Surprise! We have a new Podcast!
Kathy Zant and Michelle Frechette are teaming up to bring you anywhere from 5 – 20 minutes of Monday happiness, Monday joy, and Monday Motivation. In this first episode we introduce you to what we’re thinking!
Transcript of Episode:
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Hey Kathy.
Speaker 1 00:00:05 Michelle, it’s so good to see you. How are you?
Speaker 0 00:00:07 Good. It’s always good to see you too. How are you doing?
Speaker 1 00:00:11 I am doing good. You know what, this is the last weekend that is gonna be hot in Texas. Like we’re at the tail end of the, the furnace is being turned off, and I’m excited.
Speaker 0 00:00:22 We, I woke up to 46 degrees here in the north this morning, , and I’ve been freezing all day.
Speaker 1 00:00:28 Oh no, It’s okay.
Speaker 0 00:00:29 I like it. I like, I like fall. It’s all good. It’s all good. Um, it is
Speaker 1 00:00:33 Pumpkin spice.
Speaker 0 00:00:35 I am a big, if you’ve ever followed me on Twitter, you know that I am addicted to the pumpkin spice life. I do not have a boots, I do not have a puffy vest. I do own a plethora of scarves. And if, you know, I, I, like I said on Twitter last week, if, if I, my love of pumpkin spice makes me basic, then I’m basic and I’m okay with it.
Speaker 1 00:00:57 , I’ll be basic with you. I love pumpkin spice too. And, and I, I’m fine with pumpkin and I love pumpkin spice and all of the fall things until my first piece of pumpkin pie. And then for some reason the pumpkin pie, it’s just like, then I’m kind of done . I’m like, just, I’m done for the season. That’s it. Thank you. Thanksgiving, I’m just done, you know? And then the, and
Speaker 0 00:01:19 Then it could be onwards to the rest of the holidays. So yeah,
Speaker 1 00:01:22 I still do you have Trader Joe’s up there? Because Trader Joe’s is like the pumpkin spice place.
Speaker 0 00:01:27 Oh, we do. But it’s about a 45 minute drive for me, so I haven’t been there. Yeah, like
Speaker 1 00:01:32 You’ll have to make it. It’s a hike for me.
Speaker 0 00:01:33 I’ll have to make a trek before the snow set. Sit up here. ,
Speaker 1 00:01:37 Everything. They have like pumpkin spice, dog treats, like it’s all the pumpkin spice. I’m like, ours is about 40 minutes away too, so it’s like I have to make an investment in order to go go there.
Speaker 0 00:01:48 But it sounds like it might be my autumn mecca, so I might have to, I might just have to go .
Speaker 1 00:01:54 Yeah, it’s kind of like finding that perfect apple orchard and get an apple donuts and the apple cider and all of that stuff. You gotta hit Trader Joe’s to get all the pumpkin spice stuff too. Well
Speaker 0 00:02:03 The Apple place is right here in my hometown at Hilton, New York. It’s called Kelly’s Apple Farm. Yeah, it’s been around probably since the thirties. I don’t know. I’m misquoting probably, but when I went to high school in the eighties, it was there and we would walk by it and it is the place to be for cider donuts. A pie is almost 20 bucks, but that pie weighs about seven pounds. It is so worth it. Oh, it’s amazing. Just amazing.
Speaker 1 00:02:25 Wow. Yeah. That makes, makes me miss the north.
Speaker 0 00:02:29 I know. I’ll send you a pie. People might be wondering like, what the hell are these women doing and what is this thing that, why, why are we listening to Michelle and Kathy? Well, first of all, why aren’t you listening to Michelle and Kathy? That is the first question I will ask everybody Who ever turns into us? But secondly, Cathy and I like to do things on a whim and we like to do things together. And this is our first real opportunity to like do something and have it, have it be hours and owned together. So this morning here it’s, we’re recording on Friday, September 23rd. It is three o’clock in the afternoon Eastern, uh, two o’clock for Kathy. And I said to her this morning, I’m like, Hey, you wanna do, I just had an idea. I wanna do a new podcast. And without even knowing what it was, she’s like, Yes, .
Speaker 1 00:03:15 You know, I was watching you at Word Camp us and well, I was watching the hashtags, you know, I’m living through hashtags. I wasn’t able to make it this year. But I, I, and I tweeted about this because I really noticed, like my favorite thing about Word Camp us was how many people recognize the powerhouse that you are? Because I’ve known, and I know a lot of other people know, but I really felt like the World Press community celebrated you. Cuz you really do lift up so many people in this community. Yeah, I do. And I love that about you. And I am like, I’m on team Michelle, all my anything you do. So you me, Hey, you wanna do something? I’m like, Yes. What? And where? Just tell show up
Speaker 0 00:03:53 And what are we doing? And I, you know, what of the things we see, you know, hashtag WP Drama, we see all of these things. We see people slogging through the last almost three years of pandemic. I said, Why don’t we do something to motivate people at the beginning of every week, Whether it’s a silly conversation, a serious conversation, just our smiling faces blathering on about whatever, um, let’s do something. And, and I quickly found, of course, you know, the next, the first thing you have to do is, is there a domain name that I can have to go with this? And WP Motivate seemed perfect. So here we are hoping to motivate you at the beginning of your week. If you don’t like us, just don’t listen. You don’t have to say anything negative. We’re all about the motivation and the happiness here. But, uh, , I know, believe this or not, Kathy, I know I am not everybody’s cup of tea. And I’m perfectly okay with that. .
Speaker 1 00:04:46 I am not everyone’s cup of tea either. I think I well, we’re both kind of like strong cups of coffee, aren’t we?
Speaker 0 00:04:53 We kinda are, but we don’t clash with one another. And that’s a really good thing too, right? So you guys
Speaker 1 00:04:58 What that’s, Yeah. There’s so many times you see like people with strong personalities or strong, um, well I, I don’t think we have like, you know, abrasive personalities, but we are strong. We’re strong, we strong in our personalities. Convictions, Yes. And strong in our convictions of what we, what we, what we want and what we want to do. Not only just with WordPress, but what’s with life itself. Mm-hmm. . But it’s so neat that we have those strong convictions and vibrant, vivacious personalities and they just kind of like dovetail and we have fun.
Speaker 0 00:05:30 Exactly. And what I love most about this is we’re gonna debut this on a Monday morning. Like, we thought about this on Friday morning, by Monday there’s a website and this will be published and people could listen to it because we are also women of action. Let’s face that too. Right? Exactly. So we’re gonna get this done, but, um, , we’re gonna, we, we missed all of the news stations. Like we missed, we missed the post status newsletter. We’ve missed all of the newsletters and we don’t care if, if we’re just going for it anyway, cuz it’s good fun.
Speaker 1 00:05:59 Yeah. That’s it. I’m here for the lulls,
Speaker 0 00:06:02
Speaker 1 00:06:04 Here for, for happiness and good vibes because life is too short. Don’t do things you don’t wanna do. Do the things that make you feel open and light and vivacious. And we’re here to help you find that within yourself and your own life. Because life is too short for Debbie Downers, in my opinion. .
Speaker 0 00:06:20 Exactly. I can’t remember what, Oh, I, I, okay, so I don’t know if you saw this, but I got the word in one guest this week.
Speaker 1 00:06:29 I did see that and I’m like, so do you with Wordle, do you like have your one word that you first try all the time? I
Speaker 0 00:06:36 Have five or six, but sometimes I close my eyes and listen to the universe vibration and try a weird word. So like, usually something like bride or something and the, it’s never it and it’s like, oh, look at that. None of those letters are right. But the other day I just kind of like, I, I know that there’s more used letters right in the, in the English language. So I tried the word saint and that was it. Wow. And I almost second guess myself as I was typing it in. I almost typed satin instead cuz it’s the same letters and it’s the same letters as stain. And if I had, I would’ve been able to get it in three within three guesses. Right. But then I picked the right one first I was gobsmacked. It was like 1230 at night. I’m laying in bed doing the wordle and I was like, like cow likelihood. I don’t know what the actual likelihood is, but it was not good. It’s not high.
Speaker 1 00:07:25 Okay. So you’re playing with the lottery today. Right.
Speaker 0 00:07:28 Funny else said too, I think Terry from Nexus was like, go buy a lottery ticket. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:07:33 Seriously. I mean that’s
Speaker 0 00:07:36 Pretty
Speaker 1 00:07:36 Good.
Speaker 0 00:07:38 But you know, my point is you never know right. When things are just gonna be serendipitous or whatever. Yeah. And it’s a good thing. And what words you wanna start with every day could be different and it’s all good.
Speaker 1 00:07:50 Right. Well and then you just, you know, I think a lot of people are like afraid to try something that might be like, come up as an inspiration like that or they second guess themselves or it has to be perfect and they don’t even try because they second guess themselves and they overthink things. And sometimes it’s just like, throw it out there, see what happens and Yeah. You know, maybe in six months we might not wanna do this. Or maybe it might be the best thing in the world and we’re like on national television, you know, move over,
Speaker 0 00:08:19 Bump,
Speaker 1 00:08:20 Bump the major networks outta the way because Michelle
Speaker 0 00:08:23 And Hona were, Lee and Hona were gonna give them run for their money. But what I, what I didn’t, what I didn’t tweet last week was what? I didn’t get the word. Like I, I very seldom don’t get it by the six guests. The word was Parer, P A R E R. And first of all, the double letters should be like disallowed in Wordle cuz nobody thinks about that. And I didn’t, but like I te my daughter and I send each other our word scores every day. And I sent that one, like having missed it with wo and you said like, No Debbie Downers. So we’re only gonna talk about getting the world. We’re not gonna talk about missing the world. We’re not, we’re only gonna talk about the wins, we’re not gonna talk about the losses. This is just about celebrating WordPress, giving everybody the motivation.
Speaker 0 00:09:06 Yeah. Uh, you and I have had incredibly shitty years. If we look back over the last 12 months, it has not been a good year for either one of us. And yet here we are laughing, smiling, and wanting to help motivate other people. And I think that’s what it’s about, is we could dwell the negative. And certainly I can speak for myself, I have cried more tears this year than I have probably in my whole life. But it’s still about showing up every day and giving your best and trying to live your best life. And I think that you and I have been good examples of that this year. So
Speaker 1 00:09:40 It’s, it’s definitely been a challenging year. But if you start, start with that core, that one thing that you can find gratitude in, I ended up watching that movie at Life is beautiful, the Italian movie where mm-hmm. O Benini, um, takes, he’s got his son and they’re in the concentration camps and he’s like trying to just make it into a game right. For his kid to keep his kid positive and everything and you just like the most horrific thing. But trying to find comedy in it. And that just kind of like one of those major motivating stories for me for my whole life. And after all the crap started hitting with stuff in my life, I just kept holding onto that just like, this can’t last forever. And you know, we’re still in the mix of all kinds of challenges and whatnot. Mm-hmm. , um, had some yesterday, but uh, that was kind of soul crushing. But today’s the therapy day, so, and
Speaker 0 00:10:35 You got your new desk and your daughter volunteered to put it together for you. So there are definitely plus things did every day.
Speaker 1 00:10:41 There are. And honestly, sometimes when the really challenging things happen, there’s little sort of, I don’t know, somebody said something once, like finding the, the Buddha in the mud, right. Finding the golden statue in the mud, you know, like you’re looking at just that you can’t see anything but a mud pile, but there’s something good in there, you just have to look for it. Mm-hmm. . And usually you’re not looking at the mud pile, you just look in here and there’s something good there and that comes out. And when you can be like the force of good in the world with everything we have going on in our world right now, and you can be the force of good, it lifts everyone up. So that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do. Works for me. Me too.
Speaker 0 00:11:20 Absolutely. Absolutely. And to, you know, to put out only the good stuff. Like you, you, you have shared publicly several of your struggles this year and it isn’t all the good stuff, but it’s sharing in a positive way. Yeah. So even putting out the stuff that, you know, talking about the negative stuff, when you talk about it in a positive way and you share your struggles in a positive way, um, it helps other people. And so yeah, it’s not, it’s not that we’re not gonna alwa not gonna have our down moments, not talk about things that get us down, but we’re gonna try to always talk about, about how we overcome those things and I’m Yeah, super excited to be on this journey with you.
Speaker 1 00:11:57 Yeah, me too. And I really like that you scheduling it on a Friday, because we scheduled at eight o’clock on Monday morning, I probably wouldn’t have
Speaker 0 00:12:05 Oh my into
Speaker 1 00:12:06 The now I’m for it. same.
Speaker 0 00:12:13 Same. I’m like, it’s a fi Oh no. An hour and a half until it’s five o’clock. But , But yeah, I, um, I am not a morning person and I am not a Monday person. And yet that’s what all of my meetings get scheduled. And so I thought if we’re gonna put me too, if, if we’re gonna put this out for Monday, we’ve gotta do it on Friday. But that’s good. It’s almost like our own little version of the happy hour. So
Speaker 1 00:12:34 , That’s it. Ching
Speaker 0 00:12:36 Ching. So the one thing I wanna put out to our listeners, all one or two of you this first week listening to who we are, um, and we’ll put this out on Twitter too, is I, we need a tagline, We need a tagline for WP Motivate. And so we wanna open that up to our listeners. We may not take any of your suggestions, but we might, and you never know. So if you have a good tagline for Kathy and Michelle’s WP Motivate, let us know what it is and we’ll discuss those next week and we will, uh, figure out what that looks like and we’ll add it to the website.
Speaker 1 00:13:08 Sounds great. I’m excited. This will be fun. It just, anyway to uplift people. And I love that the WordPress community has so many people in it that, that uplift. Michelle being absolutely, I think the primary example, but , um, so much empowerment comes outta this community with people being able to create a living for themselves, maybe in a community or a, a part of the world where there isn’t much in terms of, um, academic opportunity, but WordPress gives that to them. There’s so many great stories like that. And that’s my, maybe my favorite thing about WordPress is, well it’s obviously the people, but just the, the empowerment that exists here. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 0 00:13:48 absolutely. With you 100%. So we don’t have a tag right yet. We can’t leave you with that this week other than to say, we hope that your week is amazing that you find motivation in the every day. And that if you don’t DM one of us and we’ll give you a pep talk.
Speaker 1 00:14:05 That’s it.
Speaker 0 00:14:06 Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:14:07 They have to have a good week now cause they have us. Right.
Speaker 0 00:14:10 Right. I mean, seriously. And Kathy, thank you so much for embarking on this journey with me. Whether it be five episodes or 500, I wouldn’t wanna be on this journey with anyone other than you.
Speaker 1 00:14:21 Thank you. Same.
Speaker 0 00:14:23 Good. All everybody, we motivate again next week, but bye for now.