Tips for Hair Loss

Does anyone reading this have any tips for hair loss, or more specifically, stress-related hair loss?

I’ve always had really long, really thick hair and while it’s normal to lose some of it (people with long hair can relate) and leave long blonde hair around, I have been losing a lot of hair over the past month, specifically. My entire hairline is changing, it looks like I have a bald spot near where I part my hair these days. When I brush my hair it feels and looks like clumps of it are just falling out of my scalp.

I’m not sure what to do. My doctor says I need to keep myself calm… which sounds like fantastic advice if I were in control of the issues facing me.

How do you cope with hair loss? I know this happens to people with stress, and I’ve heard of this often happening after someone has given birth. If this has happened to you, what did you do? Is there anything I can do?

Finally, a small reprieve from the bills

One of the great perks of my new job is that I didn’t have to wait for my new beneftis to kick in. Many employers will force new employees to wait three months, to determine if they want to ‘keep them’ before they offer benefits. My employer wants happy employees.

So, I get benefits.

What does that mean for me?

Well, two nights ago my prescription refill went from the $389 I’ve been spending monthly, to… $52.

That means I get $337 a month back.

Which, given my expenses lately, is a huge reprieve.

It’s a small win. I still have the tax bills, the lawyer bills, the car bills, and oodles of trauma to overcome. But, I need to take it one small step at a time. Feeling greatful for my new employer and that they care about their employees’ well being.

Let’s talk logic.

The CEO of Alberta Health Services, Dr. Verna Yiu, “is out” of her position, effective immediately.

The UCP Government is trying to lead the public to believe this was a planned move, in that the intention has always been for her to step town and to be replaced at the end of March 2022.

This was always the plan, eh?

Dr. Verna Yiu has been in the position as CEO of Alberta Health Services for six years and still has another year left in her employment contract.

The government will have to pay her (more than half a million dollar) salary for the remaining year of her contract out in full.

The government has not hired her replacement.

The government has only ‘established a committee’ to begin the search for her replacement.

That’s right – the largest health authority in the province has no CEO as of right now, while the pandemic is still very much a reality, and while Alberta leads Canada into the sixth wave of COVID, and this was a plan.

Because she ‘wasn’t fired’.

Dr. Verna Yiu, who was hired while a democratic government was in power, has explicitly ‘not been fired’ under a conservative government, ‘this was always the plan’.

The cronies are out today spewing to the press this wasn’t a politically motivated decision, to ensure the sound bites are all shilling the same narrative. The cronies, who are only sent out to ‘handle things’ when this government fucks up, assure us this not being ‘handled’, and that this was always the plan.

Please, tell me again how this isn’t politically motivated.

Please, tell me again how this was always planned. Please, tell me again why the conservative leaders of this province want us to believe it was smarter to have no one in charge of the governing health body and pay out severance to the CEO who ‘wasn’t fired’, rather than have her complete the remainder of her contract, or at least, stay in the position through to them being able to find a full time, qualified replacement.

Please, tell me.

I’ll wait.

Through all this, the government is maintaining their stance that she wasn’t fired, that it was always the intention for her to step down at the end of March 2022.

Outside the snow is falling

It’s true, the snow is still falling.

Life has been busy as of late. I’m getting very worried about money, and I don’t know how to escape that stress.

Let’s talk about life.

The CEO of a professional football team slid into my DMs on LinkedIn and offered me a job. I thought it was a scam. So I phoned the number to tell whoever answered that it was a shitty scam to pull on people on LinkedIn. To my surprise, it was actually the CEO who answered. It was his cell phone number that he left in my DM and he was serious.

It’s a weird, weird world we’re living in.

For the record, there are very few things in this world that I truly can say I hate. Football is, in fact, one of those things. Also, for the record, if you legitimately want to approach someone with an offer of that type, a scammy looking LinkedIn DM is not how you do it.

Nevertheless, I digress.

I went to learn the damage of my taxes today. While there, I learned what was done on my 2020 taxes. Turns out, I still owe the government a lot of money. If I can offer a piece of advice to everyone on earth, if you’re not going to do your own taxes, pay a professional, please. Don’t “trust” friends or family members to do it, and never ever, EVER, trust someone you’re in a relationship with to do your taxes.

I’ll talk about it more one day – perhaps when my present state of debt doesn’t have such a chokehold on me.

Bills are tough.

Being an adult is tough.

Trusting people is a mistake. I don’t care how long you’ve known them. Trust yourself.

In other news, it looks like I might be moving sooner than I thought. This is worrying me because it looks like I won’t have quite as much time to save up money for the move. Money, money, money, it seems to be the majority of what I think about these days. That and why it’s still snowing.

If I do end up moving sooner, I might not get into the condo I want. Which I guess is fine, I guess. We all have to make concessions in this life. It just seems like I’ve had to make a lot of them lately, and not a lot of others have.

My day job is going really well. I feel very lucky that I was picked to be a part of this team, and so far, the experience I’ve had has been very positive. The opportunity this job has presented me is one that I’m really shocked by, and didn’t expect was coming when I was in the interview process. It’s like I thought the job was going to be something, and it turned out being something way better than what I originally imagined.

I’m still getting to know the new team, and the lay of the proverbial land, but it’s been good so far. When I started working for the start-up there were so many red flags that I looked past for the sake of the job that this time around I feel myself being hyper-vigilant about everything. With all of this hyper-vigilance, I’ve yet to find any red flags. It just seems like a good team with good jobs who work hard. As someone who’s been working since she was 13 years old (10 if you count a paper-route, which some do and some don’t), working hard during the work day and enjoying life after is something I can be on board with. No more working until 9 and 10 pm for this girl.

I just want to get back to a point where I can enjoy life again. I want to leave the trauma that’s plagued the past 6 months of my life behind. I want to leave the people who’ve disrupted the past three years of my life behind. I want to smile and have it be genuine. I want to spend time with my friends and my brothers and all of their kids. I always wanted to be ‘that crazy aunt’ and I haven’t been. I’ve been that sad person that no one knows how to help, or even talk to most days.

I’m trying.

I’m trying to get through this. Right now it just feels like I am barely staying afloat. But at least I am still trying. That’s got to count for something.

Wow, I feel like this sounds so sad. I didn’t mean for that to happen when I sat down to write this.

If anyone reads this and you have some good news in your life or something bright that is worthy of sharing, I’d love to hear it. I might not be celebrating myself right now, but I am very much always for hearing about the good in others’ lives and celebrating their victories.

Okay, bye.

Tips for writing the perfect newsletter – for bloggers.

Are you a blogger who sends out a newsletter?

Have you focussed on CRO for your newsletter? If not, I have some suggestions for you! Please note these are only suggestions, so please feel free to take them or leave them. I am by no means claiming there’s only one right way.

Here are my tips:

  1. Newsletters should ALWAYS be written using the ‘choose your own adventure’ format. What does this mean? This means instead of including an entire blog post, or entire paragraphs from pages of your website, you should include 2-3 sentences, a small photograph and a link.
  2. The goal of a newsletter is ALWAYS to drive traffic to your website. Don’t give everything away in your newsletter. Why? Many reasons – the most important of which being that people have short attention spans and won’t bother to read it.
  3. A newsletter should be dated. Track your progress. Track your process. Refer to older newsletters in present times, and let the dates help so that newsletters serve as memories of your past and how far you’ve come.
  4. A newsletter should ALWAYS have an ‘unsubscribe’ button. Listen, I don’t care if you live in a country that is loosey-goosey with their spam laws. It’s 2022 and you should give people the option to opt out if they want to. No one subscribes to a newsletter for life, even if they’re your best friend.
  5. Open your newsletter with a personal greeting. Don’t just say “Hello!” Instead, choose something that speaks to your personality. You’d be surprised the difference a “Bonjour Butterflies” can make to the opening of an email.
  6. Measure success with KPIs. Key performance indicators are a great way to tell if you’re accomplishing good promotion with your newsletter, or if it can be improved upon. Depending on the size of your audience, use things like read rates, click-through rates, and conversions to measure how well your newsletter is being received. Ask yourself what you can do to make sure the KPIs are consistently being improved upon with each new newsletter.
  7. Close your newsletter with a signature. LET PEOPLE KNOW YOUR NAME. If you’re feeling really generous, give them your email in the said signature as well. There’s nothing worse than opening a bomb-dot-com newsletter and having it not be signed at the bottom. If your newsletter is important enough that you think people should read it, it’s important enough that you should sign your name to the bottom of it.

When it comes to newsletters, try to include 6-8 links, with the goal of getting people to click on 1-2 links total.

If you’re finding that not as many people are actually reading your newsletters as you would like, try sending them less frequently. Also, try telling readers when you will be distributing them. If people know there’s a particular day the newsletter is coming, they might be more inclined to watch for them in their inbox. After all, if you’re putting in all of the effort to make the newsletter, you might as well try and get people to engage with them.

My neighbour…

I’m not sure how many people have heard stories about my neighbour before, but if you have, this story will seem right on par for what you’ve heard.

My neighbour just cornered me on the way back from the mailboxes to tell me a story about this one time in her late twenties when she broke her shoulder so badly that doctors wanted to amputate her arm.

I know. Don’t get me started, I already know.

She said that when doctors told her they were going to amputate her arm, she didn’t accept the prognosis and she went to go see a naturopath who told her that bones heal faster when you starve yourself. Not intermittent fasting, but full-on not consuming anything other than water – starving yourself.

Her response to this was to not eat for a full seven days.

She said she didn’t consume anything beyond water because she didn’t want her arm to be amputated.

I know. I know. Trust me, I know.

She said when she went back to the doctor seven days later, her doctor told her that her shoulder had completely healed, because she starved herself, and that she no longer had to have her arm amputated.

Whew, it was a doozy of a story with at least 20 mins of details included that I’ve kept out because, quite frankly, they’re stupid.

Why did she tell me this?

She broke her toe.

So her plan is to starve herself so that her toe heals faster.

She wants me to check on her. Because she plans to starve herself and starving herself makes her pass out, due to lack of nutrients in her body to keep her functioning. So she wants me to text her periodically to make sure she’s okay, and if I don’t hear back from her, she’s going to leave her door open so I can come in and rescue her. But I’m not allowed to call 911 if she does faint because she can look after herself, but she needs me to check on her in case she doesn’t look after herself, because she plans to starve herself to make her bone heal.

I can’t make this up. I also cannot follow the logic.

Like… I want to be a nice person and a good neighbour, but also, I’m not going to be responsible for this woman’s wellbeing, when I have long since believed she has psychiatric issues – and I don’t use that term jokingly, I am dead serious.

First week on the job

I survived!

I didn’t just survive, I’m pretty sure I thrived. I am thriving. There’s such a stark difference from my last employment experience to this one. I think I’m really going to like this team.

Since I don’t think that I shared here, I am a Campaign & Advertising Manager for a national business here in Canada. I will be spending all workday, every day, managing the business social presence through paid and organic avenues.

I know what I was thinking when I heard that I got the job – why me? I spent a few days with imposter syndrome, thinking I’m not qualified for this role. But then I thought that I’m not going to do that anymore. I earned this job. They had 200 applications for this role and they picked me. That wasn’t on accident. I’m going to go forth with that perspective and be a damn good campaign manager for them.

Here’s to hoping I don’t fuck it up, because I want to move. I’m still looking for an apartment in the new city and realizing how much of my stuff I’m going to have to either sell off or give away makes me a little sad. Moving into this house was the first time in my adult life that I actually had enough disposable income that I could purchase some things I wanted, and not just things I needed to survive. You know what I mean?

My personal life is still a hot mess. Not much has changed there, I am just trying really hard to not bitch about it online (sorry Jenn, for bitching about it to you). Some days are easier than others.

In other, completely exciting news, I think we’re finally done with snow in Calgary. I think it’s finally spring. The grass is turning from brown to green, the birds are chirping and it’s daylight until almost seven pm each evening. I cannot begin to tell you what that’s done for my mood. I’m still anxious, but feel better about myself when it’s not so dark all of the time.

Speaking of being anxious, I’m trying to find more at home or over-the-counter means to help with my anxiety. If anyone has any tips, I would love to hear them. Meditating isn’t really my thing. But I’ve recently cut way back on caffeine and while I am definitely more tired because of it, I can say that tiredness means I’m less anxious. Like if anxiety were on a sliding scale, with caffeine, I’m a 12/10 for how bad it is, and without caffeine I’m a 9 or a 10/10. Small things might help, who knows. I think I’ll always be an anxious person because I’ve always been an anxious person. I still have to try and help myself, though.

Okay, time to go forth and go about my day.

Passive Aggressive Post

To everyone who needs to hear this right now (cough – they know who they are), LinkedIn tells users when someone views their profile.

To everyone who needs to hear this right now, anyone who works online(me) who has half a brain(me, most days) tracks who is searching them on every platform, not just LinkedIn.

Yes, I track when I’m searched on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc, etc, etc…