As I walk the busy city streets at lunchtime I see a parade of pale blue shirts. Do they all shop at the same place? Do these places not sell another color shirt?

This pale blue parade reminds me of “Little Boxes,” the theme song of Weeds. “… doctors and lawyers and business executives, and they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same…”

When we lived in Wilmington I remember commenting that everyone there dressed so casually. Even the “professional” types downtown never wore a jacket, if they even wore a tie.

Here in Nashville there’s a diverse crowd for sure, and you can always find a good place to watch people go by. Since everyone knows us as “Music City USA” you’ll also find herds of tourists that think they’ll look like locals if they wear their cowboy hats and boots. CMA Week is the best example of the awesome people-watching here.

Nashville is not just country music and cowboy boots. We’re also not just a pale blue shirt parade. You should definitely come see for yourself

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I ran into this issue yesterday. I created an image which originally came from Adobe Illustrator and ended up in Adobe Photoshop. I saved the image as a JPG and uploaded it to a Wordpress blog. When I sent the blog’s link to everyone I work with, I got a quick call from one of them stating the image didn’t appear for them.

Let the troubleshooting begin.

I quickly determined that the issue was with Internet Explorer, as the image showed up in Firefox and Chrome. So I did a Google search to see what documentation is out there.

Several places suggested it may be a permalink issue. I tried it just to make sure, but that was not the answer in this case.

Upon further searching I found the issue on the Microsoft Support page. These are all great suggestions, but still didn’t fix my problem.

So, back to the drawing board – the Photoshop drawing board. I thought maybe I should rename the file or try a different file format, that maybe Wordpress was getting confused because I had uploaded several versions of the file to get it just right.

As I was re-saving the JPG image, I realized the error of my ways. The file was in CMYK color mode. D’oh! I changed it to RGB color mode, re-saved, re-uploaded and voila! Instant fix!

It’s like magic.

What tipped me off? When you do a “save as” in CMYK color mode you have far fewer file format options to choose from than RGB color mode. I noticed my list was much shorter and then checked how the mode was set. Hopefully this will be helpful if you ever encounter this issue.

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It takes a village to raise a child. I’ve heard this before. It’s not that I doubt this to be true, but until recently it didn’t resonate with me.

When you’re pregnant (with your first child, especially), everyone has advice for you – about being pregnant, about childbirth, about raising your child. The only advice I give to soon-to-be parents is this – Everyone will have advice for you so take it or leave it, and carry snacks and a bottle of water with you wherever you go. Who am I to tell you how to raise your kids?

I have the absolute best parents and in-laws anyone could ask for. They have never offered parenting advice in front of our son (which can cause problems on so many levels) and they’re always there when we need them. I know I can call them anytime and they’ll offer an ear to listen, a suggestion to solve a problem or a shoulder to cry on.

Our 6th grader has given us a fit with his grades and general attitude toward school. We pride ourselves on being self-sufficient grown-ups, but there are some days when it seems everything we try just doesn’t work.

When you’ve restricted him from every video game, computer, phone privileges, his skateboard, staying home by himself while we go to the grocery store, everything we could think of – and nothing seems to work… What do you do then?

You enlist the help of the village.

You know as well as I do that children will listen to everyone except their parents. You tell him that new shirt is awesome, but he doesn’t want to wear it … until his friend sees it hanging in his closet and says how awesome it is. Now it’s his new favorite shirt. Of course.

I can tell you that our son looks up to his grandpa and adores both of his grandmothers. So when he got in trouble at school and had to explain himself to all of his grandparents, the crocodile tears came streaming out.

Each time he talked to a different family member, he heard a different perspective. Grandpa told him that as he gets older he’ll have to take more responsibility for his actions. When you’re little, people will write it off as “being a kid” but he’s not a little one anymore at 12 years old. Granny told him to think about his teacher, think about it from her point of view, and to consider the feelings of others.

You can learn something from each member of your village.

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