Cool and Cold: Birthday Month, Week 2

Maybe every week of Birthday Month should end with a cupcake? This one came from Jilly's.

The full pace of work is an ever-growing reality that hit me hard this week, leaving me mostly exhausted before it was even over. Oh well, so much for easing into the new job. The transition period is all gone; now it's clearly all job. But luckily the job is still all good: no complaints, and I'm still smiling.

I guess this makes it all official.

Sometime during my all-day workshop on Monday and my half-day planning meeting (that I facilitated), my first box of SLU business cards arrived, blue fleur-de-lis and everything. Oh, how I've missed working at a school where blue is one of the official colors! Forget green and gold, orange and black, or even "blush and bashful" - blue is my signature color! (Quick: name that play/movie.)

People are still asking me if I am doing okay with the winter weather. On Monday, as I walked between buildings on campus, snowflakes tickled my nose. How can that kind of weather possibly be bad? Sure, the wind was fiercely cold on Tuesday and Wednesday, with overnight lows in the single digits and daytime highs barely hitting the high 20s. But I really have missed the winter season, and I think I've even missed bundling up for it.

I also gave my first "speech" at work this week. Well, nothing major: just remarks at the end-of-training dinner for the RAs and professional staff of Housing and Residence Life. I had the general narrative mapped out in a burst of inspiration a few days before but incidents stole my preparation time away from me on Thursday so I only started typing out my notes about an hour before my scheduled time at the podium. I trusted the worthiness of my storyline and found myself referring to my notes only once or twice and managed to easily fill the 10 minutes of pre-dinner time speaking mostly off-book. Moments after my applause, I greeted each student coming through the buffet line, and I was happy that several gave me great feedback about the speech: "smart," "funny," "lively," and best of all "cool." Already double the age of these students? - Sure, I'll take those compliments. Thanks. I've still managed to be cool (in the cold and dark St. Louis winter).

After work one day, I was greeted back at the temporary digs with a new doortag - the handiwork of one of the RAs.

I knew that if I could just make it past Thursday evening's speaking engagement and into a relatively lightly scheduled Friday, I would be fine. And so it was that I got to the end of this second week of the month, and the university campus is slowly coming back to full life with a growing number of students, faculty, and staff returning. I got through some tasks, carried some over to the next week, scheduled some meetings and rescheduled some other meetings, but overall still felt quite productive and thankfully still useful. That giant vanilla cupcake was a happy surprise afternoon treat at the end of the week, as was the grocery run to Trader Joe's that ended up costing me a whopping 26 cents (thank you, holiday gift card)!

Halfway through Birthday Month 2011 and everything still feels fully fresh, alive, new, challenging, social, and yes..."cool."

Ending the week with pROjECt hApPine$S syrah - thank you, TJ's!