fun started me thinking….

Happy Pies and YouTube Friday…that was the subject line of the email that hit my inbox late one Thursday afternoon. Reply with your favorite pizza topping and bring your favorite clip to lunch. Friday noon found 13 of us crammed into the Worthwhile conference room, eating pizza, watching goofy clips and laughing together. 30 minutes later we were back at our desks….more energized and closer as a team. Read the rest of this entry »

When my son Ben was 2, he was given a pair of red Sperry’s…love at first sight! Ben was so passionate about his red Sperry’s that he wore them 24/7. It was winter in Michigan — they had to fit over his footie pjs. Night after night I would wake up to see his little head by my bed…”I lost my shoe!” Over and over I crawled out, dug around in the bottom of his blankets, and slipped the much loved red Sperry back on his pj covered foot. Ben discovered that passion keeps you up at night. Read the rest of this entry »

Flowers are never wrong! Thank you Dan, for the beautiful roses you brought to the FIT team.

Books on my nightstand….Saturday the pile toppled and I realized it was time to start weeding out and re-evaluating my reading materials. My nightstand is actually a beautiful dining room chair that has been in my family since the 1820s when it was made as part of a set for my grandfather’s grandmother when she was married. Since it’s a chair, it doesn’t have shelves and doors to hide things, so I have to be really disciplined to keep order.

I have always been addicted to reading, and although I no longer read while riding my bike, this time of year usually find my chair piled high…probably in reaction to the end of tennis season, rebellion at the thought of having to be superwoman to get through the next month, and the fact that I don’t have a fantasy football team to follow!

So, cleaning the pile took awhile as I sifted through what I had gathered over the past month. Read the rest of this entry »

The four of us were standing in a room, dressed in large brown jumpsuits and separated from the rest of the group. We were in Hallstatt, Austria waiting to start a tour of an ancient salt mine. Everyone around us was in a conversation with each other — in German. The guide talked in German to the majority of the group for 10 minutes then uttered those (to us) famous words, “Ok, who needs the English translation?” Suddenly, we realized that what we were going to learn about salt mining was minimal. We ended up walking miles underground staring at brown dripping walls and “hearing” long German explanations followed by our  “English” translation of one or two sentences including explicit examples like … “Ok, this is where they mine the salt.”

I know, this is an extreme example of total lack of communication, but when I am in the middle of a conversation and I realize that neither of us are understanding what the other is saying, my mind goes back to the salt mine. Read the rest of this entry »