Good Karma Only, Please
Kathy and Michelle discuss all the things, but ask for good karma going forward. Do good things, get good things, right? Also, we’ve had enough grief and heartache for awhile, ok Karma?
Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Happy Friday, Kathy.
Speaker 1 00:00:06 Happy Friday. Michelle, how are you doing on this? Fine, cold Friday.
Speaker 0 00:00:11 So cold. There was snow on the ground this morning and um, looking out the window, it looks like it’s gone now, but I just boosted the heat in my condo a little bit and I ordered a heated mattress cover. Did you? Yeah, it’s supposed to arrive on Monday and it’s wifi enabled, so if I’m watching TV in the living room, I could heat up the bed before I go get in it. So, um, so the cold, I wanna be like Elsa, I wanna say the cold does never bothered me anyway. But the truth of the matter is I live in the north where I shouldn’t because the cold bothers me all the time. .
Speaker 1 00:00:49 Wow. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Oh my gosh, I, that makes so much more sense than a heated blanket because heat rises, right? So heated mattress cover, I’m gonna have to investigate this sounds amazing. Although in Texas I will use it probably like one or two months, well maybe three or four months. It’s not, even though I’m in the south, our houses here are not designed to stay warm. They’re designed to stay cool and to shed heat and that’s what we’re doing. It’s just shedding heat. And the heat bunts are all on the ceiling. So my feet are just always cold, but it’s warm like five feet above me. Just,
Speaker 0 00:01:29 Well, I live in Rochester, New York and my heat vents are on the ceiling too, which makes really zeros. It makes zero sense. That makes zero sense
Speaker 1 00:01:37 Whatsoever.
Speaker 0 00:01:38 And cause it’s a condo, there’s no basement, so it literally sits on a cement pad. So, and I have no carpet, so, I mean, I have an area right here or there, but, um, but I walk around on laminate floor so I have to have slippers because otherwise Yeah, your feet will freeze. Right. So, you know, I mean, we find ways to make it work. I mean, I have good windows, like there’s no breezes through the windows. Everything is good that way. It’s just my bedroom is the only room that it has, um, exposure on two walls to the outside.
Speaker 1 00:02:08 Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:02:10 And they didn’t insulate the closets in this place, so, and it’s a walking closet right off the bedroom, so I have to get that door closed, which is fine. But the bedroom, I keep the door closed to the bedroom cuz I don’t want my cats in there. Like, I need a cat free room. Right. Yeah. Um, I need to sleep without cats going, Hey, wake up, I wanna eat. So . So I will at night, like walk down the hallway, open that door and it’s like stepping into the, like the cold storage because it’s like 10 degrees cooler in the, of any place else. So, you know, we talked about the Thanksgiving, US Thanksgivings next week. We talked about, granted I am grateful that I could order a heated the mattress pad so that by Thanksgiving next week I will have that sucker on my bed and I will be able to, you know, the thing is, I like, even with electric blankets, I would turn them on and then turn ’em off before I go to sleep. Otherwise you wake up sweating, right? You just, you just need to take the chill outta the mattress and then you can sleep. So
Speaker 1 00:03:10 Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:03:10 , I’m the,
Speaker 1 00:03:17 Oh, me too. I am living on Amazon these days because it’s just, you know, it takes so much effort to get out, you know, I have to make sure everything’s okay. Yeah. Or like sneak out early in the morning before my husband’s awake. So he doesn’t need anything cuz you know, if he rolls around and rolls out of bed, I mean, I need to be here as much as I can. So yeah, I’ve been living on Amazon and very thankful for the world we live in now where I can order anything I want and it arrives in my doorstep. It’s wonderful.
Speaker 0 00:03:45 Yes. I, you know, we, we’ve talked before every, I think most people know that I have disability, um, and it’s a mobility disability, so I can toddle around to like limp around my condo just fine and all. But if I’m in the living room, I don’t wanna run to the bedroom to grab something and run back. I get out of breath, my knees are killing me back. It’s that kind of thing. So
Speaker 1 00:04:06 Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:04:07 I’m super grateful for everything that AI and technology makes for your home to make it much easier to live. Like I can walk into a room and say the word that shisha who shall not be named otherwise things actually start to happen. , you know, turn on the lights and the lights turn on. I can say set the thermostat too and she’ll set the thermostat for me. Cuz I have a smart thermostat. I can open my front door, I can unlock my front door from my phone. Um, I’ll be able to heat my bed from my phone. Like all these different things that I can do. But I’m also a little spoiled because like the living room and the bathroom are not like special lights. So like I walk into the, into the li into the, I’m sorry, the kitchen, uh, the living room is, I walk into the kitchen and I start to go, uh, no she can’t, she can’t turn on the lights in my kitchen. I actually have to flip a switch . Yeah. It’s problem. I do understand the switch is right there. I walk right past it, but it’s nice. So, or just being able to ask the device like what’s the weather today? I don’t have to get up. Like, or if I really wanna see what a side outside, but I don’t wanna get out from under the covers. I open my ring doorbell cam and I look and see what’s happening in my own front yard. so smart.
Speaker 1 00:05:23 So nice, but so nice. It
Speaker 0 00:05:25 Does, it makes life easier for sure.
Speaker 1 00:05:27 Yeah, totally. The ability to just give you something that you can manage right, right. On your device. It’s like right there. You don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. It’s like, and they keep making them, it’s, you know, it’s not like these incremental leaps anymore, but it’s just like they keep adding more and more features that makes just living life easier and so much. Yeah, they do you find like your, um, like when it first started, like with, you know, know she who will not be named, like sometimes it just didn’t get you, but I feel like it’s getting better. Is that, do you feel like that too? Like it’s understanding you more?
Speaker 0 00:06:06 Yes. The funny thing is like television programs that’ll have that word, you know, if you, if you’re wondering what we’re saying, it’s a L e x a, I have one on my desk, I can’t say the word. Um, if you television programs will say that word and it doesn’t pick it up. So I don’t know like how they program that, but somehow they figured out not to have that. But TikTok does. So I’ll be like in my room at night, like trying to go to sleep and trying to like wind down and I’ll be watching TikTok and somebody will be like, ale x a blah, blah, blah, blah. And mine will start to talk to me like, I’m sorry I didn’t understand that. And sometimes this scares the shit outta me. I’m sorry, scare scares the outta me
Speaker 1 00:06:45 .
Speaker 0 00:06:48 Um, but seriously, it’s, it’s, it is a blessing. It’s uh, I’m sure it is a little scary. I know they’re always listening, there’s security, blah, blah, blah. I don’t think of myself as somebody that, um, really has to worry too much about I, yes, identity theft is real, Jim, I totally get that , you know, all of those things. But, um, but I’m not as worried as some other people are. Even
Speaker 1 00:07:10 If I, yeah. Yeah. I kinda, you know, in terms of like that whole question because obviously living in the security world as long as I have, um, yes. The whole idea of privacy, like when it first started like becoming this big deal, I was like very vigilant. I’m still pretty vigilant about like my online identity and passwords and how accounts that I have. You know, like going back to accounts that I had like 10 years ago and making sure that they have like strong passwords. Cuz back then I’m pretty sure like sure, my, my, my dead dog’s name was probably at some point. But now I kinda look at everything that’s happening in the world and it’s like, okay, there’s not much I can do about privacy. But you know what the flip side of it is, A lot of the, I guess people in control or people who are in a more privileged space who can push a button and, you know, change laws and do those types of things, those people have to live under these privacy, I don’t wanna say violations, but these, the, the lessened privacy as well.
Speaker 1 00:08:12 Yeah. So I feel like in some ways this whole shift to a non-private world is leveling the playing field in a lot of way and things that used to be done behind closed doors, there are no more closed doors. Yeah. You know, you have to imagine that anybody can be listening and that there’s, you know, vulnerabilities in your phone that mm-hmm. , it’s in their phone too, you know, that Right. That people can, so everybody’s got to sort of be on that hypervigilant protecting their identity, but so do they, they don’t get to do things that are, um, in that the best interest of the people they represent type of thing. So I’m kind of like, all right, let’s see how this goes. No more secrets. Yeah, no more lies. Everybody just does things above board and no more backroom deals.
Speaker 0 00:09:03 We live in the
Speaker 1 00:09:04 Open, be fun, , everybody’s gotta, if I’ve gotta live in the open, hey, everybody else does too. Mm-hmm. . So let’s get to some authenticity and see what happens there. It’s an interesting experiment.
Speaker 0 00:09:16 Yeah. It really is. And socially it’s an interesting tangent. Like it’s ok. Um, but it’s, yeah, it is definitely. I agree with you. It’s, it’ll be, it just, it’s interesting to watch. I remember as a kid reading comic books and one of the comic books, I think it was Richie Rich, uh, to be honest, I was at the dentist office reading Richie Rich comic books in the waiting room and Richie decided he was gonna call somebody and he used his TV phone. And I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be so cool if you could actually call people and see them while you were talking to them? That’s hysterical. Like it, to me it was like, ha ha that would never happen. And then like, not only do we have Zoom now, but like, I have FaceTime on my phone. Like I can call my mom and see how she’s doing. Now if, if you’re listening and not watching, you’ll have to imagine this. While I’m talking to my mother on FaceTime, she has this thing where her, her phone starts to like, she likes to, it starts to lay flatter. And so I start to see less and less of her face. And eventually I’m just talking to the top of her head and I’m like, Bob, fix the phone.
Speaker 0 00:10:21 So funny. But the fact that we can, you know, FaceTime people and you know, zoom call and Skype. Remember Skype . Yeah. It was the original. I think, you know, I mean there’s just, we’ve come a long way and you know, I am truly grateful for the fact that I have a very, um, talk about remote work. I have a very remote family, so I have, you know, my brothers and, um, well, three of my four brothers are in Oklahoma City. Uh, my sisters in Kentucky and I have aunts and uncles literally all around the world. And we can get outta Zoom, call and discuss things. When we were, when we were planning my dance funeral, we were zooming with the pastor. We’ve had Zoom calls with the attorney to try to get everything um, going, which is by the way, a nightmare. We wanted to talk about that.
Speaker 0 00:11:11 But all of that is possible because we can literally be in the same electronic room, I guess, whatever, whatever you wanna call it. Right. Um, and be able to see each other. I’ve attended meetings for outside of work, like all of these different things, um, you know, word fest and for two years of two or three years of almost of, um, word camps all online and being able to stay connected that way. So, uh, it’s a blessing and a curse because sometimes like, oh, one more zoom call, but at the, at the same time, it’s just made, um, us so much easier to connect and communicate with one another.
Speaker 1 00:11:51 Yeah, I, I’m with you on that. I mean, well, you and I have been on online for a really long time, and I remember the old days of just like meeting so many people. Like I was like an old live journaler. Like I have an old life journal, and so I’ve got like friends that I’ve met that I’ve known for, like, ever because of journaling online and stuff. And we’d all like, share like everything, right? Back then it was like, oh, it’s just on Live Journal. It’s all locked down to this particular friend group and everything, and the friendships that have transpired and then now with these types of meetings where we can actually, you know, see each other and it, it, um, it enriches my life, especially now where I’m like less, you know, I used to be traveling all over the place, going to Word camps, all at like, same with you, going to Word Camps every single month.
Speaker 1 00:12:43 Um, sometimes a couple of them in a month and just traveling the world, meeting everybody using Word Cross. And now it’s, you know, I can’t do that like I used to. Um, and a lot of us haven’t been able to do that over the last couple of years. And to be able to have technologies that allow us to stay connected and to make connections, there’s plenty of people that I’ve met in WordPress that I’ve never met in real life, but we talk every week. We’ll send a Twitter DM and say, Hey, you got some time to catch up and we’ll just catch up and have some conversations and, and what are you dealing with, with, you know, and we’ll talk, sometimes we’ll talk shop, but a lot of times we’re talking about what’s going on in our lives. But yeah, we talk shop a lot like, Hey, how’s your PHP eight migration going? Oh really? , oh, well I tried this. And what about this plugin? And just like, you know, being able to have those kinds of connections to make everything, you don’t have to do it all by yourself anymore. And to have these kinds of connections, I’m really grateful for it. And, uh, yeah, it, it’s, it’s cool. I’m all about the remote work, so anybody tells me I have to go back to an office, it’ll be like, yeah, no,
Speaker 0 00:13:51 Which I’m so, which, which brings me to Twitter, , it’s, that’s the show Compos,
Speaker 1 00:13:58 Here we go
Speaker 0 00:13:59 Show on Twitter. That’s never gonna be not funny to me, by the way. Um, compost . Uh, I, I was thinking, you know, you did that beautiful film open, I think. Yeah. You know, you should, you should do a documentary style film on Twitter and just call it closed .
Speaker 1 00:14:18 Mine is, oh my gosh. How many people have been let go from Twitter?
Speaker 0 00:14:22 Yeah. I mean, we can laugh at the cock show that it is, but real lives are being affected, you know? Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I’m, I’m a life who’s effective but not in the same way. Right. So we use it, but the people whose livelihoods are derived from it are just that the whim of somebody who just makes unilateral decisions one day and changes on the next and everything. It’s that kind of volatility is, is really scary. And, and I’m, I’m grateful that I don’t work
Speaker 1 00:14:52 Well. Yeah. I, I have a soapbox moment about how businesses need to take care of people. Because really it’s not about your bottom line. If you take care of your people and you take care of the people who work for you, your customers, they’re people. It’s all about people. So put people first. How do you make people’s lives better by the work that you do, by the decisions that you make? I mean, I have to believe that in the grand scheme of things, that there is some kind of balance that has to happen. They call it karma. And I hear she’s a little bit of a bitch.
Speaker 0 00:15:32 . I’ve heard that too.
Speaker 1 00:15:34 . She’s one of my friends. I like her, but she can be quite the bitch.
Speaker 0 00:15:40 . Yeah. And she is a fair weather friend because she has bit me before too. . Sure,
Speaker 1 00:15:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there will be balance every time.
Speaker 0 00:15:52 Yes,
Speaker 1 00:15:52 This sounds terrible, but every time I have to deal with something, you know, with the husband’s stroke and it’s like something I don’t wanna do or like I’m too tired, I just like, here you go. Karma,
Speaker 0 00:16:03 .
Speaker 1 00:16:04 I’m expecting payment,
Speaker 0 00:16:10 Supposed to be balanced. I’d happy to. I’m, I’m waiting for the ice cream .
Speaker 1 00:16:14 I’m waiting for the ice cream. Cause sometimes I’m dealing with some actual compost at times. And, uh, I’m just hoping that it gets balanced. Well, you know, I mean, and so I obviously, I, I surrender to the service that universe and God and Marriage has asked me to do. Um, there are decisions I could make to say, you know, they are nursing homes for this kind of thing. I can’t live with that myself personally, so I’ve made the decision, but I do sort of like say every once in a while, karma.
Speaker 0 00:16:44 Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:16:47 I know. It goes both ways.
Speaker 0 00:16:49 Work, work The good magic today. Karma, please. These be the sweetheart, not the bitch. .
Speaker 1 00:16:56 Exactly. I’ll buy you dog toys.
Speaker 0 00:16:58 . I love it. Love it. Um, maybe karma just wants ice cream too.
Speaker 1 00:17:06 Could very well be. Could I just take karma for a, you know, a ride through, uh, in and out and get like a Scooby snack?
Speaker 0 00:17:13 I was gonna say go to Starbucks and get a cup,
Speaker 1 00:17:16 A pop cup. Yes. A cappuccino
Speaker 0 00:17:19 Cup.
Speaker 1 00:17:20 Anything Karma. What, what does Karma want for Christmas this year?
Speaker 0 00:17:24 That’s a good question. Or shopping. If you figure it out, please let me know.
Speaker 1 00:17:29 Exactly. Yeah. And if you’re watching or listening and you know what Karma wants for Christmas, we need to know
Speaker 0 00:17:36 , please, please inform us. We, we’ll be happy to contribute to the Karma, um, Christmas fund. .
Speaker 1 00:17:43 Yes, definitely.
Speaker 0 00:17:46 Oh my goodness. Oh my gosh. As we do, we, as, as you’re not listening or watching this, we have entered into, um, Thanksgiving week, uh, here in the United States anyway, and I, I know I do speak for both me and Kathy. I didn’t ask her first, but I’m gonna speak for her anyway, to say that we are grateful to the people in our lives, whether you listen to our podcast, watch our podcast, whether you, um, support us in other ways and just give us the time and the space to accomplish the things that we do. Um, I do have gratitude for sure for all of you. And at the top of that list, Cathy, I am just super grateful that we get to do projects together and that we are in each other’s lives.
Speaker 1 00:18:28 Same. I don’t know what else to say. That is a huge part. I took it off. You have blessed, you’ve blessed me. So thank you. Thank you. You have blessed. I can’t even tell you how many times you have blessed me in my life. So I am extremely grateful for you. I know I’m not alone. I know there’s many people who, who look to you as a leader, as a support, and just as a great friend with a wonderful heart. So
Speaker 0 00:18:53 Thank you. Well, likewise. I know that that works for both of us. So thank you. And, uh, we are recording next week. We’ve already decided that it may be Black Friday, we have to work. So, uh, we’re gonna record anyway, so you’re not even gonna miss a week. So we hope you’re grateful for that too. But we will see you next week when the topic is whatever we decide.
Speaker 1 00:19:13 . Perfect
Speaker 0 00:19:15 . Bye.
Speaker 1 00:19:17 Bye.