Living In a Food bubble

I love cooking books, I love cooking shows, love kitchen gadgets and I really love to watch my country’s Master Chef. The only problem with what I wrote in the previous sentence is that I hate cooking but I really love eating. I don’t come from a line of cooks or mini chefs, I come from a line of those who find short cuts. When my kids were young stir fries were eaten frequently as was pasta, pizza, quesadillas and tacos, all foods that were easy to make with 3 young children.

The last 3 pandemic years when we were all home kinda changed my love hate relationship with the kitchen, I started cooking more and trying new foods and flavors. When I watched Master Chef I discovered foods I have never heard about before that apparently are commonly eaten in my country, foods that I have never heard about. When I say this my husband keeps reminding me that we have not lived there for 30 years so that might be it. But in reality when I researched this I discovered these foods were there always. I apparently have been living in a food bubble.

Technically food bubbles are not bad thing if this is what you like, we all have our go-to comfort foods that we can eat all day and every day. I do have to add that I am a Celiac, which means I do not have the food freedom that most people have. But during the pandemic I decided to expand my food range and try new things or even convert some interesting menus to become gluten free.

I have succeeded on some and failed miserably on others. My baking skills have improved and I can make a mean gluten free Brioche and focaccia bread that are not hard as a rock the following day. I also discovered more ethnic north African foods I like and figured out how to make them. My fails were on foods that were foreign to me and I had no intrinsic feel of what they taste like, just how they look like on TV or on paper. But my food journey is not over and I am continuing on my mission of breaking my food bubble.

Finding joy

My dog has a collection of pinecones. She started collecting them as puppy. They are not allowed in the house, so my smart girl either leaves them next to the door or takes them to the patio where she has a bucket for all her pinecones. We are blessed with many pine trees around us and with every walk we take she finds additions to her collection. She is so happy and excited to find new ones and every time I see her I get a little jealous as I too strive to find such happiness from the simple things.

My goal in life is to find joy in the little thing, so I am following her lead (pun intended), learning how to find joy from simple things , seeing her when she finds a pinecone, seeing a butterfly passing by, my basil plants sprouting and even smiling when the pesky neighborhood squirrel eats my vegetables.

The phone call before you leave work for the weekend.

You go to work every day, happy or less happy, interacting with all your co-workers and with your clients. You get to the last day of your work week, a week that you thought was good, productive and had no issues. And then you get a call from your boss, a call that causes you to pause and look at your week and ask yourself did I miss judge my week? Did I miss anything?

You start to question yourselves and your actions during the week and after questioning yourself and asking the people around you, you understand it is not you. You just have a bad manager .

A manager that not only does not value or appreciate  you but is  also actively trying to depict you in a bad light while lying about your performance or constantly finding fault in what you do.

How do we deal with bad and toxic  leadership when there is no one above said manager that you can speak to?

When we work in small or family owned companies, we sometimes lose when a family member who is also your manager has no one to be accountable to. Issuing a complaint to HR will not do anything as even they are beholden to this family and their job is at stake as well. God knows that the annual anonymous employee survey is not really anonymous or even if it is no one will do anything about what you write.

Dealing with a bad boss is not easy, especially when you know that they are wrong.  Do we keep our heads low until we find a different job? But what if you really like what you do and your co-workers, do you give it all up for one bad leader?

As you can tell I am in a quandary, so for now I will enjoy my weekend and try to cleanse all the bad mojo out of my life and will look for all the positive things that I had this week.

If you are reading this on a weekend, I hope you have a great one, otherwise keep your spirit strong .

That dreaded training session

Today I had corporate training. Usually i get the notification that I have scheduled training I cringe, I hate training sessions, they are usually long, not efficient and not effective. I really do not enjoy them partially because they are on zoom and I need to be  in front of the computer for way too long for my cup of tea. However, today was a first for me.

I attended the training, complaining in my mind about it and then I was pleasantly surprised. Training was good and interesting and I actually enjoyed it, which brought me to think how was this training better? Especially since this was technical IT training that usually burns my brain to a crisp.

The difference was that this session was concise, effective and to the point with real tech examples and know-how. The trainer was not going on and on just to hear her own voice like some people I know. I left the training feeling that I gained knowledge and not wasted my time on another mandated session.

So why was this online training better, for starters it started on time and there was no wait for all the late attendees. Presentation was good and showed real examples that we encountered and solutions and not some theoretical mambo jambo that does not connect to us.The session was short, effective and efficient and I personally felt that the trainer valued my time and was not doing this training just to fulfill some corporate mandate. And lastly this trainer knew how to use the technology, in this case it was Zoom. I attended a training session last week with a trainer that wasted 20 minutes of our time not knowing how to share screens or look at the chat and frankly after the last 3 years of life in zoom if you have not mastered it yet get a moderator to help you. So all in all a good start for my work day!

Why I started blogging

I was asked recently why I am starting a blog, there are many reasons. One of my friends mother passed away recently and when they organized the house later they found notebooks filled with stories and poems that the mom never showed anyone and they decided to publish them after her death, I don’t want my kids to read my notebooks after I’m dead, I want them to see them now, I want the world to see them now,

The other reason was the pandemic, in a way the pandemic made me think about my priorities and what I would like to do in the remaining years that I have. I lost my hearing during the pandemic and that added to my introspection time, I started listening to podcasts while walking the dog and discovered Mike Rowe’s podcast (yes. The Dirty Jobs guy), on several episodes he had his mother Peggy Rowe, Peggy spoke about her road to becoming on the national bestseller list and how she fulfilled her dream and all the ups and downs that led to that and that inspired me to no end.

The other reason that might seem mundane is just a simple quote from Farrah Gray “Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” that was posted on Linkedin. This post made me stop for a second and  think hard as it  touched a nerve. I have worked for other people all my life, not always were my capabilities appreciated  and when they were I was expected to do more for the same pay while someone else reaped the rewards. Mind you I quit from that company after I saw that my hard work was not appreciated but that belongs to a different post about toxic management. 

All of these reasons plus several others that I did not mention made me think and think hard about how I would like my future to look like, i do not want to miss opportunities or reflect in years to come on how I missed them. I know many of us have the same feelings, especially after the last 3 years we had, at this point in my life I am choosing to forge ahead with a new view – I will not stop myself anymore, I will believe in my capabilities and if ever my bucket list if full  I will simply get a new bucket!

That dreaded Monday feeling

We all have that dreaded back to work day, for some it’s monday, for others it’s going back to work after a vacation or a long weekend. For others it’s every day. There really is no wonder that many songs were written about Mondays and none of them positive, The Bangles have their Manic Monday , the Carpenters have Rainy days and Mondays (always make me cry – continuing lyrics) and i’m not even going to talk about the Boomtown rats – I don’t like Mondays, which is a very dark song. Does Monday morning blues have  to be a Monday, probably not. By coincidence today is my day, not because it is a Monday, I work on Sundays so technically my Monday is a Sunday, instead I have meetings that I am being forced to attend with people I do not value and meetings that just drag on and on as some people just like hearing the sound of their own voice. You go to bed the night before with that terrible feeling of dreading tomorrow and wake up to the same pit feeling in your stomach.

So what do we do to make us less anxious about our “monday”? Suffer in quiet, look for a new job or be a Pollyanna and try to find the positive in this. Frankly I don’t want to be positive today, really not in the mood! But what I did instead was to find a course that looked interesting on Coursera about entrepreneurship and freelancing. Will see how my day ends.

The difference of perspective

My husband recently discovered that our dog knows how to get water from the fridge, the rest of us knew that she could do it at 5 months old so when he came to  tell us we all shrugged our shoulders and said what else is new.

Our dog is wicked smart from a breed of self sufficient and smart dogs that was used during world war one to send messages, the breed used to be police dogs as well, but they are very independent and don’t always or really rarely listen unless they want to.

But I digress, my husband was very shocked that she can do this, while we all knew about this for 5 years, and started getting very worried about all the other stuff she knows to do and how much damage she can do. The rest  of us looked at him and smiled, not because we think her eating chairs is funny or because she knows how to use a fridge, but we saw this as a sign of intelligence and were trying to figure out – how can we use her abilities for the good while my husband only saw the negative aspects of her capability and all this is a matter of perspective.

A week of firsts

This week was a week of firsts for me, I don’t have them that often. First time I saw an Okra plant ,I really dislike Okra, so growing it was at the end of my list. First new pilates instructor in 6 years, I loved my usual pilates instructor, the gym I attend has decided to switch instructors for most of the classes. Not sure what they are trying to do and why as my old pilates instructor was very popular and all her classes were full, but i am not gym management. This instructor was terrible and this was the first time ever I left a class before it ended. I debated with myself the whole time I was in class how rude is it really to leave before, but she was so bad that I just decided to leave.

My other first was seeing a new doctor, my doctor for the last 25 years retired. And finding a new doctor is like going on a first date. You don’t quite know what to expect, you hope for the best but prepare for the worst. You check the doctor on all social media, make sure the doctor is part of your insurance plan and look for acquaintances that saw this doctor just like you would try to find any potential information about a first date. Except looking for a new doctor sometimes is a longer commitment. Although I was very worried I did like this doctor and that added to another first – a Monday that I did not hate!

Navigating difficult bosses

First we had the great resignation, then we had quiet quitting followed with quiet firing. Now my feed is flooded with articles with explanations of how to deal with a bad manager. Maybe google spied on me again and heard me complaining about one of my corporate bosses again.

These articles Include all the possible psychological explanations for the manager as to why the manager is bad with explanations  such as  the manager being insecure and what strategies to use to handle these difficult bosses.  When I read the articles my first thought was -Really? How come us employees how to figure out strategies to cope with difficult bosses, when did we as employees become therapists? I’m not sure about any one else’s job description, mine despite having a B.A. in psychology does not include providing therapy sessions. 

Lord knows that if I continued to get my degree in counseling I would have been making a lot more. Going back to my original question, why do we even have to learn how to deal with a bad manager in the first place. Yes, some of us have no choice and are stuck for whatever reason at the place we are, we learn to play the game with said manager. But shouldn’t the emphasis be on training managers, training them to be better managers and also leaders in the first place. We are treating a symptom instead of looking for the cause and prevention. Training managers to be leaders or better managers should be the responsibility of the corporate or company you work for as better managers create better employees and in return a better company.

Thoughts during walks 10/3/22

I live in a suburban neighborhood, families, kids walking to school or riding their bikes, dogs being walked everywhere. We have big dog poop trash cans and dog bag dispensers everywhere. There are so many dispensers that you can almost always find a bag. There are some instances that the dispenser is empty for some reason or another but they are really far between. In our many years here I think this happened only twice.

We have a neighbor who walks her dog every morning and passes by my house on the way. I know this for several reasons, my dog really hates her dog, no rhyme or reason she just hates that dog so when they pass my chief barking officer starts. If for some reason my chief barking officer forgot to bark I still know when she  passed by as she always carries a gazillion dog poop bags and leaves them on her trail like  Hansel and Gretel leaving bread crumbs so they can be found. I never understood people who carry that many bags or feel the need to grab all the  bags in the dispenser. Even on any of my dogs’ bad days there really was no need for more than 4 bags max, you can also buy bags on Amazon, pretty cheap as well. I bought a huge box 4 years ago for probably 10 dollars that I still have.

Going  back to the dog poop bag situation and knowing very well that I am weird, everytime I see these bags all over the path we take on our walks I wonder- why have so many bags if you leave them all over the place? Or better yet, what is the need to grab so many bags out of the dispenser when there are dispensers everywhere?  Does the woman have bag anxiety?

 Most days I just pick up the bags that she leaves all over the place and just put them in my pocket without even realizing it (thank god for yoga pants with side pockets), today i actually felt good about the bags all over the sidewalks, I haven’t seen the dog’s owner for several days and didn’t realize that , I know she lives somewhere in the neighborhood but not exactly where, but  this way i knew she was ok. Yes, we do  have a neighborhood busybody who knows everyone and everything and I will catch her later to see if everything is ok  and if our bag lady needs anything.