If we were having coffee, I would welcome you to #weekendcoffeeshare, which is hosted by the lovely Natalie of Natalie the Explorer. Let’s grab a drink and have a chat!

This will most likely be the final weekend with some decent warm weather, so let’s outside to the benches!

This week’s Harvest

I harvested these daikon radishes from the garden earlier this week, hoping to give some room for the daikon radishes to size up. For those who are not familiar with daikon, it’s a Japanese radish typically used in soups and pickles. Daikon means “Big root” in Japanese. I think you can see why, right?

They are a short season radish and will only grow after mid-summer. This vegetable is like spinach, it will only grow when the day-length is getting shorter. I grew quite a bit this year and will be pulling them out before the deep freeze.

I feel the garden is quite prepared for winter this year. I’ve ordered the proper sizes greenhouse plastic for all the beds with hoops so plants will be protected from the cold. I will be running experiment to see if I can overwinter pepper plants in the front garden with the southern exposure sun and 6-mm greenhouse plastic. Per my estimation, the temperature difference between the front and back garden can be 5-10 degrees.

Future Harvests

This weekend, I’m hoping to finally clear the sweet potatoes out of the front garden. The cold weather is supposed to be arriving on Thursday, and I’m not sure if I want to spend one of the weeknights doing such thing of harvesting sweet potatoes since quite a bit of clean up will be involved.

I also still have a cantaloupe that still need to be harvested. I’m not sure if this is fully ripened. I think I’ll try to give it until Wednesday before pulling it.

A Rant about Bias

A customer soured my mood at work this week. He demanded a call after ranting in an email ranting that someone from my team never returned his email. Well, how can we reply to an email if we never received it in the first place, I asked him on the call.

That’s when he asked, “Are you calling from a call center?”

“I’m sorry?” I said, surprised. He repeated the question, this time, slowly and enunciating each word like he was talking a deaf person. “No,” I answered.

“It sounds like you are,” he said. Why? I wanted to ask, because of my Asian accent? He wasn’t the first person to do it and most likely won’t be the last.

If there’s anything I hate the most in the world, it’s people being bias – making assumptions without getting a clear picture. That and my mom forces me to speak Chinese at home so I don’t lose my language. Unfortunately, my English-speaking skill had gone down the drain in the last few years because I don’t get to speak English anymore. So when I do speak English, my accent comes out heavier than it should be.

Nothing got resolved on the call. The guy whined about having to do everything including handing an invoice to the guy in his company that pays the bills despite me suggesting twice to add the appropriate email address to the account.

Well whatever!

Change of Title

Finally, I have a different title at work this week. There’s nothing extra that comes with this change other than a clarification of what I do now. I’m just glad I’m no longer an “Accounting Specialist” but a Billing/Accounts Payable Specialist. Everyone on the team now have an unique title.

I appreciate you stopping by. Until next we chat. 🙂