Talia Comes to Visit – December 25-30, 2009

It’s been my experience that when one consults about choices and makes decisions, then resources to carry them out begin to show up. Shortly after the December 6th consultation about my life, I heard from Talia Lindsley, who wanted to volunteer to help with the Marriage Transformation Project. She is an Ohio State college student, living only about 2.5 hours of driving from my home, although across the country from her family in Oregon. She is a music education grad student.

Even before Talia came on December 25th, her offer was beneficial. It prompted me to sort through piles on both desks, throw things away, and get organized. Once she was here, we discovered we worked well together and accomplished the following:

- set company goals for the first half of 2010
- reorganized and cleaned out the book shipping area of the basement
- planned out a new, simplified design for the website
- edited the agent query letter and book proposal for Empowered Healing
- edited a new e-book entitled Caring for the Soul of Your Marriage
- set up a company profile for Marriage Transformation on Facebook
- researched dating websites so as to be able to make recommendations to clients
- cleaned up the online shopping cart and made it more accurate
- researched potential software and setups for e-books
- set up a coaching profile on a relationship magazine website
- set up an ad on buyfrombahais.com

We also talked, walked, shoveled snow, cooked and ate together, prayed, played music, and had fun. On Saturday night, we visited my friends the Twaddells for a party. One of their sons, Daniel, is a student in the music department at OSU and in the Bahá’í Campus Association there as well, so he and Talia had previously met each other. Their son David was visiting from Israel, where he works at the Bahá’í World Centre. We enjoyed watching his slides and videos.

Talia’s family placed book orders and so did others, so I ran to the post office a couple of times. I shared a lot about Craig with her, which was a lovely activity. One unique experience was connecting via Skype with Talia’s boyfriend Rory Turnbull, who was visiting his family in Scotland. We set up a Scrabble board here, turned the web-camera on it, and we told Rory what letters we chose for him. Amazingly he won! Well, and then again, he’s a linguist. (See photo of the game)



I talked Talia’s ear off…it was so good to have company! And definitely a blessing for the business as well. I was tired enough when she left that I know we had reached the limit, but it was also sad to have the house so empty again. I had thought before she came that it would be good to have someone who was high energy, but Talia’s quiet, gentle spirit was actually perfect and helped me to sustain my energy. She even coped relatively well with working in a 67 degree house with a snowstorm outside! (See photo)



Today has been a rest day – lots of time in bed reading and relaxing before heading into year-end inventory and financials tomorrow.

Love,
Susanne