In the past, I’ve written about how terrified the seven year old Joan was of tag games. I have grown up a bit such that being tagged by misscipher is not scary, but is in fact a useful prompt for self reflection.

10 things I love

1. Dancing to songs with a rhythm so clear and catchy that I can’t not move
2. Going to restaurants with my mum, dad and brother
3. People at work telling me that they appreciate what I do
4. Mangoes in summer
5. Blogging
6. Taking photos, making them look nice, then sharing them with other people
7. Reading fantasy and science fiction books
8. Having a personal project, like setting up a new blog and researching to buy a gadget
9. Challenging and interesting discussions with Damjan
10. Food and farmers’ markets

Only 10 allowed? I can think of a few more.

10 things I don’t like

1. Myself when I forget that I don’t know everything
2. People who use their cameras and/or camera flashes in museums, churches, aquariums, on the London Eye (this enrages me)
3. The idea that climate change and energy is the only or most important sustainability issue
4. People who avoid their responsibility to deal with unpleasant or difficult situations
5. Savoury drinks
6. Certain foods that feel slippery in my mouth
7. Unshakable faith in the sanctity of markets
8. People who don’t try to see things from other people’s point of view
9. Living on a main street, where the noise of cars, motorcycles, trucks and emergency vehicles make it hard to sleep
10. Jogging and running

5 random things

1. Following the relative success of my chocolate ban, I am now two weeks into a ‘crisp and chip’ ban.
2. For three years, I kept a daily journal because I felt like it was the ‘right’ thing to do. It was only in my fourth year that I started to look forward to writing in it. I am now in my seventh year.
3. I used to think that I would be happy enough living in a rented house. Now that I’ve lived in three flatshares in three years, I am really looking forward to buying a home and making it my own.
4. There are 136 websites in my Bloglines RSS reader.
5. I am going to Mauritius next week to see my best friend Kate (who taught me how to chew gum) get married to Avi.

I tag…

• Yap
• Cobi
• Kaye

Brain… slow.

Have I typed anything in the last ten minutes?

Sugar! I need sugar!

Nothing in my drawer. Supplies are out.

Mariane, do you have anything?

I’ll try the kitchen.

(wake up, wake up)

THERE! Grapes, melon, orange, apple.

Mrmph, mmmrm, rmph. Left-overs from meetings, mmmrm…

Saved.

On my way to work, there is a section of road where rain water creates a puddle so large, that cars have to swerve to get around it.

One morning, as I walked toward this section, I heard a shriek. A truck had decided not to dodge the puddle. In hurtling through it, the poor girl walking in front of me was drenched.

I stopped. There was no way I was walking past that puddle while cars zoomed by. I looked back to get my timing right. When I spotted a break in the traffic, I sprinted into, through and past the splash zone. I was safe.

How bizarre and interesting!

The Age reports, ‘No turbulence at A380 superjumbo restaurant‘.

Imagine boarding a plane without security checks or even tickets and more importantly, there’s more than just fish or chicken for dinner.

Set in a dull commercial building in central Taipei, the A380 In-Flight Kitchen looks and functions like an airline in many ways, expect that it serves a regular restaurant menu of Western food, sometimes in plastic trays.

From the picture gallery the food doesn’t look all that much better than real aeroplane food. However, as I was growing up, any Western food was exciting. My favourite thing about being in hospital for a week whe I was 12 years old was the food. Mmm… Aeroplane Jelly.

Retravision is one of the biggest electrical goods retailers in Australia, and each of its stores is privately owned.

Last Christmas, my family visited a Retravision store. This one is in at one of Melbourne’s south-east Asian community clusters.  It was the kind of neighbourhood where all the store signs are in Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Hindu, and where a white Australian person would be vastly outnumbered.

As my parents talked to the salesperson, I wandered around the store. I love electronics so I am easily occupied in such stores. However, an inspection of this Retravision did not yield the typical delights. Currently, I’m interested in noise-cancelling headphones but the headphones section consisted merely of five earbud-style models. The camera section was paltry, with no digital SLRs. I did find three minutes of entertainment on the massage chair.

So if there were no headphones, cameras or computers, what was taking up all the space in the store?

Well, a quarter of the floorspace was devoted entirely to karaoke — speakers, mixers, microphones, amplifiers, disc players. That’s where my parents were, interrogating the salesperson about the specs for a wireless receiver and microphones.

You’re not too surprised, are you, considering the neighbourhood? This Retravision store owner definitely knows his market.

In this age of cheap no-frills flying, it seems extravagant that on the 2.5 hour flight from London to Lisbon, we were served breakfast.

I expected a bread roll — a packaged croissant, if we were lucky. Imagine my pleasure, then, in being handed a warm foil-wrapped package. I could smell something yummy inside.

I tore it open to find a toasted tomato roll. Well, actually, it was a toasted cheese and tomato roll but I didn’t find out until halfway through. In melting, the cheese must have sunk to the bottom.

Wolfgang and Rosangela showed me their silvery packages. They too had found a pool of cheese stuck to the bottom of the wrapper.

Wolfgang remarked, ‘They must heat the rolls standing up. It seems like a fundamentally silly thing to do. Don’t you think they would have worked it out by now?’

After three days working in Lisbon, Damjan flew in to join us on Friday night. He arrived at 11:30pm, a bit tired but ready to see the sights.

‘Have you had dinner yet?’ I asked.

‘Oh, enough,’ Damjan replied. ‘They gave us something on the plane. It was a ham and cheese roll.’

Wolfgang immediately asked, ‘And had all the cheese sunk to the bottom?’

Damjan looked startled. ‘Yes, actually! How did you know?’

Wolfgang, Rosangela and I just laughed.

One of my projects at work is to produce a film introducing the concept of sustainability to all the engineers, scientists, designers, project managers and support staff in my company. As usual, it’s a rush job — why do people leave things to the last minute?

I think we’ve done a pretty good job in putting together a script for the film. Four different bosses have laid down the law on what the film should say. Crafting something that will satisfy  four executive directors… It’s tricky but we managed.

I sent the final draft script to the film unit . The film unit is part of our company’s corporate communications department. Their job is to turn the script and our ideas into a coherent all-singing all-dancing message.

*Bing!*

The sound announces the arrival of an email in my inbox. It’s from Ben, the head of film.

‘As promised,’ Ben says, ‘here is the edited script. ‘We trimmed it down to fit ten minutes and changed the order of some of the ideas. Could you have a look? If it’s okay, we’ll start to put the film together.’

The attached Word document is covered in the red of track changes.

As I read through Ben’s version of the script, my heart sinks.

‘Did you see the script?’ Amanda says as she walks past my desk. Amanda is the project manager for the film.

‘Yes,’ I reply.

I have trouble with my next sentences. Amanda waits.

‘There’s nothing wrong with Ben’s changes,’ I say at last. ‘In fact, they’re really great. He didn’t change any ideas… he just made it all simpler, less formal. But not casual, either.’

Amanda nodded. ‘I thought so too. You and I, we both try to avoid jargon, but we forget how much we write in ‘report speak’.’

‘Look at this!’ I lamented. ‘I had written, “The company’s regions and sectors have each developed their own sustainability strategies to implement the objectives of the sustainability policy”. And what did Ben write? “The different parts of the company have strategies to tackle the goals of our sustainability policy…” Why didn’t I just say that? It’s so obvious now. ‘

I yowl in anguish. ‘I thought I was good at writing! But I do ‘report speak’! I don’t want to ‘report speak’!’

Amanda laughed, ‘Don’t worry, Joan. It’s his job. Corporate comms are professional communicators. You know, Ben couldn’t calculate a carbon footprint like you can.’

I am in Lisbon, Portugal. I have been working on a project here and have stayed on to be a tourist on the weekend. Damjan flew here on Friday night. We’ve had a great time eating seafood and custard tarts. We’re flying back to London in a few hours. I will have some photos from our trip soon.

I have a lot of experience setting objectives and targets. I do it for a living and I pretty well know how to put together a target, commitment or goal that actually spurs people to change what they do.

It may surprise you, then, that I have made a dumb new year’s resolution. It’s dumb because it’s not SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic or Time-bound.

My resolution is: ‘To enjoy going to the gym’.

Since coming back to the UK, I’ve been to the gym twice. Both sessions have been good — I think I enjoyed them. Does that mean that I’m keeping my resolution?

Well, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to say because ‘to enjoy’ is pretty vague. What does it mean? I also don’t know how to measure it. Am I having more fun than I had last year? Should I enjoy myself more tomorrow? What level of enjoyment should I have (whatever ‘enjoyment’ means) within three months? What about by new year’s eve 2009? Is it really possible to enjoy going to the gym or are those gym junkies deluded?

Speaking of new year’s resolutions, I brought macadamia-centred chocolates back to the UK so that my workmates could have a taste of Australia. Would you be surprised if I told you that about a quarter of the people to whom I offered a chocolate declined because they were on some kind of new year’s resolution diet?

I was astonished. How can one resist chocolate-covered macadamias?

But I shouldn’t be surprised, really. After all, I too have been on an no-chocolate regime.

Back in September last year, having completed my one month chocolate ban, I reintroduced chocolate back into my diet. For a while, it was going well. I ate a bit of chocolate here and there. But then, my chocolate eating started to ramp up. One day, just as I was putting another piece of pointless-sweet-no-flavour chocolate in my mouth, I realisedthat I had reverted back to my former ways.

So I made a new resolution and that time it was a SMART resolution. I am only allowed to eat chocolate with greater than 70% cocoa content.

Specific? Yes. I know exactly what I am allowed to eat, and not allowed to eat.

Measurable? Yes. It’s a pass/fail criterion that applies 100% of the time, although I have made exceptions for spectacular chocolate cakes on three occasions.

Achievable? Yes. If coeliacs can avoid wheat products and vegans can avoid animal products, then resisting milk chocolate should be a piddle.

Realistic? Yes. It’s not like an indefinite ban on chocolate — clearly, I would fail that resolution. With this goal, I’m allowed to have the yummiest and best chocolate but avoid the incidental stuff (e.g. team mates bringing in cakes and sweets). It’s the incidental (accidental, non-deliberate, unplanned) chocolate eating that has increased since moving to London.

Time-bound? Yes. The resolution was applied immediately and lasts forever.

Forever!