Thanksgiving, November, ah, the seasons turn…

Another month… another month that I don’t manage to make my end-of-month summary before the end of the month! Who didn’t see that coming :). Anyway, I did another review, this one on Happiness is a Choice You Make, so head on over there if that seems interesting to you.

Thanksgiving was naturally one of the highlights of the month; with the whole pandemic going on we didn’t actually venture out to visit family or anything, but my sister and I still put together a little spread for ourselves (Gardein made a “holiday roast” for vegans, so we had that, and then we had mashed potatoes [gobs and gobs of mashed potatoes… the grocery box that my sister gets most weekends almost always has a couple potatoes in there, and we don’t go through them very often], and a broccoli-bell pepper-onion dish that I’ve slowly been perfecting [I’m quite proud of it at this point, I’m planning on throwing together a page on it for the recipes section of this site sometime soon]). We had a long FaceTime call with my parents, where we and they all had our dinners together.

Last post I’d mentioned that I was preparing for a leadership class, so that took up a couple of my weekends. It was pretty motivating; a surprisingly large amount of stuff was the sort of stuff that seems like common sense, and then you get into the little breakout groups and you remember why you signed up for the course — it’s not easy! And you do have to practice. Shy / introverted as I am, it’s stepping way out of my comfort zone to do these sorts of things. But of course, that’s why I signed up for it. If I want to have more of an impact in my career, I do need to start developing these sorts of skills. On a similar note, my company has a “Toastmasters” group that meets once a month that I’ve been to a few times; this was the first time I actually participated in one of the roles — I was the “ah-counter,” so I kept track of the times the other speakers said things like “you know” or “um.” It’s a pretty fun group, and I’m enjoying getting to know some of the other folks in it. Next time I volunteered to be the facilitator… accidentally! I’d intended to sign up for another of the minor roles as I’m still learning the ropes, but by the time the president got to me among the folks volunteering, that was the only one still open. I took a deep breath and went for it. We’ll see if I crash and burn next month; I’m probably going to do a good bit of practicing an introduction and such. Which will probably a good investment… it may be a bit of throwing myself in the deep end, but hey.

I just finished reading a book called The Pragmatic Programmer. It’s something of a classic in my understanding among the world of software engineers, but I was pretty proud to find that most of the suggestions in there were already things I do (or know I should :P)! I guess that comes along with being the daughter of another software engineer. And the granddaughter of one. I used to fight back suggestions of going into the field, but now that I’ve been here for a good few years, it seems like it couldn’t have hardly been any other way.

Anyhoo, guess that’s already a pretty meaty post, I’ll sign off now. Hope you’re all doing well! Until next time.