Author / Jim Cota

Posts by Jim Cota

Jim lives in Indianapolis with his wife and four kids and feels lucky to work with the fine folks at Rare Bird. An occasional writer, tweeter, and shooter. If you need to know anything else about me, this should do it...

Drop and give me 100 pushups!

Or, as Chief Petty Office Paet used to say in boot camp, “Pushup position, hut!” (Although the exclamation mark may be misplaced, he was a smallish Filipino guy who never raised his voice.) So the days of actually doing 100 pushups at once are several years behind me. Until now, that is.

I stumbled upon OneHundredPushups today and I’m inspired that slugs like me (and yes, even you) can aspire to do 100 pushups in just six weeks using the plan created by Steve Spiers. I’m starting today. Char will start today. I’ll have the kids start today.

Why don’t you start today, too?

[Take the 100 Pushups Challenge]

What's going on at Rare Bird?

Quite a lot, actually. We’ve added a few great people to the staff, brought on a few new clients, and are working diligently to complete and launch a very cool, completely new e-commerce platform with direct fulfillment integration for a well-known Ivy League university. (More on that later.)

While preparing for a presentation a few weeks ago, I was compiling a list of the sites we’ve launched so far in 2008. They include (in no particular order):

Stay tuned, there are more in the works!

The thing I like best about me is…

Lily was given a form to fill out at school today, her second day of second grade. It was used to describe herself by writing the endings to several sentences. Things like:

My favorite colors are green and blue and pink
I am good at tennis and swimming
One way I help at home is by getting my sisters drest

My favorites were:

In my family there is twins and one brother
The thing people like best about me is I’m nice

But the absolute best was:

The thing I like best about me is I am smat

(She was mortified to realize she forgot the ‘r’, but Char and I thought it was hysterical.)

Just when you think they're not listening…

I came home the other night from a ride during which I’d taken a fairly nasty tumble off my bike. I walked in the door covered in dirt and sweat and bleeding from several places. (I’m pretty sure I looked better that I felt.)

Jack looked at me and said, “Dad, what happened to you?”

I quickly recapped the story in all the dramatic fashion I could muster. He looked at me thoughtfully and then said, “Well, at least you got right back up on the horse, right Dad?”

What I was thinking was that I was a few miles from home, in the middle of the woods with darkness falling all around me and no one else on the trail. I didn’t have much choice but to get back on the horse.

Instead, I said, “That’s right, Jack. You gotta get right back on the horse.”

So when we think they’re not listening, they probably are. More importantly, however, they’re watching.