Holiday preparations

Well, its the week before Christmas and I'm happy to say that we're in pretty good shape.

All 125 holiday cards went out in last Friday's mail.  This year I used mostly coastal-themed cards with lovely beachy Christmas scenes.  Some had a lighthouse adorned with a wreath and garland, another had 3 decorated Christmas trees on the beach, another had a coastal home/barn/lighthouse decorated with lights, and other had a wreath adorned with ribbon, starfish, sand dollars, and sea shells.  Its a Coastal Christmas!

All gifts have been purchased.  We're still awaiting the arrival of some of the gifts, so the wrapping certainly isn't done yet, but at least we know everything is either here or is on its way.  Tomorrow I'm off so I'm going to wrap everything that's here.  The items currently en-route will be wrapped on Sat. I'll also do all the baking on Sat.

And I've already planned what I'm baking to take with us.  My initial plan was to bake cookies, but I've since decided against that.  First, cookies are labor-intensive.  Although we have 3 racks in our oven and can bake 3 trays simultaneously, you've still got to move the trays around so the bottom ones don't bake faster than the upper ones, then they've all got to be transferred to cooling racks, then once cooled, transferred to cookie tins.  Second, my sister-in-law always brings a huge platter of assorted homemade cookies, so mine would just be extra.

So instead of cookies, I've decided to bake brownies.  Specifically, I'm baking Mounds brownies and Reese's brownies.  For the Mounds brownies I'll take a box brownie mix and add chocolate chips and coconut.  For the Reese's brownies I'll add chocolate chips and peanut butter chips to a box brownie mix.  I can bake them in disposal foil pans which will transport easily and will save me lots of time over baking cookies.

I'm also going to bake a pair cake.  My recipe is also simple like the brownies and doesn't require lots of extra handling.  I'll start with a yellow box cake mix, pour 1/4 of the batter into the round pan, then place pair halves in the pan, then pour the balance of the batter in and bake.  Once out of the oven, I'll pour a combination of pair juice and St Germaine liqueur over the top to create a 'wet cake'.  Just before serving I'll dust the top with confectioner's sugar.

I'll also bake breakfast casseroles for Christmas morning.  They consist of hash brown potatoes, eggs, cheese, cooked maple sausage links, milk, and salt and pepper.  I bake these at home on Sat in ceramic baking pans, let them cool, then refrigerate.  On Christmas morning we'll warm them in the oven and enjoy.

I hear TV/radio commercials, see Facebook posts and hear actual people talking about how "stressful the holidays are" and I think to myself "they're really only as stressful as you allow them to be".  If you feel you must make 50 dozen homemade cookies, then I guess it could be stressful.  But YOU have the ability to make different decisions that can result in less or no stress during the holidays, like making brownies instead of cookies, or making bake-ahead food that just needs to be warmed up.  Mostly, being prepared and not waiting until the last minute are the best stress-reducers.

Its up to YOU.

Life lesson

This really IS true.  Nothing stays the same forever, be it good or bad.  We can always try to do things to improve our situation, but sometimes its just a matter of patience.

This is a life lesson I wish I'd learned a lot earlier in life.

Pressure at Christmas

A work associate asked me this morning if I was ready for Christmas.  I paused for a quick assessment and then said "Yes, aside from 2 gift cards I need to pick up, I'm ready."

I'm not sharing this to brag about how organized I am, or how 'on schedule' I am.  Rather, I'm sharing it to affirm that I do not drive myself crazy or overspend to find the "perfect" gifts at Christmas.  Why not?  First, because perfection is a fantasy, and second, because I choose not to put that kind of pressure on myself.

When my nieces and nephews were younger it was easy and fun to buy them toys, games, and creative things at Christmas.  When they got older it became much harder to get them things because their personalities were developing and their tastes were changing.  We began asking their parents for suggestions of what they're "into" now, which helped to a degree, but also added some pressure when they wanted "the" popular gift of the season that was expensive or hard to find.

Fortunately Spouse & I are both of the same mentality in this regard.  We do not pressure ourselves to find the "perfect" gift that will change our loved ones' life.  In reality, lives aren't changed by material possessions.  Lives are made better by spending time with each other, loving one another, appreciating one another, and being present in the moment.  That's how you have a positive effect on someone's life.

So gifts from us are just that:  gifts.  Things that don't cost a lot, that may or may not be needed, but are most likely going to be liked and appreciated.  Cute costume jewelry.  A t-shirt with a funny saying.  A coffee mug with his favorite team on it.  Cool sunglasses.  Soft flannel sheets.  A novelty watch.  A monogrammed shaving kit.  A portable electronics charger.  A gift card to the movie theater.  Stuff that's less than $50. and most of it less than $25.

Not having the stress of finding "perfect" gifts allows us to enjoy the days leading up to the holiday so much more, and once we're all together, allows us to focus on being together and sharing ourselves, rather than on the gifts.  

Remember that gifts are just a part of how most people spend Christmas.  There's the yummy food, enjoying the beautiful tree and decorations, spending time with family and friends, hugging, laughing, kissing, and appreciating all that we have.  Of course if you're religious you can add all the Jesus stuff on top of that.  

You can reduce your holiday pressure if you choose to.  Then you'll be able to enjoy the holiday rather than just surviving it.

High pay & low stress

I saw an article on the AOL homepage that I thought was interesting.  (Yes, I still have an @aol.com email address which I access from their homepage.  It was my very first email address, and I love it.  Plus, I believe that keeping a consistent email address helps people with whom you've been out of touch for years reach you, like keeping the same phone number.)

I thought this article was interesting because most of the time we equate a high-paying job/career with high stress.  Typically lower stress jobs are usually accompanied by lower salaries or hourly wages.  But this article offers suggestions for high paying low stress jobs and tells you the education or experience needed.

Check it out!

One of the surprises to me was Economist, which studies the production and distribution of resources, goods, and services.  The average annual salary is just over $100K and requires only a Bachelor's degree.

Share this article with your children, nieces, and nephews in high school.  It just may help them select a college major and future career.  It may also be useful to those who may be considering for a career change.

Career change

So, for the past few months I've been going on and on about my career change. I went to real estate school, got my license, and scored a position as a buyer's agent on a very successful real estate team. Every day is a new experience as I pick up different nuances of real estate.

But the other day as I was thinking about my life over the last 6 months, it occurred to me that I've made a complete career change... a career change!

I think a lot of people (including myself) throw that term around without really understanding its true weight.

It can be stressful and traumatic just to change jobs within the same industry. People frequently lose sleep (literally) over promotions or moving to a different company within the same industry.

Then, of course, in sales you have the added stress of when you'll actually sell something so you can get a commission check.

Yet, for some reason, I've acted as if changing careers wasn't that big of a deal. I thought of it as what I needed to do in order to move on. I didn't want another job like I had before. I wanted to really enjoy my work, so I went about retraining myself to become a realtor. Then, I didn't just affiliate with a brokerage, I sought out 1 of the most successful real estate teams in the area and explained to the lead agent that I wanted to join the team.

Its as if I fully expected it to all work out. A concerned friend questioned my new career choice due to all the real estate doom and gloom heard on TV "news" shows. (I use the term "news" quite loosely here.) My response: "I have no plans for anything but success." Now, that may sound as if I had no back-up plan, and I guess that's pretty much the truth. I'm only planning to be successful so I don't feel that I need a back-up plan.

But perhaps subconsciously I knew my career change was a big deal. Several times I've woken up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning after a stressful dream, and then been unable to fall back asleep because I can't stop thinking about work. Its not that I'm worried or stressed about it, I just can't seem to stop going through all the mental gymnastics in my head.

But I am really, really enjoying my work now. I love real estate and I love working with people so I'm certain I'm doing the right thing.

Stress

Since Spouse & I are not going to our personal trainer anymore we have been trying to do more walking. We walk around the nearby pond, around our charming little historic town, and over the canal to the bay. We really enjoy walking the full length of the boardwalk because its beautiful to be able to look at the ocean as we walk, and because the boardwalk is exactly 1 mile long.

Last evening as we were walking the boardwalk Spouse wanted to tell me his thoughts about my plans after I stop working this Friday and after we return from our cruise. It wasn't so much what he said (although some of it was borderline insulting), but more so the way he said it that got me upset. I felt like he wasn't being optimistic or hopeful about me getting re-employed, which I interpreted to be a lack of confidence in me and my abilities. It seemed that nearly everything he said was presented in a worse-case scenario. It seemed like he was saying that something we had agreed upon 2 weeks ago was suddenly not an option anymore.

Perhaps the stress of knowing I will soon be unemployed has made me more sensitive. If you've never been laid off before you might not know how it feels. It takes a real toll on your self esteem and confidence. To have Spouse appear to question my worth and ability to get re-employed really hurt. In hindsight I know he didn't mean it that way.

But we worked through it.

He and I have different ways of processing information and planning. He tends to think through 87 back-up plans, which I find exhausting. I mean, after back-up plan 4 or 5 doesn't work, you'd probably better go back to square 1, right? I am overwhelmed by too many back-up plans. Plus there's just no way to predict all the possible ways things can work out, so all 87 of your back-up plans could be completely useless if something you hadn't anticipated happens. Of course I appreciate his concern and forethought, and I definitely see the need to be as prepared as is reasonably possible for the unknown, but I can't deal with extended decision trees that stem off of 87 different back-up plans.

We're both trying to respect each others' processes and not get carried away. My being unemployed will not be easy or pleasant. It will likely create stress in our relationship again, so we acknowledged the need to stay calm and take care of each other.

Although leaving on a 10-day vacation (cruise) the week after being laid off may not be ideal, I think we will both benefit from the change of scenery and the time to relax together.

Crush du Jour: Robert Miller

Melancholy

I've been feeling somewhat melancholy. Maybe melancholy isn't the right word, but I just haven't felt like myself in a while.

My job has been stressful and hectic. Also, there are lots of changes happening there. My role has changed again, and we are transitioning to a new platform which I am trying to learn. I used to know all the answers and felt very confident about the old platform. Now I feel like its my 1st week at a new job. I find it hard to be motivated or creative. I'm more reactive at work now. I even wake up earlier than I need to and have trouble getting back to sleep because I begin to think about what I have to do at work. But its not just about work.

For weeks there was the waiting for the condo deal to happen. We settled 2 weeks ago and since then I have been going back and forth with 2 different contractors trying to get a reasonable price for the remodeling. I hate negotiating, but I can't afford to pay too much so I have to do it, which adds more stress to my life.

Then there's the porch expansion. We'd been trying to get our builder to give us a price and commit to a start date since last fall. Then in early June - just as the condo deal solidified - he gives us the price and says he's ready to start. We really didn't want to have to pay for the condo, the remodeling, and the porch expansion all at the same time. That's stressful too. But our only recourse was to postpone the porch, which would mean its completion would be at the end of the summer, when we'd have little use of it until the next year. So the porch expansion is going on too.

Then there's the yard. Before the condo and porch deals happened, I had worked with a landscape company to fix up our yard. The garage construction wrecked our grass, which wasn't that great to begin with. I got an estimate to regrade the yard, put better soil in the beds, move some plants, add some plants, put down some sod and some river rocks. But the yard project got put on hold when the condo deal happened and the porch project happened. Spouse simply won't spend any money on the yard right now, so the weeds are getting out of control. We've had no rain so the grass that was left is dead, yet somehow the weeds manage to survive. I hate seeing the yard this way, but I agree with him that we shouldn't spend anymore money right now. Although I know its the right thing to do, it still bothers me to see the brown, dead patches and weeds.

Then there's the blogs. I used to do a pretty good job of keeping up with the blogs to which I subscribe. But over the last few months I have just not been able keep up with them. Reading blogs during the day is just out of the question now. I feel like I'm busy all the time, so in the evening after dinner I often prefer to relax and veg in front of the TV. So, I feel like I've lost touch with many of the smart, funny, entertaining people I used to feel like I knew. I've also noticed a drop in comments here, which could be because I've not been reading/commenting on other's blogs, or it could be because my posts aren't as interesting as they used to be. I don't know.

And then there's the invasion. Tomorrow Spouse's mother, sister, brother-in-law, and their 3 teenagers are arriving for a visit. For a week. Several unplanned large expenses have caused them to feel they couldn't rent a beach house in Myrtle Beach this summer like they usually do, so they asked if they could spend a week's vacation here. Now, I love these folks and genuinely appreciate the way they have whole-heartedly accepted me into the family, especially in light of my biological family's behavior. But you know the old saying: Fish and house guests both get old and smelly after 3 days. I can't believe we're going to have 6 extra people here for an entire week. I'm sure they won't be here in the house all day while I'm trying to work. Spouse is taking off the entire time they'll be here so I'm sure he'll go with them to the beach, the waterpark, etc during the day, so my ability to concentrate at work will likely not be affected that much, if at all. But its all the rest of the time! I won't be able to watch TV at night in a loose pair of boxers, or fart out loud for a week! I don't know how I'm going to make it.

So that's what's going on with me, in case you're interested.

Crush du Jour: Eliad Cohen

Work

Work has been very busy and stressful lately.
I've been working through my lunch hour, only taking 15 or 20 minutes to run downstairs and eat a sandwich before returning to my desk.

Part of it has to do with personnel changes within the company. Part of it has to do with my new boss' brilliant ideas (insert heavy sarcasm), all of which add more work to me.

Then there's the challenge of working in a field that requires lots and lots of client interaction. Service questions, billing inquiries, complaints, changes, updates, now, yesterday, faster.

Oddly enough this is the time of year when my clients' work tends to slow down, but there seems to be little if any sign that they are slowing down for the summer.

Another challenge I face is working with clients in Europe and Asia and the time difference between us. One of my clients is in Hong Kong which is 12 hours ahead of me. When they arrive at work at 8:30 in the morning their time, its 8:30 at night of the previous day for me. Therefore all of our communication takes place via email, one day at a time.

And to top it all off, we are about to migrate to a new version of the product we provide to our clients and I have been in countless training sessions and meetings to learn all of the nuances. Next will come the undertaking of helping my clients come up to speed on it.

Lately I've had more and more fantasies about resigning and working for myself. Its quite tempting after the last few weeks I've had. But nobody likes to hear people complain about work
so I'll shut up. I should be glad to have a job, right?

Crush du Jour: Heath Pearce

Weekend highlights

We had a rather calm, relaxing weekend.

Despite it being the last weekend before Christmas, we only had 1 thing 'planned' for the weekend, a party at Steven & Thad's on Sat night. So we slept in Sat morning and had a leisurely day as we awaited the winter storm of apocalyptic proportions. After breakfast I ran the dishwasher and watched some shows on HGTV, while Spouse ran to the grocery store to get a few ingredients to make a cake from scratch for the party.

We listened to Christmas music while Spouse made his cake and I wrapped gifts. It was nice to still be together and able to talk to each other while doing different things.

The snow started around 3:30-ish but several times it sort of tapered off. We certainly didn't seem to be getting anything similar to our family in northern VA. We left at 6:00 for the party and the roads just had a thin coating of snow on them. I felt confident in our all-wheel drive Honda CRV but Spouse couldn't resist telling me to "Watch out!" or "Slow down!" any time a nearby vehicle's break lights came on.

A few folks didn't show up for the party due to the weather but we had a great time anyway. Steven cooked enough for a small army and we really enjoyed talking and visiting with everyone who came. The snow increased while we were inside, and when it was time to leave there seemed to be about 3-4 inches of snow on the ground. We drove home slowly and carefully.

Sun was another quiet, relaxing day. At 1:00 we went back to Steven & Thad's for lunch to help them get rid of some of the left overs from the previous night. We even wound up bringing some home. Some conversation resulted in Thad pulling out envelopes of old photos and we had more than a few belly laughs on his account.

We got home at 5:30 and just watched TV and used the computer until bedtime.

One of the reasons for our calm, relaxing weekend was that we decided not to decorate our house or put up a tree this year. Earlier in the month we just had too many things going on, plus we felt as though we'd just gotten our house back together and cleaned after the addition. I also did not do my usual baking of cookies for the neighbors or a holiday party this year.

I bring this up because so often people lose the joy of the holidays by feeling obligated to keep every Christmas tradition, every year. They stress themselves out and worry over activities that should be joyful. Our suggestion is that you allow yourselves the permission to skip a year for some of your holiday traditions if you are feeling stressed or behind. Your neighbors will not starve without your cookies, nor will they vote you off the block for not decorating your house.

I am content that this year I got over 140 holiday cards in the mail, went to 5 parties, and purchased/wrapped 15 gifts. All I have left is to purchase some gift cards for the teenaged nieces and nephews. I am totally OK with the fact that we didn't decorate our house, put up a tree, bake cookies, or host a holiday party this year.

There's always next year!

Crush du Jour: Sebastian Rivers