We bought a truck this week. It was the most difficult and exhausting vehicle purchase we have ever made! And it all had to do with supply and demand, and the economic effects of a recession on a particular product line.

We wanted a truck. But not just any truck. A 3/4 ton or better. Now, half ton trucks are a dime a dozen. But the price just JUMPS as soon as you go any larger. There is not much price difference between used 3/4 ton and one ton trucks – a matter of perception of fuel efficiency, mostly. But supply drops, and demand rises right at that 3/4 ton breakpoint.

The problem in Wyoming is that it is a truck state. Everyone and their dog has a big truck. In the current economy, big trucks are not being traded in, or sold used by owners. They are keeping them longer. More people are buying used instead of new. So we now have a shortage of used trucks, and a higher demand for them. This has pushed prices up about 50%.

So what you now find, is higher miles, and higher prices. Not a good combination. That means they are harder to afford, harder to finance, as well as being harder to find.

We searched aggressively for days before finding one. We had a time limit, could not take our time. Every other time we’ve bought a car, the entire process took less than a day, to find the car, and finalize the deal. We’ve even bought two cars on the same day, and it didn’t take the whole day. We found good deals and met our needs quickly. So this time was really exhausting.

We’ve had one other time when outside influences affected a market this strongly, and that was from the seller’s perspective, not the buyer’s perspective. We sold bulk foods, and computers. When 9-11 happened, the computer market crashed, and the bulk food business boomed – so much so that we could not meet the demand, and had to issue refunds because the items simply were not available.

We often don’t connect things like this until we need something that has been strongly affected. When they do happen, we just have to deal with it. Tiring or not, we had to spend the time. High, or not, we had to spend the money, and take what was available.

People who say they don’t have to let the recession affect them are dreaming. Because it will reach out and touch you whether you want it to or not. We can’t choose what comes into our lives, but we can choose how we deal with it when it does.

Pages and Profiles are two separate things, with two separate purposes on FaceBook. But if you don’t know the lingo, they can sound like the same thing.

A PROFILE is what you start with. It has some rules, and it does some thing, for a specific purpose.

It is designed to let you communicate within a group of people – and to allow people to connect with people. Therefore, a Profile is for a PERSON. It is NOT for an entity like a business, town, or organization.

Profiles allow you to let people know what you are doing, tell people about yourself, and control who can see it, and who cannot – Profiles are only partially indexed by search engines. They have a limit of 5000 connections.

People can connect to you by requesting a Friend connection.

A PAGE, is something that is OWNED by a PERSON – so in order to have a page, you first have to have a profile. Because a page is essentially owned by a profile.

Pages are designed for ENTITIES. If you want to promote your business on FaceBook, create a profile (that’s personal), and then create a page (for the business).

Many of the functions are the same. People SUBSCRIBE, instead of connecting through a Friend request. A Page has no limits to the number of people who can subscribe.

When you are connected as a Friend to someone, you see all their posts. When you are subscribed to a Page, that page does NOT receive your personal information. Communication is one-way on a Page, Two-way on a Profile. A very important difference.

Pages are fully indexed by search engines, and have options for discussion groups. Unfortunately, the discussion groups do not send notifications on discussions, so they are rarely used by page subscribers.

A Page is a good way to keep customers informed though.

You can feed a Page into Twitter. You can feed Twitter into a Profile. So you can post to your business page, and it will show up automatically on your Profile wall if you have connected both feeds.

FaceBook also offers other options, such as Groups (really just another form of Page, which you can join, but you won’t get discussion notices from that either so they are rather ineffective), and Causes (again, a variation on Pages, and completely ineffective because everybody joins, but then does nothing to actually make a difference to the cause).

The first step is getting your Pages and Profiles straight. Once you understand the purpose for each, and how they can be used to advantage, FaceBook can become a better tool for you.

“All things being equal, business owners do not make more money than those who hold a corporate job.”

All things are not equal. I get up every day and go to work, in my livingroom, and I earn more than just mere money.

• I earn time with my husband. A precious commodity, even though working together in a business has been one of the hardest things we’ve ever done.
• I earn time with my kids. Yes, that is hard too. But worth it.
• I earn the ability to set my own schedule. Mostly.
• I gain the opportunity to work with people I like, and can choose to let go of those I don’t like working with.
• I get the chance to chart my own destiny – to choose the work and business that I engage in.

It isn’t all sunshine and roses, not by a long shot. But it is better than working a job for a boss. The last job I had drove me nuts. I could see so many things that would help, but could not do any of them. I was required to do things that didn’t matter, at the expense of things that did, on someone else’s schedule. It made me truly appreciate what I have in being a business owner.

And now, the money ain’t bad either. Though we put in long years of work to get it to the point where we feel like we have more of the financial choices that we wanted.

But I would not trade it for a job that paid twice this much.

I’ve written several gardening metaphors for business and family. Right now, I don’t have another one in me. But where I’m at may be one anyway.

We’ve gardened out here for three years. Two years did ok, and last year was a complete flop. A combination of weather, lack of water, and deer left us with very little in the way of anything edible that came from the garden. We had the deer under control the last year, but then part of the back fence had to come down and that put an end to that. Add to that the fact that just as the lettuce started to come in, I discovered that lettuce no longer liked me. Neither did most of the early greens. I could still tolerate spinach then, but cannot now.

So there are few things we can grow here that I can actually eat. And many of the things that do grow, do so poorly, and require an extremely high maintenance to do so.

I tried hydroponics. I can only grow things I cannot eat, and they end up being prohibitively expensive.

We tried a greenhouse. The summer is so hot, and the sun so brutal (high altitude) that the plants just cook inside there in the summer. Moving them in and out is just not feasible if you want any significant amount of plants, and that is what we’d have to do spring and fall, because the days are too hot in the greenhouse, and the nights are too cold outside.

So I’m about done. I haven’t decided whether to garden this year or not. I may decide to put in broccoli and nothing else. I may decide not do even do that.

Our church counsels that we plant a garden. And so I want to do it. I need so many fresh veggies that I really NEED to be able to grow some of them. But I’m just thinking that I really can’t do what I need in Wyoming. Where THAT particular observation will lead us, we don’t quite know yet. But I think it is beyond significant.

I know some people end up feeling this way about other areas of their life. It works for other people, but a series of challenges combine to simply not make it worth the doing. When I reach a point like this, I always consider a few things:

• How important is it to me?
• What are the variables I can adjust?

The answers on this one are things I can’t do anything about this year. But I’m laying plans for being able to garden, somewhere, a few years from now. Because it is important to me.

I just don’t think I can do it right now.

It is just so much more complicated than I thought it would be! Learning to use an LMS is just another learning curve for me. I managed to figure that out. But figuring out how to do a brain dump, in a combination of text, images, videos, audios, site links, and software downloads, is downright hard. How to organize it all so that people can move through the courses in a logical manner, get their questions answered, and look up reference material?

Online courses can happen in a variety of ways. They can be anything from simple “pay to access” online content, to content plus quizzes, to emails loaded into an auto-responder, to a full fledged Learning Management System with prerequisites, forums, quizzes and certifications. We went with the last option, because we want certifications to be part of the picture. But it is important to realize that you may not NEED a full scale LMS to do online lessons or protected content. Often a much simpler structure will be enough.

I’m finally well into the process of creating short courses. I have several long multi-segment courses to upload eventually, but decided to start with the short ones that have only 8-10 lessons. I am not sure how capable I’ll be of tackling the big ones, but figure the experience from the small ones will be a help.

An LMS allows you to group things together in a fairly granular way. I have the following options:

• Categories. I can group Courses together into categories.
• Courses. A course can contain multiple lessons. A course contains lessons on a single topic, or single group of related topics, usually.
• Lessons. A lesson should be a fairly well defined learning concept. It can be further broken down if needed, but is often the lowest element in the tree.
• Units. A lesson can have multiple units, if you need to assign additional study on a concept.
• Examples. I can put in examples for any given lesson.
• Assignments. I can create assignments to complete for any lesson.
• Videos or Documents. These can be attached to a lesson.
• Quizzes. Each lesson can have a completion quiz.
• Tests. Courses can have final tests.

A course can have a forum attached as well. So the learning options are fairly flexible. But it also means that setting it up is a VERY involved process.

Oh, anyone can go in and create a lesson and paste some instructions into the page. But to create a real online course, that someone can actually learn from, and then demonstrate that they have learned, is much more difficult! All the pieces have to be found, created, and set to work the way you want them to.

I think it will be worth it though, because it doesn’t just teach people. It does so in a way that frees the teacher to reach more people at one time.

Hard. But worth the learning curve and time.