Another Nancy

Growing up as a Nancy, people would make fun of my name. There was fancy nancy, nannygoat, bananners, Nancy Drew, Nancy Kerrigan, Nancy Reagan, blah blah blah. In college, I had a totally awesome friend named Nancy (nicknamed "the other Nancy"). And now, I have a pretty cool Nancy to be teased about. She is the mother of five children and the new Speaker of the House. That means if something happens to the President and Vice President, then Nancy Pelosi would become the President of the United States. Hmmm, "President Nancy", I like the sound of that!

Freedom, Tacos and Creativity

Why is it that when we are free do to what we want, we feel frozen and stuck, but if we are assigned a task we can complete it creatively?

Lately, I have been doing all the cooking because I have the time. I can cook anything I want, thousands of recipes from any of the dozen cookbooks I have collected over the years, and I still have a hard time deciding what to cook for dinner.

In some weird way, it was easier to come home after my California bridge commute and whip up an omelette packed with veggies and cheese than it is to sit down in the middle of the afternoon, flip through my recipe file, and find something to cook for dinner. The easiest way to cook is when your starving husband asks for tacos at 8:30 on a Tuesday night. It takes all of the freedom out of the process, but it allows you to prepare the most creative taco night of your life.

Speaking of creativity, I am about to leave for the land of inspiration and innovation, India. I will be gone for the rest of November, but I will be back with lots of stories, pictures and maybe some dysentery. I hope not, but you never know. I hate to lose my loyal blog readers, so if you are feeling inspired, do you want to be a guest blogger for me while I am away? You can write about any topic, except me (especially if you knew me in college). Oh, and it would be nice if you could keep it PG-13/R rated. AND you would have to deal with the unparsimonius blogger hosting setup thing I created. If you knew that I made up the word unparsimonius then this is the job for you! Drop me an email before I leave on the 9th. I'll leave one more post before I take off for India. But I still haven't solved tonight's dinner crisis, so I better go get on that.

Cute Overload

Cutest. Poodle. Ever.
Originally uploaded by nanodudek.

I like cute things and I am not ashamed to admit it. When I need to decompress I do a Google or Flickr image search for puppies. If I had a dog, I would dress him up for Halloween. But I don't have to, because now I have cuteoverload.com.

Cuteoverload.com is a gallery of cuteness. Kittens, puppies, napping hedgehogs, baby mice, gerbils, guinea pigs driving toy cars, ponies, bunnies, fuzzy chicks and more cuteness can be found there. Every photo has a silly caption and the entire website is peppered with exclamation points!!!

I highly recommend you check it out whenever you feel like you've had a long day.

What does it take to be great?

When I started college I wanted to be great. Awesome, accomplished, respected. But then the stress and fatigue of college and grad school beat me down. By the time I was done I just wanted to be good at something. And nice. That would get me by in life and afford me some spare time on the weekends and evenings to hang out with my husband and my friends. But now I find myself in my 30s feeling average and wondering where my spark went. And the only person I have to blame for my mediocrity is myself!

The other day a feature at Forbes caught my eye, "What it Takes to be Great." Is greatness a natural born talent? Or is it simply the product of hard work?

Well, scientists have actually researched this philosophical question. The results are in...the good news is that greatness is not a result of innate talent, it is the product of at least 10 years of hard work. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Bobby Fisher, they all had a decade of experience under their belt. The bad news? That greatness is the result of 10 years of hard work. And not just 10 years of showing up for practice, but years of deliberate confrontation with challenges, discomfort and adversity.

That means if I want to be a great blogger, I need to spend a decade pounding out articles about subjects that are outside of my comfort zone. That means I would have to write about red meat, downhill skiing, politics, underwire bras, racism, public washrooms, religion, toenails, hockey, sex, my marriage, etc. etc. But maybe that wouldn't be so bad if it made me a great writer. That is a risk with a payoff I am not certain I am willing to take at this point. But, it also means that if I want to be a great scientist, manager, or samosa fryer, I don't need to have been born with an innate talent. I just need to work at it.

I did a Google search for the word greatness and the first result was an exhibit by 4th and 5th graders who profiled 12 greatness icons and came up with a table of characters great people have. I also found this speech from MIT that reminds us that our American Democracy affords all of us the opportunity to achieve greatness. Oh yeah, and Canadians too .