The Job Hunt Continues...

I am now six weeks into the job search and am about to have my first in person interview (I have had phone interviews, but this is the first face-to-face). Let's hope I remember how to be impressive in person! I am flying out to Stamford, CT to interview with a great company out there that needs a Sr. Director for Performance Improvement - right up my alley.

I find it interesting that with all of the cities I have been to around the world, including several in CT, Stamford is not one of them. So, if any of you have ever been to Stamford, send me your thoughts! It's a great position but it does mean relocating and leaving behind family and friends here and selling my house which is always a daunting task. I have however embraced the fact that no matter what new job I take, it will require relocating so I am just thinking of it as the next adventure in my life.

I am also interviewing with a company out in the Bay area that is looking for a Sr. Director of Training and Development. We are still in the phone interview phase on that one. The crazy thing about this one is that their office in San Jose is literally across the street from my old apartment there. Wouldn't that be funny if life came full circle and I ended up working there?

It's great to have a couple of prospects out there and I will post again to tell you how the interview in CT goes...in the meantime, keep those job tips coming.

One Man's Junk is Another Man's Treasure

My boss at my current gig (VP of Marketing for GiveMeAPlayoff.com), is a man of a thousand ideas and one of his latest is to hold a consignment style garage sale every Saturday morning. We spent a week gathering all sorts of items and held our first sale last Saturday. First, let me say that the number of people who rolled in at 7:00am was astounding to me! Who in the world voluntarily gets up that early on a Saturday?

Anyway, we had a good sale and I personally made $70. My favorite part of the whole thing is that most of the money came from my two coworkers! One bought the smelly shelf (this would be the black corner shelf that my brother Matt and I built and whose smell took over my whole house until I was forced to banish it to the garage) and another bought an old suitcase that I had. They bought an old laptop case, a decorated box that has sat in my basement collecting dust, books, videos, and DVD's I haven't looked at in years, etc. I asked them if this week they just wanted to come over to my house and choose what they wanted thus saving me the trouble of carting it all the way to the sale.

So this is all by way of saying that I now look at everything in my house with a more critical eye - do I really need that? How much can I get for that at the garage sale? My pile of items just keeps growing. If I am not careful, I am going to end up in an empty house with nothing to do but count my garage sale profits (paid of course in one dollar bills). (Oh yeah, if you live in Utah and you want to sell anything, let me know!).

A Few Thoughts on Friendship

In the last 60 days I have the chance to reconnect with many of the women I have been friends with at critical periods throughout my life. A common thread I found was that it didn't matter whether we had last seen each other 10 years ago or 10 days ago, our friendships slipped back into place, without apology or awkwardness, as if no time had passed.

In February I attended the wedding of my friend Nancy and reunited with the women who befriended me and supported me when, as a 24 year-old, knowing no one, I picked up and moved to the San Francisco Bay area to begin my next adventure. These are the women I spent my twenties with as we found ourselves, found our careers, found out we were capable of doing and being more than we had yet imagined, and in the end, became adults.



A couple weeks later I went to lunch with the women who were my high school pals and allies. These are the women who took a shy 15 year old and made her a cheerleader. They got me through high school, first dates, first heartbreaks, and all the drama that comes with being a teenage girl.

Finally, I had the chance last night to go to dinner and a movie with my college friends. These are the women who transitioned with me from girlhood to womanhood. Together in this period of intense academic learning, while we also learned how to run a school, stick to a budget, and how to work for a living, we also began to learn, step-by-step, who we were and who we wanted to be. We took those first tentative steps into adulthood together and instilled in each other a confidence that has served me well all my life.

Lesli (see picture below), one of my bay area friends, made the observation that we were very lucky to have gathered around us, at such a formative time in our lives, such strong, intelligent, capable women and how that doesn't happen very often in a person's life.

As I look back on the friends I have had throughout my life, I find that I have been blessed again and again to be surrounded by, and friends with, such strong, intelligent, and capable women.

So this post is a shout out to all of my girlfriends, past and present, pictured here or not, for being such stupendous role models and for giving me such a solid and unwavering support system through all of life's journeys.