Monday, September 15, 2008

Sometimes you have to be your own best cheer leader.


In your personal life, and professional life, you often have to dig deep to keep up your own self-esteem and spirit.


Recently a person who committed fraud/forgery against me as a licensed appraiser was sent to prison. It's not really the "resolution" I wanted, but it seemed to be the only way to have a precedence set for a crime of this type.


The local paper (Columbian) featured an article on 8/30/08


"In typical identity theft cases, the thief goes after a bank account or a line of credit. In Kathy Carpenter's case, the thief was even more bold. A woman took Carpenter's professional identity as a real estate appraiser, using Carpenter's name and license number. She even appraised commercial and million-dollar properties that Carpenter, a residential appraiser, isn't licensed to do. Jean Faye Dodge, former manager of a La Center appraisal company, is now in prison. But Carpenter's troubles aren't over."


The problem was, I knew this person. I had contracted with her company for a few years after the major AVM she represented left town and she continued her appraisal network to funnel work to me and some other appraisers in the area.


The other problem, it was a "virtual" crime of sorts. No one physically took something, or came onto my property, yet the repercussions were farther reaching. There was no compromise of my software, or my computer. It was a simple copy, edit paste (and a bad job of it at that with a barely legible, fuzzy facsimile of my name). It was all too easy.


This has made it all the more difficult to validate my feelings of loss, and re-group to move on and keep going.


Since (or during) all of this, I have been developing YEAH YEAH Out Loud, a children's program. I began working on my initial idea back in 2004 but didn't get product and site up until December 2007.


......but having that as a distraction, fed me life that was getting sucked out on the "other side".


That's a YEAH YEAH Out Loud from me::to me!


...Empowering kids to discover their inner "cheer" leader.