Random Thoughts From 101 Centavos For The Weekend

101 Centavos writes about career, gardening, cooking and eating well, speculating in mining stocks, tightwadishness and matters of personal finance, in no particular order.

This is a random mish-mash of mini-topics that were jotted down in the blog journal, and never developed into full-fledged articles.

 

Retirement

 

What will we do after we retire?  I know a number of people that did so, cashed in their chips in their sixties, and then came back to work part-time as consultants.  Some even went back with the same company.  One person in particular I’m thinking about went and did the retiree thing, bought the expensive RV with the intention of seeing all those places in the continental U.S. that he and his wife had never gotten to.  They took one trip, he was bored out of his skull and turns out they both didn’t care much for RV campgrounds. After a year, he had decided to get back to part-time work, and was perfectly happy.  Could your skill sets lend themselves to this approach once you retire?  How much in demand are you in your industry?

 

In The Garden:  Weeds

 

Turn a negative into a positive with weeds in the garden. It helps to view weeds not as annoyances,  but rather as fast-growing green biomass that is perfect for the compost pile. Some, like lamb’s quarters (Chenopodium Album), are deliciously edible and even have medicinal properties.  As one of my gardening mentors is fond of saying, a weed is just a plant that’s out of place.  So, next time you’re sweating out in the garden pulling weeds out of the flower beds, don’t bag and throw them away to end up in a landfill somewhere.  Pile them up into the compost bin or compost pile, and turn them into wonderful fertilizer.  You could also use weeds as green mulch for your flower or vegetable, laying them under the regular wood chip mulch to decompose and add to soil fertility, but be very careful that they’ve not developed any seed-heads yet. While the heat of the compost pile should cook any weed seeds beyond viability, introducing weed seeds straight into your garden is not good practice.

 

Good Eats On Route 66

 

If you’re ever traveling on that famous backbone of middle America (that would be Route 66), please please make sure you plan a stop at the Will Rogers Museum in Claremore OK, followed or preceded by a stop at Hammett House restaurant, not two blocks away from the museum.  We’ve had many a great meal there, and last night was no exception for gastronomic delights of home cooking.  Pork loin with pecan-cranberry relish and about a half-plate of steamed summer squash (and kale garnish – I ate the garnish!), navy bean soup with thick chunks of bacon. The chicken-fried steak is so far the best we’ve ever had (period), and the pies and desserts on their own deserve a 500-word ode to their delicious goodness.  The sizzling apple pie skillet with vanilla ice cream was a work of art, and thoughtfully delivered with a small side dish so I could decant the ice cream into it.

 

Career Tiplet #9.1

 

“Cross-cultural communication” is a skillset buzz-word that infests many a resume.  It’s one thing to say it, another to do it. A very simple way to put this into practice is to be exceedingly polite when writing emails to foreign correspondents. North Americans (which includes Canadians) have an easy familiarity which sometimes grates on more formal Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Malaysian people.    Americans will often address correspondents by their first names to start their letters.  Rather than doing that, I counsel people to start with a “Dear” (insert name), and then thank for whatever they’ve done or said in the previous message — with no trace of sarcasm if the message was negative.

 

Better to start, “Dear Mr. Wang Shu Zen, thank you for pointing out how our service has been some of the worst you’ve ever experienced, it is certainly useful feedback etc. etc.”

 

Good manners don’t cost anything, and they provide handsome returns.