Fulfillment & Mentorship

My career journey at CPS has been nothing but fulfilling. I am utilizing all my skillsets and established myself as a true creative. Through my interactions with various clients and taking every opportunity to step out of my comfort zone, I have grown leaps and bounds as a professional and as a person.

The past year and a half, I have worked on so many projects with so many units and collaborated with many great people - I feel so grateful to have these opportunities to continue leveraging my skillsets to grow.

This past week, I got to travel to Medicine Hat for a women in leadership conference and connected with so many inspirational and powerful women, I feel re-ignited. I’m thrilled to have won a contest through CWIP to attend the first annual Alberta Women in Public Safety (AWIP) - Women's Wellness and Leadership Conference! That’s right, I tried my luck with a draw and won!

This opportunity means so much to me as it aligns with my passion for growth, making connections, leadership, and supporting women in my field.

Here’s to more opportunities where intentionality creates reality. I need to work on my success circle as part of my growth journey which involves finding a mentor, a sponsor (someone who advocates for me - even when I’m not in the room) is what I learned at the AWIP conference. Believe it or not, I’ve not had or found a mentor yet and always just relied on myself to be where I am today…but I believe WITH a mentor, my career could be even more bright.

Photo credit: Louie Dang

Photo credit: Louie Dang

Day in the life of a Learning Coordinator

I love being in a role where safety and training can impact corporate culture. My current role encompasses various aspects of media development. From preparing print course materials to the planning, production and post production editing of videos. I feel blessed to be given opportunities to grow and learn in each role but most importantly it's fostering relationships that I'm most grateful for.

Never afraid to get dirty...

Always up for rolling with the punches, that’s about sums up my time working at DIRTT. I had the opportunity to work for such an awesome environmentally and sustainable company for the past year.

There were many firsts:

• first time building walls

• first time using a drill bit and other tools

• first time overcoming my fear of dogs (long story short, I was almost bitten by vicious dogs as a kid)

• first time working on a team dedicated to support product development

• first time working alongside unicorns crafting up creative solution based communication materials

• first time baking my cream puffs in an industrial sized oven and kitchen

• first time feeling like I was apart of a family at work

I strongly believe my career path and creative journey will not end here…its only a chapter of my life. I sincerely appreciate and feel grateful for each and every place and every person I’ve crossed paths with. I’ve learned so much in each and every workplace setting and honed into using my creative abilities to bring to the next place. The relationships I’ve made with coworkers, many whom kept in touch with and call my friends, will last a lifetime. Cheers to new opportunities and new doors opening.

Its official!

I received my Photography certificate in the mail the other day. The feeling of the certificate in my hands felt so good. I felt a sense of accomplishment. Although I've already earned my certificate, I'm still taking night classes to continually improve myself and learn the craft of photography. I love learning and connecting with people through photography.

When I first decided to finally take up courses back in 2016 to get certified, I thought it was time for me to learn more technical aspects rather than just relying on using my creativity and taking decent shots. Little did I know I entered into a realm of expanding my knowledge immensely and at the same time pushing myself to experience a whole new world that allows me to round out my design thinking skills. I now look at the world a different way through the lens. Each project pushed me to use photography as a creative outlet and a way of storytelling. It taught me that there are different ways of capturing an image, a visual logo, a moment in time using my own style and techniques.

I actually never thought I could become or even call myself a photographer. I always thought learning the technical aspects was too tough and alot of mathematics was involved (I'm not the typical naturally-smart with math type of person). And that frightened me. I choose to become a graphic designer because I love using my creativity and not have to deal with numbers. I have always been in front of the camera and loved modelling as I was growing up but after having my kids, I started taking more photos and really trying to document their lives. They are growing so fast and I feel its apart of my job to make an impact in their lives by documenting their journey and experiences. I feel it is more important to have something special they can have and share with their family when they get older and that I helped capture those memories. 

Photographing other people came afterwards, when I became more confident technically, to actually have people pay me to capture their life events. I feel so honoured to be able to use my skills and be included in capturing special moments for my clients. 

Domesticated me

When the weather is so cold outside, what else to do but bake and make some homecooked meals?

For lunch, I decided to try and make something quick. When I cook I don't follow recipes. I just go by what I have in the fridge to use up and most often than not, my family likes the food I make. Cooking for kids especially, they will tell me whether they like something or not!!

I grabbed the over-riped tomatoes, which has been sitting on our counter for over a week, and put them in my Vitamix. Any time I can add more vegetables in sauces, I do it!

I put in carrots, an onion, celery and cilantro and a dash of sea salt and blended it all up into a liquid then boiled it down in a pot with some leftover tomato paste my husband used for making pizza the day before. Later, I remembered I had some ground turkey so decided to mix some spices in and rolled them into balls and put them in the sauce. I tried to involve my girls with the ball rolling but they didn't want to touch raw meat. Perhaps I was like that as a kid? I popped some garlic bread from the freezer into the oven and let the girls dip it into their tomato veggie soup. Ta da!  The tomato soup turned out thicker from the low boiling and looked more like a sauce but tasted really good. 

When I have my oven on, I like to use it to its full potential and try to make multiple items and multi-task. So while my soup was simmering down and letting the flavours cook through, my girls and I tried out a recipe for making matcha swiss roll: https://www.justonecookbook.com/matcha-swiss-roll/. It didn't turn out looking exactly like the one in the recipe but tasted pretty good. I always tell my kids that they have to try something even if it may not look good, because you never know how it tastes. I used pandan flavour extract in the whip cream instead of using matcha. I didn't want the kids to stay up all night from the matcha!! I didn't know until a few days ago that matcha is very high in caffiene. We had company over and they wanted to try the matcha green tea I bought from Costco. I didn't have time to read the instructions and put 2 heaping tablespoons of the matcha powder in my little teapot. Weeeelllll, let me tell you, I didn't sleep a wink that night and affected me the whole week! Not kidding you. Anyways, the pandan flavour profile was a nice compliment with the matcha. My kids gobbled it up with every bite with a 'yummy' and licked the plate clean.

Then after dinner we tried our hand at making macroons following this recipe: https://www.thespruce.com/easy-classic-chocolate-macaron-recipe-434873. Since we didn't have almond flour, I decided to grind some almonds with my vitamix. Nope...it didn't work out as nicely as I wanted but we were half way through and I didn't want to just give up. Seeing my kids faces after telling them the almond 'flour' didn't turn out, I decided to make our own version. The clumps of almond actually added a good texture and tasted like a macroon...just a flatter version. Instead of filling the 'macroon' with our hazelnut chocolate cream, I dipped the flat 'macroons' to coat halfway and put them in the freezer. They actually looked like florentine cookies, something that I always wanted to try making, so it really turned out in the end cuz the girls loved them and was well satisfied. 

With warm bellies and feeling grateful for having family and good friends around, here's to  new beginnings and a happy new year!