Acting Reveals a Lot About Me

I had my work Christmas Luncheon this past Wednesday, and I was on the planning committee. My assignment was music and helping the emcees. The emcees were Greg, Marden, and Carl, who I now affectionately call the three stooges of HRS. They are hilarious and totally feed off of each other! That's the reason why they are the emcees. Our theme for the luncheon was a cowboy Christmas, and the emcees got this brilliant idea to film a black and white film with the four of us being the actors. The idea behind the film (and to make sense of the video below) is that we get the group to start singing "Here Comes Santa Claus" while we wait for Santa to come into the room, but Santa doesn't show up! So Greg and Marden (the two cowboy emcees) think something is wrong and head out to go look for Santa and that's when the video begins - of their adventures of saving Santa from the evil Black Bart.

Guess who is Black Bart? Yep. Me. I'm also Ms. Jesse Jane at the beginning. And let me tell you! I have a new respect for actors and actresses - or at least the ones that can do just about any role. The part where I have to swoon into Greg and Marden's arms? Yeah.... we took like four different takes of that because I couldn't do it! I make fun of swooners so there was no way I could do it myself. Ugh.  But as for being the evil villain? Piece of cake. It came so naturally to me..... wait.... yeah. That was the great reveal! I'm a natural villain! Oh dear.

Enjoy the video.

Mundane Monday: Old Posters from College

This weekend I did some spring cleaning and came across some posters that I used to hang up on the walls of my college apartments. I just wanted to memorialize these since I loved them in college and I've now tossed them.

An image of downtown Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics

Ansel Adams image of Denali National Park

Every girl should have this image in her apartment.

A Roommate & China

I'm getting a roommate. I know. You're shocked. I've held for several years now that having my own place was a step foward in progression for me and that getting a roommate (other than family) would be a step back in progression. Well.... this feels good - like I need to be doing it .... like it is a tender mercy from the Lord that I didn't ask for, telling me to beef up my savings faster than I could have otherwise ... as if something is coming that I need savings for. Initially, when I heard the voicemail from Sister Hooper from my ward wondering if I was interested in getting a roommate, I shut down the idea. But I started thinking about it and how helpful it would be to my savings. So I thought I'd at least get the details before I shut down the idea entirely. When I found out that she was older (38) and had very few belongings because she is from Taiwan and that Sister Hooper said she was very nice and a sweet girl, I thought I'd meet the girl and see how I feel. Thursday night she came over to see my place and meet me. Her name is Jo Kung. She is very sweet and I felt good about it! She is chattier than I expected, but she seems very sweet and on top of things. So I invited her to move in! She moves in tomorrow and Tuesday. And one other reason why I like this idea - is because I'm doing her a service. She's been living in a terrible situation with a roommate who has been having her boyfriend sleep over. I guess I'm a sucker for helping people out.

And then China. Well. I received an email from my master's program director inviting us students to go to China with her and one of our professors next summer. It would be a mini summer study abroad since we'd be going to a Chinese university, living on it's campus, and attending a class there taught by our professor. The whole trip would be six weeks and they would do a bunch of cool side trips on the weekends to Beijing, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China, Shanghai, the terracotta army, Hong Kong, and other places. Guess how little this trip would cost me? $3,000. That price includes airfare, lodging, tuition, side trips, and most meals. I'm skeptical because that seems too good to be true! Flights alone cost nearly that much. I'm going to grill them with questions at their information session this week. Then I'll have to figure out some way to make it work with work, like maybe they'll let me work from China, or else I'll have to go for only three or four weeks since I won't be able to save enough vacation days for the full six weeks. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Mundane Monday: My HRD Job

A few years back, I did a post on my current job at that time . . . and now that I've changed jobs . . . three years ago this month, I think it's high time I document this job too! I still work for Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I also still work in Human Resource Services, but now I work in the Human Resource Development (HRD) office that falls under the scope of Human Resource Services (HRS). My office's focus is to develop employees through professional development workshops, online training, and even our employee wellness program. 

My Co-Workers

We have three full-time employees: my director, Tim Black; my coworker that oversees the instructor-led trainings and workshops, Collette Blackwelder (who actually just came to HRD in March as part of the great musical jobs shake up that moved  Greg Danklef out); and then I oversee the online training. We also have one part-time non-student employee: Marie Harris who acts as our Administrative Assistant and also as the Wellness Program Coordinator. Then we have ten part-time student employees: three wellness coordinators, two web-masters, three graphic designers, and one editor. I supervise the graphic designers and the editor. 

My Responsibilities

As the Online Training Consultant . . . I do a bunch of random stuff. There are a few things that I do that are routine, but mostly it's kind of random. I'm the functional system administrator for our learning management system that houses the online trainings and handles all the registrations for our training workshops. I troubleshoot all the online trainings that have technical difficulties. I create opportunities for the online training developers around campus to collaborate. I develop a few online trainings myself - currently I'm working on what I call the Student Professional Series that will have courses on customer service, professionalism, working with the generations, communication, etc. Then I have fun random projects that I get from my vice president, Brian Evans. I have to add here that it is interesting working in a job that is so particularly interesting to my vice president. He has me send him monthly reports of all the online trainings we have available - by name - not just the statistics . . . he wants to know the detail. Anyway, back to the project: I have the opportunity to develop the university's first training certification. It is based on one of our values: Innovation. The certification process will consist of three online trainings (basically covering how to innovate) and a capstone application project where the employee will have to actually implement an innovative idea. We're going to pilot the certification idea with Innovation and see how it goes. If it is well-received, then we'll develop certifications for each of our other values: competency, respect for sacred resources, integrity, teamwork, accountability, respect for all persons, etc. Student Auxiliary Services and Physical Facilities are my biggest training developers with most of their trainings focusing on safety topics. Financial Services, Risk Management & Safety, and the College of Life Sciences are also big users. We have over 400 trainings in use with 4,000 users taking trainings during our peak months and about 1,500 users taking trainings during our low months. What else . . . I think that covers the big things. 

How I Came into this Job

Previously, I was one of the Area HR Consultants (I so loved that job). But during the hiring freeze, in November 2009, the previous Online Training Consultant left for another job and of course, because of the hiring freeze, we couldn't replace her. But we couldn't let the position remain vacant since online training seemed to be one of our vice president's pet projects. So my assistant vice president, Forrest Flake, talked with his directors to figure out who they could move into the position. Apparently, I was the one deemed tech-savvy enough and design-savvy enough to be able to transition the best. Holy moly. It took me a year to get up to speed. I was calling the people that I was supposed to be consulting to learn how to do my job because my predecessor did not give me any helpful training. It was a rough adjustment - not only to learn all the technical aspects of this job, but to also go from a very social and central position to one of complete, utterly complete, autonomy and individual contributor. At the time I moved over, HRD did not have a director since the previous one left during the hiring freeze. So Greg, Marie, and I were on our own - although we did have Forrest's oversight, albeit very removed oversight. The hiring freeze didn't lift until January 2011, and by that time we were six months away from an even more previous director, Matt Smith, returning from being a mission president so Forrest decided to keep the job open for him to return to in August of 2011. Matt passed away this summer - just one year after being released from being a mission president. 

My Pride and Joy

Just in the last two weeks I received my pride and joy at work: my MacBook Pro. It's been like Christmas at work because just a few days before getting my MacBook Pro, I also got an iPad. Online training development is tough on a computer - the authoring tool we use to develop our trainings (Adobe Captivate) is very memory-hungry and my old PC laptop was not cutting it. It would take 5 minutes just to open the program and then sometimes it would take several minutes just to move about my training as I worked on it. And don't make me talk about how it wouldn't publish my training. Ugh. That was super annoying. But with my new and beautiful MacBook Pro . . .  sigh . . . it is so blissfully fast . . . and beautiful. I didn't realize how bad my PC was until I got my baby. I'm truly the fair-haired child to have this set up since everyone else in HRS have PCs even though some have requested Macs but didn't have the business case for it like I do. The iPad has been indispensable as well since I'm in the midst of testing HTML5 published trainings to see if they'll work from our learning management system on an iPad. Currently, they do not and it is quite frustrating. 

Here is my office in the Jesse Knight Building

And here is my baby - my MacBook Pro

Thanksgiving in Review

We had a treat this year for Thanksgiving - Jill and Mike and their family came to Logan this year!! It's normal for my mom and me to go to Logan to Teri's house for Thanksgiving, but to have the Hansen's there too was so much fun. Two of Teri and Kelly's kids were there as well, of course: Jeremy and his family, and Nick and his wife. Thanksgiving day was mostly the normal fare: cinnamon pull-a-parts for breakfast, snacks galore for lunch, and then the traditional dinner on Grandma Bertha's old china. But one thing that was different, beside the attendance of the Hansens, was warm enough weather to go for a bike ride! So Spencer, Parker, Kelly, and I went for a little mountain bike ride up Green Canyon. (Teri, Kelly, and I also got a ride in on Friday.) It's wonderful to be able to burn a little bit of the calories off that I consume over the entire weekend.

Kelly & Spencer

Me & Parker

Friday night, Teri, Kelly, and I took my mom to get a new cell phone. Her cell phone was too many years old, losing its ability to keep a charge, and she couldn't hear very well while on it anyway. After two hours, we came home with a new one for her and with her nerves in tact, mostly. The excellent thing is that she can hear much better on it than her old phone! And we've taught her how to text message and now she's on fire! She's been texting a bunch.

On the last day of our festivities, Saturday, we went to Salt Lake City to see the new  City Creek Mall, to Temple Square to see the Christmas lights, and to the old ZCMI building to see the Christmas candy display windows in the new Macy's. Everything was so beautiful and amazing.

Christmas candy display: Santa! 

Christmas candy display: a beehive with a trimmed tree and fireplace inside. See the bees with the Santa hats on?

Christmas candy display: The Nutcracker and the King of Mice (on the opposite side - not pictured)

Snow is Even More Glorious....

When you have a Subaru Outback! I woke up to this on Saturday, November 10:

I was so excited to go drive my Subaru through it to my boot camp class. My Ruby Subaru did not disappoint. It was awesome in the snow! Then on Tuesday, when I had to meet up with my carpool to go to class, there weren't a whole lot of parking options but there was one spot that had a snow pile from the plows .... I hesitated for a minute, but then remembered that I had a Subaru so I pulled in. Getting myself in and out of the car was trickier than getting Ruby in and out of that snow drift. Why did I purposely park in a snow drift? Because I can. :)

Mundane Monday: Today's Favorite Song

I'm currently obsessed with this song: "I Won't Give Up" by Jason Mraz. Maybe I'm a hopeless romantic to like such lovey-dovey songs while single, or maybe .... I'm not giving up hope that I'll be able to share this song with a husband someday, maybe I'm not giving up hope on other loved ones, or maybe I'm not giving up hope on people in general.... maybe all of the above and some that I haven't thought of yet. I just like the thought of not giving up...