Month three, or is it four? Self-refection with SWOT Analysis

I managed to get myself back on track, slightly, during March with my self-refection efforts. Then I wound up sick for the first two weeks of April--cold and flu stuff, but still, it's sucked. I'm rarely sick enough to warrant my taking time off work, but I had to take a day off from both my jobs. Yuck. Anyway, my being sick derailed my efforts to complete my review of March's efforts to consider my life.

For March I opted to use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis. I realize this is a method for businesses to make decisions, but I thought the different way of looking at my problem might be useful.

Strengths:
Strengths, Experiences, What makes you unique

• Creative*--I'm a writer, reasonably artistic, a half-decent eye for what looks 'good.'
• Reliable--I almost never miss a day (the last week excepted), never show up late.
• Independent worker--I don't need constant reminders, or a hovering supervisor to get my work done.
• Researcher and librarian--10+ year experience in academic research, with involvement in various stages and various roles of the research.
• Small group fitness instructor--2 years experience in teaching aerial circus skills, speaking in front of small groups, class management.
• Baker and cook--need baked goods?
• Seamstress

After some discussion, Andrew told me that: "You are very good at doing whatever it is you need to do for the job in front of you."

I'm not quite sure how to sum that up, maybe: Gets Shit Done?

*I always say I'm creative, but what does this mean, really? How much of a strength is this? Why do I always think of myself as creative? I'm beginning to wonder.

Weaknesses:
Areas for improvement, resources needed, education required

• Initiative--This may seem kinda of weird. I'm really good at doing tasks assigned to me and completing them on time. What I'm not so great at is, when I'm told something general needs to be done about this huge thing, figuring out what I should do about it, or where I should start. Being presented with an overarching or generic problem with no specific requests on how to fix it stresses me out.
• Timid/Conflict Adverse--I almost always prefer to handle things via email if I can. Please don't get in my face.
• Jealous--I constantly struggle with feelings of jealousy, especially when I see someone have an awesome opportunity open up to themselves, to which I have no share (but wish I could).
• Insecure/Lack of Confidence--Seriously, my head is a mess.
• No business sense--Hence why my self-published novels have sold very little.
• No specific goals--I tend to think in generalizations...

Here's a thing I learned from doing SWOT: I've always been a dreamer. I've spent a lot of car and bus trips daydreaming. I used to spend a lot of boring nights as a child and teenager wishing something random and amazing would happen to me, at my house in the countryside.

Dreaming doesn't translate into success. At least not directly.

I have dreamed of being a writer for about at long as I can remember. I have three full novels sitting on Amazon Kindle doing only slightly less than nothing. I have failed to do anything about this. I haven't learned how to market myself. I haven't learned how to make a better cover for my novels to make them more attractive. I haven't learned how to use a Kindle marketing campaign. I haven't even stood on street corners handing out flyers for my books.

(I have, in fact, spent years sending my first to novels [Cimwai's Bay and The Cure] to agents and publishers, to mostly no avail.)

If I choose to take the artist's route for the rest of my life, I have to learn how to do this. Yes, I love to write, it makes me feel good when I've completed a (in my opinion) particularly delectable scene. HOWEVER. I would also like to make a small sum from my efforts.

I have to take initiative to make my dreams come true.

Ciao,

Andrea

P.S. I'll finish the last 2 points of my SWOT Analysis next time...this post got long.

Photography by Alexa Baker--because she is awesome and makes me look awesome.

I'm 32 years old and I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, Part 5

This one's about pipe dreams.

Things I (and sometimes Andrew) wish we could do if we had the time or money.

First, there's the pretty obvious: I want to be a writer. Okay, I guess in practice I AM a writer. I write almost everyday, but I want to be a writer in credentials (does that make sense?) too. I would like to see books I've written available in print or e-book. I would like to earn enough income from them that I don't have to work full-time (that might be a tall order as advances and royalties aren't large). It might be nice to receive the occasional piece of fan mail.

Then there's the baking-related pipe dreams.

Opening my own bakery. In some ways, baking for a living is extremely appealing. I'm a morning person anyway, and I'd have a reason to make all those deserts I see in my (now defunct) Google Reader subscriptions. As I said last week, I'm particularly proud of my breads.

A variant on the bakery I've been musing about recently is the Pain a la Panier idea I threw out several weeks ago. Instead of actually having a shop I could sell my product in a street vendor set up--out of the paniers of my bicycle. Of course, in Edmonton I'd have a somewhat limited selling season, and Andrew doesn't think I could carry enough on my bike to make any money.

Whether I could make any money from a bakery business at all is questionable. I don't have much in the way of business sense; I don't have any notion as to how much I could sell my stuff for; and everyone thinks they're a baker these days. Really, have you been to a local farmer's market recently? How many stalls of baked goods are there? Lots? Yeah. How many of them do I think produce goods better than my own? None.

Finally, there's the B&B pipe dream.

This is where Andrew comes in. This is more of a retirement idea, one that is only half-joke when we talk about it. We'd love to find a for-sale B&B in the Niagara-on-the-Lake region and take it over. As a retirement gig, we'd only run it from March to October, then travel for the winter. Again, I could bake to my heart's content for the second part of the 'B' and we've even toyed with the idea that we could offer a dinner option on certain nights of the week. There's something very appealing about this, especially if we could take over an already existing B&B. We'll see, maybe one day.

"For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."
~Steve Jobs

Ciao

I'm 32 years old and I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, Part 4

The next logical step in my discussion of jobs might be to take a look at what I like to do/what I'm good at. Although to be honest, I don't know how this will transpire into ideas of what I want to do when I grow up. At any rate, here it goes. Maybe something will come to me as I type...

Kitchen related activities: cooking and baking pretty much any thing. I love putting together complicated meals, trying new cooking techniques, new ethnic styles of cuisine, everything. I also love to bake bread, cakes, muffins, squares, whatever. I'm particularly proud of my breads. I've been doing sourdough for several years and have got my method down pat. I tried a new rye bread this past weekend--divine!

Writing, of course. I'm mostly a long story writer, although I've done a few short stories in the past. Obviously I blog and tweet, although I haven't figured out a good niche to focus on. My biggest downfall is that my command of grammar can be questionable, and my editor-eyes are only half-powered when I'm looking over my own work.

Knitting and the occasional craft project. Most of my non-writing creative energy gets focused into knitting, although I've never felt compelled to create my own patterns. I'm pretty good with complex patterns for sweaters, scarves, mitts, whatever, although I'm pretty new with colour patterns. I don't really sew anymore, although if I had the time and patience it might be nice to get back into.

Aerial skills. So I'm never going to be in Cirque du Soleil (not sure I'd really want to anyway), but I love learning, practicing, and performing on the silks and rope. It's something about the combination of strength, dexterity and grace required that appeals to me; that and I love being twenty feet up in the air and going for a huge slack drop.

Okay, so those are some things I like to do, but what about more bankable skills, things that will help me land a job?

Well...I am the office cake lady. If someone's leaving/there's a special event, I'm often called on to bring something in. Writing and good communication skills are also pretty important for most jobs, but what else?

I know my way around most biomedical databases (Medline, Embase, CENTRAL, CINAHL, etc.), which means if you need literature on a medical topic, I can probably help you out. In more every day terms, I also have pretty good Google-fu. However, don't confuse the term 'Librarian' with 'Search Engine'. My dominant Darcy-Pants gene will probably rear it's head and I will glare at anyone who asks me something for which the most basic Internet search will return appropriate answers.

I'm pretty good with most of the standard citation management software such as Reference Manager, EndNote and RefWorks. I know how to use the various grouping/folder features, make output style filters, and integrate them with Word. However, if there's an actual problem with the software, I can't help you. Also, don't confuse 'Librarian' (at least this one) with 'Tech Support.'

What else? I mean, is this my resume or something? Sure, I can spout off a series of standardize remarks about my critical thinking and analytic skills, ability to work with minimal supervision, my project management skills, etc., but that isn't really the point, is it?

I'm supposed to be reflecting on what I'm good at and what I like to do in order to help me make some job-based decisions, and all I can say thus far is what I like to do (and what I'm reasonably good at) are my hobbies.

So what's the point? What have I learned (Charlie Brown)?

That I, like so many others, would rather live the high-life, have fun, and not work at all.

I do, however, live on planet earth, and am well aware that I can't just have fun all the time without an income to help support Andrew and me.

I think I'm back at square one.

At the end of the semester I had 27 study partners, 8 Mead journals filled with recipes and a D average—so I dropped out. I just figured if I was going to make the world a better place I’d do it with cookies." ~Ana Pascal, Stranger Than Fiction

Ciao

Cake-central at the Milne appartment

I worked on my second wedding cake this weekend--primarily the baking part. I'm a little nervous about this cake since this one's not for family and I'm getting paid for it--therefore it really needs to look good. I made a test cake back in December? January? for the bride to taste and see if she liked the flavour. I'd been asked to make a coconut cake, which I just happened to have a recipe for. The cake was given bride-approval. On Friday night I baked the top two layers of the cake (10 inches and 12 inches respectively), then on Saturday morning I finished off the bottom two (14 inches and 16 inches), plus an additional small layer (8 inches) since I had enough ingredients left to do one more half batch.

One of the biggest challenges this time around is that I only have my tiny apartment kitchen to work in. Back in October, I had my parent's giant kitchen, their huge (and much newer stove), plus my mom's industrial strength mixer. My oven is inconsistent at best (and so burning the cake was a concern), and I only have my trusty old hand-mixer to whip together the batter. To my great relief everything worked smoothly. I had to mix up 6 single batches of the cake batter as my equipment couldn't handle more than one at a time, and by carefully monitoring my oven and rotating pans I was able to avoid a charcoal catastrophe. The whole process took around five hours. Now all the cake layers are wrapped in plastic and taking up almost all of the space in my freezer until this Friday when I'll complete the cake.

All the ingredients I required for baking the cake.

The largest cake pan filled with batter.

My trusty mixer, plowing through a batch of batter--this was toward the end of the process where I'm adding in the egg whites.

The freezer filled with 5 layers of coconut cake. I'm sure I could figure out how many square inches of cake that is, but I don't remember all the mathmatical formulas to make the calculation.

Then on Sunday, in an effort to make my life easier come Decoration Day (possibly also judgment day?), I piped out around 3 dozen icing flowers. I used royal icing for this so there won't be any chance of the flowers going droopy on the Wedding Day, and coloured them a dark purple (with a little white to liven them up). I opted to make 'sweet pea' blossoms as they seemed relatively easy, and used instructions from an old (1970s) Wilton book my mom gave me at Christmas. It took less time than I would have expected to pipe the flowers taking me only around an hour (while watching Jane Eyre on YouTube).

Me piping a flower using my flower nail. By this time my icing was getting a touch soft from the heat of my hand, but everything still worked all right.

The spoils of my hour.

Finally, a few things I learned this time around:

1) Alberta Bulk Barns do not rent their large cake pans (even though they do in Ontario). I am now the proud owner of a set of four circular Wilton cake pans.

2) Cake Release is SO worth it. Each cake layer just slid out with next to no effort besides loosening the cake a little on the sides.

3) It's probably not a good idea to look at Cake Wrecks when you're a little nervous about the icing flowers you piped, either on Sunday when amazing cakes are featured, nor the rest of the time when the cakes are terrible.

Ciao,

Andrea

My sourdough experience, expanding the repertoire

In the summer I blogged about my experience bringing to life a natural yeast, sourdough starter. I made several very delicious loaves of sourdough, but started to wonder if I could really make a loaf every week without growing sick of it. My dedication to feeding my starter dwindled, going from a once a week thing, to a week and a half, to "crap, I need to feed my starter before it dies." Now, thanks to Clotilde, the writer of the blog Chocolate and Zucchini I have added two more sourdough recipes to my repertoire (it was from reading her blog that I first decided to try sourdough).

Two weeks ago she put up a recipe for sourdough bagels. The tasty looking pictures convinced me that I wanted to give it a try and so last week I made my first batch. As it turned out, they were an awful lot like Montreal bagels. If you've never had Montreal bagels, you're missing out. They're delicious, even though they don't have fancy flavours like blueberry or garlic and herb. Andrew and I happily munched on my bagels all weekend (breakfast and lunch). And so, when I had lots left over starter this weekend I decided to make them again.



After the success of the bagels, I looked through the Chocolate and Zucchini archives and discovered a recipe for sourdough English muffins. I whiped up a batch of those, with a mix of whole wheat and white flours. They were all right, but mostly just tasted like nice brown buns. Still with lots of extra starter I decided to try them again with just white flour and a sprinkle of corn meal. They turned out much closer to the English muffins you can buy from the store than my first batch, although still not quite as porous. I'm going to have to try them again and see if I can get the timing from after the starter is fed, to the making the dough right.




At least if the librarian/PhD thing doesn't work out, I can always fall back on being a baker. I can already make fabulous white and whole wheat bread/buns, sourdough bread, bagels and English muffins, and any kind of regular muffin, cake, pie or cheesecake you could ask for. I just need to add a few more types of bread, maybe ciabatta, pumpernickel or rye bread and find a good cinnamon bun recipe and I'll be in business.

Ciao,

Andrea