  The locale has shifted, but the ritual remained.  Jumping away for I’m not sure how long (maybe two week?) has had its own interesting twists.  The first day, I felt almost panicky, although I’d probably typed for a day or three before I finally stopped.  After three or four days, I started to consciously avoid this admin panel, feeling a different kind of anxiety.  I didn’t want to document much of anything inside of me.

I’ve gradually driven away my fans, my lurkers, those whom I revolted (I doubt there were many).  Now, I have a few deep friends and those who accidentally stumble upon the site.  For many months, I was consumed by poker while trying to live a normal life and work a normal day.  The last ten weeks, it’s been launching a youth soccer club that took the place of poker.  I’d felt I needed to do something constructive with all of that discretionary time and energy, so I focused it all in a new direction.

I haven’t enjoyed getting yelled at by parents who feel their daughter or son has been wronged or should be playing professionally by now.  I haven’t enjoyed being told I was clueless or incompetent by other parent-coaches.  I haven’t enjoyed feeling the weight of the eyes of 150 parents and 75 boys and girls, trying to control things that aren’t in my control.  I haven’t liked being called a control freak as I had to do 150 things to get this where it is today.

The bigger challenge for me is figuring out why I have to have some huge avocation that saps every ounce of energy and attention from me when I can’t do the same for my business and career.  This summer has been quite similar to my WSOP summer in that I was consumed.

I’ve lost alot of traction and energy for this site along the way.  I had a new vision when I redesigned the site to broaden my content, to share more of myself in a wider array of topics.  Maybe I’ll get it back.  Maybe this has been the final part of a cathartic process to relaunch my blog.  We’ll see.

For those of you who have occasionally peaked to see if there is anyone here, I appreciate that.  For those who have continued to encourage me, thanks as well.  I hope I am back soon, and I hope others are as well.  I hope so.

It’s been strange to post here so infrequently.  I think I’ve been a daily poster for a couple years, so two posts over a span of a couple weeks is very different.  Sometimes, different is OK.

These last few weeks have been terrific for me.  I’ve put my heart and soul into something that now has a life, and we’re in the nurturing and foundation-building stage.  I feel healthier mentally and emotionally than I’ve felt in several years.  Much less time goofing around, although I still have to ramp up my efforts on the business side.  I have a couple projects, but as always I need a big surge on the business development side.

I’ve finally found the benefit of the lifestyle that I’ve created.  If I can keep my travel down yet add value to a core of key clients, then I can pour myself into kids and soccer.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have a great few weeks to get things started, but the real key will be to transition this in the Fall.

Thanks to any of you still following here for your patience and support.

It’s been terrific to be so busy and doing such good stuff that I can’t update this site, can’t do flickr, just have to keep cranking away.  In the last ten weeks, I’ve stumbled upon an entrepreneurial spirit that I never fully understood that I had.  I’ve always had creativity and other components of entrepreneurism, but I’ve been more comfortable telling others how to do things rather than running with them myself.

I don’t expect what I’ve been working on to be some huge moneymaker, although there could be future business opportunity in there.  I’m really just thrilled that I’m doing really great stuff again, it’s hitting the mark, and I’m getting great feedback.

I’m also restarting my tennis journey tonight.  My knee has held up for the last year or so, and this will be my first real venture to hit since I had knee surgery I think three years ago (may be four, I’m actually unsure).  I really hope I’m able to move around a bit and that it holds up as I’d love to get back into it.

We’ve had neighbors who now live in London with us since Friday (grandmother, mother, daughter, and three sons).  My wife is great, just rolling with the punches.  I have as well for the most part, not sweating much except for the large number of flies now living with us.

I hope everyone else is loving life like I am.  I’ll take it, that’s for sure!

I mostly don’t mind being a technical layperson when it comes to computers and everything IT related.  I should be an expert geek as my father has been a computer programmer since the late ’60’s.  I remember my mother making Christmas wreaths out of key punch cards if you want to know what that means.  It’s times like these though where I get frustrated with not knowing much.

Here’s a short list of things I can’t figure out currently:

• Firefox 3 won’t let me post photos in Wordpress (something about a Rich Text Editor)
• I need to password protect a portion of a new website we built for the soccer team, and I can’t understand technically what the options are
• Doing an email newsletter using a emarketing tool, have problems and not sure how to figure it out
• Need to upgrade the two G5 Macs we have to get latest Adobe Creative suite up and running, not sure if I need to get new hardware or if I’m good

I’m reaching out to my buddy skidoo on one of these, but any nerds out there feel free to ping me in comments or at csquard@gmail.com.

I stumbled upon this site from an extremely progressive designer in Slovensky.  It helps me creatively just to see stuff like this from time to time (can’t paste an image of the site in, so you’ll have to give me the benefit of the doubt). Let me know if you have any interesting sites yourself.

I’m sitting in the Pittsburgh International Airport after spending two days with my client.  Thanks to the Alternate Security Checkpoint, I joined five other people to whisk through the TSA folks in three minutes rather than the thirty-minute cattle drive I left behind.

I miss feeling valued, and it is by far the biggest driver of my self-worth professionally.  When I lived in Corporate America, I shunned public recognition as much as possible (or liked to think I did).  Although I liked to think I was above it, I always liked being a high-potential fast-tracker, too young to be at whatever level I was at.  Today, I thrive best when I am valued, when what I provide to someone is appreciated and valued.  I don’t like when I am just a transactional provider of some product or service.

I am valued by this client, and all the hard work and sacrifice of the last few weeks is worth it.  A few of comments from my key client as well as some of his staff:  “Can we work with him rather than these other guys we work with?”  “We need him more involved.”  “I’ve seen alot of these, and this didn’t suck!”  The last one is heading to some marketing material of mine soon enough.

I passed out on the bed of my corner luxury suite in an old-town Pittsburgh hotel, forgetting to ask for the wake-up call at 4:00AM which would get me at the airport in time to fill-up my rental car, turn it in, move through Security, and make it to my 6:45AM flight.  No wake-up call from the Front Desk, but I opened my eyes at 4:04AM.

My view as the sun set last night.

I normally work feverishly on a morning post, but yesterday wasn’t the day to do that.  My family stayed away for an extra day, and I’ve been busy multitasking.  It’s a good thing for them to stay as they’ve had a great time and enjoying what is now the chunk of change to drive to Hilton Head and back.  I seem to be getting more and more productive, and these couple weeks have been both cathartic and a tiny bit transforming.

It is very strange that I am minimally following the WSOP when I spent every waking hour there last summer.  Railing a tournament online is very difficult until an event gets to the Final Table, although I tried to follow Liz Lieu over the weekend (she finished 28th in a $2.5k NLHE event).  I still receive press releases from the WSOP, and I can check the spreadsheets of finishers or Day 1 chipcounts.  This morning I saw that the Ladies Event winner was Svetlana Gromenkova, arguably the best Ladies Event winner the WSOP has had in a very long time.  I tried to interview her last summer (she is a big online player on Stars), and her one word responses made it fairly tough to write up.

Another strange thing I’ve been dealing with involves soccer.  I’m sort of spearheading the creation of a new soccer club, leaving the church league we’ve been a part of for the eight years we’ve lived here.  I’m pitching the concept to parents and coaches, and I’m finding that I really like pushing from the idea into the creation.  I also really like the selling of the idea, and I seem to be very good at it.  This soccer experience seems to be a blueprint for starting other things.  I don’t mean the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, but more the core of what I’m experiencing and feeling.  I haven’t been convicted and believed in something for a very long time, haven’t been a zealot for some endeavor outside of myself.  I’m certainly not like that about my own business.  Maybe this is another example of the need to tweak or blow up what I’m doing.

Nothing much here, sorry for that.  Back to work.

All replies, please send to csquard@gmail.com

• eMail Marketer (for set-up for new projects)
• Articles on sales and marketing topic for a relaunch of my corporate website
• Marketing assistant:  part-time marketer to work on corporate marketing for my firm; services would include creating marketing programs (we have graphic design/web capabilities), lead generation, lead qualification, research.  Location could be anywhere, and I may bring on more than one person (if multiple individuals, at least one would be international)
• Unpaid internship to work on special projects; this position is specifically for any MBA students who currently do not have an internship

Please forward this link on to anyone you think may be interested in any of these positions as well.  B-to-b/industrial/manufacturing company experience ideal but not required.

As a qualifier, know that I am a pretty ignorant computer user.  I’ve used Firefox as my browser of choice now for probably three years or so.  The only problem I’ve been able to find with it is that it seems to eat a ton of memory, which locks me down at times when I have a zillion applications running.

Lifehacker pointed me to the opportunity to download Firefox 3 and provide feedback during the Beta testing that Mozilla is driving.  Since I have no idea what I’m doing nor if I should be downloading it, I proceeded (Lifehacker says that it is stable enough to use, so I’ve jumped in).  You expert users might want to do the same.