Earth Day…

Thanks to the new Division wide “Green Team”, we had a little Earth Day shindig at the office. It involved “fun” snacks (which we learned did not include carrots/broccoli/veggie dip), Earth Day trivia contest complete with eco friendly prizes and a little surprise for everyone to have on their desks. Part of my morning was spent with a couple of coworkers covering milk cartons (like we all had in grade school) with paper wrappings containing green sayings…Recycle, turn off lights, etc. Aren’t these cute?

It even had a little flag made from address labels and coffee stir sticks that said Do Your Part. Who knew all that creativity could come from Finance?

Happy Anniversary…

In honor of my 1 year anniversary (Today) at the American Cancer Society, I give you a taste of working downtown.

I went to open one of my office windows earlier this week and noticed the road across the street was closed. So what did I do…took pictures of course.

Turned out to be a commercial shoot for the law firm across the street. My boss and I watched as they filmed the exact same scene multiple times. Shockingly enough, they weren’t very good.

First, one guy walks down the stairs and meets up with another guy. Next, they closely exam a set of what I’m sure is very important papers (probably their lines).  I saw this exact scene enough times that I got bored and never saw them actually move passed it.

In another prime example of working downtown…I drove past this lovely scene on the way home tonight.

Sorry about the very small amount of actual photo but I was driving and trying to be stealthy. So direct your eyes to the right hand corner. That would be a police van with cops putting people into the back in hand cuffs. Oh yeah and there were three cop cars and another van. On the bright side though, I didn’t see any SWAT vehicles.

I’m off to enjoy my celebratory Chipolte!

Best in show…

at least where costumes are concerned. On Friday, our office had a Halloween bash complete with contests for best costume, best door decorations, and best pumpkin decorating. It was a very entertaining afternoon. As a whole the finance department was not real into the whole dressing up thing. Then another department came down to “say hi” (spy on the competition) and we decided that maybe they needed some true competition. Now on to the pictures…

This is Finance…a Chief, a girl who started not long after me, myself and a VP. Our VP had the sudden idea that we should be dressed as disgruntled Chiefs fans. She gets all the credit for our Best Costume win. We were missing the other two finance staffers in our office, that is until the pumpkin decorating contest.

The gourd is my boss who is from Texas and so she is always “blinged” out. The little one is our accounting VP, who had taken the day off to go with friends to as many Chipolte’s as possible dressed as burritos so they could get free ones. So we made him a burrito. The Chief decided that this is what would happen from now on if you were gone on Halloween…just wait till April Fool’s Day.

Our entire office…one department came as different animals.

Randomness through photos…

This picture sums up my day…

I spent so much time waiting for one of the slow as molasses websites to load that I started drawing on anything available. My desk got very colorful!

While roaming Barnes & Noble on Saturday I stumbled across this book…

All I have to say to that title is AMEN! And I saw this calendar…

First thought…I love Dilbert. Second thought…it might as well say Dwight and not Dilbert.

Question mark??

Tuesday morning, I came into work and noticed something odd on the table in our work area.

As people started filtering into the office, various theories of what exactly it was were thrown out. Now before someone asks, I do not need to flip the photo. It really was backwards, hence our confusion. The most immediate thought is that it was a backwards question mark. But why backwards? Throughout the day, various people from other parts of the building walked by and gave their opinions as to what it was and who did it. Some of the more creative ones…fish hook and a noose. Someone suggested that maybe we have staffer who is dyslexic. By late afternoon as a few of us worked frantically to finish a report for our national office by the end of the day, we decided to break into the candy. We did have a rule that you had to follow in order to take a piece…You had to create a new symbol or word with the remaining pieces. We had things like the word “Who” and an arrow pointing to the VP’s office. It got quite entertaining. Today we got it to an equal sign and then a dash. Can you tell it’s the end of the year for us and our minds are almost gone?

In other pictures, these are the lovely little signs along the highway that tell you how long it will take to get to a certain exit or where an accident is located.

This morning it was NOT my friend. I only have to drive 10 miles to the office, typically it takes 12-15 minutes in the morning. Today was not one of those days. I got onto the highway and while it was a little slow, it picked up to normal fairly quickly until just before the sign that says I have 8 miles to get to my exit. This morning that nice, little sign said 25 minutes… to go EIGHT miles! Yeah, that’s the way to start the morning.

Finally, I started in a new small group tonight at church. It’s through the women’s ministry and I didn’t know what age range etc. these women would be. Two of the girls there tonight are my age and another is a little older than us. The funny part is that four of the six there tonight work in the non-profit arena. Pretty cool huh? I think it’ll be good to get to know some people in the church and get more involved.

It’s official…

It’s really been official for awhile now but I got my nameplate so it seems more real. That combined with the fact that a couple of the guys from school have started back to classes without me. And before you ask, no, I don’t miss it and yes, I have rubbed it in.

August…

Can you see me?

You guessed it, I’m the big black blob in the center of the picture. The reason for my being a blob is not poor picture quality or angle or anything like that. It’s because I work downtown.

Today was so hot that
the power company asked everyone downtown to try and conserve energy in order to avoid a brown out. Their suggestions ran from turning off unnecessary electronics to turning off lights in offices with windows. So everybody in the finance department worked without lights, as we all have at least one window. Let’s just say that it made us all very sleepy today…and apparently will do the same thing tomorrow.

Where’s my shoe phone…

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about…RUN and go see Get Smart! I can’t begin to tell you the number of times someone held up a shoe when talking during our finance department meeting. And people think finance people are boring. The last two days have been meeting after meeting and tomorrow means finally getting back to work…it’s not going to be pretty, especially since I was at training most of last week. These are a few of the photos I took while in St. Louis for training.

Since I haven’t really blogged since I got back from training I thought I’d do a bullet point review, which is much more interesting for us all.

• While trying to say some other word that I can’t think of, it came out that we brainwash our employees. Let’s just say that the mistaken word got a really long laugh.
• I have a new respect for those who work with volunteers on a regular basis…you wouldn’t believe the stories that I heard.
• I can list a word for every letter of the alphabet that has to do with the organization (okay so I had help from the rest of my team)
• When in need of a team mascot that will be judged by the Chief of Government Relations, go “green”…it made all the difference in our points.
• People make you do really stupid things in group training meetings under the guise of fun…case in point, making up/performing a cheer for your team.
• I discovered my inner cheerleader.
• It pays to work in the division level especially in the corporate office, especially when that means you get an easy question during the videotaped “So Glad You Asked” training.

I’m guessing that at this point those who really know me are wanting more details regarding my “inner cheerleader” moment. If you didn’t want them, stop reading now.

Through out our three days of training we played games as teams for points as a way to break up the lectures. First we had to come up with a team name and mascot which we made posters for. We created these posters after the first team game and someone called my table the “Megastars”. In the name of full disclosure, it really wasn’t a fair game for me to play as the fact that I do coding for the entire division means that I know EVERY office we have and we were listing as many offices as possible. Well we took the megastar theme and went in a slightly different direction. We named ourselves the “Megawatts” and our mascot was an eco-friendly lightbulb. You know, one of those twisty lightbulbs. Oh, I just remembered that I took a photo of the poster…

So when it came to the cheer game, we decided to make it based on our mascot. Let’s just say that I had a few more ideas than I am willing to admit to. It was incredibly cheesy and went something like this:

Electrocute the cancer, Illuminate the Cure….blah blah blah.

Anyway, that’s the gist of the cheerleader story… and I’ve now bored you all enough.

Slip, slap, slop…

Today was a long, cold, coffee filled day of doodling for me. This morning started our training for New Staff and the part before breakfast wasn’t too bad. They did a good overview of the American Cancer Society and then split us up by the two main groups of staff. My friend and I stayed with the Income Development group because they were going to get a crash course in what the Health Initiatives side does. With being in Finance, I know all about the income side and things like the Relay for Life. I also recognize the names of most of the programs but don’t really know what all they do. So the HI overview was pretty good too. Then we had a great pasta bar lunch with orange sorbet for dessert! Unfortunately the day had to keep going.

After lunch started the in depth on the volunteers and how to recruit and retain them. I have ZERO interaction with the volunteers as did about five others from our big group. Let’s just say there was a lot of doodling going on. Some of the stuff they talked about was kind of interesting, but the majority of it was putting me into some sort of daze where I know that I was awake because I had a couple pages of doodles yet I couldn’t tell you what they really talked about. It has been fun putting faces with some of the names that I have been emailing since I started. It’s funny how different some people look from what I imagined and how others look exactly like I imagined.

At night, our hotel has free “adult” drinks and popcorn and nachos so after our giant lunch and constant sugar intake in order to help keep us awake, we had that for dinner and then crashed. We have plans to head over to the Arch tomorrow (which is the whole reason I brought my camera) night after we sit through another day of games, managing the volunteer relationships and HR overview. I know…you’re envious, aren’t you? The worst part won’t come till Thursday morning when we split our big group in two and have “So Glad You Asked!” training…that is video taped for some unknown reason. I spotted a Starbucks a block over from our hotel when we arrived from the airport, so I will be heading over there before the dreaded training starts for some especially gigantic coffee!

The title of today’s post is the current month’s campaign advocating the prevention of skin cancer by…slipping on a shirt, slapping on a hat and slopping on sunscreen. I guess I did learn something today.

Working girl…

Here I sit in my sweet “little” hotel room waiting for my new staff training that starts bright and early tomorrow. During an improptu group lunch today with the finance bigwigs, they all said how nice this hotel was…they weren’t kidding! I’m in a room by myself with a king sized bed and a window which overlooks this…

Before you ask what this building is, don’t, because I don’t know. All I know is it was out my window and begging to be photographed! I’m on this trip with the other girl who started not long after I did, which is great! She was so excited to come here because she had never seen the Arch. Little did we know, that we would end up at a hotel that is practically right across the street from it! So she and I are going to trek over there some evening so that I can photographed it/her since she has the classic mom problem of never being in any pictures. Just a word of warning, this blog may have some entertaining posts over the next few days. I have a feeling that my sarcasm will be brought to full force with this training. So stay tuned…

Oh and I just realized that I am suppose to do something with the lovely little award that mom gave me…tomorrow night I’ll do it! Promise, mom!