Category: tradition

Feliz Dia de los Muertos

Feliz Dia de los Muertos! On this day may you remember your loved ones who have passed on. Today I honor all four of my grandparents, my father and my best friend from high school.

May they walk in peace and enjoy a tasty pink cookie and some tequila on their journey.



My sugar skull looks a little more cranky than I had intended.
And yes, I slapped an Instagram filter on there. I don’t care what that says about me.

Oh yes, this is one of my favorite times of the year. I love Day of the Dead and all the traditions that go with it.

I also love the art and I love making my own Day of the Dead art too. (may I never forget my New Mexico roots)

Since I haven’t really had my crafting skills on much lately (work and life and no craft space in the new apartment) I was sort of jonesing for some day of the dead art.

All it took was a few office supplies and a really long and incredibly boring conference call.






Much love and peace to all as they remember in their own way.

Happy Weekend to all!!






Photos and drawing Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the right column of this page. Photos taken with an iPhone5 and the Camera+ app.



Decision Time: Do unto others as was done unto me?

So the good news is, I get to hire a new person to my team. We really need the help. Oh boy could we use the help.

And I think we’ve found the right person for the job (after quite a long recruiting process), oh joy!!

So as the paperwork goes through approvals and I wait, I was given the go ahead to start outfitting the cubicle and equipment for this new starter.

Yay!

Now, let’s go back a bit in time. Cue the wavy lines as we go back over two years ago.

To the day when I started this job. I was fresh faced and full of optimism and enthusiasm and other words ending in m.

My new boss ushered me to my office. Hard walls! A window! A door!

Then he handed me a laptop. Ker. Thunk.

In my previous gig I had been blissfully using a sleek, speedy Mac and this…thing…that was placed into my hands was a Dell.

A Dell. *shriek!*

Not only a Dell, but an almost three year old Dell that was running, horror of horrors, Windows XP. In the year 2010.

I was told that:

1) The Company keeps laptops for three years. Three years exactly, no early upgrades. This machine wasn’t quite three years old so tough luck kiddo.

2) Windows XP was the only authorized operating system at that time.

3) The Company does a big bulk purchase once a year and we get smoking hot discounts during that time. So even if the machine was older then three years, I couldn’t get a new one until Buying Season.

So, I did what a new hire does. I made it work. It was the slowest, saddest, boat anchor of a machine I think I’ve ever known. I bitched incessantly as it locked up and had to be restarted again. And again. And again.

I waited long enough and was a good little girl and magically buying season arrived AND my machine’s three years expired and I was finally able to order a new machine.

A brand spanking new Dell that ran…Windows XP.

Oh fine. It was faster and the keyboard didn’t contain food and hair and skin particles from my predecessor (I so wish I was kidding about that), and the screen wasn’t cracked.

So I was happy!

The piece of crap I had used was dutifully sent to recycling. I hope they crushed it.

About a year later, I had to replace someone who left my team to work in another team within the same organization. My boss told her to take her machine with her. And so she did.

When I hired someone, it was not the Buying Season and I had to dig up a boat anchor of a Dell to give him that would take a coffee and a smoke break when my employee asked it to do simple spreadsheet things.

But he was a new employee and fresh faced and full of optimism and enthusiasm and other words ending in m, and he endured. Buying Season finally came unto him and he bought a new spiffy machine, and by this time the IT organization had approved Windows 7 so he was FLYING. Pivot tables! Moving graphics on PowerPoint. Weeeee!

Which brings us back to now. I’m still using the machine that was purchased two and a half years ago. As cheap PC’s are want to do, it has sloooooowed down considerably.

My PC will have a third birthday in about six months. The start of Buying Season is about nine months away.

I can make it last. Right?

At a recent group luncheon, one of my peers (who started right around the same time I did) talked about how he’d just hired a new person too. And how he’d ordered a new machine for them (we are currently in the buying season) and how he took the new machine for himself and gave his two year old machine to the new guy.

My eyes widened. “You can do that?”

“Of course,” he said. “I got a crappy machine when I started here. It’s a tradition.”

Which got me to thinking. You see, as mentioned, it is the Buying Season now and I ordered a new machine for my new hire and this year The Company upgraded the standard from Dell to Lenovo and it’s a pretty nice machine.

It was delivered on Monday and it’s in the box under my desk right at this minute.

So. Do I break the chain and give New Employee a new machine?

Or do I scoop that damn thing up and give him my not that old and not that terrible machine?

I have a few weeks to decide just what kind of person I want to be.







Cartoon vulture found on How To Draw Cartoons Online.



Tweets From My Beloved

Yesterday on my lunchtime walk with Worm Girl she had a story she was so excited to tell me.

She lives in the same house where she grew up and when both her folks passed, she inherited it. Over the past year she has been renovating the place and updating the furniture. She’s making it her own home.

Part of that process has been uncomfortable for her. She’s been pulling everything down from overhead storage in the garage, including boxes that haven’t been opened for decades. It’s been a sad but fulfilling process to go through things that belonged to her folks along with family memories.

Over the weekend, she found a box that she thought had been long missing. It contained much of their family’s photo collection, her parents wedding photos, and a big stack of letters.

Her parents were married quite young. Her mom had moved to the US from Australia and was something like 18. Her dad was a couple years older and was in the military. After they married, he was deployed overseas and so for the first years of their marriage, their relationship existed solely via written letters back and forth.

She said, “They were so cute!” as her dad fretted about her mom learning to drive a car and the fact that “That ol’ Plymouth” kept having to be taken into the shop.

He told her the events of his days in details, almost boring minutiae, then would end with a shy proclamation of love.

At one point he was rather bold. It seems that the young wife was quite thin, too thin, and was trying to put on some weight. “I hope you’ve gained a little weight. I want you to be hale and healthy for my return, if you know what I mean.”

This part made me laugh right out loud. I said “You dad was a bold one, wasn’t he!” and she laughed too.

Then I told her I have some of my parents’ letters too. It was a lot along the same lines. Several pages of “what I did today” and wrapping up with a few love words. They are fun to read.

Which got me thinking about how great the art of letter writing used to be. It was such a valid and important means of communication and staying in touch. But it also provided a written history of the lives of these people. Something tangible to hang onto which helps the reader feel a little closer to to the past. I have letters from my Great Grandfather to my Grandfather. I never met my Great Grandfather but I sure know a lot about him by reading his stern words.

I also have one of the most beautifully written love letters I’ve ever seen that was written by my paternal Grandfather to my Grandmother. In his words I know he truly, deeply loved her.

Not that I have any kids who will pull my mementos out of storage one day, but I got to thinking about the early days of my own beautiful romance and marriage. We have a few notes and cards that are very dear to me, but I have to be honest, in those first blushing days of our relationship, we exchanged most of our correspondence over email, text message and chat.

I guess you can’t really clutch an iChat log close to your chest and cherish the memories of simpler times, can you? My godaughters won’t be able to learn about the love of Nina Karen and Uncle Good Man the way I did, by exploring old scrap books.

Time marches on, but I can’t help but feel that over time we all will have lost something of our personal and enduring history by losing the art of handwritten letters sent in an envelope with a stamp. Just not the same as a click on a screen.








Comic found on People I Know.



Family Traditions

With the insanity of a more-than-full-time job, and the crush of the holidays, I’m a little sad that I wasn’t able to make a batch of my Blue Ribbon biscochitos this year. (Long time reader Ephraim has agreed to eat extra of his wife’s batch of biscochitos in order to bring balance back to the universe)

I also didn’t get a chance to make sugar cookies.

I didn’t manage to get to that chocolate covered peanut butter ball recipe I wanted to try.

And toffee. This year I was going to make toffee.

I didn’t get any of that done.

Thankfully, one family tradition did manage to squeeze through my kitchen as we near the holiday.

When I was growing up, my mom used to make these fabulous cream cheese mints. I always considered them to be so elegant and classy. Posh, as the Brits would say.

I remember my mom wrapped up a beautiful box of mints and gave them to my kindergarten teacher (who I idolized). She sent my mom a gushing thank you note. For some reason that stuck with me.

Through the magic of the internet, I was able to find myself a set of candy molds that approximated my mom’s collection, and Thursday night I put all else aside and whipped up a batch.

Tasty treats. Family lore.

Happy Christmas Eve to us all!!




This tin was supposed to make its way to work to share. It didn’t make it to work. More for me!



So pretty!!




Photos Copyright 2011, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons on the right column of this page. Photos taken with an iPhone4s and the Hipstamatic app.


That There is a Winner!

As the Holiday season draws to a close, just two days now until “The Big Day” those of us at work come together for our annual “What Did You Get From The Suppliers?” comparison event.

As I started my career working for the government, I rather enjoy being in private industry where we can accept small tokens from the companies we work with.

Now let me just say, I’m usually the big loser in these competitions because I work with the telco commodity. Those companies are as cheap as the day is long.

I thought I had a pretty good entry this year for Worst Present. I got this tacky plexiglass picture frame that sits in a weird base and when I put the plastic part into the base, it immediately broke.

And then, I got ANOTHER one in the mail the next day. Their sales team clearly didn’t coordinate.

So I brought that out and declared it the worst gift of 2011.

But I got trumped and trumped hard.

“Oh NO!” I heard from the corner. “I can beat that.”

Beat that, she did.

Behold:






Now, it helps to know that the recipient of this present is a very classy, stylish girl from the City. She’s quite Coco Chanel and Jimmy Choo.

To make this gift even more charming, it was handed to my coworker while still wrapped in the plastic shopping bag from the Dallas airport.

Obviously I had to concede the race. I reboxed my broken plexiglass frame in defeat.

By the way, the lady with the worst gift is also the winner of the most and best gifts too. She works in temporary staffing. Those suppliers fall all over themselves to give stuff away at the holidays.

I need to consider working in a new group. This annual defeat, even in the worst category, is gosh darn humbling.

And for as ungrateful as I may seem, I really do enjoy the little trinkets our suppliers send.
.
.
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Especially when it is a box of See’s candy.