Escape with Ghirardelli Intense Dark: Unexpected Rewards

In a world where work is sometimes hard, long and sometimes unappreciated, it’s important to give—and get—unexpected rewards along the way.

My workplace has changed in a big way over the past year. I’ve transitioned from 20 years of working for someone else to finally taking that plunge and working for myself. I don’t have a commute—except from the kitchen where I do most of my foodie creating, to my office where I get the design work done.

I can wear what I want, even though I pretty much did that anyway. When I run out of olive oil or am craving a new white dish for a photo, I can run to HomeGoods in the middle of the day and not feel the least bit guilty about it. Hey, I may even stop at 7 grocery stores on the way home. Yes, I do that too.

Working for myself is something I wouldn’t change for the world. But I do sometimes miss the company camaraderie, the daily interaction with co-workers (read that with a big emphasis on ‘sometimes’) because I really have the best set-up I could ask for. I work from home but I have the support of fresh ideas, willing hands and not yet jaded minds who are eager to learn.

I have interns.

For the past three years—has it been that long already?—I’ve been teaching Advanced Typography and Magazine Design at a local university. One night a week I meet up with senior college students about to embark on the transition of student to worker bee and teach them not only about design, but also about the real world, with real expectations and the hard work that will be expected of them once they get into it. Oh how I remember the days, my whole future was a glorious open field, ripe with opportunity. And it was so scary.

One of the reasons I enjoy working with these emerging careerists is not to teach them, but to teach me. To motivate me to be a better communicator and a wider thinker. To familiarize me with new technology I wouldn’t know was available as I work in my pigeon hole of doing the same thing the same way like I always have. To give me ideas and inspiration in an effort to keep fresh and relevant, and keep me up to date on the slang and fashion forward so I don’t seem like a total old fogie to my daughter and useful to my readers.

Each semester I have students who ask to intern with me. While I was at my previous job working for a publishing company designing magazines, these students would rotate in and out of a regular work environment consisting of a cast of characters, coffee breaks and listening to people complain about their job.

Since becoming a solopreneur, I now I have interns who work with me at home. It’s definitely a different vibe since its more one on one and we sit right next to one another with nowhere to escape for either of us. But it’s also a great way for the soon-to-be-employed that this is a working scenario to aspire to even though I tell them all they really should work for someone else, for a bigger company or at even three before going out on their own.

There’s too much to gather, too much to learn—the right way to do things in business and also and the bad way to do things in business—that you aren’t exposed to at the ripe old age of 23. I know there are exceptions for sure, and boy how I would have loved to have been one of them. But then I wouldn’t be here talking to you now either.

So to celebrate the end of the semester and the nearing date of college graduation, I took my interns Annie and Jessica to brunch. Because everyone knows you can’t work if you don’t eat and we all need a little reward, a little break in the day. It’s the name of the game.

We talked again about their plans for the future, their dreams versus reality and as usual I was offering up all sorts of unsolicited advice. I’m good at that.

My advice to them? Three things:

1. It just takes hard work. Even if you aren’t a naturally talented designer with an eye for the slightest difference in fonts or can discern each and every Pantone color known to man, if you work hard, really hard, and dedicate the time, you can learn anything—including the rainbows of Pantone—and you will succeed.

2. Listen. Just stop talking, and listen. Before interjecting your thoughts and knowledge to prove what you know and how good of a problem solver you are, button your lips up tight and just listen. Solving a problem starts with knowing what it is, and by letting your client, boss and even your partner share their thoughts with you, will give you the information to formulate a solution. If you don’t know what they want, you can’t give it to them. This has been the hardest lesson I’ve had to learn and up until about two years ago, I was failing miserably at.

3. Take a break. Whether its a week’s vacation in France before you start your new job, a walk around the block during your lunch break or a much needed chocolate fix in the late afternoon, you need to walk away from a task or event to escape the day, refocus and reflect on what, and why, you’re doing what you’re doing. Why are you here? What do you love, and is this it?

As part of my thank you to Intern Annie and Intern Jessica—yes, I love nicknames—for their hard work these past few months, I gave them a simple escape from their day to be enjoyed from their desk or even on the airplane en route to France: an afternoon pick-me-up thanks to a decadent chocolate fix.

I keep a of dark chocolate in my desk drawer for my afternoon cravings, to take a break from staring at the computer and instead have a nibble and stare out the window to regroup. It’s something I’ve done for years, my little reward for staying focused throughout the day. It’s the perfect bite to get me through the day and a secret I’m happy to share.

Us workin’ girls have to stick together.

Download the Mid-Day Chocolate printable.

Die cut tags from Target or similar here.

Sponsored by Ghirardelli Intense Dark Chocolate. Create your escape here.

All content, ideas and words are my own. Thanks for supporting these sponsors that allow me to create new content like this for FoodieCrush.

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N7028.286925.SAYMEDIA/B7436402.17;sz=1×1;ord=[timestamp]

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15 Unexpected Uses for Aluminum Foil

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Privacy Policy / Your California Privacy Rights
Revised and posted as of March 4, 2013

Prime Publishing, LLC ("Company," "we" or "us") reserves the right to revise this Privacy Policy at any time simply by posting such revision, so we encourage you to review it periodically. In order to track any changes to this Privacy Policy, we will include a historical reference at the top of this document.

This Privacy Policy will tell you, among other things:

Your California privacy rights.
How we collect information and what information we collect.
How we may use information.
How we may share information.
Your choices regarding the sharing of information.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT/YOUR AGREEMENT
Company websites are not intended for use by individuals under the age of 18 or those who are not legal residents of the United States. By using our website or submitting information to us, you consent to the Company's use and sharing of the information collected or submitted as described in this Privacy Policy. If you are not 18 years of age or older and a valid resident of the United States or you do not agree with the terms of this Privacy Policy, do not provide us with any information or use any of the products or services offered or provided on Company websites or through Company technology.

YOUR CALIFORNIA PRIVACY RIGHTS
Beginning January 1, 2005 under California's "Shine the Light" law, California residents who provide personal information in obtaining products or services for personal, family or household use are entitled to either: (1) a list detailing the categories of information shared and the entities to which such information was provided; or (2) to be notified of a mechanism by which a consumer may opt-out of having their information shared with third parties. We have elected the second option. To opt-out of having your information shared with third parties please write to us.

HOW DO WE COLLECT INFORMATION AND WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?
We collect and combine personally identifiable information ("PII") and non-personally identifiable information ("Non-PII") through various sources, including those discussed below. For your reference, PII is data collected with an intention to specifically identify, contact or locate a person, including but not limited to name, address, telephone number, or e-mail address. Conversely, Non-PII is data that is not used to specifically identify, contact or locate an individual, including but not limited to zip code, gender, age, or IP address.

Distribution Partners
Website operators that license our ad serving technology pass information to us so that we may serve advertisements to you. The information passed may include, but is not limited to, your IP address, e-mail address, name, mailing address, telephone number, date of birth, and gender.

Offer Forms
We also collect information about you when you complete a survey or offer form on one of our websites or web pages. This information may include, but is not limited to: your e-mail address, name, mailing address, telephone number, date of birth, gender, and payment information; information about your background, interests, health, education, career goals, and shopping preferences; and any other personal information or unique preference information you provide to us or our advertisers.

Website Registration Forms
We collect information about you when you register on one of our websites. This registration information may include, but is not limited to your:
e-mail address
full name
mailing address
telephone number
date of birth
gender

Publisher Partners
When you complete a registration or offer form that is hosted by one of our website publisher partners on our behalf, the website publisher partner may submit all or a portion of the information that you submitted on the form to the Company. This information may include, but is not limited to: your IP address, e-mail address, name, mailing address, telephone number, date of birth, gender, and payment information; information about your background, interests, health, education, career goals, and shopping preferences; and any other information you provide to our website publisher partner.

Marketing Partners
We may receive information about you, including but not limited to your IP address, e-mail address, first name, last name, mailing address, and telephone number, from third party marketing partners that provide us with consumer data to manage on their behalf.

Automatic Information/Digital Identifiers
We may automatically receive and store certain types of information about you through the data sources listed above.

You may be familiar with the term "cookies," which are unique alphanumeric identifiers that store information on your computer. A cookie is placed on your computer when your web browser accesses our website. We use cookies for tracking transactions and the user characteristics explained in detail throughout this Privacy Policy. If you choose, there are utilities available for purchase from independent software providers to install on your computer as well as tools/preferences you can choose through most web browsers to make website visits anonymous. Of course, cookies let you have a more satisfying website experience, so we recommend that you leave them turned on.

We also collect information through our web server applications. This information includes your Internet Protocol or "IP" address, date/time stamp, browser type, and referring URL.

Additionally, we may use pixel tracking technology to track the completion of transactions with us or our advertisers, the source information for those transactions, and your IP address, date/time stamp, browser type, and referring URL.

Government Forms
The Company may be required to create, collect, maintain, and submit certain information required by the government, such as IRS Forms W-9 and 1099. This information, which may include your taxpayer identification number, will not be used, shared, transferred, or sold for marketing purposes.

HOW DO WE USE THIS INFORMATION?
We may use the collected PII and Non-PII for any legally permissible purpose in our sole discretion, including but not limited to those explained below.

Ad Serving
We may serve advertisements to you based, in part, on your IP address, the demographic and geographic information you submitted to the Company during the website registration process, and other socio-economic information, psychographic information, Internet behavior (i.e., browsing, search, shopping, purchase, and ad response behavior), and lifestyle information about you that we obtain from affiliated entities and from third parties.

We allow third-party companies to serve ads and/or collect certain anonymous information when you visit our Web site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information (e.g., click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over) during your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. These companies typically use a cookie or third party web beacon to collect this information. To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit www.networkadvertising.org.

Pre-select/Pre-fill Offers
Our website technology may pre-select certain offers for you to view based on the demographic and geographic information you submitted to the Company during the website registration process. Additionally, this technology may pre-fill some or all of the offers' data fields with the information you submitted during the website registration process in order to prevent you from having to re-enter this information. We may not show all of the pre-filled data fields to you.

Upsell
We utilize customized post transactional or "upsell" technology to help advertisers generate sales, while providing you with a series of great offers we think may be of interest to you. The way it works is simple: once you purchase a product or service from one of our reward advertisers, you will be offered additional products or services that we think may be of interest to you. If you elect to purchase products or services from an advertiser in the post transactional channel, we will pass the information that you provided during the initial transaction to the subsequent advertiser, including but not limited to your credit card information. This information pass is done to enhance and simplify your purchasing experience. Your information will only be passed to an advertiser in the post transactional channel after you have elected to purchase their product or service. By electing to purchase their product or service you consent to the passing of your data to the third party advertiser in question.

Customer Service and Fulfillment
We may use your information to operate the website promotion, service your account and to fulfill rewards earned through Company websites. We may also use your information to verify your identity or claimed account status and, where we consider appropriate, investigate your compliance with the terms and conditions of the website promotion or any advertiser offer. We do retain customer service correspondence.

Credit Card Preauthorization
By submitting your credit card information to us or to one of our advertisers, you are authorizing the Company or its agent to periodically verify that your credit card account is valid and has credit available by charging, and thereafter crediting, a small sum to the card.

Marketing
We may use your information in our online (e.g., e-mail marketing) and offline (e.g., telemarketing, cell phone text messaging, skip tracing, and direct mail) marketing programs. If you would like to be removed from these programs please write to us.

HOW DO WE SHARE INFORMATION?
We may share the collected PII and Non-PII for any legally permissible purpose in our sole discretion, including but not limited to those explained below.

Within the Company
We may share information we collect with affiliated companies, including our parent company and other subsidiaries of our parent company, for use in their ad serving and marketing programs. This Privacy Policy does not apply to affiliated companies and their collection, use and sharing of information.

Vendors
We may share your information with various third party vendors that are not part of the Company, including but not limited to vendors that provide us with technology to deploy commercial e-mail, vendors that sell the products or services for which you have qualified through one of our websites, and shipping companies that we utilize to ship products to you.

Advertisers
When you participate in an offer by completing a form, we will transfer the information you submitted on the form to the applicable advertiser.

When you answer "yes" or "no" to a marketing or survey question, some or all of the information that you submitted during the website registration process will be transferred to advertisers that we believe may be of interest to you without providing you with another opportunity to review the information.

When you select "yes" next to an offer, we will transfer some or all of the information that you submitted during the website registration process to the applicable advertiser without providing you with another opportunity to review the information.

Ad Serving Companies
We may use third party ad networks or ad serving companies to serve advertisements on our websites. We pass information about you to these companies so that they can deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of interest to you. The information passed to these companies may include, but is not limited to, your IP address, e-mail address, name, mailing address, telephone number, date of birth, gender, and any other information you provide to us. Web pages that are served by these companies will state that they are "powered by" or "ads by" the applicable company and will contain a link to that company's privacy policy.

Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site.Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our users based on their visit to our sites and other sites on the Internet.Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Marketing Partners
We may share, license or sell your information to third parties for various marketing purposes, including their online (e.g., e-mail marketing) and offline (e.g., telemarketing, cell phone text messaging, skip tracing, and direct mail) marketing programs. If you would like to be removed from these programs write to us.

Data Enhancement/Appending/Validation
We may use third party service providers to enhance our database with additional elements, including but not limited to age ranges present in your household, whether you own or rent a home, the length of time you have lived at your residence, whether you are a mail order buyer or responder, household income, and gender. Further, we may use third party service providers to append telephone numbers to other data points we have in our database. We also may use third party service providers to validate the data we have in our database.

Additionally, we may share, license or sell your information to third parties for use in their data validation, enhancement, information verification services, and, to the extent permitted by law, individual reference or look-up services.

Third Party Cookies

Notwithstanding anything else in this policy, we or a data provider we have engaged may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser to enable you to receive customized ads or content.   These cookies contain no personally identifiable information.  The cookies may reflect de-identified demographic or other data linked to data you voluntarily have submitted to us, e.g., your email address, that we may share with a data provider solely in hashed, non-human readable form. To opt-out of these cookies, please go to http://www.aboutads.info/choices.

Governmental Agencies or Other Companies
We may share your information with law enforcement officials or governmental agencies: (1) in response to their request; (2) when permitted or required by law; or (3) to establish our compliance with applicable laws, rules, regulations, or guidelines.

We may store and share your information with third parties for suppression or opt-out purposes.

We also may share your information with third parties when: (1) trying to protect against or prevent actual or potential fraud or unauthorized transactions; (2) investigating fraud that has already taken place; (3) enforcing or applying existing terms and conditions and/or other agreements; (4) protecting the rights, property or safety of our websites, our users or others; or (5) responding to subpoenas, court orders or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims.

In all cases, this information is not provided to these entities or persons for marketing purposes.

Right to Transfer
Should the Company choose to sell or transfer business assets, it is possible that the information we possess may be transferred as part of that transaction. The Company may decide to retain a copy of the information post sale or transfer.

COMPANY CUSTOMER CHOICES

Marketing Communications and Unsubscribe Information
By completing and submitting a Company registration form, you are consenting to receive marketing communications from the Company and its third party marketing partners. If, after you have shared your information with the Company, you decide that you do not want to receive marketing communications or newsletters from the Company and its third party marketing partners, you can discontinue the communications by clicking here and filling out our form. If you have registered or submitted information under more than one e-mail account, you must submit separate unsubscribe requests for each account.

Request for More Information
As it relates to marketing communications or any other questions you might have about our Privacy Policy, please write to us at Prime Publishing, LLC, 3400 Dundee Road, Suite 220, Northbrook, IL 60062.

WHAT HAPPENS IF I HIT A LINK TO ANOTHER SITE FROM A COMPANY WEBSITE?
Our websites may offer links to other websites. Other websites have their own terms of use and privacy and security policies. If you choose to visit one of these sites, you should review the policies that govern that particular site.

APPLICATION OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY
This Privacy Policy applies to all information collected by or submitted to the Company. Other affiliated entities of the Company may obtain information independently from transactions and experiences with you or from other sources. This Privacy Policy does not pertain to that information.

WHAT IS THE POLICY WITH RESPECT TO COMMUNICATING WITH CHILDREN?
We recognize the unique privacy concerns regarding children. We are committed to carefully protecting privacy where children are involved no matter the point of contact. In particular, our intention is to fully comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA"). Per COPPA guidelines, we do not knowingly collect PII from children under the age of 13. If a parent or guardian is made aware that a child under the age of 13 has provided us with PII through any point of contact, click here to contact us and we will delete the information about the child referenced from our files.

SECURITY
There is no such thing as complete security on the Internet or otherwise. The Company uses various security techniques on our websites to help protect against the loss, misuse or modification of information we've collected from you. When you access your personal information or transmit information to us, that information is stored on servers that we have taken steps to protect from unauthorized access or intrusion. While we strive to protect your information, the Company cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us. You acknowledge and assume this risk when communicating with the Company, its partners and affiliates.

LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
YOU UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT ANY DISPUTE OVER PRIVACY IS SUBJECT TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY, AS WELL AS THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS WEBSITE (INCLUDING LIMITATIONS ON DAMAGES). YOU AGREE THAT THE COMPANY'S LIABILITY FOR ANY BREACH OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY SHALL BE LIMITED TO THE VALUE OF THE TRANSACTIONS OR SERVICES PROVIDED TO YOU BY THE COMPANY TO THE EXTENT SUCH CLAIM IS NOT OTHERWISE BARRED BY OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

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