LearnNugget – One Girl Scout Cookie box at a time

As many know, Girl Scout cookies are the bomb!  Their unique flavor and distinct little boxes are bar none to any cookie on the market.  My favorite are the Samoas, but the Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties are a very close second.

The one thing even better than having your favorite Girl Scout cookie is having your favorite Girl Scout Cookie in the off season.  That’s right, if you don’t stock up when they come knocking at your door you have to wait a year for another chance.  You can’t ask your co-worker if they still have an order sheet lying around, and you don’t see any makeshift concession stands out front of your local grocery anymore.  Not for another year!

The strategy here is to buy a year’s supply of these tasty little morsels.   Cookie sales vary throughout the year in different parts of the county and in my neck of the woods that’s late ‘winterish’ time.  I buy a few extra boxes and tuck away one in my drawer at work for mid summer.  At home, we stash a few boxes in the pantry for late summer and Fall.  There’s something about munching on a Peanut Butter Patty in front of co-workers knowing I may be the only one in the office with a Girl Scout cookie!

We’re still working through the first batch and I was taught a very important lesson recently.  Our normal routine in the morning is gathering in the kitchen preparing the day’s lunches.  I make coffee, my wife sorts through the available ingredients, and my step-daughter, Lauren is busy organizing her morning snack, lunch, and afternoon snack.

One morning Lauren says to me, “Would you like a Samoa?”  My response to her was, “Um..Duh! Of course I would. Thanks for asking.”  She asked if I would like two or three and I said I would just like two.  As she put two in a little baggy for me she asked in a very persuasive voice, “Wouldn’t you like three?”  At first I was catching on to her game because if I chose three cookies, she would assume it would be OK for her to have three also.  I said, “No thanks. Two is fine.”  What happened next made me laugh the rest of the day…

After that last response, she formed a rather pitiful sad look on her face and then all of a sudden got stern with me.  “You NEED three cookies today.  See, there are 12 left.  If you have three today and I have three today, that leaves six left.  That means we can both have three more tomorrow.”  I was impressed that she was planning so far ahead in assisting me in my lunchtime desert, but I had to challenge her.  “Yes, but if you and I both only have two today, there will be eight cookies left and we’ll have enough for two more days in our lunches.  She would have nothing to do with that math because what she said next made everything clear…

“We need to hurry up and finish this box! We can’t open another box until this one is finsihed and I want a Thin Mint!” (must be a rule my wife imposed)

Well then.  Appealing to her quest to get a Thin Mint, I agreed and had no choice but to accept three Samoa’s that day.

Hear what I’m sayin’

A friend of mine tweeted the other day with a link to Comic Quotes – “Good comics invent their own language and boundaries.” He asked the question “Should elearning have the same?” It got me thinking about language, images and my favorite subject, Graphic Communication. Eric replies, “The interplay of text & images in novel way,” got me thinking even further about the juxtaposition of text and images, elearning, and…the speech bubble.

In elearning our collective goal is to communicate our message to a learner with an overall outcome that ultimately changes their behavior to impact performance. If it’s been said, it’s been said a thousand times and we all know that yet we (we = the instructional designers, developers, training managers, and anyone that has any remote capacity in the delivery of elearning) continue to struggle with the how. We read books, attend conferences, share ideas, and always end up in front our own computer with all the latest and greatest tools, access to any resource, and scratch our heads about better ways to communicate. Do I have the one-all-be-all answer? Of course not! What I do have is nothing new – just a new way of thinking about text and images, or the juxtaposition of them.

LearnNugget #7

I am in my mid-40’s turning 45 this year. My wife will hit the big 4-0. They say 40’s is the new 30’s, but that’s only if you take care of yourself along the way.

I love my wife dearly for many reasons and one in particular is her overwhelmingly attention to health conscious eating. I’m a big guy by nature and I love my food, although I need to learn portion control as I can throw down a pizza pie alone!

As with every new year it brings with it a spirit of anew; a spirit of “starting over” or “changing of the guard” in respect to habits. With this new spirit my wife and I have been getting more and more interested in “clean eating” better known as whole foods and whole food ingredients.

That being said, we’ve been doing very good at planning out a week’s menu and shopping for those ingredients to accommodate several recipes. We tried the ‘Monday is fish,’ ‘Tuesday is Soup & Salad,’ etc. but that doesn’t work all the time. Instead we simply plan out a series of menus that have variety based on our schedule and mood. If we’re too busy or tired, there’s a 30-minute recipe. If we’re in a good mood and want a glass of wine, we have a more “gourmet” style recipe available.

We both work at the same company and we drive together as often as we can. On the way home last night, we were both in a sort of funk. I was simply mentally exhausted from a day of chasing problems and she was experiencing signs of an awful cold coming on. The planned menu was Tilapia and whole grain rice = Boring!

On the ride home we often listen to the local AM news station. On most nights at the top of the hour is a segment called “Food for Thought” which are a few minutes long that offer suggestions and tips in the kitchen. This time they were talking about how to spruce up boring pancakes. When I hear the word “pancake” my ears perk up and I was pleasantly pleased at what I learned.

Did you know you can mix ham & cheese in your pancake batter? If you add an egg or two also, you’ve got one well-rounded breakfast cake! There were several suggestions and I tried three: 1) The previously mentioned ham & cheese. 2) Cinnamon & apple chunks. 3) Sliced bananas that go on after the batter is poured. Dinner last night were these pancakes…I had two of each!

Portion control – Schmortion control…I found a new favorite!

LearnNugget #386

Tony Karrer recently posted on his blog about browser keyboard shortcuts while conducting a workshop.

Some of these I knew as the File menu in the browser’s toolbar displays them. My new favorites are Ctrl+Tab (tab between open browser tabs) and Ctrl+Shift+T (open last tab you just closed). Didn’t know that – very cool!

I learned something new today…

LearnNugget #1

As you can read, I’m not a very committed blogger being its been a couple months since I last posted, although I really want to.

What’s a “Learn Nugget?”  I don’t know…just thought of it really.  Actually, the more I think about what a “Nugget of Learning” is the more global the concept becomes in my mind.  Simply put, a LearnNugget is a glimpse of time in your day that you actually learn something new.

My Dad always told me, “Close your mouth, use your eyes and listen – you might learn something.”  Basically, be quiet and observe what’s around you.  As I became a parent I carried that bit of wisdom with me and am attempting to pass it on to my offspring.  However, I have never forgotten that simple lesson and if I truly pay attention, I do in fact learn something every day.

This morning I learned that putting leftover biscuits in the freezer last Saturday, thawing them out and reheating them this Saturday doesn’t necessarily mean they will taste the same.  Freezing fresh bread – yes.  Freezing baked biscuits – no.

I have re-committed to blogging.  Perhaps I may even post again this month!