The 5 people who change your life

We have summer hours at work so I worked a ½ day today and met my ex-manager for lunch. I actually saw her last weekend but didn’t really have a chance to catch-up with her one-on-one.
When we first met 9(!!) years ago, she was working at her first full-time job out of university, and I was on my third co-op work term. We kept in touch off and on through the years and eventually worked together again when she hired me about 2 years ago. I had always been fascinated by the kind of work she did and was hoping to find something like that myself somewhere.

It’s a bit funny how I ended up working for her. We were in the midst of a re-org at my last company and while I am certain I would have been placed somewhere in the organization, I didn’t want someone else to decide my career path for me. I had been bored for a while anyway, and had been thinking about a change, so the re-org was the kick-in-the-butt I needed to start looking.

I started searching the job sites and got in touch with a headhunter I had worked with in the past to get the ball rolling. When I first read the posting for my current job, I remember thinking: “Wow, sounds like the challenge I’ve been looking for….and eerily similar…” When I looked at the details for the job, it turns out my friend was the hiring manager. So I sent her an email to ask if it would be weird for me to apply, went through several rounds of interviews, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have this vague notion that Dr. Phil or some other self-help guru wrote a book about how there are 5 people in one’s life who have a significant impact...I seem to remember, too, Oprah talking about how this book changed her life…I’ve sort of played with this idea, wondering about who the 5 in my life would be, and if I’ve met them all yet.

This list would most definitely include my parents whose actions and thoughts have fundamentally shaped my personality and beliefs—my father because he died when I was 9, and my mother because she raised 3 kids on her own. That leaves 3 spots free on my list. In terms of my career, to date, possible candidates include two people who have helped me along the way, one of them is a friend from school, and the other would be my ex-manager. Who’s to say what the future will bring and how this list will change?

On a lighter note, I’ve been practicing my wire-wrapping the last couple evenings just so I can get my hands on the good stuff. I’ve also been browsing various sites online to find some inspiration so that when I felt my technique was worthy of more expensive materials, I’d have the perfect project to focus on. Well, I think that time is now.

I’ve lately been quite taken with turquoise so I spent an hour after lunch at the bead store having a ball picking out semi-precious stones, crystals, shells and pearls to make a necklace similar to this one here. Over $100 and forty minutes in rush hour traffic later—at 2 in the afternoon!!!—I get home and lay out all my goodies into a pattern. It’s then that I realize I didn’t buy enough beads, and the wire I bought was the wrong gauge! Grrr! So, instead of starting work on my necklace as I had planned for the afternoon, I have to wait until tomorrow to go to the bead store to get sufficient supplies. How disappointing.