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It’s officially Spring Break! Woowooo!! Except not so woowoo, because I’m staying in Boston and doing research and work. Snooze. More like wahwah.
I’m trying not to be bitter that most of my classmates are jetting off to California (hey, that’s place!), the Caribbean, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and the like. Especially since if I were I would certainly be stressed out about all of the work that I have to do before the end of the semester. Still, it would be nice to come back in a week all sun-kissed and relaxed. My goals for this week are: work on super secret research project for a client for my directed study, work on my CSR (that’s corporate social responsibility to the rest of the world) consulting project for a local company, start working on getting that monkey off my back (i.e. job hunting), sleep in, play with the few remaining friends in town, do an apartment deep clean including doing the laundry that always gets stuffed to the bottom of the hamper and never done, get crafty with a couple of new projects, read for fun, and go to New York for a weekend. Gee, it kind of seems like I might need more than just a week to do all that. Good thing I’m not going anywhere!
Courtesy of Rob Brezsny:
“If I love you, what business is it of yours?” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Now I’m offering his words for you to use as your mantra in the coming months. Your main job, as I see it, is simply to be a lover of pretty much everything — to generate, cultivate, and express love in abundance — and not to worry about whether your love is reciprocated or how it’s regarded. It’s a tall order, I know — one of the most difficult assignments I’ve ever suggested. And yet I think you have the soul power and the crafty intelligence necessary to accomplish it. Happy Valentine Daze, Capricorn!
I’m sitting at school waiting for a meeting to start, listening to Passion Pit, all caught up on my reading for this evening’s class. In other words, it’s finally an opportune time to blog.
Last time I posted, my niece Eva had just been born. I’ve since had a chance to meet her, stay up all night with her, and change her diapers. I’m happy to not be the one having to do that all the time! She is a beautiful little creature, though, and I can’t wait to see how she changes and develops as she grows.
Here are her long, long fingers (definitely inherited from her mom’s side of the family) and itty-bitty feet.
 
And here is Sleeping Beauty (now if only she would sleep through the night!).
I have a brand new baby niece!! Her name is Eva Marie (both are family names). She was born 12/29/09 at 5:39pm PST. She’s 5 lbs 14 oz and 19 inches long. Teeny tiny!
Look at that little grin!
Of course, the whole timing was ironic. My SIL wasn’t due until January 8th and her doctor told her last week that she wasn’t going to give birth for another 2 – 3 weeks (i.e. the due date or beyond). My travel arrangements were to fly back to Boston on 12/28 for New Year’s and a week of intensive class. My SIL made arrangements to have me fly back home on 1/9/10, the day after my class is over, and back to Boston on 1/15/09, thinking that the baby would have to come some time during that week and I would be there for the birth.
As I’m enroute to the airport on Monday, I get the call that they are on their way to the hospital! Turns out that at this week’s appointment they found out that my SIL’s fluid levels were going down and the doctor wanted to induce. Sooo…..off I went up up in the air back to the snowy tundra of Boston and off they went to have a baby! I was bummed I couldn’t be there for the birth, but my brother and my fellow aunt – my SIL’s younger sister – kept me updated as things transpired. And she’s adorable…I can’t wait to hold her!
My friends and I have been holding a Bake-Off every year for the past 7 years, since we lived together and used to brag about our baking prowess. This year, I made a Buche de Noel, a Yule Log cake, for the 7th Annual Bake-Off. My cake didn’t win, but it was tasty and festive.
It was chocolatey and delicious. I decorated it with meringue mushrooms and marzipan greenery.
The sponge cake recipe came from the December issue of Martha Stewart Living and you can find it here. For the filling, I made the easiest filling I could think of – Cool Whip (1 tub, defrosted), mixed with one small package of chocolate instant pudding and 8oz of mandarin orange slices including the syrup. Bake the sponge cake and when done immediately turn it out onto a clean dry dish towel sprinkled with powdered sugar. Roll the cake up (with the dish towel separating it as its rolled) and let cool. This will help keep the cake from cracking when you apply the filling. When the cake is cooled, un-roll and spread the filling out, rolling back up as you go along. Place the filled cake seam side down on your serving platter and frost with your favorite frosting. I’d recommend a nice chocolate buttercream, but I was in a hurry so I cheated and used store-bought frosting and then applied some texture with the remaining filling.
For the meringue mushrooms, I used this recipe. I ended up letting the meringues dry out in the oven all night (turned off, of course). The meringues started getting sticky every time I pulled them out of the oven, so I think it must’ve been too humid in the kitchen. The ones that I packaged up immediately survived nicely.
To decorate the cake, I used frosting to affix the mushroom stems to the caps and dusted them with cocoa powder to make them look a little more authentic. I dyed marizpan with food coloring and shaped leaves and stems by hand. I included a little lady bug and some berries, too, for color.
I’ve got a list of goodies that I’m raring to make for Christmas, but we don’t eat many sweets around my parents’ house these days so I’m going to have to ease into the baking slowly. First up are Mexican Wedding Cakes (a.k.a. Russian Tea Cakes and an assortment of other names). I’ve been craving the sweet powdered sugar goodness of these cookies for a while now, so I can’t wait til they’re ready.
Mexican Wedding Cakes
(Set oven to 325 degrees.)
- 1 C. butter
- 1/2 C. sifted powdered sugar
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- 2 C. flour
- 1/2 C. finely chopped pecans
- 1/8 tsp. salt
- more powdered sugar!
Cream the butter, 1/2 cup of powdered sugar, and vanilla together. Separately, combine the flour, pecans, and salt. Add the dry goods to the creamed mixture. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 20 – 25 minutes til lightly browned. Roll warm cookies in powdered sugar and cook on wire racks. When cool, roll again in more powdered sugar. Makes 36.
-Recipe from: Better Homes & Gardens Mexican Cook Book (c. 1977)
Every year, my school holds a holiday party to celebrate the end of the fall semester. It’s a festive occasion, hosted by the MBA Council (of which I am a vice president), held at a posh location in the Boston area. It’s an opportunity to get dressed up and unwind with classmates before heading off in our various directions for Winter Break.
This year’s holiday party planning proceeded as normal, with a small committee scouting venues. The lead venue that the committee returned to the Council with was the Cambridge Hyatt, a beautiful site on the other side of the river with high rise views of Boston and the most affordable price quote of the venues reviewed. However, I had caught a story in the local news recently about questionable business practices by the Cambridge Hyatt. The Hyatt had brought in a group of new employees at minimum wage, told their long-term (20+ years, living wage paycheck) employees that they were going to be their seasonal help to fill in for them during vacations. They had their existing employees train the new workers and then fired 98 of their older, higher earning workers without warning.
I brought my concerns to the Council and we discussed the issue, agreeing that we couldn’t do business with a company who acted so unethically. We informed our contact at the Hyatt of our concerns and moved to looking at other venues. The Hyatt, however, after incurring a (pardon my language) shitstorm in the media, realized the PR nightmare of their error and sent us a response letter telling us that they had rectified the situation. They promised to find jobs for the 98 fired employees and to continue their health benefits for six months. We corroborated their story with local news reports and decided that one of the important lessons in business is recovering from failure. We decided to extend them a second chance, particularly since the party committee was so favorable about the location’s suitability for our event and the fact that they were still the cheapest venue.
The semester continued and party planning continued on uneventfully. As VP of Marketing, I created posters for the party and we began publicizing the event and selling tickets. At this point, a classmate who had been following the case emailed a couple of council members to raise issue with holding the holiday party at the Hyatt. The recipients responded to his email with the information that the Hyatt had given us and considered the issue resolved. Then, however, other classmates began asking me about the Hyatt issue. I, too, reiterated the information that we had; however, I also went looking for more information from that great being in the ether – Google.
What I dug up was that the former Hyatt employees were dissatisfied with the concessions that the Hyatt had made. It turns out that the Hyatt had lived up to the literal words of their promise, but had still short changed their former employees. The jobs that they “found” for them were temporary, minimum wage positions with the very same staffing agency that had been used to replace them. Moreover, when one of the employees went to get medical care for her child, they were denied service. Due to a “clerical error” medical benefits had been cut-off for employees’ dependents.
Students who were aware of this situation were upset (and rightly so) about having our holiday party at the Hyatt, and thus breaking a boycott that the Governor had called against the hotel as well as essentially condoning the company’s behavior. We held a meeting to discuss the issue with concerned members of the student body, at which we decided to survey students regarding their thoughts on the matter. The survey was, in my opinion, unclearly worded. Regardless, the results showed that 60% of students would still attend the holiday party if it were held at the Hyatt (the wording did not give the opportunity to indicate preference for another venue over the Hyatt, nor did it explain that students could get refunds if they didn’t want to go to the Hyatt).
The Council held a second, emergency meeting (since the party date is so close) to vote on the issue. Again, we had impassioned speeches from people from either perspective. We discussed the earlier raised prospects of holding the event in January or holding it on the same date but at an alternative venue (other spaces had become available due to cancellations and vacancies and were offering extremely reasonable prices in order to fill their ballrooms at the last minute). We also discussed the $4,000 cancellation fee that we would incur for canceling our contract with the Hyatt.
I strongly favored moving the party to another venue or another date. In this era of ethical debate within the business world, with business schools jockeying for attention for signing (in my opinion, meaningless) oaths, I felt that it was an opportunity to demonstrate our commitment as a student body to being ethical business people. As a member of the MBA Council and a caretaker of student monies, I take my responsibility seriously, however my ethics don’t have a price tag. To me, the $4,000 was a penalty worth paying if it meant that our school could make a statement of not condoning unethical practices by the Hyatt. (In addition, there were very real possibilities of reducing the budget gap due to the lower price quotes by other venues, among other means.)
The majority of the Council did not agree with me. They voted to keep the holiday party at the Hyatt.
So, if anyone needs me on Friday, I will be dressed up, sporting some sparkly jewelry, ready to party. I will be celebrating the end of the semester with about 30 of my closest friends and classmates. We will not be at the Hyatt with the rest of our peers. We will be enjoying drinks and music, and our integrity, somewhere else.
I have been far too busy to cook lately, but that doesn’t mean I can’t drool over other people’s creations. One of my favorite food blogs is Smitten Kitchen. They’ve been hitting it out of the park lately with these delicious looking treats:
Cappuccino Fudge Cheesecake
Coffee Toffee
Vanilla Roasted Pears
Not only do their recipes sound amazing, they look gorgeous, too. Got to appreciate well done food porn.
I’m back from a five day trip home to California, visiting companies with our annual West Coast Tech Trek and seeing friends. I flew back to Boston this morning on the red-eye and have spent the entire day today in my pajamas catching up on everything. Sleepiness aside, I think everyone needs a day on the couch in their jammies every now and then!
So, our networking was really interesting. We went to Sun (& got to hear interesting insights into the Oracle merger), VMWare, Chevron, Adobe (they’re undergoing some intense shifts right now, too), LinkedIn, and Ubisoft. The hiring market right now is tough, but I think our trip was helpful for inspiring my search.
Of course, it wasn’t all work. I got to see several friends and even squeezed in a trip to Napa! I’m posting a couple of photos from the week.
This was a storefront in Oakland. I still have no idea what kind of business this is, I just thought it was funny. My friends and I discovered it on our way home from an awesome dinner at Dona Tomas. Killer carnitas…highly recommended. This wasn’t the end of the oddness on the walk home, though…we also discovered some sort of nerdom medieval sword play going on in the Rockridge BART parking lot. Only in California!
And this is from Napa. It was an absolutely gorgeous day…the kind of day that makes you not want to leave! We had lunch at Mustards (good, but didn’t live up to the hype) and tasted at Cosentino, Sawyer, Elizabeth Spencer, and Alpha Omega (not including the link for that one, because it wasn’t good). I’d been to Sawyer before and it lived up to memory, but the other three were new to me. Had a great rose at Elizabeth Spencer, would’ve been tempted if it wasn’t so darn hard to get wine into Massachusetts. BUT, I did manage to pack two jars of my favorite jam into my luggage (strawberry chipotle jam from Tierra Vegetables at the SF Ferry Building Farmers Market). Yum!!
Just thinking about this week makes me miss California already. Good thing Thanksgiving is just around the corner!
It’s **supposed** to be fall right now, but it snowed today!! In October!! Two whole months before it’s supposed to!! I’m exclamation-ing a lot because, while I like snow, I don’t like the idea of a 7 month long winter. Nooooo!!!
My girlfriends and I didn’t let that deter us from enjoying some appropriately seasonal activities tonight, though. I made turkey chili and mini-cornbread muffins and brewed up some spiced apple cider and we all carved pumpkins. Here are some pics of the festivities.
It was Beth’s first time EVER carving a pumpkin! Glad I got to help her learn about the real fun of Halloween.
Here are our finished products, including Beth’s scary ghost face, Christy’s kitty cat, my “Boo!”, Candice’s little hillbilly pumpkin, Sheila’s ravenous vampire pumpkin, and Elise’s smiley face.
Snow? What snow? It’s fall in my apartment right now!
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