Categories
Character Put It In Your Belly

Broiled Bread w/ Zucchini, Goat Cheese & Basil

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You must start this meal (Ryan would call it an appetizer, I will call it a meal) with a delicious extra virgin olive oil, the kind you wouldn’t mind dipping your finger into just to taste…. this variety came to me from Sicily via Alice.  You can see how much I’ve used already and the bottle only recently arrived at my doorstep. Ah, Sicily!

Now that you’ve found a quality olive oil, here is the rest of the recipe:

Broiled Bread w/ Zucchini, Goat Cheese & Basil
Adapted from The Dabble.

Ingredients

  • Sliced french bread
  • Extra virgin olive oil
  • Zucchinis, thinly sliced
  • Fresh basil
  • Red pepper flakes
  • Sea salt/ground pepper
  • Goat cheese, garlic and herbs flavor

Preparation Instructions

Drizzle your olive oil over slices of french bread. Pop the slices under the broiler while you fry up some thin slices of zucchini, in more olive oil, and ground some salt and pepper to taste. In a bowl, mix a healthy handful of basil, red pepper flakes and even more olive oil. Add your thinly sliced fried zucchini when they’re lightly browned and tender. Mix ’em up, then take out your lightly broiled bread, add the zucchini mixture and top it off with your favorite goat cheese (try garlic and herbs – divine!).

It will seem like a simple dish.

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But it will taste so good.

Categories
Free Idea Friday

Build a Good Place to Work

I like ideas. Others might say I need focus. So, here are some old ones cluttering my head. Ideas are free. Execution isn’t. Take my idea, let it live long and prosper in your capable hands. Tell me when you’ve brought it to fruition. I’ll be the first to promote it.

There is a huge market for a new kind of place to work.  No one wants to work in offices, which are formal and rarely conducive to teamwork or creativity, and few people – after the first few months of it, really – like working at home either. It’s lonely and it’s expensive to set up right. So-called “third places” are going to be the new place for work, and if you start building your franchise now you could be very rich. Particularly because coffee shops are extremely uncomfortable to work in and the co-working movement is desperately slow, disorganized and revolves too much on schedules, membership and other red tape.

Besides, being an entrepreneur, you’ll want to make money. So here is what I would include in this new kind of coffee shop  – something of a combination college library, hip office, and the corner coffee shop:

  • Large monitors, ergonomic keyboards, and all the right cords, so that customers can just bring in their laptops and begin.
  • Plugs and outlets that hang from the ceiling or are built into the table desks.
  • Real table desks that don’t make it precarious to place a french soda next to a laptop, and ergonomic chairs.
  • Copiers, faxes, printers, staplers, tape, paper, pens, and all the latest technology.
  • Baristas that double as the Geek Squad if customers have IT issues.
  • Private conference areas for companies to hold meetings in to impress clients and employees.
  • Sofas, warmth, books and other comforts of home.
  • Exposed brick walls and a library wall
  • Really good food, wine, beer and all the regular coffee accouterments

Freelancers, designers and others will naturally make their way to your coffee shop because of the superior design. But you should also be the advocate for a new way of work and encourage stodgy companies to build new policies. The kind of policies that allow their employees to work at their company’s offices or in your coffee shop office which is going to be strategically placed within walking distance of all the young and established companies. The kind of policies that believe results are more important than physical presence. Where politics are kept to a minimum, and challenging work is the encouraged maximum.

Your coffee shop office should be the physical manifestation of how work can and should change. It should be more than a place, but a lifestyle for modern workers. None of these ideas are particuarly new or ingenious. But no one has executed on them and done it well. And no one has franchised the heck out of it. Maybe that could be you?

Categories
Happiness Relationships Self-management

A New Residence for Home

Ryan is so very tall and my condo is so very small. So it was not without reservation that we recently moved in together.  We talked about it a lot – the important things, the mundane, the humdrum. In talking about moving in together, we broke our record in effective communication. And then we talked some more. “If we could communicate like this for the rest of our lives,” Ryan said, “we’d be the best couple ever.” And so it went… until.

You know, moving is very stressful, and moving in with someone you intend to spend your life with is this gigantic life decision, and somehow all of the pressure and insanity of it all got put into one question – did we need to buy another dresser?

Perhaps the most romantic notion I had of combining our belongings and everyday lives was that we would be able to use my library card file (currently in use as my sock drawers) as our dresser. But, no. No, no, no.  Ryan needed a place to store his t-shirts. All forty-six of them. And he didn’t find it at all romantic, never mind practical, to store a lone t-shirt per tiny drawer.

I won’t take this moment to comment on the romanticism or practicality of forty-six t-shirts, but I do recommend that you, my dear reader, come to your own conclusion on that point.

Besides his t-shirts, Ryan also likes to hang his towel on the closet door instead of the towel hook we bought specifically for the purpose. He takes out the trash and cleans if I cook. I don’t know when, but he watches ESPN because that’s the channel that appears when I turn on the TV. I am always on the computer and he is always on the phone. He leaves his eye glasses on the bathroom counter, but little else. His shoes are lined up across the top and bottom shelves of our closet, and underneath the bed. Waiting for Cribs, I guess.

He overtakes our small white couch like a dog. If Ryan could be animal, he has said that he would want to be a big, slow dog, so please don’t think I am insulting my incredibly sexy boyfriend publicly. Well, a dog or a lion, he said. There are a lot of similarities.

He has a repertoire of several particularly esteemed dishes that he can cook: pork chops, meat spaghetti – in which the spaghetti is actually egg noodles – and chicken and broccoli “stir-fry.”

He locks the door when he leaves in the morning and says to me when he’s home: “You know you don’t have to lock the door when I’m here, right? I will protect you.”

“It’s a habit,” I reply.

He opens the shower curtain from the wrong side, and never closes the blinds. If you touch him when he’s not expecting it, he will unreasonably flinch and exclaim “ow!” like he means it.

When we watch a movie, he will lie down and I will lie down, and we will spoon and watch the screen and out the sixth-story window. When I get too tired, I will turn around and settle into his chest, and he will kiss my forehead and I will go to sleep.

Ryan moved in on the anniversary of our first kiss.

This weekend, I think we’ll buy a dresser.

Good Hearts.

Categories
Character Links Put It In Your Belly

Women, Wear Red for Influence

Blueberries & Yogurt

I am going to get to why you should wear red, but I first want to tell you that Ryan has been exercising and eating right like a madman lately. I blame it on his ex-roommate who obsessed his way into a completely new body. Ryan is well on his way. I keep telling him to stop counting calories and he keeps telling me that my metabolism is too high to comment. So, okay.

When I offered this delectable treat to him at first, he gave a face. This is a man who believes that going without meat for one meal is bad. Very, very bad. Even when on a diet. But I had faith he would really like my simple treat. So I foisted it upon him. And guess what? Now, when goes to buy his lean pork chops and ground turkey, he picks up some blueberries and yogurt as well. The non-fat kind of course.

Blueberry Yogurt Snack & Dessert

Ingredients

Preparation Instructions

The vanilla yogurt is key to this treat as well as the quart-sized containers, which match up well with the blueberry’s containers and will last you the week. I also suggest cute ramekins. Red is a good color. In fact, when women wear red, men pay more attention and think they’re more attractive. So it stands to reason that putting healthy food in red ramekins has to be a smart move as well.

Place spoonfuls of yogurt into a red ramekin all the way to the edge. Dip your spoon in. Add blueberries until they start to overflow over the top. Enjoy the creamy, fruity goodness.

Categories
Free Idea Friday

Create Your Own To-Do App

I like ideas. Others might say I need focus. So, here are some old ones cluttering my head. Ideas are free. Execution isn’t. Take my idea, let it live long and prosper in your capable hands. Tell me when you’ve brought it to fruition. I’ll be the first to promote it.

Productivity systems are incredibly personal. What works for one person might work for another… if only it was tweaked a bit. Create a platform that allows the user to pull together different modules to create their perfect to-do app.

Much in the same way bloggers add widgets to their sites, to-do app users could easily add modules like “Weekly Lists,” “Goals,” and “Next Week’s Tasks” in a proprietary editor to create their custom productivity app. One user might create an app as simple as Teux Deux or as intricate as Remember the Milk. You could allow users to share their designs and templates in a library for others as well.

Yeah? What do you think? I would totally use this. Someone create it for me, please. Right now I use a mash-up of Google Spreadsheets. It’s a clunker that works, but ain’t so pretty.  How do you list to-dos?

Categories
Character Things to Do

Taliesin

For the 4th of July weekend, Ryan and I went to Taliesin in Spring Green, WI, which was Frank Lloyd Wright’s home during the summer months. This was my third time there. I wrote a bit about my fascination with Wright here. We weren’t allowed to take interior shots, but I took some good exterior photos using my iPhone camera.

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This is Romeo and Juliet in the background.

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The meandering entrance to the Taliesin home.

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Back of the house.

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Some of the gardens. This is looking towards Wright’s bedroom.

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You get a bit of the sense of how the house is built into the hill here.

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Gorgeous, calming views.

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Bye, bye Mr. Wright.

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Afterwords we drove back to Madison for dinner, drinks, and a cigar and new sunglasses for Ryan. Then we headed to James Madison Park for the fireworks show. It’s a day I will remember for a long time.

Categories
Business Knowing yourself Personal branding

Originality & Influence in Personal Branding, Architecture and Walmart

We are told to show streaks of our soul, to be original. To show irreverence. And especially, place your mark on the world. Eschew tradition.  And while you should be yourself, you should also, somewhere along the line – if you’re lucky, between high school and turning thirty – find that originality is only the beginning.

Renowned architect Frank  Lloyd Wright is known for pioneering one of the most important movements in architecture. His mastery of the compression and exaltation of space has little to do with inspiring awe (although that it does), and much more to do with a space that is living. That shows you how to act, impresses upon you what to feel and has a conversation with you. The building has a conversation with you, not Wright.

Which was probably a great mystery to those who knew Wright while he was living since he was quite the arrogant bastard. But his architecture lacks ego. Wright matched a structure to its environment. The infamous Guggenheim intentionally looks nothing like the home of Taliesin.

In contrast, Santiago Calatrava or Frank Gehry, two of the celebrity architects of present-day, are very recognizable. No matter where you are. No matter what city you’re in. A Calatrava or Gehry building has a distinct stamp, an identifiable arrangement with their hand apparent. An impression, of themselves.

And however distinct those buildings are from each other, they are also, ultimately, more of the same.   The type of sameness that dominates strip mall suburbia where big-box retailers have stamped their own identifiable arrangement with the ease of reflecting the last box onto the next, so it is the same from town to town to town.

It isn’t quite fair to compare a Walmart to a Calatrava, of course. A Calatrava is beautiful and a Walmart is most certainly not. But it is fair to compare this obsession we have to create and stamp our brand – in all of our novel and impertinent glory – across our careers, and projects and relationships.

Maybe if we all tried a little less to leave our imprint on the world, something might rise that’s a bit more meaningful than ourselves alone. We need to concentrate less on being special, and more on matching ourselves to our environment. Success isn’t about you.

Wright did this through architectural structures. You’ll do it through a lesson plan. Or diving. Or an iPhone app. Or parenthood. Whatever.

But if you say, “That’s not part of my brand,” you are missing the point. Match your skills and talents to the environment around you – those jobs, projects, affairs, and challenges that form our lives. That is change; listening to the milieu and giving it a voice.

Dilute your brand. It’s less than you think anyway. Pay attention to what’s bigger than you. Match your rhythm to what needs to be done. Respond.

Categories
Character Put It In Your Belly

Spinach, Mushroom & Goat Cheese Quesadillas

1/2 Quesadillas

I recently got the craving for quesadillas from an article describing how sad the state of food was now that we are elevating the plain and humble quesadilla. Which only made my insensitive taste buds salivate at the thought of delicious melted cheese. Ohh, cheesy cheese!

Mainly quesadillas, with some of your favorite flavors, are easy to make as a quick dinner on a Monday summer night.

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Just take some corn tortillas – stay away from flour, please. Corn tortillas have so much more flavor and are usually smaller which means you can experiment with different fillings in one session. Plus, they’re better for you. Which is good because we’re going to add a lot of cheese next.

2 - Goat Cheese

A lot of goat cheese, to be exact. You can grab all the cheeses from your drawer however, and try each variety one after the other.

4 - Mushrooms

Your choice of mushrooms from your local grower. We’ve got some crimini and oyster mushrooms here.

3 - Spinach

And finally, some fresh spinach for strength.

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Look at ’em frying up all cute just for us.

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Mushroom, Spinach & Goat Cheese Quesadillas

Ingredients

  • Yellow Corn Tortillas
  • Goat Cheese
  • Mushrooms, your choice
  • Fresh Spinach
  • Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Preparation Instructions

After you’ve chopped the mushrooms and given them a quick warming up, fry the tortilla with some goat cheese spread all over. Peek underneath, and when it starts to show a light crunch, add a small handful of spinach. Remember, spinach shrinks when you cook it, so add a couple more leaves than will seemingly fit. Add a small drizzle of olive oil, and fold the tortilla over.

Fry the quesadilla on both sides (if you have a non-stick pan, no oil necessary), open it up and then add your cooked mushrooms. Fold it back over and transfer to a plate for scrumptious eating.

If tomatoes are in season, chopped with salt and pepper is all you’ll need on the side as a salsa.

Be sure to try different cheeses and variations on fillings as that’s half the fun of quesadillas. Cheddar, artichoke hearts, and broiled red peppers would all be good in our lowly quesadilla as well.

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Categories
Career Generation Y Leadership Management

The Young, Motivated & Unsatisfied

I recently met a young woman who wanted to start a blog from a teacher’s perspective that revealed a teacher’s real and true thoughts. Like how bratty the kids are. How she cusses at them in her head and makes fun of how they dress.

She wasn’t alone; a whole group of her teacher friends were planning to anonymously co-author the venomous expose together. I felt sorry for her students. So very deeply sorry and guilty, but Ryan had left my side and I didn’t know anyone else at the party and I was stuck and uncomfortable and anxious for the future of kids I didn’t know and would never meet.

So we kept talking, and she told me more of what she wanted to do: Get into education administration, lobby reform to politicians, overthrow outdated lesson plans, revolutionize school requirements, change the whole entire educational system.

Turns out? Not so jaded. Just so desperately and achingly unsatisfied.

“Worker satisfaction in the United States is at an all-time low,” reports the New York Times.  “Only 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security. Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers.”

And it’s not just those people that have settled and resigned their dreams to the attic who are so unhappy, but a large percentage of what the Harvard Business Review calls “high-potentials” – those young rising stars that have the ability to have an enormous impact on how we work and live.

“One in three emerging stars report feeling disengaged from his or her company, and admits not putting all of his effort into his job,” the HBR study reports. These highly disengaged high performers have more than doubled from 8% in 2008 to 21% in 2009. And one-quarter of these highest-potential people intend to jump ship within the year despite the recession.

High-performance workers are being consistently and abhorrently under-utilized. Companies and managers must give motivated and ambitious young employees the ability to perform or risk irrelevance.

“When emerging talent is never truly developed and tested, the firm finds itself with a sizable cadre of middle and senior managers who can’t shoulder the demands of the company’s most challenging (and promising) opportunities,” the researchers warn.

So maybe it’s time to stop making young people pay dues. And stop assigning fluff projects. And maybe managers could stop putting the kind of hold on workers that is so tight that they’ll pop right out of their slippery control.

We are your sick, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free of the industrial age molds that keep us shackled in our desks from nine to five. Your greatest challenges are our greatest thrills. Let us execute, and then execute again. Let us fail, let us win. Let us do. Let us work.

“True leadership development takes place under conditions of real stress – indeed, the very best programs place emerging leaders in ‘live fire’ roles where new capabilities can – or more accurately, must – be acquired,” the researchers report.

Yes, let us work.  Stimulating and meaningful work that leads to compelling career paths and the chance to prosper if you do.

We’ll hide the red tape in the breakroom.

Categories
Art & Photography Character Wishlist

Portal & Focus

These awesome prints are actually by the designer I work with at Alice. He’s fabulous at transforming my sad-looking wireframes into works of marketing genius, but he also creates real works of art. He’s been recognized in a variety of areas, most recently with several collaborations with Urban Outfitters and Society 6.

Check out Jerod’s portfolio on Cargo and Behance.

Categories
Character Design2

An Apartment with Provenance

These are photos from a Cobble Hill apartment in Brooklyn, home to the architects/designers behind Workstead. All of the pieces are meaningful in some way to the couple, have a rich history and a story to tell. The boyfriend had this lovely quote in the article:

“When I bring something home that’s new, or if I’m not sure where it came from, I find it loud, distracting,” Mr. Highsmith said.

via Seesaw via New York Times.

Categories
Art & Photography Character Wishlist

Places on Earth

I love maps. I mean, I really, really loooove maps. Which is strange, because I don’t have a good sense of geography. But maybe if I hung this up in my place, that would improve. You can also mark all the places you’ve been. The print comes with 202 pins to chart your path. 200 of the pins are black, one of them is red and one of them is blue. Red is for headquarters, blue is for next target.

Oh, the places you’ll go!

$180 at You and Me, The Royal We.