My Tee Fury shirt arrived today and I am STOKED!

Waiting in my mailbox for me today was some of the books I ordered to add to my collection. READING IS COOL.

After maybe 6 years with my natural dark brown, I dyed my hair black again yesterday.

Had a lot of fun playing kickball with so many awesome people, can’t wait till next year!

To learn more about the Reateaching Gender & Sexuality Tour, visit reteachinggenderandsexuality.org and learn how you can help out.

IT IS! This Sunday I am going to playing Kickball (for the first time since elementary school) on TEAM GOLD for the Dirty Fall Quickball 2011. It’s a Kickball tournament, complete with halftime show, concessions and all sorts of FUN to benefit the Reateaching Gender & Sexuality Tour. Check out the video below and visit the reteachinggenderandsexuality.org site to get an idea of what the awesome organization is doing to re-define gender and sexuality all over the country and help queer kids lead happier healthier lives!

So — how can YOU help? Well I am glad you asked — make a donation in my team’s honor (TEAM GOLD!) OR if you are in Seattle and want to check out the festivities on Sunday, pick up advanced tickets!

Let’s kick some BALLS!

Pagebreak is a podcast I started back in August with Niki Brown from the DesignOBlog. Niki and I spend our spare time reading a book about design, development, freelance or marketing and then at the end of each month we record a discussion on it! Throughout the month, we send out short-format shows where we read a blog post targeted to our industry and give our 2cents on it. We release something for you every Wednesday, so subscribe via RSS or on iTunes!

I am so glad we started doing the show and I have been having a lot of fun work on it. Our goals for the show in 2011 include revamping the website, having guests on Snippets from time to time, including our listeners more, and getting better at SPEAKING without saying like, ya know, kinda like or ummm… so much!

Was interviewed by WebDesignTuts recently where I talk about my business, clients, WordPress and a few projects. Check it out!

I’ve neglected this blog for a while now… and I really have no excuse. Sure, I am busy with client work — but there has been plenty of times where I was really busy and I still managed to keep active on the blog! Last fall I had a crazy rushed project and I not only balanced the huge load of work with a steady blogging schedule, I turned the process into a whole series!

I think part of what has made me loose momentum with the blog is that I feel like I’m almost tapped out of subjects to cover! (I’m sure this isn’t true, but it feels true) If you haven’t been following the CMD+Shift Design blog over the last 2 and a half years, check out the archives on Freelancing— I think there are some real gems about freelancing here!

Today I was thinking about what the blog has been in the past ( a sort of freelancers guide) and how part of what discourages me is some of the BIG boy freelance blogs have multiple writers and huge communities that I just can’t match… and I don’t want to honestly…

This blog has never really been something that I aimed to be a FreelanceSwitch.com or FreelanceFolder.com — I’ve always through of it more as being about just one woman’s experience in being a freelancer, small business owner, entrepreneur….  and one woman web design studio! I share what I learn and what I think and hopefully it may help out some of those freelancers just starting out or be a resource for those who are experiencing the same things that I am in their small business. So… on this note, I am going to make a commitment to reclaim this blog and let it be what it is, and I’m starting this process by stating that I will start to do one blog post a week (usually on Friday – i think) where I just talk about some of the stuff going on in my business… stuff I am learning, stuff I need to learn, stuff I am thinking about, worrying about etc.

So… here we go!

So the wait is finally over, Niki and I have been scheming about this for a long time now and then over the last couple weeks pulled it all off…

PageBreak is a design, business and marketing-themed book club and podcast, started by Liz Andrade and Niki Brown. The main goal of the club is to build a strong online community of designers, developers, freelancer (like ourselves) and to discuss and enjoy books about the stuff we love to do!

We’re starting out with the plan to pick a new book and record a show at the end of each month, so if you have a suggestion we’d love to hear them! You can subscribe to the show via iTunes or stream the show at pagebreakpodcast.com (we’re working on a site with commenting and all that jazz, so stay tuned…)

Book #1? Rework by 37Signals Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Make it through the show (or download it and skip to the end) to find out what we’ll be reading for September, maybe you’d like to read along? If you’ve read Rework and you want to discuss it with me and Niki or other listeners of the show – head over to the GoodReads PageBreak group!