Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Left brain left! Right brain right! Left brain...

Yesterday was a big day at work. We had a major special event in the morning, then I crunched the budget in the afternoon.

Right Brain Morning

Working with a team from parks and rec, public health, community schools and some other good people, I helped host our annual Healthy Kids Preschool Fair. We took over a big community centre and organized checks of vision, speech, hearing, nutrition etc with health nurses, as well as exhibits by all kinds of organizations dedicated to helping kids and families grow up healthy. As one of the parks people, I was focussed on the fun stuff - crazy hat-making, fish pond, face painting and balloon twisting. I also coordinated the volunteers. We get students from the high school, people whose fitness classes have been cancelled for the day to make way for the fair and some wonderful seniors. We think about 300 people attended. It was a lot of fun. My favourite was helping the volunteer at the fishpond for a while. You should have seen the children's faces when they threw the "hook" into the pond, then there was a tug on the line and pop! a surprise! The whole morning felt like a great big birthday parties with lots of aunties and uncles hosting together - for a serious good cause.


Left Brain Afternoon

Then there was the afternoon. We've just switched the whole city over to a new automated office system for HR, finance etc. It's massive and we're all learning and adjusting to new ways of doing just about every administrative task. And now it's budget time. Everything is different, and everyone is anxious to get it right. On top of that, my co-workers are (one) off with a sick child and (two) off with a broken foot, so I volunteered to do three budgets. Well, I just closed my office door and crunched and crunched. I actually love numbers and figuring out new things, although I procrastinate and avoid it for a bit before I take the plunge. Having already worked on it all day Friday, I picked it back up and finished the darned thing. I still have to double-check my work, but I think it's done. It's like learning a new language, thought. I'm still not sure I haven't said something totally ridiculous without know it. Ah well.

I was glad to come home at the end of that day, enjoy a nice supper with my family and crash early. Both sides of my brain worked well for me. That's a good feeling.

question: which side of your head works most often at your work?

mompoet - cranium like a geranium

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your co-worker with a sick child so appreciates your flexible brain!