10 Tuesday Oct 2017
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Hi, I am super busy right now with writing new songs, recording them, am also working on a new Civil War era CD, and tweaking some traditional Norwegian folk songs. I hope to record the Norwegian songs,too, and am just wsiting for the right time.
I am also busily booking concerts for this year and next.
And of voyrse, producing the monthly show MUSE Live!. You can raad more about that at http://www.barbsorensen.com/muselive/
Peace and I hope you all have an awesome day!
Barb
28 Wednesday Jun 2017
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Wow! Its been since March that I last posted. Have been super busy. Booking concerts, practicing, writing and working on the special events. This weekend July 1st, come to Palatine to watch a bunch of Zombies in the parade. We will be handing out leaflets for the 3rd Annual Halloween Techno Zombie Geo Cache Hunt! The parade starts at 11 am. Hope to see you all there!
Peace Barb
17 Friday Mar 2017
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That Kickstarter Campaign! It ended today. This all-in-one-week campaign did not raise the funds as hoped for. The project is a promotionsl video and video release concert gor Christ in the Wilderness Reyreat in Stockton, IL. These tools will be used by them to raisr awareness and draw in donations to their cause.
While the Kivkstarter campsign did not reach its financial goal, it was still fun to see people were interested in it. Thank you to the two who did make a donation! I will keep in touch and let you know where it goes from here..
For right now, I need a nice long nap.
I hope you all have a wonderful evening.
Peace
Barb
16 Thursday Mar 2017
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Running a kickstarter campaign feels almost like having a baby shower! Tell everyone the good news the 1st day, get a few excited responses. Then the talk goes around about the project to try and figure out what its going to be… a boy or a girl? Will the campaign raise the funds or not. Then there are a million emails from marketers asking me to pay them to promote the campaign…kind of like everyone in the family telling you what to name the baby. But I already named it….The Christ In The Wilderness Promotional Video and Fundraiser Concert!
Of course, no pregancy is complete without a baby shower! So I invite you to help me welcome this project to life! There are only 9 hours left to make a donation (breathe) to the campaign (breathe). I only have $25 raised thus far (breathe) You can do this!!! Breathe!! I need to reach $7500 by Thursdsy morning 9:30 am (puff puff puff puff) Thanks for your support in helping me bring this project to life. (Waaaaaahhhh!!!) The rewards are wonderful! Just think! No more posts about this campaign if I reach my goal. If I dont reach my goal, I will have to do it again. … twins?! Yikes!!!! Lol! That would mean double the work!!Then there will be more posts! Thanks for considering helping me with one campaign at a time. Peace Barb
14 Tuesday Mar 2017
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HI, There are 44 hours left to go on this Kickstarter Campaign to create a promotional video for Christ In The Wilderness Retreat in Stockton, IL. Thank you for the donations and supporting this project. You can help me reach my goal by making a donation and/or spreading this post around the internet to all your friends to help me get the word out. Thank you!
Peace
Barb
14 Tuesday Mar 2017
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My lenten gratitude list….day 13
(Ok… so i started late, no biggy lol!)
I am grateful for the beautiful soft white snow!!!
It makes the noise on the street muffled and hushed. 🙂
I am grateful for mac computers that dont fail! I am grateful for the ants that cleaned my counter and floor. Today they are having a picnic by the sea…. cleaning up the inside of my kitchen sink. I am grateful for my friends and family and pets. I am grateful for having found a pair of sfissors I thought I lost, I am grateful for Palatine Hand details master cleaner and owner Sergio who did an awesome job videotaping this past weekend’s music video. Thank you! And of course I am grateful to those who donated to the Kickstarter campaign for a promotional video for Christ in the Wilderness Retreat in Stockton, IL.
13 Monday Mar 2017
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It is day 5 of the Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the Christ In The Wilderness Promotional Video and fundraiser concert. There are 65 hours left in this campaign. I’m hoping it comes together before time runs out. CITW really needs this video and the concert would really help them fundraise. Thank you to all the donors thus far and to those considering it!
I have been super busy with sending and responding to emails. I have put the word out on Social Media and local bulletin boards. I have a bit more work to do to get the word around even more.
Yesterday I went to an author fair in Palatine, IL for my children’s product (Mathamusic) Of course I told people about this campaign there as well. LOL 🙂
There was one person who came to my table and introduced herself saying she came because she saw that I had posted this campaign on the local bulletin board and then also saw that I was going to be at the author fair. She wanted to meet me, so she came! Wow! How awesome! When I read all the Kickstarter articles on how to do this.. .it did not occur to me that people would seek me out in real life to get to know me before they donate! LOL! I enjoyed that. Thank you for coming out! I enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you to everyone for their kind emails and well wishing and especially the donors! I appreciate you! Hope you are having a wonderful day! Peace
Barb
13 Monday Mar 2017
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Its supposed to snow tomorrow evening. I am looking forward to it.
I have my car fixed, my pc fixed and a broken phone. Thinking positively, that means, if it snows a lot, it will be a perfect setting for getting a lot of behind the scenes work done tomorrow without any phone call interruptions. Lol!
On the topic of thinking positively….. lifelong, I have always considered ants as annoying little thieves. A few years back I found a stream of ants flowing from under my cabinet to a little tiny piece of food I dropped inadvertantly on my kitchen floor. My first thought was…Wow!!! How did they find that!!
My second thought was.. jeesh! Look at how many there are. Its going to be difficult to kill them all.
My third thought went right into strategy.. I prefer organic methods rather than chemical, if I start annihilating them at the point of exit from their hideout hole under the cabinet maybe I can get them all in one fell swoop without them scattering.
As I crouched down to watch them more closely to study their movement patterns so to better time my pouncing on them, I became more fascinated with them and my mind began to wonder as it wandered…. what is their purpose on this planet? What are their intentions in my kitchen? What do they do with this food? How are they going to carry such a huge crumb? Why would I jump so quick to killing ants just because they are there? Do I really need to buy that powerful toxic chemical spray to get rid of them? Do ants have families?
The more I watched them, the more I quickly realized that they are not a pestilence that I have been taught they are. On the contrary they serve a vital and important piece in the chain of life?
What’s with my rush to kill them?
And then I decided to do something different. Something that all of my friends probably would not have done. I decided to let them clean up the crumbs as they found them on my floor. I made a deliberate effort to step over them instead of on them when I walked through the kitchen. I could see how seriously busy and hard working these ants were. I couldnt stand the thought of them also dying under foot in the midst of them fullfilling their duties and actually… doing me a favor. They were cleaning up the floor for me if I let them. It took 1 day for them to clean everything up and disappear back into whatever hole they came from. Poof, as if by magic. There one day, gone the next. And I had a clean floor without having to sweep it up myself!
I thought of the hundreds of times, I picked up a broom and shovel to clean up. And how busy I was with work at that moment. So when I did my job, and I let them do theirs… it worked. Did I like the site of ants crawling on my kitchen floor?.. nope. I realized, it was their quick persistence I didnt like, and how they were not stoppable en force. I also had a fear of them spreading into the living room and crawling all over other parts of the house. I am not the most clinically clean of housekeepers you know, lol. So this challenge of trusting ants was a bit unnerving. Still I was willing to try getting through it to see where it leads. To my surprise and amazement they cleaned up and disappeared without a trace. I didnt have to work so hard if I let nature do its thing. I felt a bit like Cinderella. Lol.
I also realized during this process, that I could not invite any of my hasty fearful ant killing friends over during this cleaning phase, lest I be judged as a nut, and the ants and their families be destroyed.
I made a note to myself, that perhaps the ants were coming out then because it was spring and they were getting more active seeking food to make more baby ants. I was grateful I did not wipe them out. They also never came back the rest of the year. And that was not necessarily because of my improved housekeeping skills lol!
It is spring again… and they came back to visit me this week. Lol! I dropped 1 pecan when I was baking. They found it! I didnt know ants LOVE pecans!!! I decided to see how long it would take them and how they were going to move that giant pecan. It took them 48 hours to get rid of it without a trace. They had a steady stream of workers that lined up to grab a giant bite from the pecan, and carry it back to their cave. The next one inline did the same, and so on. Very efficient and diligent little critters! I have noticed this week how grateful and happy I am to see them again. They are peaceful and dont attack. They just go about their task, and if I am in their pathway as I am cooking (because it is still my house), they walk around me quietly and patiently without any complaints. Wow!
Such lessons we can learn from watching nature more closely and not interfering with it, not judging it as less than or annoying, not fearing it, not trying to control it, or exert power over it or steal from it, nor destroying it. But working with it to let it support us. Making friends with nature feels really nice. 🙂
(I feel like a long haired hippie! Love them! Flower power!! Ant power! Lol!!! )
Those are my positive thoughts for the day. I hope you have a wonderful evening.
Peace,
Barb
12 Sunday Mar 2017
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An 8 min promotional video for Christ In The Wilderness Retreat in Stockton, IL Read more
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This is my first ever Kickstarter project. In the first three days so far, it has felt like having a last minute baby! Lol.
I saw the kickstarter promo a week ago for the allinone campaign. At the same time I was working on a video for Christ in the Wilderness Retreat which they could use as a tool to help raise funds for themselves.
I had been wanting to try a kickstarter project for years now, but never felt I had just the right project… until now.
Raising funds to help create the promotional video and fundraiser concert for Christ In The Wilderness suddenly seemed to make complete sense. I love giving of my gifts and talents where I can. And I have found that there are some costs which need to be covered that are also open door opportunities for others to play an interactive role in the project too. So I felt I would give Kickstarter.com a try and open the video completion process to the world. Thank you to the donors thus far! Wow! I was so excited to see that first and second email come in telling me you had made donations to the project. I was over the top excited! Totally made my day! Thanks also for helping get the word out and spreading the news to help me accomplish my goal within this week. I have 4 days left. to raise the funds.
A Funny story… sort of… in my push to get the word out onto Social Media immediately after launch…. I thought I would send special invitations to my friends on Facebook to start with. Unbeknownst to me, Facebook made some changes to the site the night before. When I sent the invitation, somehow, rather than individual invites sent to my friends, it instead created some sort of giant room filled with people from the general public. I could not figure out how to delete and start over. Suddenly the anger began to appear on the message screens by people who I didnt know but were somehow in this chat room. So I apologized and sent a help request to Facebook to shut the room down.
To make it worse… or better in a funny way… I was sending the apologies by typing from my cellphone because of the urgency, I couldnt get back to my office pc to fix the mess. My cellphone had autocorrect on. So when I typed in a copy of the email I sent to Facebook, for the chat room members to see, so I could let everyone know what happened and what I asked Facebook to help with….. autocorrect kicked in. And before I could catch it with my fast finger typing…. It corrected my spelling error to a word that wasnt ok. I meant to type in “I asked Facebook to shut the room down.” But autcorrect retyped it as ” I asked Facebook to shit the room down”. Oh my goodness! How embarrassing. I could have crawled into a hole. It seemed like people were already mad at me and this only would have made it worse. I feared the backlash… but instead I received responses that showed tears of laughter as they laughed their heads off reading it. I didnt catch how funny it was until someone pointed it out to me. I havent stopped laughing since. I am so grateful there are kind hearted people with humor and higher perspectives in this world that offered me a way to get through a tough situation with dignity grace and style. Thank you to all of you!
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12 Sunday Mar 2017
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We sure had a lot of fun today at Clean Cars and Concerts! Lol!!!
We created a music video for the German folk song “Freut Euch des Lebens”. (Rejoice In Your Lives”). My favorite car was there being hand detailed and I just could not pass up the opportunity!
Thank you to Sergio the master hand detailer and videographer, Willy and John from Palatine Lawnmower Repair shop and the crowd of people that did not show up because of the Palatine St. Patricks day parade. Lol! And..a super special thank you to our sponsors for the Clean Cars and Concerts Open House for Palatine Hand Detail. Because of your support for the event, we have been able to relax just enough to let the creative juices flow a little bit, to be able to create this video. Thank you T2 Auto Repair, Palatine Complete Auto Repair, Albo Auto, A&A Autobody Repair, Palatine Chiropractoe Dr. Pyzik and Palatine Lawnmower Repair.
The video now goes into the editing process. We are aiming to have it completed by July, and to be shown at the Catlow Theater in July and /or August. I will of course post updates here as soon as I know the exact dates. Maybe we can get a group of us together to go watch it at the theater. Sounds like fun to me. Let me know if you would like to come and I will reserve the seats. Peace. Barb
Barb Sorensen 