Best of 2011

I thought I'd bring back the traditional of the Best of posts this year. I managed to accidentally skip last year, but here's the one from 2009.

2011 has really been a truly crazy year. I feel like I've turned life upside down and things are just starting to finally settle in a good place. The upside of this is that there are a lot of great things that have happened during this crazy year for me to reflect upon. Here's an assortment in no particular order.

1. Travel: Italy & Australia - I doubled the number of times that I've been out of the country in my whole life this year and added a new continent.
2. Graduating from Haas - How did the 2 years of b-school fly by already? I'm glad to be done, but do find myself missing the community, growing opportunities, and fun of Haas.
3. Starting my post-Haas career at eBay - So far so good on my re-entry into the real world. It has been a bit of an adjustment, but I'm getting to hang of it again.
4. Moving out of Berkeley - I have looked forward to moving out of Berkeley pretty much ever since I moved there. I loved my classmates, but am so glad to be done with all of the Berzerkeley crazies.
5. Surviving another Nike Half Marathon - ChuThis and I survived another Nike Half. Not our best race, but we made it and had a good time in the process. It's apparently becoming an annual tradition.
6. Winning the most team steps in a day prize in the office turkey challenge - this was both a great way to help me meet new people in the office as well as get off the couch and back into running shape. Hopefully, I can keep this up with my 2012 fitness goals.
7. Seeing the successes and life changes of my classmates and friends (weddings, babies, successful startups) - 8 weddings, at least as many babies, friends with newspaper articles, NPR interviews, successful startups (go Modify!), and so many others. It was great to share in all of your successes this year.
8. Making some really good life decisions for me - while never a fun thing to do, I'm really proud of how I have taken charge of my life this year and really worked to shape its direction instead of just riding with the tides. I'm on a much better course now and can't wait to see where I end up next.
9. Keeping in touch with old friends (no matter the distance) and making new ones - as we move and grow in life, it's really great to keep connecting with friends from the past in addition to meeting new people as you go.
10. More painting & creative pursuits- see my previous post...

All in all, it was definitely a very challenging year, but I have come out on the other side a better and stronger person. Here's to the new challenges and adventures that 2012 brings!

Sunnyside Up's Best of 2008

Since everyone else has been doing a best of 2008 blog post, I thought I should join in and pull one together as well. I'm borrowing the format that JulyDream used in her best of 2008 post to use in mine. I aimed to come up with the best 25 things of 2008 because I turned a quarter century in 2008, but I was only able to get to 17, so here goes the best 17 of 2008! (Note: these are in no particular order)

1. the beginning of dessert night
2. starting the business school application process
3. taking the GMAT finally
4. the Valentine's Day pillow fight (well the whole valentine's day experience)
5. the beginning of Sunnyside Up!
6. switching to a new job that didn't require traveling
7. leaving that new job and moving to one that required my brain
8. Spinsters' Annual Ball
9. J's Hanukkah adventure
10. MixMatch's trip to Baltimore
11. discovering Lululemon & Bar Method
12. Elizabeth's wedding trip to Longmont, CO
13. getting my dream Kitchen Aid mixer
14. the puppy cam
15. the Fois Gras appetizer at Ecco (technically discovered in 2007, but so tasty that it carried over)
16. finally getting decent knives
17. learning to wakeboard and ski

All in all, 2008 was a great year. I can't wait to see what 2009 has in store.

Crazy Day!!

Apparently, just before holidays or long weekends, work gets totally out of control as clients are worried about having a couple of days off and who's covering for who. We're cramming last minute code changes into production and getting everything ready to go for the end of the fiscal year for many companies. Also, HR decided that we didn't quite have enough to do so piled on annual reviews on top of everything else. It's kind of weird for me because this is the first time that I have to do reviews for people who report to me. Now, they don't formally report to me as in I really have a serious input into their career, but they do report to me on projects that we're working on which makes me much more involved in their career than I have been in past positions. It's just a weird spot to be to realize that I actually manage people and have that kind of input into their career progression.

On that note, I must get back to commenting on their performance....oh and writing my own self-review as well.

I Can't Believe It's Already August?!?!?

It's just SOOO insane that it's already August. Were did all of the time go? It feels like it should be the beginning of July or even earlier! I was just starting to stop wearing sweaters to work (ok, maybe not since it's freezing in my office) and all of the summer fun was ahead of us.

Perhaps it's because I use the impending date of my birthday to judge how much summer is left and since it's already this weekend, I'm feeling like this summer is already over. It has been a busy summer. I've been home to Monterey probably about 4 times, maybe more, been to Colorado with J, been to concerts, birthday nights out, eaten tons of crepes at the best crepe stand in the city (thanks Alan for introducing us to it), and we're getting ready to go to Baltimore for the Virgin Mobile Music Festival this coming weekend. All in all, despite the speed at which life is flying at me, it's really good. I really like my new job a lot. I have a great set of friends that I've done all sorts of fun stuff with this summer.

In spite of all of the good things, it is a harsh reminder that I'm rather behind on a lot of the things that I wanted to do this summer. It's good for me to see my friends head off to their new adventures for the school yeah and either start business school, head back to law school or finally join the real world after finishing some sort of post-grad work. I see that perhaps that's something that still might be interesting for me despite the fact that I really have no reason why I want to go to business school anymore and this might not be the right time in my life for what I thought I wanted out of business school (but I'm not going into a philosophical discussion in this post, I promise).

I'm just shocked at how fast this summer's gone! I guess it's time to buckle down and start really making a dent in all of those things that I wanted to accomplish before the summer's officially over.

Life: How Fast Things Change

As the summer sort of starts to wind down and I finally have time to catch up with people that I haven't seen or talked to in a while, the changes that everyone has been experiencing lately. Now I'm not talking about the friends who've gotten married or moved to a different state or country as the only example here. I do have a fair number of friends who are moving off to grad schools or different jobs in different places. I guess I'm more talking about people who appear to be in the same place in life physically and they've totally emotionally moved or changed and grew. It's really quite amazing.

This past year for me has been a bit insane: 3 different companies, worked in 2 states, almost two new apartments, reconnected with many old friends, made many new ones. But that's not really the important part of the story or what made me write this post. The biggest differences are in the person that I was then compared to the person that I am now. It's interesting how throughout the year I've gone from a very not happy person to very happy person to a very not happy person and back again to a happy person. Fundamentally, nothing has changed besides my outlook on life and how I've allowed myself to be treated.

Now that I've actually blogged about this, I'm not sure it was worth blogging about. There has just been a lot going on in my head and I thought that perhaps by putting it down on paper would make it all clearer somehow. I'm not sure that it has and I appreciate your participation in this effort. It is interesting though to look at gates or chapters in your own life and compare your current state with the state you were in before you went through the last gate and see how much you've changed.

The GMAT Giant

Ok so the title of this post is mildly misleading because the GMAT is big, but hundreds of thousands of people have survived and overcome this giant so it is not insurmountable.

As a college senior, I somehow managed taking the GRE, the grad school application process, 2 theses and a host of other fun and academic related things so I know that it's definitely possible for me to still have fun, get my work done and do well on the GMAT. Nonetheless, balance in life is hard when you try to do everything.

Looking around at the world more since college, I've seen lots of really successful who don't work at maximum capacity and tons of sort of successful people who put in little to no effort at all. This has allowed me to start to relax my idea of what hard work really is or how time consuming it has to be. Also, for the last 5 months, I've been only working a 40 hour week which was something really unusual to me. I really didn't have the option of working more if I wanted to mostly because there was no more work to do and if there was work, it was boring so I didn't want to do it. This left lots of free time for fun so the balance in life has swung towards "life" instead of work.

Now, I'm back in a job where I could work 24/7 if I wanted to. At the moment, I'm still enjoying my "life" so don't want to work too much. But now GMAT and grad school applications need to make their way into that life. I know that I will have to make sacrifices and not be able to do everything to buckle down and study for the GMAT. I know I can do it, but I've always hated missing out on fun things.

The GMAT isn't insurmountable, but it definitely means that key sacrifices will need to be made. I just have to keep looking at the end goal of 2 great years in grad school, but first I have to tackle the GMAT Giant.

It's all about finding that balance between things that need/have to be done and the things that I want to do. But, that's life and we all keep learning.

Officially a Corporate Monkey

Yesterday, I officially became a corporate monkey at my new job. I finally got a corporate issue Blackberry 8700. For those of you SmartPhone junkies, this appears to be the most basic of SmartPhones. It has no cool trackball like the Blackberry Curve and is definitely massive! (I feel like I'm talking on a pancake when I am on the phone.

I have to admit as someone who's been resisting SmartPhones since I joined the work force 3 years ago, it's not as bad as I thought. The first thing I did was download Google Maps and Google Talk for Blackberries and that definitely helped my perception of the device. The Google Talk app is very cool and rather usable. Ironically, almost everyone who talks to me on IM on my phone couldn't call me if they wanted to as it is supposed to be a purely work phone. I did resist the urge to get Blogger for my phone. I figured it would be vastly faster to just blog at my computer since I type SOOO slowly on this thing.

It has been mildly handy so far, so I will resist making negative comments. It's just an opportunity for me to say no to work even when it's so convenient.

It's Been a While

So, it's been quite a while since my last blog and since I haven't been working I really have no excuse for not blogging. Lots of things have happened...

My last day at Genentech was 5/30. I'm very excited to be done and moving on to newer and better things. Really the only things that I miss are several of my co-workers and most of all my MacBookPro. But my own MacBookPro is in the mail, so I will have my own soon!

Immediately after ending my adventures at Genentech, I started to move into my new apartment and that's where the drama started. My new landlord was relatively unreasonable about getting things fixed and refused to clean the apartment. She kept claiming that she was used to dealing with "adults" who were more mature. Luckily, I was able to sign a new lease for my old apartment and get out of my lease with her so I didn't have to deal with that drama for a whole year.

While some of that apartment drama was getting fixed, I hung out at home in Pebble Beach with my parents and chilled, went to yoga and generally hung out. That was a very nice change of pace and good that I was totally away from everything that was happening here so I couldn't worry about it as much. Sadly, my great Aunt passed away at the beginning of my vacation, so the second half of the week was spent traveling to and attending her funeral. It was definitely sad, but she'd been rather lost since her husband passed away 4 years ago and it was a good opportunity to reconnect with some family that we hadn't seen in a while.

J and I went to Live 105's BFD on Saturday and got to hang out and hear some great tunes and chill amidst dealing with some of the challenges of the venue like ATMs without cash and the lack of a lawn for relaxing. It was definitely a good day, but a tiring one.

The last three days of my vacation have been probably the best because I really got to exist in a relaxed state. I spent the first week getting to that state and then have gotten to enjoy it. I got to do some things around my apartment, besides unpacking, that I've wanted to do for a while and got to catch up on my movies and tv too.

Somewhere in the vacation mix was a chill dessert night of ice cream sundaes (thanks to L1 for all of the supplies). There are no pictures unfortunately, but I promise I will get back into formal blogging mode for tonight's dessert night.

All in all, it's been a really great and relaxing vacation. I'm very excited to start at E2Open tomorrow and it's been really really good for me to get a lot of that tension out of my system so I can start my new adventures totally relaxed.

Lots of Changes

Last Friday was a big day for me. Within an hour, I quit my second full time job ever and told my apartment complex that I was moving out. Kind of insane to be unemployed and homeless within an hour.

Despite the fact that they are both really good changes (aka. a much better and more fun job and a bigger and quieter and just as nice apartment), it's still a bit nerve wracking to make such big changes at the same time. But it also leaves you with this oddly really freeing feeling.

Everything happens for a reason and I'm looking forward to this clean slate in life. I just need to remember to luxuriate in the freeing feelings that it leaves me with instead of stressing about how it will all get accomplished.

Awesome Rewards for a Less than Stellar Job

Ok so yes, I'm a recovering overachiever, so things like this bug me.

Consider the following situation....
You slap together a presentation in less than 30 mins that is going to a very important audience to convince them of something and present it to your boss thinking that it is a first draft and that he or she will improve upon it before sending it off as the final version. Instead, your boss sends your first draft off as the final version with no changes.

So the realist would say "who cares because you still end up better off in the end and you conserved energy that you would have possibly expended to achieve the same result." Somehow the overachiever in me disagrees. I relish those moments where you've worked really hard for something and every ounce of that hard work paid off.

I feel awkward accepting rewards for things that are less that my best work. Growing up, it was all about just doing your best. I guess that message stuck and so it's hard for me to except rewards that come from doing less than my best.

I'm learning though that working hard all of the time does not get me everything that makes me happy in life. My last 4 months of working at Genentech has taught me that with my increased spare time. Maybe this new frame of reference will help me to be more accepting of these situations where I am recognized for more than the effort that I put into it.

WANTED: Extremely professional high schooler

This realization has slowly come to me over the last week or so...but here it goes...

I was sitting at work on Friday afternoon at 5:30 waiting for the printer to spit out copies of a presentation that I didn't get to help write and definitely won't be giving, but needed to have stapled before 8am on Monday morning. Wow, what a waste of time! Not an uncommon realization for me at work recently, but the thought that came next was...

"I could pay a high schooler a nice wage of $15 an hour and sit at home and not have to work on the rest of what I'm paid."

That's just such a tempting thought. Granted it would never work, but wow. Still if you know of any very mature and professional high schoolers, send them my way!