Random Connect Points:
Reba's Stories

‘Tis the season for graduations, new jobs and life transitions. It’s also the season for my annual updated “20 lessons” list. A number of years ago, I started a list of professional life lessons for a presentation to a group of college seniors. Since then, I like to revisit and update this list annually as a way to reflect on the past year. Recently, I’ve helped several folks fine tune their resumes and cover letters for “second career” job changes. Over the past year, I’ve approached this with a “let’s figure this out together” perspective instead of a “I have all the answers” perspective. The reason? I don’t have all the answers (see item #2 below). That’s a great lesson for me to remember for life in general and the perfect addition to the top of this year’s list. It’s been interesting to see how the style of resume writing has kind of come full circle back to the simple format used when I first graduated from college. Today, AI and Applicant Tracking S...

At my age, there's not much that can gin up a full blown case of FOMO anymore. But when I recently realized I was the only one of my "DC supper club" girls who didn't happen to be planning to be in the same place over a pretty spring week-end, FOMO kicked in big time.  This supper club started as a crew of Mississippians by birth, college or marriage (that would be me). We formed a supper club in the late 1980s while living in DC as young marrieds. By the mid-90s, we had scattered to new places to start families and grow careers.  But in spite of the distance over the years, we all grew our own unique individual friendships and, at the same time, created a really special group connection that's spanned four decades. Between us, the years have brought 15 children ranging from 24 to 40, 10 weddings, six grandchildren, numerous job changes, group travel, health challenges, football weekends, family upheavals, aging parents, and a years-long text thread t...

Every Tuesday night when I take my place around the table at our weekly Sip N Strum gathering, I’m reminded why this is my sacred time each week. For nine years, we’ve been doing more than just learning to play the ukulele. We’ve been building a community, establishing friendships, sharing talents and just plain having fun (not to mention occasionally sipping a fireball)! Eight years ago today, I wrote a post on my Random Connect Points blog about my experience playing with this crew on stage at Tin Roof in Columbia . How funny that I stumbled on that post today while doing some maintenance work on my blog. What fun it was to re-read my early musings about playing music as a middle-aged wanna-be musician without any natural talent, rhythm or skill. That post led me to search further back in my archives to dust off the one chronicling the first performance of my fledgling music “career.”  It described the initial surge of apprehension, awe and excitement I felt in playing music wit...

It’s National Word Nerd Day, the perfect excuse to call out fluffy, pet peeve words that are a writer’s equivalent of drunk party crashers. These drunk party guests are the overblown words that show up too often in news releases, on websites and in articles adding no substance to the writing. Examples of these trite and overused words include unique, revolutionary, innovative, groundbreaking, unprecedented – you see them so often they just become white noise. These fluffy words are like obnoxious party crashers, stumbling in drunk and decked out in bedazzled outfits. They hijack conversations with indulgent, overblown language, causing others to tune them out. In doing so, the drunk crashers completely miss the point of the gathering—to engage in meaningful connections. The same thing happens when a writer overuses these fluffy words. The reader tunes out and misses the connection the writer is trying to make.  There are good practical reasons to stay away from these words: • The...

The story behind my latest article in Columbia Metro Magazine is posted over at my Medway Group stories .  Take a visit there.

Like many people, I decided to do no more reading about, listening to or watching anything about the Murdaugh case once the trial ended in March 2022. I had no interest in what podcasters, movies, tv series, books, blogs or news hounds had to say once the sentencing was over. That was until I saw that Valerie Bauerlein had written a book about the trial. I’d crossed work paths with Valerie back in her early career when she worked at The State newspaper in Columbia. I continued to follow her writing through her Wall Street Journal work. I knew this book would not be the sensational, rumor-ridden, speculative narrative that so many writers, podcasters, movie producers and news people had resorted to post-trial. I wasn’t disappointed. Valerie’s direct news writing style intersecting with the narrative skill of an empathetic storyteller makes this book engaging, interesting, easy to follow, and a pleasure to read. One of my favorite sentences of the book comes on page 23 with the descr...

9.15.18 - At PetsInc Today is the first “Flossie Gotcha Day” without our girl. On September 15, 2018, I went to PetsInc as a volunteer walking dogs that had been evacuated from the coast because of Hurricane Florence. I had no plan to bring home a dog. You know what they say about plans. Here’s my post celebrating her first “Gotcha Day.” We lost our girl on March 15 this year. Here’s the tribute I wrote shortly after that. The absence of Flossie’s presence in our house is still deafening. Her bed still sits in our bedroom, and her dog bowls and leash remain on the laundry porch. I miss our nightly walks and trips to the lake. Every dog bark I hear in the neighborhood alerts me to worry if it’s her barking (we had a single annoyance complaint about her barking so I was hypervigilant about that 😊 So Happy Gotcha Day to our Flossie in heaven. I feel certain she’s found her doggie soul-mates with our beloved Dixie and Beaufort.