Maybe it's the Christmas Season, but all sorts of memories come back this time of year.  Most of those memories center on my childhood home, church, working at my dad's store filled with goodies for Christmas.  But, most of my memories tend to go back to my mother.  God rest her soul, she was a saint here on earth (mostly because she put up with my father for 46 years) and further proved that the day she held me in her arms on the way home from the adoption court hearing.

In 1946 when I entered this world there were no warnings of the genetic type that told any adoptive parents what they might expect.  Therefore, I, the absolute biggest hater of math as I came to know what it is, was raised by a MATH MOTHER.

Ew-w-w-w....wait 'til I get rid of the willies to write on....not Ew-w-w-w about the mother part, just the math part....Okay....I'm back...

I grew up watching my mother walk through the house inhaling numbers and math symbols nobody else could see.  She didn't need air, she just needed her numbers.  She did calculus in her head....really, she did.

Don't get me wrong, my mother did not look like a walking human calculator and she surely did not fit today's definition of "nerd".  In fact, she looked suspiciously like any other slightly-padded, small town, teacher mother and grandmother.  Her homemade cinnamon rolls proved that she was a great mom.  

Picture our big, sturdy dining room table around which anybody who showed up sat  and ate.  If it was my two brothers with their hungry college buddies in tow, they would eat while mother did their laundry.  Which, of course, they just happened to have in the trunk of their car.  "No, no, Mrs. Hamilton!  You don't need to do our laundry.  We just brought it with us so we could do it at the laundromat on the way home".  

Now, these guys were all in dental school and couldn't even afford a bag of George Webb hamburgers for $1.00 to share.  Laundromats were way off the budget radar.  They knew it and my mother knew it.  My mother did their laundry and she enjoyed doing it for them.  After all, having some dentists in your pocket never hurt in case your teeth fell out and your ungrateful son had his practice in California!  He didn't.  (He practiced dentistry in our hometown of Clinton, WI for years and my mother had beautiful teeth in return for her investment of time and love.)

No matter what she did or where she went, the MATH MOTHER was calculating in her head.  I used to wonder if aliens might have invaded and that was especially true the first time I had it confirmed that she actually did have eyes in the back of her head.  'Nother story......

Think of our wonderful dining room table as my personal torture chamber.  It was where we sat when my mother had to take it upon herself to teach me...yep...math.  It rarely worked very well.  She was not only a MATH MOTHER, she was a MATH TEACHER for years.  My mother sighed a lot.

It was pretty much her signal that the sanity in life totally escaped her and if a solution not found by using math was required to return to sanity, she was prepared to stay insane.  Thus, the sigh.  She sighed a lot while attempting to at least teach me enough math to allow me to graduate high school.

No matter how my mother tried to get me to love math like she did, it never did work.  For some reason, the usefulness of math came to me when I started internet marketing.  No, not because I would have to figure out profit and loss in my head - Excel is here for me to do that stuff. 

Math, to me, was always so cut and dried.  It just is what it is.  It is something which required incredible discipline for me to learn.  Like a majority of internet marketers, I am more on the creative side.  The mind can wander and create at will.  The internet doesn't make it any easier to focus.

Guess what I found out?  Internet Marketing requires some critical thinking at times when we look for a niche market, look at data analysis, seek out products and figure potential profits.  It definitely does require focus.  It isn't just all the fun of fooling around for days creating just the right header for a website.

One of the things for which I am grateful during this wonderful Christmas Season is that I found WA when I did.  Going into 2010 without it would have been pretty much like going into 2010 without my own person human calculator to call for answers.  I can even keep a running record of what I'm doing in case I get lost (voluntarily or otherwise).

Now, where was I?  I'll be right back.  It will only take me a few seconds to check out this link I see......

<sigh>