Three Cool Ideas

1. The Good Gym
Help someone run an errand while you get your work out in.

2. Neighbors for Neighbors in Jamaica Plain just started SnowCrew, a group of volunteers who help their neighbors shovel after big snowstorms. You can sign up to shovel or get help via text message.

3. In urban food deserts like Detroit, why not let Walmart move in to establish small stores?

Snow Day

Though most of Boston was shut down yesterday, the people of Jamaica Plain did some righteous sledding at Jamaica Pond. I went to join the fun, armed with a cardboard box, which didn't end up working. A nice couple took pity on me and lent me a saucer and I got five or six good runs in before it got dark. As I was leaving with my box, a passing teacher informed me that you have to put dish soap on cardboard boxes to make them go. That's what she does with her kindergarteners apparently.











Sledding was fun but dressing like a snow man is getting old. California, here I come!

Working Girl

Yesterday, I only talked to two people between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm. One was in a meeting. A meeting I was nervous about because I wasn't sure if I'd be able to communicate clearly, since I haven't been talking to anyone because this place is deserted.

Sometimes music plays in the atrium in our building. The cd or whatever the building management plays, has been skipping on the same note all day so it sounds like a rave. Every time I exit my suite I look for a small rave elf to sneak out from behind a potted plant and hand me some ecstasy but all I see is the Au Bon Pain attendant, wrapped in 3 sweaters, talking on her cell phone in Arabic.

I'll be really happy when January is over.

Travel on the cheap

In trying to book flights for summer weddings, I've been dismayed with what seem like incredibly high prices. My usual go-to websites and airlines (i.e. kayak.com and southwest) are turning up fares that make me want to cry. $400 to go to Nashville from Boston? I've flown to California for less.

Thankfully, this recent New York Times article offers some helpful tips on how to keep traveling in 2011.

If you have travel deal secrets, please share them in the comments box!

Pesky Millenials

In this piece, Daniel Pink, author and expert on making workplaces more awesome, discusses how we might cater to millenials' desire for constant feedback by providing workers with more than the annual performance review. How much can meeting once a year or even every six months really help someone? Now that I'm not in the organizing world, getting feedback on the regs, I totally sympathize with this notion. Academia, I'm finding, is pretty weak on feedback, accountability, idea sharing, and pretty much all the things that I learned were important in my organizational development classes in college.

In this other article, Pink addresses the benefits of giving employees time to do what they want. Google and others have proven that allowing employees to be creative can lead to great ideas like G-mail, so why haven't more companies caught on? This is something Wyatt and I have been talking about a lot. It seems like a no-brainer.

As a former solider of the non-profit world myself, I wonder how organizations can make space for their employees to do some creative thinking, without the incentive of bottom-line payback. Given the chance and the space to be more creative, non-profit workers might come up with brilliant new campaign strategies, reporting software and fundraising tools. The problem is, most people have too much work to set aside time for non-essential work. They need the management to mandate creative time, and even then, I've known folks who would probably keep working on their regular work. It's so lame! We're missing out on so much potential. Let's democratize the workplace. Creative time and regular feedback for all!

Holiday Highlights and The Tallest Man on Earth

The Jankas eat Turducken! In case you haven't heard of a Turducken, it's a chicken stuffed inside a duck which is then stuffed inside a turkey. A mail order from Louisiana, this one also had a lot of Cajun stuffing in it.






This is what I ate at La Rosa, a world famous Cuban place in Miami. It's a seafood stew named something that begins with a "z". We had one night in Florida on the way home from Belize and tried this place based on the Yelp reviews. It turned out to be phenomenal. My parents had skirt steak and lamb shanks in wine sauce, and my brother had house-made chicken cordon bleu. Our waiter, a Costa Rican guy, was really friendly and funny, definitely a plus after a long day of airports and airplanes.

I'm sitting in an airport again, the third time in three days and I've been listening to The Tallest Man on Earth's Wild Hunt. One of the songs on it was on all the best of 2010 lists and two friends that give me all my best music recommendations told me I'd love it. I feel like I am missing something. To me it sounds like Xavier Rudd remaking Bob Dylan and doing it badly. It feels similar to Ryan Adams' Cold Roses, a tribute to the Grateful Dead, complete with dancing bears inside the cover. It was sad. At least, it just wasn't that compelling. I feel the same way about Wild Hunt. And Kristian Mattson's voice is so annoying. Perhaps with time, I'll feel differently.






This is my brother with his Christmas gift, a Hezbollah shirt straight from Beirut. And we wonder why people think we're terrorists...

Can you Belize it?

Toucan.

You can see some more photos here.