It’s me

Oh my goodness! Has it really been since October 21 that I actually blogged something? (I’m amazed Leighton hasn’t kicked me off his blogroll)

Some of you may be wondering what happened to me. WORK is what happened to me. I like my job and the company I work for, but looking back at the last 3 1/2 months I realize that I came back to work under the worst possible conditions for me. When I came back, most of the leaders were people I had never worked with before, particularly in the departments I most deal with (Banquets, Kitchen, Food & Beverage Director, General Manager). So it meant that assuming that things would be done how they were done before was not going to work. I needed to learn how these new leaders worked and how best to communicate among our departments. That lead to some stress and extra time taken up working out the kinks. I also had to train two new catering consultants (one started a week before I came back, and one came on board at the end of October). Learning the job of a catering consultant has a huge learning curve, especially if you’ve never worked in a hotel before, so that took more of my time training them, explaining things, and answering questions. I really love training people and I’d rather have them learn something right the first time than trying to correct bad habits later on. But all this takes time, and on top of all of the above, I had conferences to coordinate that were happening within 2 weeks of my arrival back to work. I usually like to get conferences ‘coordinated’ by about 1 month before the event, so I was trying to pull myself out of a hole (unsuccessfully, I might add) ever since I started back to work.

It has been a rough 3 1/2 months. It’s had its good points and its frustrating points (Leighton hears all about those). I really like being a Catering Manager. I just wish I could have started in less of a hole to work my way out of (the hole was created for me before I even got there). With things slowing down at Christmas time, I’ve been able to start catching up, but I’m not out of the hole yet. The worse part is that there’s a really, really big annual convention at the hotel the first full week of January, so I’m not getting much of a break.

I hope going into this new year things can be better. I don’t want to continue working under the conditions that I have been. I would like more balance to my life, I’d like to take less work home and be able to spend more time with my family (more time where I’m not worrying about work). I’d like to spend more time with God. I’d also like to spend more time for me. I don’t do enough of this and I know it would help me deal with the external stresses in my life.

Leighton and I are working on our basement. We’re putting in insulation (because the basement was not insulated at all) and we gutted a room that didn’t have a light fixture (although the wiring in the ceiling was ‘live’) and had grafitti on the walls. The room is very small with the added insulation on 2 walls so this will be our ‘prayer room’. It will have a comfy chair, a small table for books and a CD player, a lamp, candles, relaxing music, and a small area rug. The nice thing about this room is that its tucked away from everything else (the boys bedrooms, the kitchen, dining room, living room, front entrance), so we should be able to ‘hide’ and be left relatively undisturbed (we’ll see how this pans out in reality – ‘mom…Mom…MOM!!’). I’m really looking forward to completing this room. I think it will be good both for myself and Leighton. We need a space to ‘escape’ to and we don’t have anything like that in our house right now. Leighton’s left it up to me to choose the paint color for the walls. I don’t know what I want yet. Something soothing and warm, I just don’t know what color will capture that.

I’ve had a couple of days off work (since Friday afternoon), and as I’ve been relaxing and releasing the stress that has built up for the past couple of months, I have been feeling very, VERY tired. This tells me that I have been more stressed than I thought I was and that I need to find things to help reduce the stress in the midst of it. I won’t get a break like this again till the summer and I don’t want to spend my two weeks of holidays sleeping!

That’s my update for now. I’ll try to add more in the next few days (maybe even some Christmas photos).

P.S. Even though I haven’t been blogging, I’ve still been ‘lurking’ and reading up on everyone else’s blogs. Its been good to read about how everyone is doing, even though I haven’t personally connected with a lot of you.