My boyfriend brought over six recent issues of Reader's Digest for me the other day. He doesn't know how he started getting them, but figured I might like to take a look.
Yep, I did take a look and pretty much kept reading until I had finished all six. He couldn't believe how enthralled I was in them. Honestly, I couldn't tell you why either, except for the fact that it has little articles about health, finances, politics, life and jokes sprinkled between it all. In this day and age it is always good to break up information with a few good jokes.
So, here are some things I learned in this little endeavor:
- Missing Money - http://www.missingmoney.com/ - go to it and see if someone owes you money. Someone owes me! We went and put in my name and someone in the state of Virginia owes me. I submitted my information and we'll see what comes back. It should take a few weeks. It could be $5 for all I care. It has instilled hope in me that money can come out of nowhere.
- The BBC recently asked its online readers to send in their "best worst examples" of office jargon and management - speak. A few winners (the rest are at news.bbc.co.uk) - going forward, incentivize, loop back, low-hanging fruit, conversate, 360-degree thinking, not enough bandwidth, granularity, drill down. Why do I share this? We use EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE WORDS AND MORE AT MY OFFICE. Yes, that font was meant to be large.
- Joke - This was from Nancy Pelosi (speaker of the house - Dem) - One day, out of the blue, my daughter, Alexandra, said, "Mother, I'm really proud of you because you are a pioneer." I said, "Because I'm a woman member of Congress?" "No," she replied."Because remember when you used to cook, and then you stopped? Well, now hardly anybody cooks, but you were among the first to stop." *Loved this because I haven't even started to learn to cook and maybe I can just put off that goal indefinitely.
- Tuesday Nights/Wednesday morning - a good reminder that these days/times of the week are the best time to buy airplane tickets. Try travel search engine aggregators like Kayak.com for great deals or the airline sites themselves.
Memory Lane - I realized while reading these that we used to read Reader's Digest growing up. My mother had an aunt that would buy us all kinds of magazines...and I mean ALL kinds. Here are a few:
- National Geographic
- Yankee
- Ranger Rick
- Vermont Life
- Reader's Digest
- Owl
- Chickadee
- Highlights
- Arizona Highways - I loved this one - beautiful photography
- Probably others I can't remember
All of us used to sit around the house reading from these magazines, as well as our parent's old college books and Encyclopedia Britannica collection. This was, after all, pre-internet. And, we didn't have a tv. So, these were a big part of our awareness and learning outside of school and church of course.
Good memories and there are still some good magazines out there. They even have online versions and I should probably start referring to those. I always have these little piles of pages that I've ripped out that I want to remember or refer to later. As a result of this post I can now throw out a couple of those ripped out pages.
Good memories and glad that a little magazine like Reader's Digest can still provide secret happinesses, awareness and laughs.
