Monday brain dump

This year I turn 30 and thanks to one of my favorite bloggers, Katie @ marriageconfessions I have started to think about my next decade. I've been thinking a lot about my job and my career and what I want to be doing. I like my job, I like pleasing people and I like making people happy. The company I work for is fantastic and I work with some great people. I've started thinking about where I want to be and how I want to grow in my career.

I work in finance and the career path for company means meeting with clients and building relationships. This seems great to me however, I don't have a feeling for the market, watching performance, or crunching the numbers. This is a being piece of the job being an investment manager.

What do I love? I love cooking a great meal or baking something awesome and people telling me I did a great job. That makes me happy. We went on vacation this past weekend and I woke up early to make breakfast for all the skiers/snowboarders before they hit the slopes in the morning. Why, because making pancakes and hearing people tell me "Jenn, these are fantastic" makes me truly happy. I'm a pretty picky eater so I could never be a chef. I'm really good at following a recipe but not so much knowing what flavors go together. But how do you combine a love for making people happy, building relationships with people/families and creating great meals that make people say "wow"? Can you even do that? I can't quit my job and be a stay at home wife so that option is out. I pray occasionally for some sort of direction but at the same I'm quite happy that I at least can get up in the morning and say I go to a job I like.

So where do I go from here? I don't know. I just have to get up, go to work and wait for something to hit me and say "do this".

A dilemma

So I've got an interesting dilemma. Back when I was interviewing for my job, one of the guys who interviewed me was telling me all about the culture of the company and happened to mention in passing that bonuses weren't that much but they did get bonuses. Truth be told I didn't really care because I was so desperate to get out of my job that as long as my salary was more, bonuses weren't a priority to me. Fast forward a year and at my review my boss was discussing the bonus pool, he didn't know what it was going to be but he thought it might not be much. So I set my standards pretty low but I figured what ever I was given would be fine.

Well, my bosses idea of not much and mine are two completely different things. My bonus is 2-3x as much as any previous bonus I have received and he told me he wanted to get me more and he hoped it was acceptable but my bonus was also pro-rated since I started in April. My husband and I have decided to save at least half and spend half. Actually, when I told him how much I would be receiving he jokingly asked "so what are we going to do with your bonus" and I promptly responded "we're spending some on a vacation". We've been taking about it for so long and now we finally can go and we need it. 

So here comes the dilemma-my husband and I haven't been on a real vacation in over 3 years, our honeymoon to be exact. We've done weekend trips but that's about it. We have no idea where to go. I don't want to spend more than $1,000 for a flight and hotel (per person). We don't care where we go but we've been to DC so that's out and Disney was where our honeymoon was. We also don't have any restrictions as to when we go. You would think this much freedom to making plans would be helpful but it's not. So any ideas?

Done!

The finished project. Total work time? Probably two to three hours. I ended up with one extra print stripe but after going around the blanket twice and not finding it's match I gave up.