jalléCafe

Alternative life strategy

Most days, I love owning a business & the whole life that comes with it. But this specific one started with a three hour Internet outage (telephone company problem). On a Monday!

As I sit here finally at lunch at 3pm, I'm asking myself why I couldn't have just taken the life strategy of marrying a rich man who would bankroll me into a nice little retail store where I could sit every day, chat over coffee, and make something simple and pretty like, say, earrings?!

No doubt I'd get restless and then try to grow it internationally & end up flying all over the world looking for design ideas.

So I guess I will stick with this crazy idea and entrepreneur life strategy I've already started.

But first I will surely scowl and moan a little. And thankfully, eat!!

My hot chocolate promise

I wrote the following scribbles in my journal early one morning some months ago, having stopped for a simple hot chocolate, in this land of wonderful Swiss chocolate, on my way to work. Came to me quickly. I've carried it with me ever since. Last week, I shared a lunch that reminded me how important that simple hot chocolate is.

Today is 17th April

Today I promise myself to embrace my life

As I find it

All of it

My personality

My place in my family

My history

All of it

 

My pro's and con's as an entrepreneur

My challenges as a person, as a woman

My mistakes

So much I still have to learn about being non-defensive

 

I seal this promise with a hot chocolate at Spruengli

And a desire to be strong and gentle

To do my best

To be a good friend and daughter

 

With the hope I can

Create something

Bring joy to someone

Blow a fresh wind wind into all things I embrace

Love

 

But with no expectations or resentment if it

Turns out differently

Life is in the end not fair

But it is to be lived

And can be damned beautiful on the way

 

Man zone

Every morning last week between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m., I entered the MAN ZONE.  This view greeted me at all five windows of my studio.  ALL FIVE.  

As the day wore on, the men wore less.

Skin of widely ranging varieties showed above the beltlines.

Finally enough-was-enough!  This week I've escaped to the mountains, where the men are no less manly, but I'm enjoying a girlie week.

Girlie-size backpack, walking sticks made for girls and after a long hike, a girli- type sauna, a prosecco, a lie about painting my toe nails after the hiking boots make their marks.  

Man zone - we'll see you next week!

When the road gets rocky - illustrated

Found this pic when downloading my camera. 

It is my favorite view of yesterday's post!

Spot the girl on the trail?

When the road gets rocky

A friend took me for a long mountain hike over the weekend.  Might I add - a highly trusted friend. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not comfortable with heights.   The hike had lovely moments.  And rocky ones. Literally rocky.

Who on earth calls it a "well marked hiking path" when you have to climb over boulders?  Well, the Swiss at minimum.  I wasn't exactly always happy while crawling over those rocks.  It needed downright hard work. My friend kept calling out ahead trying to motivate me - don't you have a metaphor or some technique from your business that will help? 

Metaphor? I didn't want a metaphor - I wanted to be done climbing over rocks!!

There are times when your own medicine doesn't work until after the climb.   

 

Emotion, thanks

I received quite a lot of notes after last week's post asking if I was OK. And of course a call from my mother. Thanks, really for being concerned.

I guess the "I cried for an hour" surprised people a little. Don't usually blog that part of my life.

I've cried many hours as a tool for dealing with frustration. Once even in front of my boss during a performance review. (OK, I was 23 then...) I seem to rebound from crying to steely determination, laced with rebel humor and the need to do something productive as a counter to negativity. Hence last Thursday's book slamming.

I also had a lovely note from my non-blogger friend Sandra O. She and her husband have, too, been decluttering: "I also found myself thinking about all those courses I had done, all those jobs, all that effort, all those books … was it worth it?!"

That was exactly my sentiment at my lowest moment last week - has all of my effort to be a decent person and to do something meaningful been worth it? Well, what is the alternative? To stop trying and give up hope? Just can't. I guess a little book slamming among tears will have to be allowed.

Aftermath of culture shock

No matter how long you live in another country, how much you love it there, and how integrated you try to become, there will always be those moments in which something goes so differently than you expected.  Because you don't totally understand the rules.  And that can be really frustrating.

This is the Friday morning aftermath of that moment I faced on Thursday evening.

I unexpectedly received a letter that entirely complicates my plan to change apartments.  I felt the most deeply stunned and culturally helpless that I have maybe in seven years.  So of course I cried. For an hour.

Then as I rebounded a little, I suddenly decided I needed to channel this energy somewhere.  I spied my overloaded bookcase, still stuffed with random books from the last decade.  And I decided it was time to purge!  Book-by-book, the rejects landed on the floor.  Hard. Thump, thump-thump, slam!

Boy did I feel better.

On the floor:  a good 1/3 dribble about relationships (kept just two classics, the rest gone!), 1/3 once-trendy, now forgotten business books (usually received from work - again I kept the classics like Drucker, Hamil & Prahalad, Collins) and 1/3 fiction that if I haven't read it in 10 years, my Kindle now ensures I never will.

I enjoyed my Friday morning coffee surveying the pile. Feeling deeply satisfied.  Then later called in expertise to resolve the cultural crisis.  It's all in the learning. By this morning, the aftermath was neatly bagged and ready to be hauled out.

Next cultural crisis pending: What are the rules for recycling books here?  I'm sure there are rules and this time I'll try to get ahead of them.  Or maybe I'll just end up decluttering my kitchen...

An advantage of night seminars

Last week, with two of three seminars scheduled in the evening, I hoped to stay fresh for the consecutive conversations.  I'm not exactly a night person by nature and have been both surprised and relieved that the genuine people involved actually give me lovely energy. 

And then.  Icing on the why-am-I-still-in-the Studio-at-this-hour? cake...

I got a sneak preview of the holiday lights as I dragged myself late to my car.  (Won't tell you how many men with safety vests were needed to correctly hang 'em.)  "Day people" must wait til the 25th for the official illumination.

Encouragement to become a night owl.

Saved by Daylight Savings

Our clocks "fell back" this weekend the same night that - remarkably - there were trick-or-treaters in my Swiss neighborhood.  I must have fallen asleep feeling guilty about not having candy around for them (Halloween is only recently even noticed here.  Typically we go right to Santa Claus and advent wreaths).  I was pretty exhausted anyway from the busy week.

Sunday morning, as I drowsed in what is usually a lovely state of half awake - half asleep stretching, I felt suddenly I'd been so busy through the holiday season that Christmas had come and gone.  My first thought: I didn't even drink a gluwine this year!  (This was really my first thought of shock and dismay.)

Happily, a few seconds later, I thumped into recognition that only the clock had moved, not the entire season.  It was still October.  My gluwine dreams were saved. 

I shall take this dream as a sign: when the time arrives, remember to walk slowly through the festive streets, not letting them pass by too quickly, unnoticed, untasted, unsavoured. Next thing you know, we'll be moving the clocks forward again in 2011.

Old dog learns new orchid story

I padded out to the living room on this foggy, colder-than-expected morning, normal coffee cup warming my hands, and settled onto my sofa cross legged to enjoy a slow wake up. A few seconds later I discovered I was joined by two happy new blooms for the first time ever.

You see normally I make orchid blooms fall like rain. That's what happened to this plant that I bought for my Studio in June. By August I had a bunch of bare sticks.

But this time I said, why don't you drop the old "I always kill orchids" story, bring the thing home, and actually try to grow it?

After three months of watering a seemingly unresponsive stem and resisting the temptation to give up and try a different plant, I have a new orchid story!

Bet It wouldn't hurt me to try throwing out a few more stories and sticking with the new ones long enough to see them grow.