Business Workshops I *Could* Be Taking

Just a sampling of business workshops I could be taking...

Poet: Principles of Effective Thinking

Creating Forward - Thinking Drama Workshops for the Business World

Leadership Skills: Is leadership a top down, white, male, professional class prerogative?

Mountain Survival is the ultimate business adventure and an incredible opportunity to mix outdoor fun into a business context

The Artistry of Change: Why add something as flakey sounding as artistry to the workplace?

Anxious to Please: Seven Practices for the Chronically Nice

Leadership Skills Through Stand Up

The Gettysburg Leadership Experience brings executives to the Civil War battlefiled to learn timeless lessons on leadership

Singing Workshops For Business

Leadership Safaris in Africa: Overcome Challenges of the Business Jungle

Laughter Yoga For Business World: Take Your Work Seriously But Take Yourself Lightly

"Persuasive communicator, problem-solver and focused leader"... in 12 short weeks!

"And you'll develop a take-charge attitude initiated with confidence and enthusiasm." Join me as I somewhat reluctantly enthusiastically take part in my employer sponsored Dale Carnegie Course, beginning election day 2008! Let the super positive self help vibe begin. 

But seriously folks, it could be interesting to see what happens to a cynical and introverted girl who would rather stab herself in the eye than take what she dreads is a 12-week speech class in Bend.

Maybe this is the attitude adjustment we've all been waiting for! Stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy the following from my reading list for more fun and games with self help: 

Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone and How To Lose Friends And Alienate People: A Memoir. And yes, I've actually read these books.

Vegetarian friendly Bend?

Had another great meal at Mio Sushi the other day. Plenty of vegetarian options, good range of relatively inexpensive choices, friendly staff. Eating vegetarian in Bend does pose its challenges. It's not like Seattle or the Bay Area where there are all-vegetarian restaurants, like Vegetarian Teapot in Redmond, WA. Restaurant staff here are not always as familiar with or respectful of vege requests. It's certainly a lot better than when I grew up here, but Bend still has a long way to go. I plan to update this list once in a while - probably won't be full fledged reviews, and probably won't be the trendy overpriced I'm-too-full-of-myself-to-have-more-than-one-word-in-my-name restaurants. But it might be helpful for those looking for decent vegetarian food - just because it gets listed in a directory as having vegetarian items, doesn't mean that those items will be adequate - or even really vegetarian.

Some restaurants that I've had a good experience with in Bend:

Bend Brewing Company - they clearly mark vegetarian items on the menu, usually including a vegetarian soup daily.

Deschutes Brewery - Great jerk tempeh sandwich among other options. Original brew pub in Bend, good reliable place that's been here since I was a kid. Unfortunately, ALWAYS crowded.

El Burrito - Good stuff. And blueberry (or is it blackberry?) margaritas.

Hong Kong - they're careful to let you know which options are vegetarian if you ask, even which soups have chicken broth. Veges always seem very fresh. Most meals come with yummy lemon cookies.

Kebaba - Yummy! Many vege options.

McMenamins - tend to have the same limited options, but are flexible if you ask. Every once in a while have a great special.

Mio Sushi - see above.

Typhoon - knowledgeable about what ingredients are in all of the options, have a vegan menu if you ask.

Some restaurants that I've had a bad experience with in Bend:

Cascade Lakes - I used to love getting the portobello mushroom burger (and beer) there, - until the day that we specifically mentioned we were vegetarian and then were served and consumed half of a sandwich with a big chunk of chicken mixed in. They did apologize and comp the mistake, but we were so grossed out that we haven't been back.

El Rancho Grande - I ordered something vegetarian and it came with chicken. I ate some of it before I noticed, which spoiled my meal. The wait staff was completely unsympathetic, grudgingly provided a luke-warm replacement burrito (or whatever it was). We used to go there fairly frequently and sit in the bar area - we'd always had good service before. It is possible we'll give them another chance sometime, but with Mio Sushi just across the alley, it is so much more tempting to just eat there.

McKay Cottage - Update: We ate there on 11/9. Staff was friendly, bloody mary and coffee liquor drinks were very good, food was hit and miss (disappointing gooey scone and usually the scones are outstanding) - but at least the vege was vege. We have frequented this breakfast place quite a bit over the years and were enjoying the newer friendly management. They offer vegetarian options and substitutions like garden burger instead of sausage. However, after having several good vege breakfasts, we were served meat in one of them. Again, they did apologize and correct the mistake, but we were grossed out and haven't been back. We'll probably give them another chance eventually.

Merenda Restaurant - I've definitely given up on this place. I've had very bad pretentious service from this restaurant on multiple occasions over the years - from right after they opened to as recently as a year ago. Last year I was sent there for the Bend Venture Conference lunch. The service was bad, the staff was completely unknowledgeable and uncaring about what entrees might possibly be vegetarian, and they didn't provide the table enough food (we had some good size college age boys at our table). Plus they have auto music on their website. I don't even want a free meal from them. Done.

That's it for now. I'd love to hear your suggestions and experiences!

Tree-hugging charismatic-megafauna-loving vegetarian hippy

So I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be vegetarian and how this affects the people around me. (Vegetarians like me are Ovo-Lacto Vegetarians, which means I don't eat meat, but I do eat some eggs and dairy products). Most of the people that I encounter daily are not vegetarians themselves and don't really get why it is important to me. They haven't come right out and said that I'm a tree-hugging charismatic-megafauna-loving hippy, but I know some of them, especially my relatives, are thinking it.

I've been a vegetarian for about 2.5 years now. You'd think the day I stopped eating meat would be an important date for me to remember. From the outside looking in, one day I was a meat eater, and the next day I was not. But for me, it was a gradual process.

I was an extremely shy and sensitive child, with a natural empathy for animals. The running joke in my family was that I was so sensitive that I would cry for hours if I even thought we might have run over a gopher with the car. It was as if there was something wrong with me, tolerated, but definitely not normal, in a family of hunters from backwoods Michigan, living in Minnesota, Idaho, then Oregon. Gradually I developed a tougher exterior, putting my love of animals into the few pets we had,  including cats, our one dog (a toy poodle), and a teddy bear hamster farm of about 20 at one point (boy do those guys crank out the babies, I discovered rather quickly). I was dragged along for target shooting with rifles (fun), and quail hunting (not so fun). It wasn't long before I made it very clear that I wasn't interested in being included in family hunting activities. But I'd eat what they brought home - meat was the center of every family meal, and it didn't even occur to me to think about what I was eating.

Even though still relatively shy, I developed a tough cynical exterior as a defense mechanism. I was married in my early twenties to a pretty big guy, who loved to eat Wendy's, pasta, and ginormous bowls of ice cream. And I did my best to keep up with him - as if I weren't going to get my fair share if I didn't eat just as much! Compounding the situation, we had moved to New Haven from Portland, and had a hard time in many ways adjusting to such a different culture. Food-wise,  Italian friends we made were serving one lobster each for Christmas dinner! Greasy pizza and cannoli were everywhere. (Oddly, moldy food was also everywhere: bread and cheese on the store shelves was often moldy, I was served a moldy bagel in a restaurant, and I started munching down on a bag of moldy chips before I realized it one time. I developed a temporary and minor eating disorder because of this, but apparently it didn't keep me from eating other things). This formerly stick thin girl started to gain weight without even realizing it. It wasn't until I later saw a shocking family wedding photo from that time period that I grasped what had happened to me.

Thank the gods we moved to California. At that point, anywhere on the West coast was going to be a great improvement. Suddenly, the food was normal (and fresh). I began to learn about what foods were really not healthy for me, and to pay attention to what was going into my mouth. I cut way down on red meat - and overcompensated with chicken. After living in Watsonville for a year I discovered Moss Landing and Elkhorn Slough. This beautiful wildlife refuge was right in my back yard. I took a great summer training course and began volunteering. I felt my exterior cracking - here it was OK to love and study animals - in fact it was encouraged. There were so many animals that were new to me: sea otters, sea lions, rays, whales, and birds - oh the birds! Brown pelicans with their prehistoric shapes, elegant terns with impossibly thin wings, cormorants, egrets, shore birds of every shape and size with silly legs, hawks, owls... I felt as if I finally had somewhere to belong. And I felt my natural empathy returning.

It was during this time that I met some friends who were vegetarian. The first were really my husband's friends, met through some forensic work. They lived in LA, probably one of the easiest places to be vegetarian. Unfortunately, they were a graphic designer and a photographer who snobbishly professed that there were two types of people in the world - those who were creative - and those who were parasites. In spite of the disdain I have for that type of thinking, they hold the dubious distinction of being my first example of every day vegetarians. They were vegetarian, but as opinionated as they were about other areas of life, they didn't act elitist about their diet. Later, through some biology classes I was taking, I met another vegetarian, who again, was not preachy, but just was. I didn't know it at the time, but these people, as imperfect as they were, showed me that living as a vegetarian was possible.

Once I moved back to Oregon, I continued to make improvements to my diet in my newly single life. I met and moved in with my fiancé who had once been vegan, but decided it didn't work for him, and was a big bacon and eggs breakfast eater. A couple of years later we met another friend who is vegetarian - and has been for probably 20 years. And some more friends, long-time vegans (vegans don't eat animals or animal products like eggs or dairy). These people were (and continue to be) a great influence on me as well. Again, they live their convictions every day, but in a completely non judgmental way. They are happy to talk about why, but don't feel the need to preach. We ended up sharing some holidays together, in which veggies and non veggies ate vegan for the day, just to make it easy, so everyone could relax and enjoy all the dishes. I saw that it was not so hard.

In the meantime, I had been learning about the very real horrors of factory farming. This post is already long enough, but suffice it to say that the information is out there if you are open to learning about it. We've been trained to close our eyes to or outright dismiss animal suffering, because we've been taught by religion and culture that we are the superior beings. Well, my take on it is that if we're going to keep animals in captivity, that we have the responsibility to see that they have healthy fulfilling lives, that their lives are not taken prematurely, and that they have the right to live and die without pain and suffering. This is just not happening in factory farms in America. I think we need to challenge our paradigms a little - if we didn't eat so many animals, then we wouldn't need to breed so many animals in the first place, consequently we wouldn't have to keep them in such awful conditions. And since I've learned that I can eat a very healthy diet without animal products, then I don't see any reason to eat them at all. 

And that's the conclusion I came to one day. Why not try it and see if it works for me? I tried it, and started educating myself on all of the food options out there. It helped that my fiancé decided to try along with me. I let my friends and relatives know when it came up. I got the requisite, "but you still eat chicken, right?" from a few people, and tried to politely explain that chickens are meat and that I don't eat meat anymore. For me it feels like absolutely the right thing to do. And my goal is to be the kind of example to others that the vegetarians and vegans in my life were to me. I'm not vegan, I haven't gotten that far, but I think it's a fair goal, especially since egg laying hens and dairy cows are kept in miserable conditions too. I've cut a lot of dairy out of my diet, but I'm still working on it - it's hard for me to avoid eggs in other products - and cheese. I have no doubt that some day soon I'll get there, gradually, 'cause that's the way it works for me. Some vegans really think that if you're not vegan, you're not making a difference - like Bob & Jenna of Vegan Freaks. Even though I don't agree, I still appreciate their outspokenness and their very entertaining and educational podcasts. A different example is Colleen of Compassionate Cooks - she very much believes that veganism is the way to go, but has a less judgmental message, in her also very enlightening and enjoyable podcasts . If vegetarianism had been shoved down my throat, I probably would not be in the place I am. I do what I can with where I am today. If I fail to be a good example, I'll try again tomorrow.

Blogging again... after 14 years

Well, I'm blogging again, sort of. Back in the early days, shall we say '94ish, I used to publish a website with frequent updates, very much in the same vein as a modern day blog. I had just spent most of '93 in Madrid, Spain as an au pair (story for another day), with no computer and no car, and returned to the states right about the time that CompuServe was popular for connecting to the Internet. Details are fuzzy, we may have had some other service before or after (Prodigy, AOL, Earth something...), but I have a vague recollection of connecting in Portland, then definitely in New Haven (no, I was not at Yale: another story for another day). Those were the days when it felt like you could find every website that existed with just a little poking around.

At the time, one of my passions was talking about Motherloss (still recommend the books Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers), and connecting with others who had lost a mother at a relatively early age (I lost my mother to Ovarian Cancer when I was a 20yo immature college student). I also ran one of the only fan sites dedicated to the works of John Irving, one of my all time favorite authors.

But eventually other things drew my attention away. I started teaching myself graphic design and worked for a couple of small businesses in New Haven before starting my forensic science based consultancy and eventually moving to the Bay Area. That basically sucked the next 8 years of my life away. No time for blogging (or vacations) when you're maintaining a website that provides online training 24/7, plus wearing all of the small business hats that one must with a 3-person company. Don't get me wrong, during my forensic time I had a lot of unique experiences, met many very interesting people from all over the world, made a life-long friend, and got in a little travel to places like Australia. But it was exhausting - and it ended badly, as business with ex-spouses often do.

So why blog now? What's kept me from blogging or similar endeavors over the last few years is that I'm now in IT consulting and I spend every day in front of the computer. Often the last thing I want to do is sit in front of the laptop for my free time! But I've been having fun with Twitter; it has sort of revived me. With Twitter, you have to be short and concise - and there's really not a lot of room for perfectionism. Twitter doesn't take up a lot of my time, so I'm hoping combining it with blogging will be manageable and fun. And I've met some other bloggers in Bend that seem to manage their blogs and lives just fine, and have inspired me. I've also learned to let go of a lot of my perfectionism in the rest of my life, so I don't feel the need to take massive amounts of time creating the perfect website, or the perfect blog (OK, I do feel the need, but I'm resisting it). As Flylady says, "Progess, not Perfection."

So who knows where this will go? You'll probably find me talking a lot about my man (also referred to as my honey, my dh, etc.), my animals, my step-kids, my vegetarian lifestyle, animal cognition, books, and animal rights. And maybe a little about work here and there, i.e., SharePoint, UI Design, etc.