Becoming An Honorary Pilipina – Food, Friendship & Family

One of the really cool things about the company I work for now is that it’s a veritable United Nations with several continents represented, mostly on our manufacturing floor.  I love it. I’ve met the most interesting people and learned from them through our interactions and conversations.  I’ve had big projects over the last couple of years that were very labor intensive and I was allowed to have people from the manufacturing floor help me (as long as I wasn’t pulling them away from their responsibilities).

I’ve gotten to know a lot of the people through working with them, but also through casual conversations and event planning. I feel very honored that some of them have shared their stories with me. I feel even more honored that I can call them my friends.

I’ve always loved working with people who are different from me. I feel like I learn philosophies that I hadn’t considered before. In the long term, I think I’ve grown from these relationships.

We have a number of people from the Philippines who work on our manufacturing floor who I think are wonderful. They have been so generous in inviting me to join their conversations and introduce me to different foods from their country. In many ways I feel like I’ve been adopted into a very special family. My youngest family member even calls me “Mum”, though I’d be a whole lot happier to be “big sis” instead.

When I heard the story out of California about the Pilipino workers who were being singled out as a culture to only speak English, I was puzzled. Why would a particular group be singled out and why would anyone give such a kind and generous group of people (in my experience) such a hard time?

I understand that all medical staff should have a firm understanding of English so that they can provide proper care to their patients, but casual conversations shouldn’t have to all be in English whatever country or culture a person comes from.

Even though conversation occasionally slips into tagalog and back again while I’m in the lunch room, I never feel left out. I’m actually more impressed that my friends can move so fluidly back and forth between two languages. I wish I could do that.

I value my status as an honorary Pilipina and will continue to enjoy the company of all my international friends and coworkers.

To Quote REM, “Everybody Hurts”

We feel pain. It’s part of the human condition. It is an unavoidable part of life. No one likes it, but we all endure it.

Children fall and skin their knees. School kids can be remarkably cruel with their taunting. They hit their targets with deadly accuracy. Middle school is brutal with it’s scuffles and walking along the tightrope between childhood and adulthood. High school is a social nightmare of jockeying for position with friends and dating.

Things don’t get any easier when we get older. Broken hearts and broken dreams are part of the territory. The worst part is that the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest. When this hurt comes (and sooner or later it will), it’s astonishing how wounding it can be.

The thing about loving relationships is that you work through the pain. You communicate with each other, remembering that the important point is that you love each other. Being right doesn’t matter. Winning doesn’t matter. Scoring points doesn’t matter.

I know a little something about being in a relationship which has been degraded by pain. We lost sight of the love. We got caught up in blame, anger, resentment, and every possible negative reaction to a bad situation which could make the relationship worse. It takes a whole lot more work to play catch up after years of anger and hurt and in hind sight if we’d spent more time loving and talking and less time being angry and hurtful, we’d be in a much better place right now.

Maybe you’ll find this blog entry and reconsider how you handle your pain and your relationships.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2N_uvnvGbI

Management Styles – Iron Fist vs. Employee Investment

I’ve been working since I was 18. There is nothing remarkable in that but it’s given me an opportunity to observe many different managers and their styles.

The Iron Fist method is very popular with managers who take over troubled departments or branch offices. These managers seem to think that this was an effective means of impressing upon their underlings their power and willingness to get rid of people who didn’t measure up. I think the reasoning behind this method was that people would work harder if they were scared they’d lose their jobs. The problem is that it negatively affects moral and unhappy people are not necessarily productive people. Economic downturns unfortunately cause this method of management to thrive. I suppose it looks good on the bottom line when dead wood is jettisoned.

I’ve never understood this iron fist method of management. It results in turnovers and winds up costing the company money to retrain replacement employees. I guess upper level managers who haven’t been in the trenches for years must perceive this behavior as effective. It’s really not and in the long run, this sort of regime is bad for companies.

Luckily, I’ve also worked under managers who see the value in helping their employees grow. It’s wonderful working for a company that invests in its employees. People feel valued and respond positively by using their new skills to work smarter for the company.

I realize that this is an oversimplification of the work environment, but it still surprises me how often I hear iron fist stories and how rare the employee investment environment is.

The supervisors who have always gotten the most out of me and my peers are the ones who live their dedication to the company, put in the hours and spend time with the people they supervise in order to train them and convey what their expectations are.

The economy will settle down and the velvet glove mentality will become more common. Hopefully somewhere along the line company owners will understand that proper development of employees (through training and interaction) is the best use of resources and high turnover is costly in the long run.

“Defending Your Life” – Fear Motivated Decisions

I realize I fell off the Meryl Movie Marathon in a big way and I need to catch up. One of the cable stations is actually playing a lot of Meryl this month so I’ve been able to see a couple I don’t own.

Even though I was not fond of “Defending Your Life”, there were some points of interest that touched a nerve with me. The whole premise was that you had to prove yourself worthy of moving onto the next level of existence and if you showed too much fear in making choices on your last go-round on earth, you had to go back and do a mulligan until you got it right.

One of the big things in my life that I think has held me back is fear. Decisions based on fear are usually not good ones. Decisions based on fear mean that you’re not taking risks, not maturing, not moving forward. Been there, done that. It’s something I’m consciously working on now. Hopefully I can teach my girls good habits when it comes to making choices based on fear.

It’s a silly, silly movie and I could tear it apart, but since there was a little diamond amongst all the rubbish, I chose to focus on that. Rent it on Netflix if you must watch every Meryl movie like I’m doing but make sure you’ve got something good to follow it up with or at least have a bottle of wine nearby.

The $200 Bra

We had an out of town sales rep in our office last week and one day a group of us went out to lunch. There is an expensive lingerie store near the restaurant and I commented that I’d love to go in there one day just to gasp over the price tags. My boss said that she has a girlfriend who shops there and her dog got ahold of her $200 bra and chewed it up.

I’m sure poor Fifi probably got hit with the paper a time or two before the lady got control of her senses, but I started to think – what does a $200 bra do for you? At what point do you get that much utility from one piece of underwear?

Does it function as a life preserving device? (They have those now, you know.)

Does it vibrate in a pleasing manner a few times a day ensuring a happy mood?

Does it have a metal detecting device so that you can find valuable coins and jewelry while you’re out walking around?

I guess if I want the answers to these and other questions, I’ll have to make the time to go to the shop and ask. If the answers are good enough, I’ll post ‘em.

The Pink Professional

I was at a sales meeting the other day and there were parts of the meeting that were way over my head. I listened, but some of it just didn’t compute. Actually, I took a lot of notes about blog ideas I was having when I was supposed to be paying attention. Gee, I hope nobody I work with reads this!

One of the things that struck me is that one of our sales reps dresses in very colorful and vibrant clothing. I’ve known this for a while, but the fact that she can pull off some of her outfits is amazing to me. The industry we work in is not glamorous; quite the contrary actually. How she manages to be taken seriously in radioactive orange and electric fuchsia is something I’d like to know. But she is taken seriously.  And she does it with matching plastic accessories and a Mary Engelbreit calendar.

The funny thing was that after the meeting, I heard a couple of the male members of the staff say that they wish that they had the guts to take fashion risks or make style statements like she did. I was happily surprised at their admiration. I wonder what they’d come up with if they had the chance to snaz up their wardrobes? The world may never know.

I don’t picture myself every following in the “Pink Professional’s” footsteps, but I do admire her sense of style and that she does indeed pull off that look every single day.

“Feel The Cheese”

I was out driving with Hannah the other day and I was trying to get someplace on time. I came to stop sign and prepared to turn left. I waited for traffic to clear, and then hit the gas in order to merge onto the road before the next car moved into our area.

I heard a “Whoa!” from Hannah’s side of the car.

I asked “Feel the G’s?” meaning the velocity at which we were moving.

She looked at me puzzled and asked “Feel the Cheese???”

We laughed for a while over that one and it’ll be our new catch phrase for a while.

So get out there and FEEL THE CHEESE!!!

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a Kraft Macaroni & Cheese endorsement in there somewhere?

Christmas Tree Down

We took the Christmas tree down today. We’ve got an artificial one. I’m okay with that. I like having everything we need right in our storage room rather than schlepping out to a tree stand or farm to buy a murdered one.

I may have mentioned that I’m a bit of a Scrooge and would rather skip the tree altogether, but the family likes it so I go along with it. I used to really enjoy the tree, but I think some of the traditions I came up with regarding the proper way to decorate it may have burned me out a little. There was a whole sequence we had to follow so that it looked right:

Assemble tree,     String lights,     Drape white iridescent beads in decorative swoops around the tree,     hang crocheted snowflakes, angels & balls evenly over the tree surface,     hang shiny glass balls from interior branches to obscure tree pole,     apply all remaining ornaments making sure to keep Bert & Ernie together.

You can see how this would become cumbersome year after year especially since some of those years found me decorating the tree alone after everyone had found more diverting things to do elsewhere in the house.

This year everyone promised to stay and help and I abandoned the sacred tree decorating ritual. The tree was just as lovely without all the rules and I was happy for the company.

I think the coolest thing about our tree is the variety of ornaments. We have glass balls (plain and decorated) from my husband’s first marriage. We have wooden soldiers, rocking horses and trains we bought together. There are metal ornaments that both the older kids got from their mom every year with names & dates on the back. I bought a bag of random ornaments at the thrift store one year and they are just as lovely to me as the ones we bought at the mall. It’s actually kind of cool that we have someone else’s history intermingled with ours. I have one sweet crafted ornament I bought from a Girl Scout troop who were selling them to finance their trip to Savannah. I hope they made their goal and some day I’d like to see Savannah too. I’m glad in a small way I helped them get there.

The tree is packed away for another year. All the needles have been vacuumed up and our living room is back to its old self. I think next year I could actually get excited at the prospect of putting it back up.

Cooking with Chicken – Mexican Fiesta & Butter Chicken

This summer my oldest daughter shared with us the joys of Mexican Fiesta Chicken Fajitas. She marinated chicken with McCormick’s Mexican Fiesta marinade and fried it up with sliced Bermuda onions and red peppers. Yum! Served on tortillas with diced tomatoes, sour cream and jalapeño peppers it’s absolutely delicious.

Megan cooks big batches so there were a couple of times we had leftovers for later. One of those nights we were out of tortillas and my husband had the inspired idea to serve it on spaghetti noodles. It was delicious. I had mine with some sour cream and it had a bit of a stroganoff aspect to it.

The last time my girlfriends and I went to West Virginia, I took some along for my dinner. Everybody loved it.

When my good friend Alexa e-mailed to let me know her mom had fallen and she had her hands full, I cooked up a batch so that they could enjoy an easy dinner while she recovered. It’s good stuff and everyone seems to like it.  I’ve had good luck with many of the McCormick marinades and would recommend them as wonderful seasons for easy dinners.

I’d bought a big tray of chicken so when I got back home from dropping off the Chicken Fajita Spaghetti dinner, I chopped up the rest and sautéed it in oil. I had bought some jarred sauces by Tiger Tiger the last time I went to Harris Teeter and we had the Butter Chicken flavored one for dinner. I let the chicken simmer in it while I prepared the rest of the meal. I served it over white rice with a side of broccoli. To my surprise, the whole family loved it.

We still have to try the Simmer Sauce flavor, but I’ll wait a couple of weeks so that the girls don’t get chicken’d out!

Pampering – Mood-Boosting Hair & Nail Care

I had a hair appointment scheduled for today so I did miss the conclusion of tree trimming extravaganza. I’ve been putting it off for a while because I haven’t had time (the holidays & such) and I don’t like getting my hair cut. Never have. I think it’s because I don’t like being at the mercy of someone else for that length of time.

Anyway, my hair was way too long and I couldn’t get in as a walk-in on Friday so 2 PM Saturday it is. I had to convince the girl that yes, indeed, I wanted three inches cut off of my hair and she did what I asked. I was really pleased afterwards and scolded myself for not going to get it cut sooner. One of these days I may have her do highlights for me as well. A childhood acquaintance of mine drives an awfully long way to have this stylist do her highlights so she must be good.

I just lucked into using this salon since it’s close to my office. There’s a good wax-ologist there and they do good pedicures too. I’ve gotten rather addicted to pedicures and even like to have them in the winter. My toes are looking pretty jacked up these days so I guess I’ll have to pop over at lunch time next week and have them attended to.

There is something almost renewing about being pampered, but I get so busy sometimes that I forget the emotional lift I get from looking and feeling nicer. Note to self for 2011 – do nice things for one’s self occasionally for a needed mood boost!