I watched an interesting Netflix documentary tonight called Living on one Dollar. It follows 4 college buddies and economics majors at Claremont McKenna College who travel to Guatemala to live in rural poverty in a small village for 2 months on just $1 a day, which is what the average Guatemalan lives on. Wow, that was a long sentence.

I was so inspired by this simple film that I made a donation at their website, livingononedollar.org. Thanks to underwriting by Whole Foods Market, 100% of donations go to help Guatemalans through either education or microfinancing, which they talked about a lot in the film.

I'm happy that tomorrow is casual Friday, it's Friday, it's payday and I don't work on Monday.

One of my workmates was sick all through Christmas and still sounded sick last week, in her voice. She was debating whether or not to keep her follow-up doc appt and I urged her to do so. I'm glad she did, because it turns out she has walking pneumonia. She is one of those people who feels an exaggerated sense of responsibility to work late hours and do everything, be everything, never slowing down. I hope she gets well soon.

I've been extremely busy at work this week with 2 large projects and 3 different people coming at me with stuff I need to write. I was feeling a lot of anxiety becus at one point i felt i didn't know what was going on, didn't feel on top of things as i usually do, and was afraid my boss was going to say something to me because I failed to attend an 8:30 a.m. conference call. Truth be told, I had worked from home the day before due to bad weather, and I totally forgot about the call the next morning. My usual hours are 9 to 5:30 p.m ., so I would have needed to get to work earlier to make that call.

My boss never mentioned it, and she was on the call. I'm not sure why but I'm relieved. It's possible it's because she's so extremely busy herself. Or maybe she didn't feel it was that important. Or maybe she didn't expect me to attend a call outside my normal work hours, though I've done that any number of times before. Maybe she will bring it up at my first performance review at this job January 27. Makes me nervous just thinking about it.

Scary thing happened to my friend Michael, the one I went out to dinner with last weekend. He finally got around to filing his tax return for last year (he had an extension) and his tax preparer informed him that someone else already filed a tax return in his name. Tax fraud! Michael vaguely remembers giving out his SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER to someone on the phone who identified himself as a jobs recruiter, as Michael is job hunting. He didn't realize he should NEVER EVER give that out unless he knows who he's talking to and there's a darn good reason for doing so.

He's set up with credit monitoring service now, but that's like closing the barn door after the horse is let out. Makes me worry about ID theft myself. It happens so often.