Hugh Hollowell

Well, I told you last week that this week I would tell you all about the big news I have been talking around for a while now. The big news is…

I am moving to the Raleigh/ Durham area of North Carolina. Yes, that is right; after nearly 14 years of living here in Memphis, I am un-assing this joint and hitting the road.

For several reasons, I have not blogged directly about this yet. There were people in my life (including that famous list of 10) I wanted to tell directly first before going public with it. (There is little worse than your Mom hearing you are moving halfway across the country by reading it on your blog). Also, from a business standpoint, I wanted to wait as long as possible before announcing I was closing. Closing a business is never fun and if people are uncertain about your future, they tend to quit coming in.

Why Raleigh/ Durham, you ask? Well, why not? (Just Kidding). Actually there are several reasons, some personal, some business related, but when it all comes down to it, I just ended up with an opportunity I could not turn down (More about that and my plans in future posts).

Moving is not easy, nor is it fun. I am quite the minimalist, yet even I have accumulated large amounts of just stuff that have to be gotten rid of. Maybe I will follow Jennifer’s example… In any event, this is why I have been so on edge, so distant, so pensive of late. Worse yet, my ADD is raging and I have caught myself just freezing up, so staying on top of that is a constant battle. Of course I will miss my family (including my newest nephew!) but as Helen Keller said, life is either a daring adventure, or nothing at all. Given the choice, I will take the adventure.

You may recall, gentle reader, that the beginning of this month I hit the road for a few days. I went to Raleigh to verify some assumptions. Since they turned out to be true, I went ahead and decided to move out there.

Over the next month or so, I will be traveling back and forth several times, so if you want to see me in Memphis before I get out of here, email me and we will work out the scheduling.

Over the upcoming weeks, if I seem more distant than normal, I am just dealing with the enormity of moving. Please be patient with me, and I will try my best to keep you all updated.

An early mentor of mine told me that no one cares how I feel, only what I do. While it seems harsh, it is pretty much the truth. While it might be nice that I love my dog, what matters is that I feed my dog. It might be nice that I like my employees, but what matters is that I treat then fairly. It may be interesting that the soldier on the battlefield is scared, but what matters is if he overcomes the fear and acts. As Margaret Thatcher once said (paraphrased), “No one would remember the Good Samaratin if he had only had good intentions”.

I am both a Christian AND a follower of Jesus. He is important to me and in my life in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who does not know him, in much the same way that it is difficult to explain why you love your girlfriend to someone who does not know her.

Yet… sometimes I experience doubts. I have had months and months before where I prayed and prayed and felt nothing… no answers, no insights, no nothing. I have had times where I wondered if indeed some Romans may have hid his body after all. I have had times where I wondered if it were really all true, if God really was up there, listening to me. Sometimes, it felt like talking to myself.

The experience is not singular to me. Spiritual writers have called the feeling of doubt and/or abandonment a “Dark Night of the Soul”. While the most I have ever endured was a few months, it seems that Mother Theresa felt the same thing… for decades. It turns out shortly after she began her work, she felt Jesus withdrawing from her. He began not talking to her in her prayers, she could no longer get joy from his presence at communion. She felt forsaken.

Yet, she not only remained faithful, she thrived in His name. She began as a single 36 year old nun and ended up a world renowned figure, who pointed the world to Him, always told of her love for Him, did so many things in His name. She kept the faith.

The story illustrates many points I do not have the time to go into, but the one thing that struck me was her faithfulness. She continued to pray, even though she could not hear His answer. She kept doing great works in His name. She always managed to turn any accolades she received into a chance to tell of His love. It adds a new dimension to her often quoted maxim that we are never called to be successful, merely faithful.

If you were in love with someone and they refused to talk to you, how long could you carry that torch? Beyond that, could you, for decades, go out and tell the world, by your words and your deeds, about this great lover of yours? While atheists will make what they want out of this, to me, knowing this side of Mother Theresa’s spiritual life does nothing but enhance my admiration for her.

Yes, I know I said I was done worrying about stats and from now on I was just going to crank out good content and let things fall where they may. That is still the case, but you do like some external validation when it happens.

Way back on May 25th, I wrote that my goal had been to break the Technoratti 100K in 2 months, but that I had done it in 28 days. Then I bet that I could break 50k by the 15th of June, but it just did not happen.

Today (August 23rd), just over 2 months later than I had intended, I finally broke the 50K barrier. Yes, I know I probably could have done it sooner had I not taken those weeks off in the middle of the summer.

Thank you all for your links, your loyalty and your readership. I could not (and would not) do it without all of you.

My Brother Jimmy is a proud Papa now, with Mr. Carter James (see below) having been born on the 24th of June. Here he is from a few days back.

I know I have been a bit morose of late, and I want to apologize. I have a lot going on right now and I am trying to process it all. Also, I have the “Big News” I mentioned in the Friends post that I am still dealing with. (By the way, sometime early next week I will be able to let you all in on it, so quit pestering me, already).

This morning, I had to close another door, and for me that is always hard. I have so much to do and my ADD is just raging, so I am frozen (Never Good).  Those of you who are around, just deal with me and put up with me the best you can and I promise next week it will all make sense.

NOTE: This is article 1 of 3.
6 Reasons Your Business Should Sell on eBay (Part 2)

Unless you have been in a cave for the last 10 years or so, you have probably bought or sold something on eBay. What started off as a hobbyist site to sell your odds and ends has become big business, invading the popular culture (did anyone else watch Transformers this summer?) and has become a way to work from home for many people.

After I mentioned in my last post I made a large portion of my income from eBay I received several emails and phone calls wanting to know both how they could make money from home with eBay and how to use eBay in their business.

While working from home by selling on eBay is a valid business model and one I will talk about soon, right now I want to focus on the top 6 reasons a traditional business should look into making eBay a part of their business strategy.

Here are the 6 reasons you should have an eBay strategy in your business:

1. Cash Flow
2. Velocity of Inventory
3. Search Domination
4. Credibility Transfer
5. Expanded Reach
6. Virtually Free Sales Leads

Over the next week or so I will take each reason and break it down in it’s own post, showing why it is important and ways you can implement it in your business.

I know many people think eBay and think collectibles or yard sale rejects but, done properly, eBay can have a huge impact on your business.

This will be a 3 part series, so subscribe here to keep track of the ongoing discussion…

He had lied about his age to go in the Army and ended up flying planes, the Snoopy sort, with open cockpits and goggles and long scarves. After the war he came back to the States, traveled with an air show for a while as a barnstormer and eventually settled down in North Texas, married a fierce half Cherokee and had some kids. My mother’s father was his oldest son.

The thing I remember most about him was his size. He was a large man, standing about 6’5”, barrel-chested and thick. He wore bib overalls and work shirts and had hands the size of canned hams. He was my Great Grandfather, but that was a mouthful for a youngster such as I, so I called him Big’un.

We normally went to see them in the summer when school was out, but this time for some reason, now lost to me, we were there in the fall when the blackberries were in. My Great Grandmother and I had been blackberry picking earlier in the day and in the icebox was sitting a coffee can full of luscious blackberries, so full of goodness they were about to burst. I no longer recall (if I ever knew) where she went, but she told him that when she returned she was going to make a blackberry cobbler with those berries.

She was not gone more than a handful of minutes when he called me into the kitchen. It was a typical (in my experience, anyway) North Texas farmhouse kitchen, with cracked linoleum on the floor, a 1950’s era yellow Formica and stainless steel table and an electric icebox in the corner.

Big’un put me at the table and put two bowls on the table, the porcelain glazing cracked and crazed from years of use. The coffee can of blackberries was retrieved and put in the middle of the table. With his huge, rough scarred hands he poured the blackberries from the can into my bowl and then his. The berries were huge, filling both our bowls to the edge and he poured the fresh cream we had gotten from his own cows that morning over the top, the cream running over the berries, filling in the cracks and crevices until the berries looked like small blue-black islands in a sea of white.

There we sat, in a 4-room house in North Texas, 70 or so years between us, eating our ill-gotten blackberries, sharing the conspiratorial knowledge that regardless of what troubles may come when his wife came back, this day, right now, we were lords of all creation.

Last night, I had this dream…

My brother Jimmy and I were riding around Memphis in a mid 1980’s Green Oldsmobile. We stopped at this coffee shop and hung out for a bit, but when Jimmy got up and went to the restroom, I left him there and went driving again.

I remember I had to be at work soon at my job (in the dream) at Target, so I started driving there. It is now pouring down rain, and I remember wondering how Jimmy was going to get home, since he had left his cellphone in the car. I decide I will go to work, drop off the wet-vac I am lugging around, then go back and get him. (I have no idea why I have a wet-vac, but it is pouring down rain…)

I get to Target, half an hour early, still lugging the wet vac, and realize I have on Navy blue pants, not the Target regulation Khaki pants. I drop off the wet-vac in the back room by the time clock and then run out the door to get Jimmy and change into appropriate pants, while dodging the boss so he does not see me in the wrong pants.

Anybody think this means I am going to win the lottery?

I was just sitting here, reading over some of my past posts ( my insomnia is acting up) and realized it is just over a month since I started this blog.

25 posts later, it is still a blast. I have blogged for years, but never just for fun. It was always to market a business, to gain an audience, to increase my profile. This blog is just for fun.

It is my stress release valve as I deal with hard issues I am having to face right now. I have found old friends through it and people who care about me can keep up with me.

This is just a note to say thank you for reading and I hope you stick around.

I have big, no, huge things going on right now. And I very much want to tell you about it.

The problem is, there are about 10 people who I desperately want to tell about it face to face. I do not want them to read about it on my blog, hear it from a third party, see it on CNN (just kidding… or am I?). And since all of them do not know yet, I can not fill you in yet either,  constant reader.

(Those of you who do know, please do NOT reveal anything in the comments. Yes, Sandie, this means you too…)

This got me to thinking about friendship in general. When you are younger, your friends were the people you hung around with, that you stood next to at recess, that you passed notes to in class.  They were in your life every day.

Now, back to those 10 people… 3 of them are out of state, 2 of them I speak (not counting email, Christmas cards and such) to about 4 times a year, 1 of them I have met face to face only 3 times (actually on 3 separate occasions,  but multiple times each occasion).

Yet, these folks are my people, my eclectic collection of friends, cronies and partners in crime. We laugh together, share our tragedies, triumphs, victories and shortcomings with each other. We all are, in the truest sense of the word, friends.

Some of them are women, but none of them were ever girlfriends. We all usually end our conversations with ‘I love you” or something similar and think nothing of it. We have watched the ups and downs of lost loves, poor mate choices, deaths and births. The longest I have known one of this group is nearly 31 years, the shortest about 2 years. We all come from different backgrounds, faiths and political systems. When you actually think about it, the only thing we all have in common is that we all have nothing in common.

I love them all.  As Yeats said, “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends/And say my glory was I had such friends“.