It’s the weekend and I’m rapping up a strong week and I’m glad to be heading home. I have some fajita meat to grill tonight with my family. I hoping that my wife should meets me at the door with a glass of wine and I can enjoy some time off. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. listen

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From the mouths of babes comes great wisdom.

I had the opportunity to come home for lunch one day this week and enjoyed a sandwich, some grapes and some potato chips at our kitchen counter with my wife and my two precious children. My son just got out of school last week and my daughter won’t start school until this fall so she was already home for the summer. While it was very enjoyable, my kids made to very innocent, yet provocative statements that will ring in my mind for a long time. My son commented that the mac ‘n cheese he and his sister were eating was ‘bouncier’ than normal and that the orange color of it probably glowed in the dark.

You see, my wife and I have long had a debate on how to cook certain types of food, I like my pasta al dente, she prefers mush. Green beans? Same story — just a waft of hot steam and they’re done in my book. My wife — low and slow with a ham hock in for good measure. You see, my wife is from the south (for a northerner like me, Indianapolis IS the south).

The other observation came from my daughter and demonstrated just how simple a child’s needs or desires can be. She sat in front of a open bag of potato chips and couldn’t have been more content or happier. “There’s nothing better in life than an open bag of potato chips” she seemed to be saying.

It made me realize just how complicated we adults can make life. Jobs that seem more important than they really are. Deadlines that never stop. Bills that indicate how one lives beyond their means. Relationships that show just how sinful we are. Governments that show the same. E-mail that needs to be answered. Phone calls - are they really more important than who’s sitting right in front of you?

So, the next time you’re stressed out about something, think about the open bag of potato chips and just how simple your life really could be.

I was invited to participate in a conference focused on the art of internal communications with some old colleagues from Insidedge, experts in internal communications and the consultants who helped make my company’s cultural campaign real. It was an excellent opportunity to get away from the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ and share ideas and best practices with others. My former manager Bernie Charland (blog: Public Relations Rogue) and I were able to attend last year’s conference in New York and this year’s took place just three hours away in Dallas.

I learned quite a bit from the other attendees and realized that for all the frustrations I have, my current employer really has a lot of good things going on. We’re actively listening to employees about what they like and don’t like, just as my cohorts on the external side are actively listening to what our customers have to say. It’s refreshing to see how closely aligned we are on how we’re behaving on the external and internal fronts as in many companies, external leads and internal simply follows. In my case, internal is clearly leading the way.

Keith Burton and the entire Insidedge team has launched a blog called Intake, that will facilitate conversations specific to internal communications. Good luck, Keith and thank you for your letting me be part of Mindshare 2008 — it was excellent.

If you like the “status updates” feature of Facebook and are addicted to seeing what your friends are doing at each minute of the day, you’ll love Twitter. But, I’d like to suggest that Twitter is more than just a toy to track friends but can be a powerful tool for networking, for keeping in touch with friends all over the world and for certain aspects of one’s job. Tapping the simplicity again of the folks at The Commoncraft Show, I’ve pasted below a short vlog on how Twitter works. Think of it as an RSS feed of what your friends and colleagues, even some people you may not know personally, are doing throughout the day. Once you’ve signed up for Twitter, you can use a cool little desktop applet called Twhirl that allows you to have a window of tweets from all of your friends in front of you. If you want to follow me, my Twitter profile is bruceericatdell.

Have a look.

I’ve been fortunate that most of my family members understand exactly what I do in my job. In my current role, I look after all things digital to reach employees of the company I work for, which means I need to understand social tools like Facebook and Twitter. Over the past 18 months, we’ve rolled out nine different blogs to engage with and listen to employees so I thought I’d post a very simple YouTube video a colleague of mine on the external side showed me recently. It offers a simple explanation of how blogs have taken off and represent the democratization of content authoring. Take a look. (This video is courtesy of Lee and Sachi LeFever at www.commoncraft.com/show)

“Sorry it had to come to this, but the ‘for sale’ sign better come down tomorrow, or this picture will start strategically making its way around xxx [my place of employment] and the xxxxxx [our neighborhood we live in].” is what my closest neighbor, John, had to say about the “For Sale” sign going up in our front yard today. This is a photo that was taken of me last year when I was doing my annual ’shearing’ of my hair for the summer. John and his wife and five kids have been our back-yard neighbors since when we spent time in Singapore in 2001 and they kept an eye on the back side of our house. Since that time, our kids can regularly be found in the afternoon and evenings going from house to house playing together. We even re-built my fence together including the shared fence and put a gate in so the kids could run back and forth after school. It will be hard to say good-bye and even harder to replace what have been incredible neighbors and friends. We’ll miss our neighborhood and our good friends, John and Anna (and all five of their beautiful kids).

Anita and I know a young couple that is are working in a part of East Asia serving the needs of children there in a special needs orphanage.  Carrie worked at an adoption agency that we had done some work with awhile back and she and her husband Jacob left the corporate world last year to take this new step in their life. We’ve been reading their blog since they got there and have seen their ups and downs as they have adjusted to life in a new country. Carrie’s most recent post hits home for me, particularly after returning from Mexico where you become so reliant on others to help you do everything - talking to the police, ordering food, etc. She very wisely points out that being completely reliant on others to meet your needs almost doesn’t feel American. It’s not what we’re used to. We want to grab ourselves up by the boot straps and get something done. But when you’re in a country where you don’t speak the language, can’t read the signs and have a hard time understanding their traditions and the way they view the world, independence quickly fades. It’s a bit of a long post but it well worth the read. Click here to read it.

We’re finally home from our trip to Monterrey, arrived back at the church Friday night about 8pm. Our day of driving was very long, a couple of hours longer than our trip down due to several accidents that brought traffic to a crawl. We had a couple in our group that had been up during the night Thursday with various sicknesses but they did well on the ride home. I was hoping to capture some video of Beth Guckenberger telling this story (I had heard her tell it when I was down there last summer) and then she told me it was already up on Godtube. It’s a real story of what the children’s homes do when they run out of food. The story is very similar to what we experienced when we were there and were able to provide for the children’s meal.This is a very cool story of how God orchestrates how He uses all of us to care for His children.Take a look.BEA 

All our vans are packed and most of us are already asleep — tomorrow we leave B2B at 6am for a long drive home from our week here. It has been a tremendous week and we have been touched by how God is moving in mighty ways in Monterrey to care for the needs of the fatherless here.

Today, we accomplished several major things today. The first was to shop for the immediate needs for a new home about a hour away from here that just called Todd and Beth saying their well is out and they have no food. At the same time, we had told Todd and Beth that we had additional funds to meet any need that came up while we were here or after we left. So, a couple of us went to Sam’s Club and purchased huge quantities of rice, milk, eggs, oil, dish detergent, clothes detergent and other essentials. I’ll talk more about that after I return home but there would have been about 40 kids and house parents going to bed hungry tonight had God not orchestrated our trip here and our desire to be His hands and feet. It’s not us, it’s Him. We just got the joy of being part of it.

The second thing we did was to pour the concrete slab that we had prepped earlier in the week at the Douglass House. It took a lot of work but we were able to complete it and then take about a dozen kids from that home to a park in Monterrey to hike up a small mountain. It is an oasis in the midst of a city of nine million.

The third thing was to hand out flip flop sandals that were provided to us by many of you (including many from Joshua and Steven’s class — thank you Mrs. Cravey and kids! — to many of the kids at the Douglass House. Joshua and Steven were front and center handing them out. What was amazing was that Rodolfo (a young man that lived at the Douglass House for many years and is now part of the Hope Teen Program at B2B and is now on staff with B2B and also speaks five languages) would ask each boy what size he wore and then hand him a pair. There was no asking for a different color, no complaining — they were truly grateful and content with what they were given. What a wonderful life lesson for me and certainly for our kids on this trip.

Thank you to everyone who supported us on this trip. We appreciate your prayers and support and look forward to returning home. Keep watching as I take some time to reflect on some of what I experienced here. I had several very emotional days and experienced enormous heart breaking just looking at the conditions many of these people live in — and they are joyful the entire time.