A Guest Hodgepot of Thoughts 1.0
Guest post number nine! See the link if you’d like to write one yourself. This week’s guest post is written by my love. I’m so blessed to have Maddie in my life. I literally couldn’t do life without her; first I’d starve, then I’d die of loneliness. Some of Maddie’s qualities that I admire are her caringness, positivity, joyfulness, intelligence, discernment, adventurousness, faithfulness, philomath-idy (someone who loves to learn), empathy, and her agape love. Thank you Maddie for taking the time to share your writing!
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Written by: Maddie Daniel (Jackson’s Girlfriend and Overall, Amazing Person)
Jackson has tragically run out of things to write about as it is his busy season, so welcome to a Guest Version of a Hodgepot of Thoughts, written by his one and only! I am taking over this week to give life updates from both Jackson and myself so his streak of weekly posts throughout the year of 2022 won’t be broken like the Tar Heels March Madness winning streak. (Sorry Jackson).
As a reminder for those of you who are interested, Jackson is still accepting blog posts for the rest of his busy season which ends at the beginning of June! Please write in so that his few hours of free time during busy season can be spent hanging out with me instead of writing dumb thoughts.
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Recently, Jackson and I hosted Mom’s Weekend at our apartment in Seattle. Both of our moms came up to visit and go to the tulip festival and got to meet each other for the first time.
For those of you who don’t know, Seattle has a world-renowned (or maybe just regionally renowned) tulip festival that takes place about an hour and a half north of Seattle. There are fields of thousands of tulips planted by color and they bloom in April every year. The festival was beautiful; we had a lovely lunch in the town nearby; and our moms hit it off beautifully! (See photo below)
Pictured are the four of us and a random woman taking maternity photos in the background. For those of you who are wondering... yes, she is included in every single photo that we have of the four of us at the tulip festival.
Not pictured is the four of us slipping up and down the tulip fields in giant puddles of mud. Lucky for us, none of us fell to ruin the photo opp, but we should have brought our mud-skates. We have noted this for next year’s mom’s weekend.
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If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Moreover, if people are on mute and off camera on zoom calls, are they paying attention?
Last week was my first of three rounds of training that I am hosting for a project at work. This past week, my co-worker and I presented 3-5 hours of new system how-to’s each day to a crowd of over 100 people! We got to the end of the week and held a two hour office hour to answer the many questions that we were anticipating getting, and… complete silence. I am 1000% sure that people should have had questions, there is a lot to learn! Below are my three theories for what could have potentially occurred for there to be so few questions.
Theory #1: Osmosis. Maybe that slacker in my middle-school classes growing up was right! Can people learn material just from being around it? Was my hours of presenting slides and system demos enough to put everyone to sleep and they learned the system through their subconscious? If that is the theory I am going to start sleeping at work immediately!
Theory #2: The staff was replaced with a gaggle of the characters that are used to promote the system we implemented. They will now be singing through the training key takeaways as they go about their cartoon lives.
Theory #3: Maybe our training was thorough enough that we didn’t have any immediate questions (shameless self appreciation). If that is the case, my co-workers and I are currently preparing ourselves for the sea of questions that are bound to come our way in the next few weeks. I just bought snorkeling gear and enough coffee to caffeinate an army to prepare.
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In a couple of weeks Jackson and I will be on our spring vacation we have been planning for over a year now. During our upcoming trip, we will be visiting UNC, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Mammoth Caves National Park, Nashville and then will be ending our trip in Louisville where we will be going to the Kentucky Derby.
Jackson has been prepping for the trip by fine-tuning his prediction algorithm to determine which horses are the best to bet on. I, on the other hand, have been preparing by finding a fancy hat.
For those of you who do not know, the Kentucky Derby is a fancy affair where attendees dress up in fancy outfits with even fancier, or funkier, hats. The outfits give off a vibe similar to the Capitol leaders in the Hunger Games, and will no doubt reach that level in the next few years.
My outfit has now been procured and I can confidently say I will be sporting a funky/fancy hat on the day of the derby. The hats were hard to find but I ordered one on Amazon that is derby-esc but not Effie like.
Photos of the derby to come - I’ll get Jackson to post some once we get back from our travels :)
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Writing is hard. I am almost through finishing this post and have so much appreciation for how much effort Jackson puts into his posts and his incredible ability to find humor in daily life. I’m so lucky to have him around and to have all of our memories documented in all of these dumb thoughts.
The End
