Awesome Day!

Today, I stepped out of my comfort zone and I presented at the Colorado Science Conference! I am great at presenting to my students and pretty good at presenting to my fellow teachers. However, I do not do well in front of complete strangers. In fact, my Public Speaking class was nothing short of torture in college! I did actually get better in grad school and presented well, but I still get nervous.

Well, back in the spring I went to the National Science Teaching Conference. I got the idea that if some of those people could present, I could too! I decided to start with the state conference and I was so excited when they accepted my proposal.

My morning didn't start out great. I woke Hayden up when I was getting ready to leave and he was VERY upset that he wasn't going. Then, I was rear ended in Denver. Luckily, there was no visible damage to my car (I will still take it and get it checked out), but the other guy's was pretty messed up. I arrived at the conference a little late, but was really glad I wasn't presenting first!

I set up for the second session with little butterflies in my tummy. I didn't have any problems with set-up, people actually showed up, and I wasn't actually shaking :) I started and as I went I saw people nodding and taking notes, which is very encouraging. At the end, I had some great questions and was able to give some great feedback. I even had a few people stop by to thank me for my ideas and my help!

That makes me feel so good. I can be reasonably sure that I was not one of the terrible presentations I heard people complaining about. I think I'm going to apply for the National Conference and see if I can make it happen!

New Website Is Up!

I have been tired of my old website for awhile now. A lot of work went into the original website and it was fun to see, but I didn't have the ability to easily edit it. I had to give all the changes to the person that maintained my website (which is a close friend, so it wasn't a problem contacting her), but that put a lot of work on her. Plus, I didn't like the fact that I couldn't change anything, we didn't have access to coupon codes, or a host of other features.

We started searching for templates that would fit what I wanted, be customizable (I don't need to look like everyone else), user friendly for me and relatively inexpensive. There are plenty of templates out there, but that "relatively inexpensive" requirement was hard to fill. We did finally find a company that could give us what we wanted!

Switching to this new company required me to switch web hosting companies, so I decided to wait until my old one was up for renewal. That gave us plenty of time to work on what it should look like, get pictures taken, descriptions written and prices updates. Plus, I still have my full-time job and my little monster to care for. It really did take a long time to get it to look right and not all of the glitches have been worked out, but the new site is up and functional! There are a few more descriptions to be added. A few pictures to be taken (or retaken to show new packaging and designs). A few things that will slowly be fixed as we work on it in between all of the other things that must be done. After my last show in December, I will really be sitting down to look over everything and make sure everything is exactly what I want and if I don't want it, it isn't there. However, for anyone in need of a few Honu products for gifts or to keep, the website has everything that is currently available!

I have to say, it really looks pretty darn awesome too!