A woman in harmony with her spirit...

"A woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing. She goes where she will without pretense, and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself, and only herself." ~ Maya Angelou

This week at work our whole team - all 15 of us - have been face-to-face for the first time, ever. We have had people visiting from Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada), Irving (Texas, USA), Egham (England) and Singapore. It's been a pretty neat experience all around.

Yesterday morning we did an ice-breaker, a get-to-know-you kind of exercise in which we had to answer questions anonymously with one or two words and then guess who had filled out which form when the answers were read out loud. I described myself using the words that came to me first, not over-thinking it, and was the first one finished. When it came time to guess, I was consistently guessed for almost every submission, except for the ones using descriptors like "sporty" or "adventurous", and my own.

Finally, on the fourth time my sheet was read, and after 12 of the 15 profiles had been accurately guesses, they put me together with my submission.

I've been trying to figure out since whether I don't project myself the same way I see myself, or if in the 8 1/2 months I've been there, people haven't been paying much attention, or if it's some combination of the two.

This has caused me to really think about how I see myself, and how I think I project "me". I've come back to the quote at the top of this post. That may not be quite how I'm doing things right now, but it's certainly where I'm heading: to being me, and only me.

Father's Day Lunch

For a number of different reasons, I have been spending more time experimenting with food the past few months. Yesterday, I decided to take ideas from Angry Chicken, my Weight Watchers meeting and Noirbettie and throw them together in one meal. I was so excited by it that it wasn't until half way through lunch that I remembered to take a picture for the Today's Homemaker Flickr pool!

I roasted beets and russet potatoes in some olive oil with some garlic (this is the part from Angry Chicken). While that was going, I bbq'd some bacon wrapped steaks, and made a viniagrette out of 1/8 of a cup each of maple syrup (the real stuff), apple cider vinegar and olive oil, about 5 strawberries and a couple of slices of red onion (blended using a hand blender so that it was all frothy and pink). I tossed the viniagrette and roasted potatos and beets with more sliced strawberries, spinach and boston lettuce, then sliced the steaks and put them on top of the salad, and sprinked the whole thing with some sunflower seeds.

The bun on the side of my bowl came from the same local farm the lettuce, spinach and straberries came from, and the butter is the stuff I made using Noirbettie's post about making butter.

Yum!

Short List

Boo:

• Weather is making me cranky and icepick headache stabby
• Allergies are out of control and otc remedies are not cutting it
• Certain websites don't want to load at home now that husband put in funny router thing
• My iPod sounds like it's playing underwater.

Bleh.

Yay:

• We have air-conditioning at home, saving both people and animals from expiring in crazy, all-of-a-sudden-it's-August heat
• Husband has hit his more social time of the year which means that we're now spending time with friends together
• We're going on vacation in about six weeks to a cottage on a lake
• I got cast in Guelph Little Theatre's fall production of "Welcome Back To The 5 & dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean"!

Woohoo!