Results tagged “work” from Getting to Know Joe

This has been a hectic few weeks. The ALZCA newsletter is complete and off to press. Happy to have that one off my plate--though I think it turned out pretty good this time. Their big fall fundraiser is the first Saturday of November: Walking to Remember. Great way to help folks with Alzheimer's and their families.

Anyway, here's the newsletter:

Put these two brochures together for Southwest Alabama Tourism right before heading for Paris. It was a quick job, but I think they turned out looking pretty good!

But a good one. Paint is going up in two of our rooms! The colors are looking amazing (well, only the lighter color so far, but still looking great. A very light bluish green on the upper portion of our walls and ceiling.

Lots of work done over the weekend--worked most of the weekend on a website for Tyler Eaton and I'm waiting on a response from that.

Finalized a newsletter for Alzheimer's of Central Alabama, sent an email out to 780 friends of Your Town Alabama, made a couple of small changes to the Alabama Front Porches website (mainly adding an entry to the "Off the Porch" blog), wrapped up a newsletter for American Mining Insurance Company and several other projects. Good, solid start to the week.

Our house is under siege--or at least that's how it feels. Renovations are progressing nicely, though. Acoustic Tile ceilings are out, smooth ceilings are in--or almost. Windows are about to be ordered, hopefully. Lots to do....

Much to clean up this weekend, of course.

Working furiously on several projects at once. Just wrapped up a newsletter for Alzheimer's of Central Alabama. Working on the website for Tyler Eaton Court Reporters--this time I think we've got a winner! Finishing up an invitation for Alzheimer's and another for the MS Society.  Making changes to Brombergs and the Birmingham Historical Society websites. Trying to finalize the website for ClasTran here in town. Wrapped up the monthly newsletter for the Alabama Sierra Club early this week and just trying to catch my breath!

Oh, my friend Ben posted his version of our trip to the Black Belt earlier this year: http://www.davisdenny.com/blackbeltben/. Entertaining reading! I also added a few new photos to my flickr page.

Just wrapped up a poster for the Alabama MS Society. They want to thank me for working on this by talking about us on the back of the invitation. Not so sure about that.

Thought the poster turned out pretty cool, though! Working on the invitation next week.

I came to the blog to do something about family, perhaps post a photo or two, but just can't get myself to do it. Not really in the mood, I suppose. Instead, I think I'll simply toss a few bits of information about some of the stuff I'm working on this week.

Having just finished the Alabama Association of RC&D Councils annual report, a nice 44 page book that I've done for them every year for the past 8 or so, I am delighted to find myself developing a website for another one of the individual councils that makes up the association: MidSouth RC&D. That brings the RC&D websites I maintain up to four (Cawaco, Ala-Tom and Tombigbee being the remaining sites). I've always enjoyed working with these guys. Nice, good folks all. I hate to see when they are, as is sometimes the case, taken advantage of by the less scrupulous web designers (and I use that term loosely) of the world. Watch for their site coming soon!

I've been working on a redesigned website for Tyler Eaton Court Reporters, a longtime client. That should be coming online in the next two weeks. I updated the Alabama Front Porches website and have added another blog to our Black Belt Blog list: Off the Porch. A husband and wife team are providing outdoor adventures in the black belt. Good stuff, I think. They've sent 2 installments so far.

And there's more, but I think I'll skip that. I did post some additional photos of last week's trip to my flickr page. You can visit it here.

Well, honestly, I've been a bit lax on updating my blog of late. I've really got to get back into the habit of the thing. I'm working on it. I have been really busy for the last couple of weeks. I've finally finished the annual report I do for the Alabama Association of Resource Conservation and Development Councils (RC&D). I've been updating my Your Town Alabama blog, my Alabama Front Porches Blog and created another blog for others to post to called "Off the Porch," tied to the Alabama Front Porches website project.

I'm in the process of redesigning a website for Tyler Eaton Court Reporters--still a work in progress, but I did the old site as well. I'm getting ready to do some heavy lifting on the AIA Birmingham website: just lots of updates and an upcoming newsletter. I've been pretty busy getting the Bromberg's website situated--an old client that I lost to a big agency several years ago (though I didn't do their website in those days) that has just returned! Lots to do. (Oh, and I'm totally addicted to Facebook and Flickr.)

Had some great fun on Thursday of this week when my buddy Ben Burford and I took a daylong trip to the Black Belt for a photo tour. Left around 6:30 in the a.m. and back around 7 p.m. Took around 400 photos. We drove down I-59 to Eutaw and left the interstate world behind for almost the rest of the trip. Stopped at several historic homes, dilapidated shacks, downtowns, had a typical lunch of fried, fried, fried fish as Ezells and then bounced over to Marengo County for a quick stop by my homeplace in Octagon, Alabama before heading to the historical beauty of Gaineswood, Bluff Hall and the general granduer that is Demopolis. A quick stop for some of the Bird family road art and on towards home.

Here's a collage of some of the photos. I've uploaded a few more to my flickr account here.

Well, I've officially been overwhelmed this week with work. I try very hard to avoid working after 5 p.m., but sometimes I manage to work a little late--I tend to make up for it by working, as I am this morning, early and on the weekend. I completed a complete redesign for American Mining Insurance Company's online newsletter,  www.americanmining.com/newsletter/, I just completed my 38th (I think) Alabama Sierra Club newsletter, I've just about finished an annual report for the Alabama Association of RC&D Councils, I started working on a new client website, brombergs.com and, well, I guess the list just seems to go on and on.  I'm very pleased with the masthead I created for American Mining's online newsletter, though. We went through several revisions, but the end one really turned out best. Here it is:

Update: just posted some of my favorite photos from the trip to my flickr account.

Haven't really been doing a lot of posting this week. Have been doing a lot of work. Trying to wrap up an annual report for the Alabama Association of RC&D's, picked up a nice new client this week, took a trip to the Black Belt to work on an Antique Trail along Highway 14--a three-day festival in the fall that I'll be developing a website for. To many irons in the fire....

Here's the Greene County Courthouse in downtown, Eutaw, Alabama. I do find the Veterans monuments in each county interesting--I consider the one in my home county of Marengo to be one of the better ones I've seen so far in my travels--but I may be a bit prejudiced. The courthouse is in disrepair and surely needs some love. More photos to come.

I was born and raised in Marengo County, Alabama, deep in the heart of the Black Belt of old South Alabama. Growing up in the country (really in the deep southwest Alabama woods) provided some of the more lasting experiences of my life. Living 9 miles from the nearest town--that town was Linden, Alabama--and 3 miles from the nearest store had some real advantages. I grew up loving the land, enjoying the good life on an Alabama farm, fixing fences, hunting and fishing and generally leading an idyllic childhood. I had a pony wagon and two Shetland ponies growing up. I also had a cane pole for fishing and a genuine Troy-bilt tiller (I got it for a birthday present one year) to use in our garden.

My parents were much older than most when they had me (my mother, Inez Watts, was 45 years old, and my father, Clark Watts, was 46 years old). This led to a little different home atmosphere than most. Where many of my classmates had parents of the baby boomer generation, I had parents that lived through the Great Depression and World War II (my father was a WWII veteran who fought in the Pacific theater and I had several uncles who fought in the European theater as well--including one who was a German POW). I have five older sisters that fit more neatly into a certain generation, but I think in many ways I got the best of both worlds.

Living so far out in rural southwest Alabama (and getting only 1 channel on the television--and that only by pointing the antenna just so), I enjoyed the woods more than many people my age. I learned to build shelters and chop wood. I learned to hunt and fish. Later, I learned to plant a garden (and I mean a real honest garden with rows of corn and beans and okra and so many tasty vegetables). One year I grew everything, and my wonderful mother helped me to can and freeze all the bounty from the earth.

My real pleasure was reading, though. I could read books all day, every day. That love I can trace back to my Mama and my Aunt Gladys. Mama would read to me every day--I still remember the first time I picked the book up after she fell asleep and kept reading: Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

And Aunt Gladys would never, ever turn down an opportunity to buy me a book or to take me to the library. (We even had a Book Mobile that came to the area once a week or so--it would usually park at the Octagon Baptist Church just down the road.) I read almost anything I could get my hands on: The Hardy Boys, James Bond books, Civil War fiction and non-fiction, the occasional Zane Grey novel, trashy paperback novels, almost anything. I especially enjoyed mysteries and adventures to other, more exotic places. I enjoyed escaping the reality of small town Alabama by reading about other adventures, other places, other times.

I must admit, though, that my favorite stories took place in the wild, out of bounds and in another, simpler time. I loved Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and the like. Jules Verne was another favorite author and one of my favorite books of all time was Where the Red Fern Grows, so much so that I actually had several Redbone Coon hounds named Little Ann (no Old Dan, though) after the dogs in the book.

My father, Clark Watts, helped me to train Little Ann to be a coondog. My great friends Coyt Jordan--who now lives in Panama City, Florida and Dave Nelson--who retired as a wildlife biologist for the state of Alabama and died unexpectedly in 2009--had a lot to do with making sure Little Ann knew what she was doing. They also had an immense amount to do with my love of nature and of all things wild. (Later, I got the dog I truly loved the most growing up--My Fair Lady, a yellow Lab--from Coyt.) Having Dave and later Coyt in my life really gave me an advantage that I can never repay. I learned much of what it meant to be a man from those two. From hunting and fishing to swimming and whistling, they taught me a lot, but they taught me first to be honest, to be reliable and to be a good person.

(We eventually got better T.V. reception and I got to watch many awesome 1970's and 1980's T.V. shows such as Magnum P.I., The Dukes of Hazard, Happy Days, Mash, the A-Team and associated drivel, but I consider it a well rounded education in American popular culture. I can, indeed, get the jokes about Tom Hanks in Bosom Buddies or who Balkie was. And yes, I understand exactly what the pop culture reference to "jumping the shark" really is: I watched the Fonz do just that on Happy Days.) And who could possibly forget the glory that was the original Scooby Doo?

When I started 7th grade, I also started taking Wing Chun kung fu lessons. I continued that until my senior year, progressing, sparring and learning a great deal about the balance and harmony with nature that the martial arts can teach.

After graduating from Marengo Academy (located in Linden, Alabama) in 1988, I moved to Birmingham, Alabama to attend Birmingham-Southern College. I finished college in a little over 3 years, due in part to having attended BSC between my junior and senior year of high school as a Summer Scholar. College days were good times with lots of new friends, new and exciting experiences and more, more, more. I learned a great deal while in college, I daresay more outside the classroom than in, though I managed to keep a good GPA and develop relationships with several great professors (including one I remain in regular contact today). I met my future wife, Ann, at Birmingham-Southern and we've been together ever since.

After college, I worked for a year at an insulation distribution company called Johnson Products, located near Birmingham-Southern in a rougher, industrial part of Birmingham. I learned a lot about insulation, the trucking industry, and what I did not want to do with the rest of my life. I enrolled in graduate school at Auburn University and moved to Auburn, Alabama for a year.

Just before heading to graduate school, my lifelong friend Jonathan Merkle (who attended Marengo Academy with me for high school and who was my freshman year roommate at Birmingham-Southern), who grew up and still has roots in Faundsdale, Alabama--deep in the heart of the Black Belt, and I loaded our backpacks and his 1986 Honda Prelude with gear and food and headed West for a 2+ week adventure tour of hiking and backpacking in the great Southwest. (see photos above of, left to right, friend Jonathan Merkle and next two photos of Joe Watts)

This would be one of the big trips of my life, with stops in Dallas, Texas; El Paso and the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez; Tucson, Phoenix; and the Grand Canyon before plunging into Colorado for a true backpacking adventure up to Lizard Head Pass (a name that invited adventure). One of the best meals of my life was just after we hiked back down. We drove to a nearby town near Telluride, Colorado and had the best hamburgers anywhere at a little roadside cafe. The burger was honestly very good, but the atmosphere and the extraordinary hunger had a lot to do with it as well.

My year of classes living in Auburn, Alabama went by very quickly and I moved back to Birmingham in the fall after a brief stay in Octagon with my parents. (Thomas Wolfe told it truly when he said you can't go home again--at least not right after college.)

I worked at an independent bookstore (Little Professor Books in Homewood, Alabama) for a bit over a year while working on my Master's thesis on Ernest Hemingway and Identity Issues. While working at Little Professor, I met someone who worked at Southern Progress Corporation, home to Southern Living, Southern Accents, Cooking Light and, at the time, Progressive Farmer. I applied and was accepted as an intern for Southern Accents in their copy-editing department. Imagine the pride my parents felt to discover that I would be working for the company that published Progressive Farmer--who knew, maybe someday I could even work there! I might get to write about tractors, or cotton prices or--if luck would hold out long enough--barn building!

Though I did a great deal of grunt work, including scanning photos and making color copies, I learned a lot as well. After that semester was up, I was asked to join Southern Living as a Food Intern. I was really involved in taste-testing, rating recipes, searching for what I thought would be good recipes and more.

Once my internship ended, I talked with old friend Jonathan, who was finishing up his M.D. at the University of Alabama in Birmingham,  and we decided to head north to Canada for another tourist jaunt. We drove north through Chicago and Wisconsin and into Minnesota and hiked a good portion of the Lake Superior Hiking Trail before traveling on into Canada and then out towards the Badlands of South Dakota and the prairie of Nebraska. (South Dakota has got to have the largest mosquitoes and the most ticks of anywhere in the world--they would swarm around us in clouds of biting, stinging horror. It really made you feel for the bison that could only slightly slap them with their tails.)

Once back in Birmingham, I was offered a job at Weight Watchers Magazine, a magazine newly acquired by Southern Progress. I worked there for 3 years developing recipes and a weekly menu, editing recipes, and writing articles about food, cooking and active lifestyles. It was during this time (1997) that I married Ann, the woman I fell in love with during college. We took an amazing vaction trip to Alaska for our honeymoon, a place I've always loved since hearing about it from my Aunt Gladys, who lived there for 20 years in the first half of the 20th century before moving back to Huntsville, Alabama to teach in the Alabama public school system and finally retiring to live the remainder of her life in downtown Linden, Alabama.

It was also during this time that I finally completed my thesis and finished my Master's Degree from Auburn University. (Though my coursework at Auburn went by quickly, I can't say the same for my thesis. I loved research quite a bit and could always pinpoint one more book to read before really tightening up my thesis. Luckily, I finally managed to stop reading and start writing.)

After working at Weight Watchers for several years, I decided to make a change of direction in my career path. I began doing volunteer work with the Cahaba Group of the Sierra Club (I became the editor and graphic designer of their monthly newsletter and wrote the occasional article for it as well and was an elected member of their Executive Committee in the late 1990's) and with the Firehouse Men's shelter downtown. I continued working at Weight Watchers, trying to change my work portfolio to include more travel-oriented work, including an article on bird watching and another on outdoor photography workshops.

I continued to write articles on food, too, including reviews of cookware, knives and even ice cream makers. My volunteer work reflected my interest in conservation and helping others. I also started sending out a few queries for freelance writing jobs, including one I got from Backpacker Magazine highlighting one of Alabama's great hikes up Cheaha Mountain in the Talladega National Forest. This article for Backpacker was probably my first foray into writing specifically to interest the traveling public into coming to a particular tourist attraction. Prior to that, most travel writing had been about bigger picture issues and the things one could do on a trip and less about where to go specifically.

One day, while going through the job ads in the Birmingham News, I found an ad for executive director of a non-profit: Scenic Alabama. I applied and got the job--a dramatic change in direction from food writer and recipe developer. I learned an enormous amount from this position, including lobbying to pass legislation creating Alabama's Scenic Byways Program, public speaking, fundraising and so much more. I also had the day-to-day task of managing membership, writing grants and generally making sure that the office worked.

After a year of fund-raising, lobbying and general fighting for funding for an extremely small special interest organization, I decided being a nonprofit director just wasn't for me and I left to start my own company, Watts Consulting. I've also done some work with the Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham and the Alabama Association of Regional Councils, mainly related to the scenic byways program I helped create for Alabama (I've done the websites for these groups as well as other regional councils around Alabama, too).

That was 2000. Since then, I've grown my business to include website design, print design, project management and more. I've branched into tourism consulting, Search Engine Optimization, grant writing (on occasion) and photography. I've managed to be a part of grants in excess of one million dollars (and yes, I try hard to look like Dr. Evil whenever I say that). The byways program in particular has grown significantly while I've been involved--partly thanks to me and partly thanks to the efforts of several other great people.

I live with my wife Ann, three Burmese cats and one adopted tabby Siamese mix cat in an historic part of Birmingham, Alabama (Highland Avenue's Chestnut Hill Historic District). We live in a house built in 1929 by a Major League baseball player named Virgil "Spud" Davis and have lived here since 2004.  Just before moving into our house on Chestnut Hill, I lost my beloved Aunt Gladys. Since then, I've lost both my father (Clark Watts) and mother (Inez Watts).

We finished a large renovation project last year. We removed old ceiling tiles placed there in the 1960's, replaced aluminum windows with more traditional wooden casement windows that match the original style of the house and more (all with the amazing help of my cousin Kevin "Chunk" Mitchell).

I still love to cook, something I learned how to do from my mother when I was a child (ask a sister about the Thanksgiving Dinner I made one year as a traditional Chinese feast--no turkey that year, but Sweet and Sour Chicken and hand-rolled egg rolls for sure). I'm often found outside taking photos (or snapping shots of the food I cook hurriedly before a meal). I travel a little more regularly to the Black Belt than before, based on some tourism work I do for the University of Alabama and the University of West Alabama. And, I've gotten much, much more interested in family and genealogy of late: as you may notice if you look through my blog.

And speaking of my blog, I started it just after Thanksgiving in 2007. I update it frequently (well, not as frequently as I once did) with random information including information about family, old family photos from Octagon and from our trips throughout Alabama, some of my work samples, occasional random things, my trips into the more beautiful stretches of Alabama's scenic beauty, and, of course, some of the food I cook. I've enjoyed my personal little soapbox/personal advertisement very much. (See, "What Blogging Means to Me" to understand my reasoning a little better.)

I've learned that I have old, old roots in Alabama, some dating back to the 1700's. And more of my family roots--almost all--date to the southern states (the Carolina's in particular), though most really do date to Alabama before it was even a state. And, my oh my, it appears I'm a son of the American Revolution--always the revolutionary!

Seems as though I haven't had as much time as usual to play with my blog. I think I've gotten a bit caught up playing with flickr, plus I've just overall been really busy working on several projects. Getting finished up with a program manual for the Alabama Communities of Excellence and finished a newsletter for AIA, Birmingham chapter. I've been pounding out ads for Underwoods (sister company to Birmingham-based Bromberg's Jewelers). Oh, and I wrote a reasonble itinerary for the Alabama Front Porches website that I posted on the blog I created for them. Need to scan some more old photos in. Haven't really made anything interesting to eat in over a week--busy and boring.

A trip to Bibb County last week netted a few good photos of the Cahaba River and the changing fall colors.

Wow, what a busy week last week. First, I have way too much to do. Then, I get hooked on Flickr. (Even uploaded a few photos to the al.com photo section--they seemed to like my photo of the guys sitting in front of the Selma grocery store--they left it on their front page for almost 2 days.) But, I managed to get lots done, including a draft of a 48 page program manual for the Alabama Communities of Excellence program (ACE), photos for a new client (the American Society of Landscape Architects--Alabama chapter), ads for Underwoods, Florida sister company to Birmingham-based Brombergs and other things I can't even remember right now.

Oh, and I finally got around to writing up a travel itinerary for a trip to Selma, Alabama, Gees Bend and Camden. It is posted on the Alabama's Front Porches blog site: www.alabamafrontporches.com/blog. A little more work and I'll incorporate it into the main site. I ordered a GPS (Garmin nüvi 750 ) yesterday to help me better plot my travels around Alabama. (click the link to buy it through Amazon.com--and give me money!!!)

One of the monthly newsletters I work on: The Alabama Sierran. I did the first newsletter for the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club in January 2006 and have done one each month since then. This is an 8 page tabloid-size newsletter printed on recycled newsprint. You can download the full newsletter at alabama.sierraclub.org. In addition to working on this newsletter, I just finished an online newsletter for Birmingham, Alabama based CGH Insurance Group (www.cghinsurance.com/newsletter). And, perhaps most fun right now, I'm working on a website on tourism--particularly historical and ecological--in Bibb County, Alabama. I'm developing it almost entirely in Movable Type (using a little Dreamweaver to help me handle the CSS stylesheets). Pretty interesting stuff. Not that far along yet, but I've built the shell: www.bibbtourism.com. Other than that, just the usual blog updates at Your Town Alabama and Alabama's Front Porches.

This newsletter is one that I do only about 2 times each year. It is a pretty good sized newsletter with lots of input, so it takes a while to complete: very pleased with this issue, both design-wise and content-wise. We managed to add in more reference, teaching-oriented information into this issue than ever before (at least since I've been doing the newsletter--and that's been about 5 years).

Seems as though the first week of the month is always filled with work on newsletters. This month (October) is no exception. I'm about halfway through a newsletter for Alzheimer's of Central Alabama, getting started on a newsletter for the AIA of Birmingham and trying to plan the newsletter for American Mining. I've also got to start thinking--probably not until next week--about the newsletter for the Sierra Club. And that doesn't even even begin to consider the blogs that I'm working on constantly for Your Town Alabama and the Southwest Alabama Tourism (with the University of Alabama). Those aren't really newsletters, but in a lot of ways they really are. Oh well, back to work! 

The calendar is finally printed. It turned out very nicely, I think. They do make great gifts. You can order them online for only $10.00--including shipping. www.alzca.org.

Well, my intent is to add these photos as a slideshow so they'll be visible within the blog page, but, for some reason, Slideshow Pro's upgrade to their Lightroom plugin isn't really working in the way that it did before. For now, I'm just creating a completely separate page for the slideshow.

These photos are some of the photos I took on a trip to Selma, Gees Bend and Camden (and all points between). There are some interesting photos...I'll wind up using many of these photos on the www.alababmafrontporches.com website.

http://www.joewatts.com/geesbend/