Health and Safety for Small Business - Writing Sample

Health and safety is easy to overlook as a small business.  However, it is well worth a second glance.  Did you know that under the Canada Occupational Health and Safety Regulations you are legally responsible to ensure that people are not hurt in your workplace.  This includes employees, clients, contractors and yourself.  If you haven't been managing Health and Safety, the repercussions can be severe.  Other then incurring harm or worse, you can be taken to court, prosecuted and fined.  Financial liability, time lost and bad press can be averted by implementing a Health and Safety program at your workplace with some simple documentation of work safe practises.

Here is a simple guide to cover your behind in the event of an accident at work. 

Cultivating Happiness - Personal Essay

Happiness is a garden that is easily overrun with weeds if not tended to with care.

Whenever I find myself in the dumps, I always come to realize that I have been neglecting my garden of happiness.  During some parts of my life when depression was firmly rooted, I had to start over and build a new garden. It was a lot of hard work. Gardening is a big commitment and so is happiness in my experience.

When did I become so unsatisfied with life?  At a younger age, I beamed with joy and optimism.  Love was in my every step.  People were a source of pleasure and joy.

Now, I frown a lot and have the wrinkles to show for it. My steps feel heavy from the extra pounds added. People have become a never ending source of annoyance and frustration.

When did I swing from optimist to pessimist?
Is it my age? Am I a grouchy old woman?
Is it my new role as Mom? Wait, am I turning into MY Mom?  (I love you Mom. Just using creative liberty.) Has my spirit been finally broken by this cold cruel world?  Am I defeated?

It could be all of those things and yet none of them at all.

Just keep planting seeds of happiness in my garden and weeding out all the things and people who make me unhappy.

All the things I listed above could very well be a bunch of bullshit I can hopefully use to fertilize my garden.

Finding your V-Spot

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Any Woman - An Essay

A plump, rosy cheeked woman puts her three kids in her 2011 Dodge Caravan.  She wears the Hutterite uniform typical for a woman of her age and stature.  It is a heavy cotton two piece dress in a dark green and black floral pattern.  The skirt very appropriately falls to no more than two inches above her ankle.  Her curly hair is a golden red and plainly pinned up with a matching scarf to cover the top of her head.  She looks neither happy nor sad as I watch her load her children and groceries into her minivan.  Her skin is milky white,  typical again for red heads.  There is absolutely nothing interesting about this woman. Not even her beautiful hair and skin.  She embodies everything dull in a domesticated life.  Other than childbearing, we would have nothing in common, maybe just the common cold.

Suddenly, the simplest of gestures puts me squarely in her shoes.  It is in a subtle act of comfortable rebellion that I know this woman.  As I sit watching her from my car in the Walmart parking lot, the homogeneous  abyss for all of humanity to merely exist in, I bore witness to this woman's subtle act that in a profoundly weird way, renewed my hope for my own spirit.

 This very uninteresting woman stepped up into her minivan and left her foot to dangle for a moment as her heel lifted out and separated itself from her shoe.  It was a slow and casual moment, like she was leading a lazy day on the beach kind of life.  A feeling of "lessez-faire" in such harsh contrast to the hard, earth-bound life Hutterites are known to lead.  For that brief moment, this woman left her everyday existence and exposed her foot to freedom. In that moment, she became every woman.  Fleeting moments of independence, quiet moments of individuality and in that moment, a small act of rebellion against what it so inherently means to be a woman.

Diner Attraction - Dialogue Sample

"Excuse me, can you pass the ketchup please?"

Daniel doesn't look up.  He reaches for the ketchup and passes it to the girl sitting next to him.  Maddy snatches up the ketchup, pops the lid with both thumbs and with one arm high above her burger and fries, she aims the bottle at her target and squeezes.

Daniel glances at her from the corner of his eye.  Scrappy looking girl he thinks to himself.  Something in him stirs. Attraction.

"Excuse me, could you pass the ketchup back," he says.
"Please," Maddy adds

Daniel's lip curls slightly for a moment.  It could barely pass for a smile.

"Please," he says.

Maddy flips the ketchup bottle around like an old gunslinger and pounds it on the counter.  Daniel watches her with his dark eyes.

"Thank you," he says with a certain sense of emptiness behind the words.

"Hey, you don't need to say thank you if you don't mean it.  It just makes you come across as cheap."

The word cheap echoes across Daniel's brain.

"And that is why I rarely say it."

"Awe, did you say it just for me?"

"It is common courtesy."

"Well, there isn't much left of the common in courtesy, anyways. It died in the 80's along with common decency and common sense."  Maddy victoriously takes a bit of her cheeseburger.

"But there is nothing common about you, is there?"

Maddy really looks at Daniel for the first time.  He is a suit, but he looks handsome with his broad shoulders and high cheekbones.  But his hands are to girly, Maddy thinks to herself.  Too bad.

"That was a pretty good line coming from a suit," Maddy says to brush him off.

"We all wear our uniforms," Daniel replies as he looks Maddy up and down. "and yours is a perfect fit."

Maddy swats the back of her hand along Daniel's upper arm.  His biceps are rock hard.

Daniel looks at Maddy with a deep loathing. She shifts uncomfortably on her stool.

"Why don't you take your greasy hands and dirty fingernails somewhere else, hippy." Daniel says plainly.

"You are calling me a hippy. Wow. Very creative for a suit."  Maddy gets up from her stool and towers over Daniel. At 5"11, she likes to use her height to intimidate people.

"Enjoy your cold omelet along with your cold eyes and your cold heart.  Eating alone suits you."

She grabs her plate off the counter,  knocks the ketchup bottle off the counter with her elbow and walks away.  Daniel looks at the ketchup bottle on the floor then up at Maddy. Nice ass he thinks as he takes a bit of his omelette. Yep, it's cold.