Tid Bits

There's no express purpose to this post - just that it's been about a month since our last update, and, well, bloggers are supposed to prattle mindlessly, so I thought maybe I'd do that.


Actually, that's not quite true. I started this post, because of an interesting snippit I heard yesterday. I'm taking a Negotiations short course this weekend - 12 hours of intense classes over 3 days = 1 pass/fail credit. No finals. No papers. So the pain is definitely worth the gain. Also, the professor is really entertaining, and he's proof that lawyers don't necessarily have to practice the law: he's the former CEO of FedEx Shipping & Freight. (Coincidentally, a lot of his stories center on how hard it is to get new employees to agree to come live and work in Memphis, because it's such a horrible place. The location leads to a lot of new employees negotiating much better pay and benefits.)


Yesterday, the professor was talking about listening and hearing, and how our personalities and biology affect what we hear. To explain, he said something that really resonated with me. Studies have shown that if supervisor tells a female employee in a performance review that she has done "ok," she'll be distraught. (I believe his phrase was run to her office and cry, which I know some of us girls have done.) But, if you give that same exact review to a man, he'll walk out of the review very self congratulatory. The explanation for this is all about the scales the different sexes use to judge themselves, and women's need for specific feedback to put the term "ok" in context. But, I thought it was a great scientific affirmation of something most of us already knew, and I felt the need to share.


That was it. The whole reason for the post. I thought about discussing my latest baking adventures, like pumpkin whoopie pies! A delicious yeasty sandwich bread! But, this isn't a baking blog....yet.


Also, we sea lions have been doing some Tennessee adventuring this fall. Our friend Allison Harding, see photo, organized a trip to a pumpkin patch before Halloween. We didn't take any picture, but you can check out the farm here. It was full of llamas, sheeps, puppies, goats, chickens, cows, pigs, and donkeys. It also had a hay ride which consisted of a tractor pulling a trailer full of people sans hay for cushioning. The driver was a little sketchy looking, and we weren't at all convinced he wasn't going to take us into the woods and try to kill us, a la some horrible TV show. So, in that respect the terror was very Halloween-y. The farm must have felt that no hay ride was complete without a little wildlife viewing, so to complete the experience, they put out plastic deer and attached wooden purple racoons, foxes, and giant lady bugs to the trees along the route. All and all, a very trippy experience.


Well, it's 7:51, time to dash off to the rest of this short course! In the words of Anjelica Houston from that wondeful film Ever After, "Nothing is final until you're dead, and even then, I'm sure God negotiates."