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Pretty Cupcakes

You know cupcakes are pretty much the rage here and probably back home. They often look too pretty to be eaten, and you wonder how you can bear to bite into that beautiful design and spoil it. (And at the back of your mind, perhaps you also wonder how bad that piece of fondant is for your body. The amount of sugar in it.. ok maybe this is just a Bel-thought.)

M and I met Joyce for dinner last night at Wahaca, and I was pleasantly surprised when she gave me a whole box of too-pretty-to-be-eaten chocolate cupcakes! She's really into baking and cake decorating recently and M and I were super impressed by her box of handmade cupcakes. She started baking 3h before meeting us, bless her heart.

I picked the polka dotted dress for myself

Look at the bag! And M being an avid shoe lover, I had to reserve that for her.

~~~~~~~

Cupcakes aside, I thought I'd like to mention something else. We met our big boss from NY this week and besides the usual boring work stuff and the what's-coming-up-in-2011 talk, he mentioned about work life balance. This is something which is lacking back home especially, and so he shared with us his definition of work life balance, after working in this bank for 14 years. He said it took him 10 years to finally realise what it is.

It is not about working say, 8h a day and then rushing out of office once you hit the 8h mark. It is about family. And friends. For him, he makes a point to work really hard for 2 days of the week, late into the night even. And for another 2 days, he makes a point to go out after work by either spending time with his family, or to meet friends. And for the last day, he makes it a point to spend a quiet night in doing nothing. Chillaxing.
Now he's made everyone around him aware of this little regime of his, and they know they need to leave him alone on Mondays and Tuesdays coz he is hard at work, but it's ok to ask him out for a drink or Wednesdays or Thursdays.

I thought this is a wise definition of work life balance, and thus wanted to share with you too :) What he's taken 10 years to realise, we can start doing something similar now. Work life balance folks!

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