I’ve always been a pretty independent worker and consider myself sooo fortunate that all of my managers have not been micro-managers. But I know it’s important that I keep them up updated with my workload and projects. Sometimes we meet face-to-face once during the week, other times I just print the document and leave it on her desk. We try to meet once a week, but it doesn’t always work out that way 
If you don’t meet with your manager regularly, this is also a good document for tracking your work load. I save each week by date (MMDDYY) so I can reference it later.
This is a forth or fifth generation document (the original was created by my co-worker and very good friend, JCo!) and with each revision it gets slightly better.
Here’s how the document works: (more…)
I’m in lovely Tempe, AZ until Thursday (1/21). It’s raining and I miss home. I don’t like flying or traveling (unless I’m on vacation!) because I get all kinds of sick: air sick, car sick, home sick… it’s okay though. I like my job a lot so I don’t mind traveling for it.
Since I was going to have 3 days in the office and 2 after-work (causal) events and 1 potential business dinner, I needed a variety of outfits. Continue reading for my plan…
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The New Year is upon us, and with it comes tons of PowerPoint Presentations to summarize the previous years’ financials or performance. I am working on no fewer than THREE PowerPoint Presentations for various year-end meetings. I suppose PowerPoint Presentations serve a good purpose – they’re a good way to organize a lot of information and present it clearly – but gosh, they can be so boring!
This is my favorite little PowerPoint tip – how to change the little details in clipart to make them more custom. Don’t get me wrong, most clipart is incredibly tacky and should be avoided. But sometimes, a little clipart and be used to make the presentation more fun. And sometimes, you don’t really have much of a choice (some bosses LOVE their clipart!).
When looking for a nice bit of clipart, I usually use the clipart library in PowerPoint or turn to the Microsoft Office Online Clipart library. A lot of the time, I find a nearly-perfect clipart… if I could just change one small detail, it would be perfect. Very rarely do I find a perfect image – so I modify the nearly-perfect ones to get my perfect image.
Continue reading to learn how…
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I thought I was sooooo clever when I put “Cup Of Joe” on my Starbucks 16 oz Custom Tumbler last year (get it? Our dog’s name is Joe… all the pictures on my COFFEE tumbler are of Joe… Joe is another word for Coffee… are you chuckling quietly to yourself yet??) – so clever, in fact that I actually Googled “Cup of Joe” and that’s how I found one of my most favorite blogs A CUP OF JO. Turns out Joanna is like 2 years more clever than me.
I ended up deciding to put this post in “Make It Green” since I know using my Cup of Joe has reduced the number of plastic coffee cups I’ve put in my local landfill – but I could have just as easily put it in “Make it Special” since I happen to think these photo tumblers make excellent gifts. Especially when you make the custom insert to put in there…
…To make it a little easier, you can find blank templates here!
If you enjoy using Adobe InDesign, there’s an InDesign template for you. There is also a Microsoft Word document you can use if you’re savvy in Word and if you just want download the template and print it out to color or paint or cut-and-paste pictures, you can use the PDF template.
For Valentine’s day last year, I made one for Chris and he just loved it (I made one for me too).
I’ve got big plans for New Year’s Eve… last year, my nieces (age 4 and 5 at the time) and I filled out a time capsule questionnaire and stamped it “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 12/31/2009″ so tonight we get to open it!
Hopefully, they’ll be excited about their answers from last year. I remember that they weren’t too excited about answering the questions (they liked tracing their hands and feet, and LOVED decorating the envelope we put everything in).
Unfortunately, I didn’t save the questionnaire but I was able to recreate it. If you’d like to use it, you can download it here!
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My nieces are 5 and 6 years old – and can be very difficult to shop for! I always want to give them something they’ll be excited about, but I don’t want to contribute to the mass of toys in their playrooms (and I know the girls won’t remember who gave them what anyway). This year, I decided a new dress would be fun… and then decided if I could somehow give them a dress they each designed, that would be even more fun!
What I ended up giving them was a package with these dress outlines and some colored pencils. I told them to use the colored pencils to design their own dresses, and we’ll pick out the best one to turn into a real dress they can wear. I used the dress options for two Butterick dress patterns (B4906 and B4842), cleaned the drawings up in Illustrator and placed the images into a “Design Your Dress” frame.
I figure I’ll defintely have to take the girls fabric shopping and eventually I’ll have the seamstress who turned my vintage dress into a sweater jacket make the dresses for me (my sewing skills just aren’t that cool yet!). I’ll keep you posted!
Today we had a potluck at the office for Thanksgiving. Everyone brought either an appetizer or a dessert and the company brought in pizza and salads. Our poor newbie, Klay, tried to make his mom’s “hopscotch crunchies” (chow mein noodles, marshmallows, chocolate and butterscotch) in the extended-stay hotel where he’s staying and failed miserably – but only on one batch! His failure looked a bit like cat vomit, but the success was delicious! And after lunch, everyone paid Pictionary – even the CEO! Good times.
I made these potluck tags that we displayed with photo clips that I got at Crate and Barrell Outlet for $.50 each! Each person writes their name on the top line and their dish on the bottom. If you don’t have photo clips, you can use small binder clips (bottom right image).
If you’d like to print your own, you can get them here. Enjoy!
