Speak Your Mind

I stumbled upon this quote a while ago and thought I would share it!  Grey’s Anatomy is one of my favorite television shows, not only for the attractive men, but for the the unbelievable quotations that come out of each episode.  This is one of my favorite and the link below has more memorable quotes!

Meredith: It’s not always easy to speak your mind, sometimes you need to be forced to do it. Sometimes, it’s better to just keep things to yourself, play dumb, even when your whole body is aching to come clean. So you shut your mouth, keep your secret, and find other ways to keep yourself happy.

Read more: http://www.tvfanatic.com/quotes/shows/greys-anatomy/page-3.html#ixzz1fAMU4SqU

I totally agree with this quote.  I believe there are certain times to say things that may hurt someone you care about or to tell a friend how you really feel.  Feelings are hard to express and even when best friends are there to support you, you may not feel like you can say anything in case it would hurt that other person.  When you have to be forced to speak your mind then what you are trying to say may come out wrong or in the wrong context.

This is not the time to freak out…but it is!

I officially have 21 days till I graduate!  I am so excited, yet very freaked out all at the same time.  I have been in school so long (6 years), that I do not know how to react when I won’t have to drive to Edwardsville every day.  I will be definitely be saving some gas and will free up an hour of every day!  I am excited to be done with this semester.  It has been a long and tiring semester.  It was the first semester in three years that I took five classes, four days a week.  This semester I had four different group projects (the most group projects I have had in a year).  I am excited for the next phase of my life to begin.  Yet, I am terrified it won’t come right away.  I am ready to get out of working retail and I am afraid, because of my limited experience in a human resources environment that I will not get a nine to five job right away.  So, if anyone knows of any job opportunities in and around the St. Louis city area, please let me know!  I love working and I am very excited to start a new career and see where the future takes my husband and I!

Happy Turkey Week!

I am a couple of days late, but I love Thanksgiving!  It is my favorite holiday! Many people ask why it is my favorite holiday and I have many answers.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because there is no pressure to buy presents or ask for anything, it is just a nice day to spend with family and friends.  Another reason is because I love food!  I have a big family so everyone chips in a brings their favorite dishes.  We always have a ton of food and always new things to try.  We all were able to catch up on conversations and had a wonderful time.  Our family loves to play games; especially on Thanksgiving.  We always have a poker game going on between the men, and the women are always playing board games or looking at all the Black Friday ads.  It was a great day and I am sad this week ended so quickly. 

What I am thankful for:

     My amazing husband

     My family (Every single crazy one!)

     My job

     Graduation on December 17th

     Our good health

     Stable jobs that pay the bills

     Great friends who I would not trade for the world

     A new year and hopefully a full-time job with weekends off!!

What an October to live in St. Louis!

I had the great opportunity to move to downtown St. Louis this summer, and I am so happy my husband and I decided to move!  It has been amazing, and I just love city living!  Not that I get to do much with all the studying and job hunting, but it is pretty exciting when we do get out on the town.  This October the city of St. Louis saw a miracle happen.  I still get chills thinking about every game leading up to game 6 of the World Series.  Watching a team that was ten and a half games behind win a championship and play the greatest game of their life is truly an honor.  I am so proud to call myself a St. Louis Cardinal fan and watch history unfold.  Game 6 was the most intense game I have ever seen.  After the game was over my hair hurt, my fingernails were nubs, and my voice was gone; but I am honored to say that I watched one of the greatest games ever played on a baseball field!  How intense!  After that game I knew we had to take game 7.  We went down to the stadium after the game and it was am amazing site to see.  There were fans everywhere!  I usually do not like crowds, but this was totally worth it.  I walked 2 miles back home at 1:30 am(in heels), and even though my feet were killing me the next day, I would not have traded that experience for anything.  I cannot wait to see what this next season will bring and it is going to be a long winter without my Cardinals.

On a sad note, Tony, you will be missed! Thank you for this amazing journey! What a way to end it!

 

Kim Kardashian…I know everyone is sick of hearing about her!

I know everyone is sick of hearing about Kim and her divorce (I am as well), but I cannot help but to comment.  I knew it all along!!  First off, her four-hour long wedding show was ridiculous.  I believe she wanted more fame, more fans, and more money.  I have read many articles explaining that she made money off of her wedding, because of it playing on television every day for the 72 days they were married.  So, she came out on top…kind of.  I believe she wanted more fame and now she is going to look like the victim and Kris Humphries will be put into the line of Kim Kardashian’s ex’s(and husband number two).  Did anyone even know who Kris Humphries was a year ago?  I had never heard of the guy! 

I have to admit, I did watch a little of the wedding special, however, I did not waste four hours of my life watching the entire thing.  I am fascinated by weddings and love the fun ideas every bride has.  One idea I do not like, is changing into different wedding dresses.  Kim had four wedding dresses, that cost more than my wedding(times two).  It is not like she will ever where any of them again…so what will happen to them?  She will probably auction them off to the highest bidder, who is a crazy enough fan to buy a $15,000 wedding dress! Profiting off of her loss(and Vera Wang’s).  Whether she did love him or did it for the money, no one will ever know, but I do feel sorry for the girl, because it would be hard to ever know if someone loved me for me with that kind of money. 

Lastly, I have seen a lot of articles relating to Kim being able to get married and divorced after knowing someone for one year, and gay couples not even being able to marry who have been together for twenty years.  Not that I am getting into a whole bag  of worms about gay marriage, but if they are happy(and have lasted longer than 72 days) then why should they not be able to get married?  Beats me, but Kim, I will be waiting for this to another Kim Kardashian E! Hollywood Special!

Go Cards!

I am sure everyone has their stories of when they were younger and going to sports games with their dad.  My father is an avid Cardinals fan and he will never be anything else.  Actually he likes all St. Louis sports, but baseball is his is passion.  So, I guess I would be lucky to say I got that trait from him.  I remember going to Cardinals games when my brother and I were much younger and he would bring his radio with him to listen to the radio announcers, because they always said everything that was going on in the game.  My father also taught us how to keep score, so we would purchase score sheets and a bag of peanuts and enjoy the game.  Those were some of my favorite memories growing up and I cannot wait to give those same memories to my children some day.  Thank God I found a man who loves the Cardinals as mucha s I do!

Anyone who knows my husband and I knows that we love the St. Louis Cardinals.  We have been to every Cardinals game on our dating anniversary for six years now and this year we continued the tradition by going to one game on our dating anniversary and one game on our wedding anniversary(just in case a Cards game falls on one but not the other).  The exciting part about this ritual is that we have been out of town to see away games twice!  We went one year to New York and watched a 14 inning game(5.5 hours long) where the Cardinals won by 2 in the 14th inning.  We also went to Philly the year after, the Cardinals lost that game, but like St. Louis, the Philly fans are amazing!  We had the best time there and all the fans were very welcoming.  So, with the World Series starting tonight I thought it was only fitting to write about my love for the Cardinals and our tradition that we will carry on forever!  Go Cards!

Non-Verbal Communication

I am taking a listening class for my speech communications minor.  Today, we watched an episode of the television show “Lie to Me“.  It was a very interesting show about a man who works in law enforcement as a human lie detector.  He can look at peoples’ nonverbal cues and determine whether they are telling the truth or not.  In this episode he was trying to find out who killed a young girl.  He had many suspects and interviewed all of them during the show.  He first interviewed the girls’ mother.  He thought she was very suspicious in her interview because her non-verbal actions did not match her hysterical verbal behavior.  He also interviewed a friend of the girl, after she gave a eulogy that was suspicious to him.  Again, her non-verbal cues did not match her verbal cues.  Unlike the mother, she did not seem very upset that her friend was dead.  She did not cry and her voice cracked.  She seemed frightened and the human lie detector could tell immediately that she was guilty.  After, watching this video, I became intrigued by how deceptive people can be.  So, I wonder if people can actually do this?  Has anyone seen this happen or can you pick out the non-verbal cues that show someone is lying?  I know I will begin to look at non-verbal cues, facial features, voice cracking, and fidgeting with the fingers when they are lying.

Good Customer Service

I Love my new job!! Nordstrom is one of the best companies I have seen as far as customer service and taking care of their employees.  They really know how to run a company.  I am worked many hours and had extensive training to get ready for the grand opening that way last weekend.  It was well worth it!  The customers were excited to see the store and the employees(all of them) were excited to service the customers.  I have met some great people who can help me along the way to a career that I will be at for a very long time.  It is an excited place to be, which is very hard to say in a retail job.  If anyone gets a chance to see the new store come by and see me! I will be at the Bobbi Brown counter in the beautiful cosmetics area!  Also, I would like to hear feedback from anyone that has been to the store.  I love hearing stories about good customer service or bad and what the store can improve on, because we all work as a team and are helping each other out!  I only work there part time, so if anyone hears of internships, I am still interested!  Happy Shopping!

Bad Customer Service

     I was on the phone with my sister-in-law today and found this next story very interesting.  I am an advocate for giving credit to great customer service and great places to go eat.  I feel that if I enjoyed my experience that it needs to be shared with the world, because I hope someone would spread the word about their experience with me at my job.  On the other hand, if I hear of someone having a bad experience at a place of business, I want to shout it from the rooftops, especially if it has to do with disrespecting my family.  So, this is the summary of the story…
My sister-in-law made a reservation at a restaurant for 10 people to celebrate her friend’s birthday. It took the server over 20 minutes to come and greet the table.  They loved the ice cream martinis and discussed going back so that they could try other flavors. One of her friends orders a banana split and did not like it.  She told the server this and asked if she could order something else. The server said that she would grab the manager. The manager came over and after arguing with  the girl, she said, “We will take this back but please know that if you come back here we don’t usually do this. You can’t return food like a t-shirt.”  Everyone shocked by the way the manager spoke to her.  Less than two minutes later, the owner comes to the table and says, “My manager was incorrect. We will not take the sundae off of the bill. Let me educate you guys, food costs, and I can’t just throw it away. This is not JcPenny, and you cannot just return something if you don’t like it. Maybe you can do that at chain restaurants that you frequent but you can’t do that here!” She continued to talk down to them and even put her hand in one of the girl’s face. If this is how the owner deals with her customers then I don’t understand why they are still in business! Obviously, my sister-in-law and her friends felt very disrespected and the manager and owner were for appreciative of their business as customers.

     Customers, no matter what business, are the core of a company.  They are the people who keep a business running.  I was very upset hearing this story and wanted to let everyone know about it!

New Job!!

I had new hire training class today for the Nordstrom store I will be working at in a couple weeks.  It is amazing how much i learned in one day, even after working in retail in five years.  They seem to really take an interest in giving their employees the best training and experience possible.  I think it will be a great growth opportunity for me!

For those of you who do not know me, I love to people watch.  This class had a variety of people from different cultures that would be great to learn from.  One thing I realized is that I need to keep an open mind when going into new situations such as this one.  While listening to my colleagues during the afternoon session, a lady in the fifties was sitting next to me and complaining about every little exercise we did.  She thought everything was useless and a waist of time.  This was her first job outside of the house and has never had real training, but that is no excuse to pick apart everything we were trying to learn.  It became so annoying I had to try and tune her out, which was very hard to do.  Many people do not understand why companies have to incorporate “the obvious” into their training classes.  If these obvious philosophies were not incorporated into training, I guarantee someone could use that as a reason for not knowing a certain rule or regulation when getting back to the store.  So, for everyone that wants to know, I just bit my tongue and let her complain to me the entire class period.

This is one reason why I want to go into human resources.  I find the training concepts that companies use very interesting.  I would love an internship and have been looking for one for some time now.  If anyone knows of an internship or opening in December(when a graduate) in St. Louis please let me know!!