Next week will be the big basketball tournaments that are known as March Madness. There will be brackets published everywhere for people to make their picks and office pools will be humming. Although I am not a big fan of basketball on TV, I will probably spend at least one or two evenings after work with coworkers or friends at a sports bar watching some of the games with my favorite teams.

One of my friends from work is Vicki Hamilton. I found out at lunch today that she is writing a blog. Of course, we don’t write much about work – we write about personal things. But it was fun to find out that someone else in the office is writing a blog. So I am giving her a “hey Vicki” and hope she stops by my blog for a visit.

I love the fact that I’m in my 30′s yet still learning things everyday.  I love the understanding I have now that I’m a little bit older.  I feel I have experienced enough to take the good with the bad.  Plus I feel I’ve experienced enough to make good choices.  Most importantly though I finally can truly understand the importance of the little things in life.

For example I see how unimportant money is and how important family is.  I see how what you do doesn’t matter half as much as you think it does.  I understand that everybody sees things differently and that we should love and respect the differences in each other.  I see how this world is such a better place because there are so many people working together to improve the lives of others.  With more men and women a job can get done twice as well.  Hopefully a deeper understanding will keep happening with each day.

This has been one of the most perfect weeks.  For one thing I had 3 days off from work in a row!  That never happens or at least not as far back as I can remember.  I was able to catch up with some friends, I went to the library and did a lot of reading, and worked-out everyday.  It has been so relaxing and wonderful.  I never realized how much I missed my downtime.  I thought I would end up bored and missing work, but that did not happen.  I guess I really needed a few days to myself.

One of my friends that I saw for lunch has been laid off from her job.  She was telling me how she was in need of this time off so bad that she didn’t even realize it.  The greatest blessing for her has been getting laid off although she was with the company for over 13 years.  She has been without a job for 2 months now and states it has been the greatest 2 months of her life.  Myabe we should all take more time off it seems like we all need it!

The last blog I wrote was about a homeless shelter that I was visiting.  This one is about a great thing we are doing at work to help people out who don’t have as much food and money as we do.  We are having a contest in every department to see which department can collect the most cans of food.  So far our department is in third place.  The good news is overall the whole company has collected almost 2,000 cans of food to donate!  I think that is amazing.  Imagine every company doing the same thing.  We might be able to knock out hunger if everyone got together and donated one or two cans of food.  That’s it that is all it would take!  This type of thing gives me so much hope.