They Know All About You

Edward Snowden went about it all wrong.  He's known all along that data was had on everybody.  Everybody.  From the days of retrieving data through someone's trash to wire tapping to cyber threats, somebody is always watching and knows what you do. This has gone on forever.  Since he had known this for a very long time and it became part of his world, he obtained employment where he was able to do just that - gather personal data.  One day he announced to the world that he had proof that big brother had tabs on everybody; and to prove it, he shared plenty of that information with an old rival.  I doubt he is happier in his new home country, even though their president who took him in despises traitors.  Snowden can't be too smart since he didn't think far enough out to know what repercussions and consequences there would be to pay.  ID 10 T.

I have known since I was a mere child that people watched people and wanted information about them for odd reasons; and from the television and newspapers stories, even trash cans were gone through to gather personal data.  I knew about spies and espionage, and the stories were just amazing.  I felt sorry for the young children of a parent who was found to be an international spy for a nemesis country who had been trained and then planted in this country to live and blend in with the government personnel.  Poor children.

It is partially human nature that there are those who like to gather information just for the sake of gathering info. Store that information and you now have records, whether it's on cave walls, in a library, or in cyber space.  Gathering, storing, and analyzing information has always been done for many and various reasons since the beginning of time.  It just has.  How that information is used is then dealt with by the people who want it.

Professionalism - Learn It

PROFESSIONALISM can be defined as the strict adherence to courtesy, honesty and responsibility when dealing with individuals or other companies in a business environment and conduct at work.  This trait often includes a high level of excellence going above and beyond basic requirements. 

Professionalism does not mean wearing a suit or carrying a briefcase.  It means conducting oneself with responsibility, integrity, accountability, and excellence.  It also means communicating effectively and appropriately and always finding ways to be productive.   Professionals strive to become experts in their field, which sets them apart from the rest of the pack.  

Part of understanding professionalism is figuring out how each of our individual actions impacts the actions and work of others.  Professionalism and the work ethic demonstrated by individuals in the business world may be built around an internal moral system or code of ethics.   The word "ethics" comes from a Greek term meaning "duty", thus a code of ethics consists of all the obligations that professionals must respect when carrying out their duties.  It includes the core values of the profession and the behavior which should be adopted.  Thus, a code of professional conduct. 

Core values are the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization.  The guiding principles dictate behavior and can help people understand the difference between right and wrong.  Core values also helps companies determine if they are on the right path in fulfilling their goals by creating a guide.  

Work ethic is usually concerned with the personal values demonstrated by Business Owners or Entrepreneurs and instilled in the company’s employees.  The good work ethic may include completing tasks in a timely manner with the highest quality possible and taking pride in completed tasks.  Work ethic is defined as a belief in the moral benefit and importance of work and its ability to strengthen character.  Work ethic is a value based on hard work and diligence.  

Morality and Ethics usually represent the personal beliefs individuals display when working in business.  Common traits often include honesty and integrity.

These personal traits often display themselves publicly when individuals respond to various business situations, negatively or positively.  A professional work ethic may be seen as somebody "walking the walk" regarding their personal morality and ethics.  

You may wonder if anyone will notice if an employee does not demonstrate professional behavior at work.   "As long as you do your job well, who cares, right?"  It turns out the boss, customers, and co-workers notice.  The lack of professional behavior could have consequences on a career, and to discount this trait could be a big mistake.  It can affect chances for advancement or even keep the job.     



            Do and Do Not -

     ~  Make it a priority to be on time.  When one is late for work or meetings, it gives the boss and co-workers the impression one does not care.  It affects them and it is like saying their time is not valued.  Pay attention to the clock.  Show up before the start time.

     ~  Do not bring your problems to work.  Don't be a grump.  Leave the bad mood at the door.  Everyone has days they are not feeling their best. Complaining is counter-productive to getting work done.  If your work is the thing that is causing the bad moods, it may be time to look for another job.

     ~  Dress appropriately.  Regardless of how you are to dress for work, appearance should always be neat and clean.  Choose the type of clothing the employer requires.  If there is not a dress code, pick attire that is the norm for work.  Save the flip-flops, shorts, and tank tops for the weekends, along with clothes that are better suited for a night out at a club.

     ~  Watch your mouth.  Swearing, cursing, or cussing has no place in most workplaces.  Unless it is positively okay where you work, don't.  Others present may be offended.  That is not professionalism.

     ~  Offer assistance to your colleagues.  A true Professional is willing to help co-workers when they are overburdened or facing a challenge at work.  Don't be afraid of offering an extra pair of hands or some creativity.  One person's success reflects well on everyone in the workplace.  It is important, however, not to be too pushy when offering assistance.  If your colleague rejects your offer, don't push it.  They may prefer working alone.

     ~  Do not gossip.  Gossiping makes you look like a middle school student.  While you may be tempted to tell a co-worker what you know about somebody down the hall, don't.  If you simply must share, tell someone who has absolutely nothing to do with the workplace.

     ~  Try to stay positive.  Negativity is contagious and it brings people down.  The boss will not appreciate a drop in morale in his employees.  If it is seen that something should be fixed, give the boss the feedback along with a plan for how to make improvements.  If you are complaining for no reason, stop.

     ~  Do not hide from your own mistakes, as hard as it may be to do.  Make sure you don't make the same mistakes twice.  Never blame others for your errors, even if they deserve it.  Bite your tongue.  Set an example so that those who share responsibility for the mistake can step forward and admit their part.

     ~  Always fight fair.  There will inevitably be occasional disagreements with co-workers or even the boss.  You may think something should be done one way while someone else will believe another way is better.  Don't let yourself get angry.  It does not matter how upset you are or how strongly you believe you are right, screaming in the workplace is not allowed, nor is name calling or door slamming.  Calmly explain your opinion and be ready to walk away if you cannot sway the other person or if he begins to lose control.  Always avoid physical contact.

     ~  Do not lie.  Dishonesty always makes one look bad, whether it is lying on your resume or calling in sick when you aren't.  A Professional is always upfront.  If you are unqualified for a job, you have two choices -   1. Do not apply for the job at all or,    
2. Submit a resume that reflects your real skills.

     ~  Do not air your dirty laundry.  Confiding in a close friend at work is usually okay, but sharing too much information is not.  Be judicious of whom you talk to, especially when discussing family problems.  If you decide to share personal information with co-workers, do not do it where customers and clients may overhear.


1.  "Ethics" comes from the Greek word _________________.
          (duty)

2.  What does "bite your tongue" mean?  _________________________________
          When a person wants to say something that may be offensive or hurtful to someone, so instead says nothing.             It is the opposite of "speaking your mind". 

3.  When working with others, how do you think your individual actions could impact the action and work of others?  ____________________________________________

4.  How do you conduct yourself as a professional?  ________________________

5.  What is your definition of "professionalism"?  __________________________


Learn the art of professionalism.  It isn't hard to do and the return on investment is great. Learn, practice, and apply.  Learn to reach your maximum potential.

Losing a Grandbaby

May 18, 2015 was a new day for a new baby girl that I only got to love for four months.  Grandbaby number five.  Being retired from the military, I now had more time to play with the children. Especially when they're little babies.  I like little babies.

September 22, 2015 was the last day on Earth for that new baby girl.  A monster got to her and took her away from us.  Monsters can be surreal, especially when they stand back and watch as I attempt to push air into the tiny lungs; wanting her chest to rise and fall with natural breaths.  But it doesn't. Not even with the chest compressions her grandfather was applying to accomodate the breaths.   

Then paramedics take over and attempt to supply air to her lungs, and continue as they take her little body on the stretcher to the ambulance to take her to the baby emergency room.      

In the children's hospital, her mother holds her lifeless body, as momma rocks and cries.  And rocks and cries.  The monster was there and he had a panic attack, so he got to go to the other emergency room.  His father went with him.  

Momma had to talk to people, so I held my new baby girl and rocked and cried.  And rocked and cried.  

Two days later, the monster confessed to the police that he had killed his daughter.  Blunt force trauma around the head and a broken arm.  

He sits in jail; alive.  

I hate him.  

Crappy days . . .

Crappy days for me is when I sleep so late that the most productive times of day are gone.  I detest sleeping.  It's a waste of time that I could be doing better things.  I wish there was a capsule to take, like in the Jetsons, where the pill kept you up as long as you wanted and you got the body rest that's needed to function effectively and efficiently.  I hate days like this and then I will do nothing in particular the rest of the day because it's so pissy to not have time to do what was wanted to be done.  So you just say screw it.

I Am Both Of My Parents - Ponderings . . .

I PONDER LIKE YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE.  I mean, I have plenty of time to and I enjoy pondering; especially when I get to come to some conclusion about whatever.  In fact, I have a Conclusion journal where I write those down, what I've learned.

I think I have turned into a form of my mother.  I know that sounds strange coming from me because you and I have talked about those things; even when she was still alive.  All my life she'd tell me, "You're just like your father."   It didn't matter what I did, good or bad; I was just like my father.  Now, I am the grandma who's always feeding everybody when they come over. My mother did the same thing with us kids and our families; have everybody over for dinner or lunch.  Or we'd just go there and hey, let's cook up some rice and kimchi, with dried cuttlefish as an appetizer.  Okay!  We were always eating at my parents' house. Mom was always feeding us.  Heck, she even knew our favorite foods because she'd fix them just for us, personally, on our birthdays.  Like, I loved Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  One whole box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese was ONLY for me.  Mom would fix two pots of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and everybody else had to share only one pot full.  The other was mine. 

Hey, didn't you go with me to my mother's house one day for lunch?  For as long as I can remember, she was always cooking food for somebody.  When we lived on Posts, she always cooked during the holidays for soldiers that didn't get to go home.  They'd either come eat at our house or she took a full menu of holiday feats just for them, usually MPs, and then later the 164 SFS.  Anyway, for a few years now, along with my chirren an 'em, we've got people that have nobody to share Thanksgiving, so they come here.  And we will eat, thank you, Jesus.  ^_^ 

I never learned how to cook.  I never had to.  All my life, everybody fed me.  Really.  I think people felt sorry for me because they all fed me very well into my adulthood due to no cooking of my own.  I didn't even know how to make sweet tea, living in the South for as long as I have.  I can't say that I hadn't tried to learn cooking at a young age; I did.  I even took Home Ec for four years; I majored in it.  I used to be a member of the FHA.  Go figure, huh?  We were taught cooking and given recipes after the teacher and we made meals.  We were taught how to run a home effectively and efficiently.  I learned everything in Home Ec except how to cook anything that tasted any good, or come out right, or come out at all.  In high school, I never learned to cook or bake anything.  Nothing.  I got an F for that part of the class, but that was okay because everybody fed me.  Besides, I passed the rest of Home Ec with flying colors so my grades made up for that F.  I think my Home Ec teachers hated me.

2009 was the year I started learning to cook anything other than white bean dip or Rotel dip.  As the years passed and nobody ever got sick, and more and more people liked what I was preparing because it was "tasty" (I like that adjective for foods - tasty), the more my own palette crave tasty foods.  The meaning of the saying, "You are what you eat" hasn't been the same as it was pre-2009.  Maybe because I don't have to pass a PT test, so to speak, anymore, I am more aware of tasty foods and not as much on super healthful foods as I did pre-09.  Don't get me wrong - I make every attempt to eat things in moderation, and I usually do.  But I make one heck of a 14-bean soup with ham and ham Goya (seasoning), with a pork bone that still has plenty of meat left on it.  (I think there are currently two ham bones in the freezer for later.)  I think I've come to the conclusion that I really love pork.

One of tomorrow's meats is a big ole' Springfield ham that Rick is cooking on the grill.  Lana is roasting the turkey.  I love ham steaks.  I love pork chops browned in butter.  I love bacon.  I love bacon.  I love sausage.  I love sausage gravy and biscuits.  Tennessee Pride puts out a very tasty sausage gravy in those boiling-pouches.  Just add more cooked sausage and herbs and voila'.  I tried to make pork chop gravy twice.  The second time it was pretty good, and I ate a lot of it.  I'm going to come back a pig.  Snort, snort!

So here I am, 61 years old, a Lali and a Pee Wee, I cook well, the kids' friends who have come to dinner have told Steven that they wish they had a grandma that cooked like this; that they heard stories of grandmas who liked to cook.  I laugh.  I am not a big fan of cooking.  I am a huge fan of eating tasty foods.  Tasty.

Pre-2009 was a whole other life.  I had careers.  Being domesticated was not in the cards for me.  Especially when it came to cooking; I didn't have to.  Remember?  My life, pre-2009, was nothing like my mother's life at all.  Never had been.  I didn't cook if I didn't have to, which was actually a good thing because what I had learned to fix in that time was hardly ever tasty.  But I had work to do out there, learn everything, be all that I could be, because nothing was just a job - it was an adventure!  And I knew I'd never go hungry, as my father knew this during the Great Depression.  He was too scrappy to go hungry much less his younger siblings be hungry.  During his Army days, he was friends with the soldiers from the mess halls.  My father was an excellent scrounger, especially when it came to food.  Like meat.  I am an omnivore.  I came to dislike meat during a part of my young life, but that's another story.

I think I've come to the conclusion that I got to get the best of both worlds with what I've learned from my father and my mother.  My first 54-years of life was used to doing things I was taught by my father; which in a way carried into my career life and helped me be all that I could be with that adventure.  I've only had seven years to learn to be domestic.  I'm not too good at most of it but I can cook.  I can cook tasty foods, that is.

Mid-Century Style

FURNITURE DESIGNS from the 1950s/60s are now called Mid-Century designs.  I heard this on an episode of "Let's Make A Deal".   I was born in 1955, which makes me a Mid-Century design.  I like that term, Mid-Century design.

I was lucky to have been born in 1955.  That year and more to follow would be a fast-moving collage of life being made and mastered.  If you think about it, the world as we know it, inhabited with people, is actually not that old.  Technology has progressed and renewed swiftly and continues to do so.  Positive proof of progress is the Hearing Aid.  I saw my first Hearing Aid in 1961 when we visited my grandparents for the first time in Memphis when I was six.  My grandfather wore around his neck and on his chest (over his shirt) a black box, bigger than your cell phone, that was a receiver with a tube that led to his ear.  When he spoke on the telephone, the ear-piece of the telephone was turned downward and over the black box.  The telephone was held upside down and the mouth-piece, the transmitter, was on top by his mouth.  Here it is, 2016, and Hearing Aids are so small now; or you can even get them in bright colors.

The Dental Experience has come a long way since the Mid-Century.  The Dentist Office with chair, the porcelain sink with water constantly swishing down the drain ("rinse and spit"), the giant, blinding, overhead light, the Dremmel tools on the silver tray in front of you, novacaine from big needles if it was available, the large films stuck in your mouth to take X-rays.  The sounds of the whirring as the Dremmel tool whined and screeched in your mouth.  Here it is, 2016, the Dental Experience has come a long way, baby.  Small needles for novocaine, small overhead light, Dremmel tools are out of sight for the most part, they offer Nitrous Oxide, and music plays.  I like nitrous to get the Dental Experience pleasant and relaxing.



     

Civil Defense - What To Do Now

     Do you remember since childhood having civil defense classes and drills throughout school?  I do when I lived on military installations; all of them.  I spent my last two years of high school in the civilian community during the mid-1970s.  I do not recall ever learning more about "preparedness" or civil defense.  When I moved to the civilian world, the American Red Cross was the only place I found that taught any such classes to the public.  I was already familiar with the ARC since I had been a volunteer back during the late 1960s, during the war in Vietnam. 

     When I joined the military in 1983, it was like I stepped back to a time where we did what we did and were taught whatever there is to know about what to do and/or how to handle things when shit hits the fan. I don't know about you but I've always found this life long training as some pretty important stuff to know.  I've always known the world had some mean, bad, and evil people out there who thrive on damaging others.  And I knew that there would be survivors in such events when these deranged people try to get their way.  I was going to be one of those who had an idea of what to do come time and how to help others do the same.  I was given the opportunity to learn even more about how to help and keep one's mind and bearings straight during these times.  

     Years ago after I got my military career off the ground, I realized that the civilian community where I live didn't do a lot involving their citizens in disaster preparedness.  We did at my Air Guard unit.  Having plenty of members' children to work with, working in close association with their Family Readiness Group (FRG), and the local American Red Cross (ARC), we started holding classes geared towards children like the Professional Baby Sitter course that taught them basic first aid and child wellness, to include a form of child CPR.  We held enough of those classes that we had spouses and even grandparents who would take this class to get knowledge for use at their work places or if they were out.  We held disaster preparedness classes, to include pet-preparedness.  The children loved the four to six hours of exciting topics and ways to be and stay prepared should an emergency or disaster strike.  The children even came up with ingenious ways to use tools and how to calm people down. 

     Now, the reason I worked hard to get these military children educated on such topics is because I have come to realize that BRATs "get it", and the term BRATs I am also using as the children of Guard and Reserve members because I know how much they deploy and what it does to their families back home.  I've seen it first hand.  I know how most of them raised their children and in the ways of "raising", those kids got a lot of the same values and ethics we did as BRATs.  My conclusion after all my years on earth is that a lot of military children get to learn how to keep control, how to stand up to a task when needed, and how to help others when it's time for them to panic.  Again, I have seen this first hand when I find out that one of our BRATs got to use first aid knowledge or emergency training in dire circumstances.  It makes my heart swell with pride knowing our own children know how, and can, keep their heads together in times of trouble.  I cannot say the same for hardly any civilian children (or their families) that I know.  My BRAT child (who is now grown) took all the Red Cross classes available through the FRG, to include more disaster training through networks she met.  She got to participate in a huge disaster training mock scenario that was held in the city that included the local Navy base, the local Air Guard unit, Homeland Security, the Red Cross, City Police and Fire Fighters, County Sheriffs, and lots of essential personnel to make a mock scenario of a 7.0 earthquake and pull off getting to the destruction and aid. 

     To me, military children, BRATs, have an ingrained understanding of helping maintain a household when a parent is away and understanding and effectively reacting to unusual events.  They get this understanding from their military families and those other military BRATs they are exposed to on a regular basis.  With this "civil defense" knowledge given to military children/families, I feel assured that if and when disaster strikes in a nearby civilian community, there are our military and citizen soldiers and their families who will be readily available to step in and successfully help.

     Do you miss the days of your community knowing what to do in a time of emergency or disaster?  Here's how you can help.  Give some of your time to your local American Red Cross chapter.  Become a Disaster Preparedness Educator and get communities together to give them ongoing training.  Or even just as good, help coordinate between a local ARC chapter and a local Family Readiness Group to offer this free (usually) training and knowledge to our military families so we can continue to do what we've usually done - be and stay prepared.

     I've always said, "Be alert.  The world needs more lerts."