WALES Staff Christmas Party 2019

Saturday was the annual WALES staff Christmas party. Lee-Anne came as my date, and since she also came to the Summer Shutdown Staff BBQ, which is pretty much the summer equivalent, this signifies that we've been together for about half a year now.

Last year, I spoke at length about how I botched making blueberry tarts and wound up settling for storebought ones. I hypothesized that one of the reasons I was dissatisfied with my product was because I was comparing it to my grandmother's wild blueberry pie, which I grew up on, and was usually made with berries that I myself had hand picked. Fresher berries, memories of grandma, and a sense of personal investment during my early life creates a nostalgia that is hard to compete with. However, I honestly think I screwed up the recipe a bit last year (it has you eyeball a lot of stuff, and I just think I overcooked the filling a bit), and since then I've made blueberry tarts that, while not as good as my grandmother's, were at least satisfactory. I'd given these to my staff team, along with pumpkin tarts. However, being able to present them at the Christmas party after my failure last year, still gave me a sense of accomplishment.

Lee-Anne made a batch of homemade butter tarts, which are apparently a fairly Canadian-exclusive dessert. To my non-Canadian readers, a butter tart is a creamy, sweet tart, made with butter, sugar, eggs, and syrup. Specifics vary based on recipe. I thought we both did well, but honestly, hers' moved quicker than mine. Kind of like how my pumpkin tarts moved faster than my blueberry when I brought them to work. Try as I might, blueberry is just not as much of a fan favourite, but I have an emotional connection with it, so I keep making them.

I visited Guelph last week. My brother has been traveling again, which means it was just me and my mother. I honestly can't say I recall a time when I've been in Guelph and my brother hasn't.

However, I happened to show up just when some neighbours were moving. They had literally no one helping them, and somehow, I wound up agreeing to assist. I may be out of shape, but that weekend, I at least learned that I can still move an entire household worth of stuff with just one other guy.

My G1 Driver's license finally came in the mail a little while back. Despite having renewed it and having updated my address at least once, they never bothered to retake my photo. So basically, until now, I've been using a piece of photo ID that used a picture of me when I was 19, pre-beard and pre-male pattern baldness. This time around, they retook my photo.

On a similar note, you're not going to catch me participating in that Ten Year Challenge trend that's going around. It just so happens to cleanly separate me from 20 and 30, and I was handsome when I was 20.

I wanted to speak a little bit more on my MESH Diversity. I noticed in my last update, that each category did not have an equal number of subcategories. Personal Baseline had six subcategories, Performance and Social Baseline had five, and Leadership had seven. You would think that each category would have an even number of subcategories, right?

Well, it turns out they do. It's just that not every subcategory fell into an Area of Strength, Area for Growth, or Area for Disparity. Each category had nine subcategories, and if I didn't seem especially strong or weak in a subcategory, and I didn't particularly disagree with my invitees, I didn't get a result with an expanded explanation. The areas in which I received kind of middling results include:

Introspection, Receptivity, Confidence, Motivation Style, Agency, Optimism, Determination, Empathic Accuracy, Clarity, Compassion, Commonality, Follow Through, and Openness.

So that's 13 non-noteworthy characteristics, 15 areas of strength, 2 areas in need of improvement and 6 areas of disparity. Still not bad.

However, I wouldn't have minded a more expanded explanation on my results for Optimism, which seems to show that other people consider me considerably more optimistic than  I see myself. Clarity and Confidence also show a bit of a disparity, even though they weren't called out for it.