Week 7

I strongly dislike referees. My cousin played her last basketball game ever this week and it only deepened my hatred for referees. The first half of the game was fine. The refs were calling a fair game and at halftime the score was tied. After halftime though was a completely different story. In the third quarter my cousin's team started to pull ahead and that is when the bogus calls started to happen. The refs would call a foul on someone who wasn't even close to the person they said they fouled and by the fourth quarter the score was evened out again.
The fourth quarter was where the refs were obviously fans of the other team. We could hear the other team slapping the arms of my cousin's teammates in the stands and nothing was being called. The foul count ended up being 13 to 3 in the favor of the other team. The bad calls and all the free throws that the other team should have never gotten to shoot caused my cousin's team to lose by 12 points. It would have been fine if the other team hadn't been fouling but that wasn't the case.

Week 6

This week I discovered just how competitive everyone I work with is. We made poster boards to keep up with how everyone is doing in certain areas of their job and we change the leader board everyday so the associates can see exactly where they are. There are no prizes but no one wants to be in last place. Just in the past three days the leader board has changed drastically. The person in last place has changed every single day. This is because the person who is last sees that and they go out and make sure at the end of the day they are no longer last.
I already knew that a few people were just as competitive as I am and I have used that to drive their performance. Now that I know all the associates, with the exception of maybe one or two, are competitive I may have to start coming up with some competitions to try to improve our performance in a few areas. We may even need to start doing prizes to motivate them even more.

Week 5

I love to watch tv shows. They help me escape from my life. Not that my life is horrible or anything. My life is actually pretty good. I just don't have a lot of free time because I work and go to school all the time. When I do get free time I like to do things that help me not think about work or school like read or watch a tv show like Once Upon A Time. This past week was one of those weeks where I wish I had time to do something to take my mind off of all the things I have to get done.

Week 4

This is my little cousin, Haley's, senior year in high school and watching her play what could be her final season of basketball takes me back to when I was in high school. I recently went back to my high school to see Haley play against my alma mater and I thought about how much smaller it looked than it did when I went there. I also felt strange sitting on the visitor's side of the gym. When I was in high school I never would have thought I would be sitting on those bleachers rooting for the opposing team.
Friday night is going to be Haley's senior night and we are going to go all out. When she had her senior night for volleyball we made shirts and posters and probably embarrassed her and she can expect nothing less from us this time. I can remember playing basketball and having to learn to tune my family out while I was playing because they were yelling so much but I wouldn't trade them for anything. Now I have joined my family in the stands and I can understand why they were yelling so much.

Week 3

In English last semester I took the Fascinate Profile Quiz, which was suppose to help me understand myself better. This quiz said that I am an avant-garde, which I still don't fully understand. It said that an avant-garde's mind works quickly to develop solutions and bring new ideas to the table. The profile also said that I get bored when forced to follow the same routine. This particular quiz also gave suggestions of things I might need to work on. One thing it suggested was that I need to stay a little more grounded and focus on the here and now.
This quiz did make me stop and think about who I am and what I need to work on. I took this over six months ago and think about the things it said I should work on. When I was first told I was going to have to take this quiz I was less than thrilled about it. While some of the things it said about me weren't accurate, it has still been helping me better understand my strengths and weaknesses.

Week 1

Today we had my niece's first birthday party. It is so hard to believe she is one already. It seems like just yesterday I was going to the hospital to meet her. I get the pleasure of watching her every Monday while her parents work and it is the highlight of my week. I love watching her grow up and learn new things. She is developing her own little personality and from what I can tell it is going to be a good one.
My favorite part of all kid's first birthday parties is the smash cake. It is always interesting to see if they are going to just stare at it or do what my niece did today and demolish it. It is so cute watching them stick their little hands in the cake and see how excited they get when no one tries to stop them. I heard some of the kids at the party telling their parents that it looked like fun. I kept waiting for one of them to start doing the same thing with their cake.