Glad for you

I was chatting with a friend the other day something big and scary in her life. It's wonderful too, for her. If it were my news, it would scare the pants off me; I'd be running into traffic praying for something large to hit me and kill me dead. Maybe one of those trucks that haul dirt, because I always wanted to be squished by a lot of dirt.

And I experienced a very interesting thing: I was so pleased for her. The very thing that would have me curled in a ball weeping was good for her. Maybe she'll need to curl in a ball and weep sometimes too, because hey - that helps. But she's happy, and I'm glad she's happy. That's a sort of new thing for me too - being glad when someone else is happy. I feel like I'm getting new emotions, for the very first time. They feel odd in my head, as though they don't quite belong to me yet. Like eating something brown and slimy and realising it tastes quite good.

I'm not sure what it's about, but there's room inside me again. It's small still, but I think it'll be good.

Patience, or lack thereof

One of my employees really made my day today. She calls me "Boss" in an affectionate way, and for some reason that really tickles me (nobody calls me "Boss").

She knew I was having a bad day - one of many in a long line of bad days - and she made me a cup of what she calls "stress tea". I don't know what it is called, but it claims to reduce stress; it works.

She walked into my office carrying a cup of freshly brewed tea and said, "Hey Boss, drink this."

She then took a few minutes to tell me how much she appreciates my patience with her.

I almost laughed. If you know me, you know I'm not patient. Really, really not-patient. But the more she described some of her own stress and how I have been helping her deal with it I realised that I am sorta patient these days.

She comes to me 42 times each day (and I do mean each day) and has oodles of questions. They're all good, thinkish questions. Sometimes she should already know the answer, but they're still good questions. She is trying so hard and consistently exceeding my expectations; it's easy to be patient with a person who puts so much effort into her job. She admits to her own mistakes, she helps others, she does anything and everything I ask her to do. And she takes care of me when I am having a total stress-out.

Apart from all that, she's helping me grow. Her energy and style of learning is forcing me to develop that patience that I so lack. How can I not completely adore her? I'm totally giving her a raise.

Small achievements

Today I taught one of my employees how to make labels on her computer. You might think that this is a basic skill, but it turns out that people aren't born with basic computer skills no matter how often I wish they were.

I am not a good teacher; this is ironic since my primary function for years was the training of incoming staff members. That training never included making labels on their computers until now.

I was a ball of happiness and excitement and relief when one of my team members asked me to show her to make labels. She was motivated to learn something new! She was branching out, discarding her natural inclination towards fear of the computer. She was receptive to change and adaptation. And when I showed her the simple nature of the label wizard she got excited too.

Now she can make her own labels whenever she needs to, and we're both just as pleased as we could be.

I has a new book!

I'm getting back into learning CSS. It's still hard (my brain is weak from non-use) but I have a lot less going on now than I did the first time round.

Because of the holidays and decreased volume at work I have a lot more time on my hands. Winter is typically when I work on updating my process manual and situating things for next year. So, in between those projects I'll have plenty of time to devote to learning new and tricky things.

Maybe this time it will stick?

Being happy on Monday is hard

I had a very long meeting today, in which I learned new and exciting things about macros and Excel formulas. I also missed lunch, and did not tackle the mountain of paperwork and payables that accumulated in my in-bucket throughout the day. As such, today was both a good and bad day, and the rest of the week doesn't afford me much opportunity to catch up. I'm committed to this happiness list though ...

• Spiced cider

• Digital books

• MPJ's kids going back to school, so she can write more tasty stuff for me to read

• That my job gave me a laptop