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Young House Love

November
27 43
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The Day John and Sherry Showed Up at My House

John Petersik of Young House Love taking photos of Making it Lovely's house

I’ve ‘known’ John and Sherry Petersik of Young House Love since 2007. We started our blogs around the same time and we’ve chatted plenty of times via email over the years, but we had never met before. When I read that they were going to be in Chicago for their book tour, I sent them an email hoping to find a little time to meet up. Sherry wrote back and said that they were down for one of their infamous house crashes, and so we set a date.

Do you know how weird it is to meet someone you’ve known for five years by them coming to your house? I mean, it was awesome, but it was also a little surreal to see John and Sherry walking up to my front door.

Sherry Petersik (Young House Love) and Nicole Balch (Making it Lovely)

They came in, we all hugged, and then they house crashed. Brandon and August were home the whole time, and John and Sherry met Eleanor for a few minutes too after Brandon picked her up from preschool. Clara was back at home with her grandma, but we all agreed that she and Eleanor would have been toddler besties.

I drove John and Sherry to their hotel when they were done taking photos of the house, and on the way I tried to point out interesting things around Chicago. “There’s the Sears/Willis Tower, over there is the Trump Tower” and so on. And of course I blurted out “here’s where R. Kelly shot Trapped in the Closet!” I’m not sure if they were into that (but man, “En Vogue… with a new lead singer” had me and Brandon cracking up in the latest installment). Later that night, Sherry and I realized that we (professional bloggers that we are) forgot to take a picture of “Young House Love and Making it Lovely” together with a decent camera. We made sure to get one with the three of us the next day, but of course I only had my phone with me. Behold!

Sherry Petersik, Nicole Balch, and John Petersik (Young House Love and Making it Lovely)
(Pics or it didn’t happen.)

See all those people behind us there? The line for them at their book signing was crazy long, with people wrapped around the store and waiting out in the rain. It was a dedicated (and really sweet) group of people. I’ve worked and attended a lot of book readings, but this was a particularly good one. A few people in the crowd even recognized me and had me sign my page in the book (I contributed project #199), which felt really cool.

Young House Love Book Signing at West Elm

John and Sherry are now New York Times best selling authors for their book, Young House Love, and I couldn’t be happier for them. (Congrats, guys, and thanks again for coming over.)

link    'B' for Books, Me, My Life, The Blog  •  43 Comments  •  November 27, 2012

The Bing it On Report

October
26 10
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I’ve been participating in a challenge with several other bloggers, in partnership with Alt Summit. It has been a week of searching with Bing instead of Google, and today it’s time for the report. Did you try it out too? I use my browser’s built-in search bar and I installed Bing’s plugin for this challenge, so switching for the week was easy.

So, what was different? Well, I didn’t notice much of a difference a lot of the time. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I was frustrated, and most of the time I felt pretty neutral about the whole thing. There were lots of little differences that you only notice because of the novelty of having them or the strange feeling of missing something. For instance, I like autofill. Bing does it to a lesser extent, but only on its homepage. You know what I mean; like when you start typing “why” and it gives you a drop-down of queries and suddenly you want to know, yes, “why are manhole covers round?” I missed the serendipity. My productivity improved without the internet rabbit hole though, so there’s that.

I did like the social media integration a lot. I also liked Bing for travel because of its Price Predictor (buy those tickets now, or wait for a drop in price?). Shopping searches were a toss-up, but image search goes to Google. I find Google’s reverse image search is pretty indispensable as a blogger.

Switching was an interesting experiment. I think I’ll probably switch between Bing and Google moving forward, depending on what I need. I figure it’s good to shake up old habits from time to time, right?


 
This post is brought to you by Alt Summit and their partner Bing. I’m taking the Bing It On challenge this week.

link    The Blog  •  10 Comments  •  October 26, 2012

Bing it on

October
22 20
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I, along with a bunch of my other Alt Summit blogging friends, am participating in a little challenge. It’s an interwebz challenge that appeals to my nerdy techie tendencies: Bing vs. Google.

Down a Different Road

I’ve installed a browser plugin because that’s where I typically enter my search terms, so I’ll be using Bing as my default search engine all week long (instead of… you know). I’ve also made Bing.com my homepage for the week, and I’ve installed their iPhone app. I’ll be posting an update on Friday, before my usual weekly Honor Roll post to share the results, good or bad. Apparently, people prefer Bing to Google 2:1 in blind tests, so I’m curious to see how the switch will pan out. You can join us too if you’re up for a little experiment, and we’ll discuss next Friday.


 
This post is brought to you by Alt Summit and their partner Bing. I’m taking the Bing It On challenge this week.

link    The Blog  •  20 Comments  •  October 22, 2012

Meeting Martha

October
15 73
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I met Martha Stewart last week.

Let’s back up for a minute, because that is something I’ve been wanting to say for a long time. Meeting Martha was on my Lovely Life List. I admire her business acumen, her signature look and brand, and I’m grateful to her for being a pioneer and paving the way for what I and many of my blogging peers are able to do today.

Martha was in Chicago to appear at a Home Depot event. I received a casual email from her PR team, asking if I was interested in meeting with Martha and doing a quick interview. I resisted the urge to pepper my reply with OMGs and excessive exclamation marks (!!!), and instead said “yes, thank you.”

Nicole Balch and Martha Stewart

There were five of us there to interview Martha, but her plane was delayed and that threw her schedule off. Instead of one-on-one time, we went in as a group for twenty minutes. She greeted us with a smile and a grand sweep of her arms as she surveyed the surroundings. “Welcome… to the Home Depot break room.” Martha answered questions about her favorite designers (Kevin Sharkey for home, Vince for fashion) and recounted her biggest entertaining emergency (“It’s hard to have a true emergency when you’re prepared”), and then I was able to ask my question.

I was already familiar with the upcoming American Made Awards honoring creative entrepreneurs, and I wanted to know if Martha ever imagined having a brand with such reach and scope that she could do something like this. Here’s our very brief interview.

Nicole: I have this funny job of being a professional blogger, and I feel like a lot of the opportunities that exist for me today are the result of what people like you have done in leading the way. I loved this quote from Pilar [Guzmán] in her editor’s letter this month.

“We believe we are at a defining cultural moment, when so many people are making a go of their creative passions and, in doing so, fueling a new American economy.”

I know you have the American Made event coming up in New York, but looking back, way back to when you were catering, did you ever imagine that you would have a brand that would touch on so many of these things?”

Martha: I don’t know if I imagined it, but I certainly hoped it. Because I really feel very strongly that there are so many talented people in this country, and we’ve always made a point of introducing them to our audience. Our magazines have always been filled with people who were great growers, great artisans, great party-givers – whatever they do, we like to tell people about them. And this event is really bringing to the fore the importance and the need for Americans to start promoting “American made” again. It makes me very sad to go to North Carolina and not see a cotton mill anywhere. A weaving mill, a sheet factory — they’re all gone. And they shouldn’t be gone. We should still be making sheets and bedding in America. We grew all the cotton, and now we’re outsourcing it.

I just did a big piece on Toyota for American Made. Now Toyota, you think “oh, it’s a Japanese car,” but they have one of the largest car factories in America making half a million cars a year in Kentucky. I went and visited the factory, and we made a whole car. They make thousands of cars every single day, and it’s start to finish. So we showed the whole process and these are going to be a series of short videos that will be on their website and our website. We have the ability to do that. To show people a lot of the processes that go into various products, and it changes their business. It changes a lot of people’s businesses when you really show them to your big audience. And we’ve had a very big audience for a long time.


Thank you, Martha (and team) for taking time out of your schedule to meet with an admiring blogger.

link    Me, My Life, The Blog  •  73 Comments  •  October 15, 2012

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