http://www.yourinnerskinny.ca/follow-dreams-its-worth-it/

There’s a lot of name-calling that happens when a new generation enters the workforce. And right now it’s Generation Y’s turn to be bullied by the older kids on the work playground. But that doesn’t mean they’re (we’re) taking it lying down.

The Wall Street Journal says that Gen Y will make up 40% of the workforce by 2020, and (like the generations before them) they’re shaking things up.

First thing’s first, this is not a new concept. Every generation brings new strengths and opinions into the workforce based on the society and economic climate they grew up in.

Here’s just a few things I think Generation Y will contribute (or are already contributing) to the workforce:

1) A better work-life balance. Whether it be flexible hours or working remotely, this generation does not see value in sitting at a desk 9-5 day in and day out. Because, in my opinion, there isn’t value in it anymore with the invention of the internet, social media, and smart phones.

2) A career they care about. The generations before Y scoff at this idea without even thinking about it, it’s like a default reaction but why? You will spend a humongous amount of your life working, so why is loving what you’re working on considered a luxury?

3) Fun. For some work environments this could mean wearing jeans on a Monday, for other work places it could mean taking an hour everyday to play Halo in teams. According to this guy, having a fun work environment is one of the top qualities Gen Y looks for in a job.

The work will all get done today and it will be there long after you’re gone, why not enjoy it a little more?

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you and this isn’t a sad letter telling you that I’m shutting down the site. But I’m going to be honest because there’s a lot of you still coming to the site everyday even though I haven’t updated in awhile (you have so much good karma coming your way, may Bradley Cooper shower you with kisses..…yeah I know, Ryan Gosling’s hotter. Listen, you get 2011’s sexiest man alive. I don’t work for People magazine, take it up with them).

So here’s what I’ve been wrestling with. I don’t like pink. Well, not that I don’t like it but I think I’ve just outgrown it. The colour doesn’t suit me anymore. I am not a peppy, pink, shiny girl who loves networking, expensive restaurants and hosting fancy parties. Frankly, that stuff really stresses me out (rewind to my hyperventilating panic attack before the launch party of this site. Thanks, Sean : ).

And I also don’t care about quick easy weight loss tips, beauty secrets of super models, and what perfume matches your dog’s personality that will hook you a husband in 10 days. So I looked at other websites created for you guys (and holy crap, are some of them ever successful!) and I tried to fit in. Frankly, I felt like an outsider trying to squeeze in with the cool kids. Because guys, I’m not cool.

My parties are not fancy, they’re loud and messy and they leave my floor sticky for days no matter how many times I mop. I care more about my career than my hair. And if you are looking for good dating advice, you are in the wrong place, my friend. Believe me.

So with all of that in mind, I have been struggling to redesign the logo and editorial concept for this site for the past year to make it something…more.

I wanted to let you know that I have not given up. I’m just going to redecorate this place while you’re on vacation. And I’ll see you when you get back.

xoxo
Dayna

Well the wedding ‘do’s done now, bitches, and the hair has been cut!

Before:

Goodbye, dead ends!

Okay, so it’s not drastically shorter, but it’s definitely a load off my neck!

So, because I was one of the first of my friends to get married, let Aunt Jo impart some knowledge and wisdom on Things that Made Day Go Good.

RELAX. Seriously.  Once you’ve got all the big stuff taken care of at the beginning, like the hall, the photographers, the DJ, and whatnot, enjoy the ride.  It’s hard to mess up a wedding. Breathe.  Of course, it also helps that I was engaged to a project manager, so we budgeted and made our to-do lists and schedules pretty early on.

I took my heart rate and blood pressure a week before the wedding.  Healthy as a horse!

Embrace teamwork. Let people help.  Your friends.  The groom.  They are all people who have expertise and knowledge to share. Sure, the artsy stuff might not come out exactly as you had in mind, but that’s okay.  Because nobody will notice.  While the wedding day might be all about you, everything that goes into it is not. There were spats and discussions between us, our parents, my mom, E, E’s parents. E and I worked out well – he took care of the overall logistics and scheduling of the day and I handled the small details.  Teamwork, yes? That’s why we’re married.

The most nerve-wracking part of the day was the walk down the aisle.  You have to walk slow.  There are hundreds of cameras pointed in your direction.  You have to smile.  And walk slow. I tend to goof when I’m uncomfortable, so it was really hard to stay proper and not do something stupidly awkward.  And remember to smile without looking manic. And walk slow.

Build buffer time into everything in your schedule. Married couples kept telling us how quickly the day would go, and that we should take time to just sit back and take everything in.  We took that advice to heart.  Nothing was rushed.  Our ceremony was 20 minutes – we gave it an hour in the schedule.  Travel time was 15 minutes, we gave it 30 minutes.  It gave us a chance to collect ourselves and not worry about rushing over to the next location.

Don’t DIY in bulk. I know I saved a lot of money trying to make everything myself.  But I completely underestimated the time it would take.  Making ten or 15 centrepieces would’ve been a breeze.  Making 32 of them was brutal.  My parents’ garage will have the spray paint marks to commemorate the experience for years to come.  If we had gone with floral vendors instead of making our own, I could’ve continued going into my 9-5 office job for the entire week.  Then again, we came in well under our original projected budget.  I mean like tens of thousands of dollars under. Hm, maybe the trade off was worth it. You let your cheapness barrier decide this one for you.

Surround yourself with good friends. Our wedding party was our barrier that day. Our day-of coordinator was one of E’s project manager colleagues and he ran the show.  Combined, they took care of everything.  They set the hall up so that it was pretty when guests arrived.  They arranged for missing pieces to be filled in.  They never once asked us for anything.  They packed everything up for us at the end of the night so that when we were ready to leave, we just had to hop in a car and go. I don’t actually know how much crap they took care of that we never knew about.  I love my friends.

Get a good MC. I cannot stress how critical it was to our party to have a good Master of Ceremony.  He was engaging and fun.  He commanded attention.  He was a good speaker.  He kept the night rolling and set the tone for the evening.  A dull MC means everyone gets bored.  An engaging MC gets the audience into it.  An engaged audience is a fun audience.

Get a good DJ. Same as the MC, a good DJ will make sure people will get up and moving.  Ours set the atmosphere for the night, and we received lots of comments about the songs he spun.  If anyone is interested:  Robin Macdonald went above and beyond what he’s supposed to do for us.  We had a great experience with him.

If you can’t go big, go home. E and I struggled a lot with our first dance.  We both suck at dancing slowly and looking graceful.  And I can’t take direction.  So instead of forcing out an awfully awkward dance, we stuck with simple stepping to the rhythm. No dipping and spinning and twirling.  This lesson covers everything.  If you can’t do a zombie-themed wedding right, don’t bother forcing it.  It’ll just come out a hot mess.

Good bartenders are a bonus. Our bartenders took the party to another level with their tricks.  They were juggling glasses and bottles all night.  And when the dance floor opened, they lit the bar on fire – literally.  They made fireballs, fountains of fire, and flaming sambucas.  Loved. It.

Bonus tip: For those of you in Toronto who need to buy decorations in bulk, but don’t want to pay the hefty shipping charges, I have two words for you: Creative Bag. I could have saved so much money if I’d known about the store earlier.  Ribbon, wrapping paper, party favours, they have everything.  Instead, I made repeated trips to Michaels to buy a million rolls of ribbon and wire and other crafting supplies.  Ugh.

Other thoughts? What about you other past brides?  Any experience you can share with those soon-to-be’s? Share share share!

You would think that as someone who writes for a living, I would be able to find the words to describe our wedding day, but I can’t.  I’ll just say that it was one of the best days of my life.

And now that it’s happened, everyone can see what happened with the ideas that I had at the beginning and how they played out on the big day. E was so concerned about our secrets being leaked, but honestly, I think seeing the stuff in action was totally different.

The dress:

Before:

After:

The bouquets:

Before:

After:

The centrepieces:

After:

The hair:

Before:

After:

And because no album is complete with Jo looking silly, “OMG a cake!”

Also, our photographer, Chris, was super fast getting some preliminary photos up.  Go go go go go look at the rest of the pictures from the day (beyond decorations) there!

Sarah O’Regan was only 23 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer — twice! Here is her story as well as some tips for checking yourself and places to turn for support or to lend a hand.

Running is a passion for Sarah O’Regan and when she headed to Vancouver after university, O’Regan decided to lace up and take part in triathlons. While running along the west coast, she began to notice pain in her chest and found it difficult to breathe, so she went to her doctor to get to the bottom of it. Thinking the breathing problem was asthma, O’Regan’s results were far from what she expected. At 23 years old O’Regan was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.

“I was sitting there waiting for an inhaler and then they tell you: you have cancer.”

The pain O’Regan was experiencing was caused by a tumor on her sternum bone that was affecting her ability to breathe. O’Regan’s first treatment included rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery.

The chances of getting breast cancer in your 20s is 1 in 1,800. But Dr. Maureen Trudeau, breast oncologist and Provincial Head of Cancer Care Ontario’s Systemic Treatment Program, advises women of any age to get to know their breasts so they can detect when something is out of the ordinary.

“[Women] need to know that it can happen so if there are changes that are persisting, have them evaluated by your doctor,” says Trudeau. “Don’t ignore things that are worrisome … it’s always better to get it checked out.”

Breast cancer under 35 tends to be more aggressive depending on the characteristics of the tumor. Young women are more likely to have a triple negative breast cancer (estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and HER-2 negative), which is more aggressive than other tumors.

“One of our goals is to make sure that the public and the health care communities know that young women get breast cancer too. Yes, the numbers are smaller, but the needs are different, the needs are real,” DeCoteau says.

Detecting breast cancer in young women can be difficult as a young woman’s breasts are dense. Trudeau says many women who have “lumpy bumpy breasts” may actually have benign tumors or cysts. You know your body better than anyone so be persistent when something feels wrong.

“If you feel something is wrong, persist. Don’t be deterred. Those are the women I see. The women who have been told ‘Oh, it’s nothing’, for a year and a half and finally it’s something.”

Know your breasts

Rethink Breast Cancer is an organization aimed at helping young people who are concerned or affected by breast cancer. After losing both her mother and grandmother to breast cancer, MJ DeCoteau, director of Rethink wanted information on breast cancer but everything she came across was geared towards older women or contained confusing statistics or medical jargon. Rethink Breast Cancer was born as a way to bridge the information gap with edgy and hip awareness campaigns like their target t-shirts that encourage women to target their breast health.

Trudeau stresses that it is important for women to know their breasts by regularly touching and looking to detect any changes. Rethink Breast Cancer promotes easy-to-understand methods of staying on top of your breast health. For instance, easy tips like TLC – Touch. Look. Check. are some of the simple ways that the organization is putting breast awareness on young women’s radar.

Breast cancer support

One main issue DeCoteau hears from women is a sense of isolation. Many women ask “Why me?” and feel alone as cancer in your 20s is a rarity among many of these women’s peers. But women can also feel isolated among other women who are receiving treatment because many programs are not age specific.

Despite treatment, O’Regan wasn’t out of the woods as the breast cancer reoccurred about a year later. Going through another battle with cancer, O’Regan notes that the journey can be lonely.

“You can feel alone in your 20s when you have it because it’s that stigma that it’s an older woman’s disease,” says O’Regan.

Some of the various ways Rethink Breast Cancer is bringing women together is through their support initiatives like the blog Breast Cancer. Now What? Another program is Support Saturdays, designed for families to learn and discuss the disease with professional facilitators. Support Saturdays is not only flexible, it’s also family-friendly so parents can leave their kids with child care facilitators while they engage in support sessions.

While support is one main drive that helps women fight their battle with cancer, another way women conquer the disease is by giving back through their innovative ideas.

Because O’Regan was living in Vancouver when she was first diagnosed, many of her friends in Toronto wanted to help out, including her friend, Amanda Blakley who decided to host a fundraiser called the Booby Ball. In 2008, the Booby Ball teamed up with Rethink Breast Cancer and created the Booby Innovation Grant. The Booby Innovation Grant helps create new programs while empowering women by giving them a sense of meaning and an outlet to give back to the cause.

O’Regan is now proudly celebrating not only her 30th birthday but her five year anniversary of being cancer-free.

Find out three signs of breast cancer you should not ignore by clicking here.

I was apprehensive about having a bachelorette party, mostly because I was aware of the astronomical costs of some of these things.  I think my friends pulled it off with aplomb!

This past weekend was the bridal shower/bachelorette doodad.  It was an absolutely perfect party.  Who would’ve thought that decorating your own cupcakes could result in such a fit of giggles and girlish glee?  It was fun, creative, messy, and the laughs came nonstop.

Lessons I learned about decorating cupcakes:

1. Icing is ridiculously hard to work with
2. Sprinkles are even more horrid
3. Fondant flowers will cover ANY flaw.  Made a big mistake? More flowers! Men, this is a great lesson for your relationships.
4. No party is complete without a penis cupcake

Of course that was only the beginning.  Then there were the manicures from zoomspa, the mobile spa.  They come right to your door!  And what a great idea, too.  If any of you are looking into doing girly things, I do really recommend a mobile spa.  What a creative alternative to having to pay out the nose for a full spa treatment! My two most amazing girlfriends put so much effort into planning and cooking and decorating, I think that was what I appreciated the most.

Unfortunately, the most x-rated picture I can post is the penis cupcake because, well, the rest of it will be something that only the ladies in attendance will know about

This is a continuation of a previous post so read this one and then come back. I’ll wait.

I think as you get older you start to accept the things that make you happy. It doesn’t sound like a hard thing to do but it also involves letting go of that imaginary person you think you are. Figuring out what makes you happy is a process of trial and error, you need to try things to find out if you like them. Sometimes you see an image or a stranger and you think, “Yeah, I want to be like that person and then I’ll be happy”. I thought that whenever I saw joggers but when I actually started training for a marathon I hit a point where I realized I was just hating it. So I had to let that idea go of eventually becoming one of those people who gets up every morning at 5am and runs while the sun is rising all peaceful and whatnot. Instead, I’m the kind of person who sleeps in until the absolute last minute and then frantically scrambles to work composing themselves just outside the office doors (nothing peaceful about it).

So here are the things I have accepted make me happy regardless how other people feel about them:

1. Dancing in clubs to really horrible pop music

2. Peanut butter

3. Reading

4. Aerial silks

My job is already feeling stagnant (and I haven’t been here that long), how do you make a job feel fresh again?

The first step is to get crystal clear on what gives you a sense of fulfillment. Think back to the honeymoon period of your job. What was fresh and exciting about it? What made you look forward to coming into work in the morning? If you are drawing a blank, ask yourself these three powerful questions:

1. Which of my strengths do I enjoy using most?
2. What type of work can I do that will peak my interest?
3. What is important to me at this stage in my life?

Answering these questions will help you to re-connect with yourself. Then you can identify ways of getting more of this type of work. Take the initiative to identify projects or opportunities that will keep you engaged and excited.

Research has shown that when you use your strengths and do work that you find interesting, you will be happier and more successful in your career. Knowing what you want will help you to define the action that you need to take.

Whether you’ve got some suspicions about your partner’s fidelity or just a little curious, take this quiz to find out if your partner could be having an affair.

1. When you first started dating your boyfriend’s Blackberry phonebook was full of:
a. A few buddies, a few exes, and lots of random girls.
b. His buddies, his parents, and you.
c. His buddies, his parents, you…and a few random girls.

2. You’ve been talking all week about the really big, really important meeting you have at work on Friday afternoon, when you return home that evening he:
a. Isn’t even home. There is a note on the table saying he went for a few drinks with his buddies.
b. Immediately rushes in to ask how the meeting went.
c. Doesn’t say anything but as soon as you mention it he takes a genuine interest in hearing about how it went.

3. His phone rings during a date and you get a glimpse of an unfamiliar number, he:
a. Doesn’t make eye contact and takes the phone into the other room to take the call.
b. Answers it and starts chatting away right next to you.
c. Ignores it.

4. You’re out at a bar and he sees his best friend’s girl with another guy, he:
a. Ignores it and when you question him he says it is none of his business.
b. Pulls out his phone, takes a pic, sends it to his buddy, and then calls him right away.
c. Sends his friend a text telling him he just saw a girl who looks exactly like his girlfriend at the bar with another dude. From there he leaves the problem up to him.

5. You and your man sit down to have that serious talk about past relationships, his naughty little secret is:
a. That he cheated on his ex…a few times…but that “it was no big deal really”
b. That he has fantasized about other girls while in bed with his exes…but who hasn’t right?
c. That he cheated on his ex once but was so wracked with guilt he came clean and could never see himself doing it again.

6. A few months back you suggested that maybe your boyfriend should take up a new hobby. What did he do?
a. Nothing. But he does seem to be taking a lot more late night meetings at work.
b. Signed himself up for cooking classes so that he could finally make you a romantic dinner once and a while.
c. Bought a membership to the city’s most exclusive gym and all of a sudden has the body of a Greek god.

7. Your sex life…
a. Is virtually non-existent
b. Is just as great as it always was.
c. Has its ups and downs. But that happens to every couple after a while…right?

Mostly A’s: He’s probably cheating

The very fact that you are doing this test is the first clue that you may have some suspicions about your partners fidelity, says Al Duncan, owner of the confidential investigation company Toronto PI. “What I always tell clients seeking help is that no one knows the individual party better then the client themselves – if a client has enough suspicion and worry that it drives them to the point where they call out for help, then usually their gut instinct is right”. Withdrawal of sexual activity, mysterious phone calls, and an increase in work meetings or late night activities are all signs that could mean your suspicions are correct. Your best bet is to sit your man down for a chat and explain all the changes you’ve noticed and give him a chance to explain. He may come clean and he may not. Either way you will have to decide if you will ever be able to trust him enough to live with what he may or may not have done.

Mostly B’s: He’s probably not cheating

He is so into you that he wouldn’t give a second look to a full truckload of Hooters girls. The guy who remembers things that are important to you and who is eager to make an effort to make you as happy as you make him is a guy who has no interest in being with anyone but the lovely lady by his side (that’s you!)

Mostly C’s: He could be cheating

This guy is a tricky one. This is the guy who likes to flirt, the guy who likes to go to the gym as much as he likes to admire his physique in the mirror, the guy who’s cheated before but swears he could never do it again. Basically, this is the guy that you haven’t trusted since day one. It is here that you have to decipher whether or not your man is actually acting suspiciously or whether you are just taking his behaviors and blowing them out of proportion because of your insecurities. Your best bet here is to be straight out and let him know that you are having issues trusting him and his behaviors. Chances are that if he’s not cheating he’ll make the efforts to change his ways. Most important here is to give him the benefit of the doubt. And if you can’t, then it is time to find yourself a new man….with a clean slate.

Al Duncan is a retired Detective Sergeant and was one of the longest serving members of the Toronto Police Service Internal Affairs Unit. His company Toronto PI offers a reliable and completely confidential service to members of the general public and corporate law offices in the areas of surveillance, missing persons, domestic and child custody matters, computer forensics, civil and criminal investigations. For more information visit www.torontopi.com or email info@torontopi.com