Kim Siever’s Blog

In this morning’s issue of the Lethbridge Herald:

. . . the typical Lethbridge home’s value [will] rise nearly $25,000 over the year . . . pushing the average resale price to $210,000 by year’s end.

Yet another reason to build high-density downtown.

In fact,

Due to investors’ reluctance to invest in new apartments and rental accommodation, however, the city will continue to fall behind Medicine Hat, Red Deer, Fort McMurray and particularly mushrooming Grande Prairie in the number of multi-family housing starts compared to the current population. Just 136 multi-family units were started in Lethbridge in 2006 — the lowest in seven years . . .

Oh, you may be asking yourself, “Woah! Kim Siever is on a diet.” That all depends on what you call a diet. Let’s just say in the last eight years or so, I have not had a large weight gain (more than five pounds). So what’s my secret?

1. Don’t eat crap. Eat healthy food and a wide variety of it. Sometimes my breakfast consists of an butter-fried egg and mozzarella cheese on two pieces of buttered toast and eaten like a sandwich. Sometimes it’s an apple, grapefruit, orange and banana combined in a blender. Sometimes it’s a bowl of Cheerios. Sometimes it’s all three. I never eat crap like Fruit Loops or Pop Tarts or that sort of thing. And when I do eat something iffy like a cinnamon bun, it’s once or twice a year.
2. Don’t sweat it if you do eat crap. Occassionally. Since I eat a wide variety of healthy foods, I don’t feel guilty when I occasionally eat something indulgent (like a Cheesecake Cafe banana split cheesecake). I know that in the long run, occasional treats (high sugar, or high fat or high salt) do not ruin my health as long as I have a mostly healthy and varied diet.
3. Rarely stuff yourself. Some of you who know me may be laughing yourself silly at hearing me say this. The truth is though that I rarely stuff myself. When I do, it’s at an all-you-can eat buffet and my Scottish/Dutch background forces me to get my money’s wroth. But it’s only a couple of times per year and doesn’t affect my long-term health.
4. Don’t worry about five pounds. If you are five pounds overweight (even ten pounds really), don’t worry about it. Especially, if it’s been that way for a long time. Five pounds will not affect your long term health, and accepting it will improve your self confidence.

Overall, my philosophy is to simply be healthy. I eat what I want, but I eat healthy.

What tips do you have?

According to the Wetaskiwin Times Advertiser, CMHC is reporting Lethbridge’s rental vacancy rate is at less than 1%.

Lethbridge is seeing its vacancy rate tighten 2.1 percentage points from 2.7 per cent in 2005 to 0.6 per cent in 2006.

Yet one more reason why high-density residential development should be encouraged in downtown Lethbridge.

One of the best positions I ever had in my church was when I was called as the clerk for my congregation. I was responsible for managing all the congregation’s records and supervising three other clerks (finance, membership, history).

It’s not too often they extend a position like that to someone who has good organisational skills. I was excited, and knew that based on the last few individuals who had been in the position, there would be lots to do.

One of the first things I noticed was wrong was there was no distribution mechanism set up for correspondence. If a letter came in from the headquarters that needed to be distributed to all the congregational leaders or if we needed to get our curriculum orders made, I had to do it all by hand with each person individually. It was the same thing if someone asked me to print off a report (such as a year-to-date budget summary): I would have to track them down to give them the report.

Ironically, in my office, there was a pigeonhole attached to the wall. Despite that a few of the slots were labelled, it was used mostly as a closet; people used it for storing things they didn’t want to bring home.

The first thing I did was clear out the pigeonhole. I put everything into a pile on my desk, and then labelled every mailslot for each clerical position and auxiliary in the congregation.

Following that, I sorted through all the material in the pile on my desk. I shredded anything over a year old (one item was the minutes from a meeting held ten years previous). I reinserted the remaining items into the pigeonhole according to who should own it.

Once I got that out of the way, the next step was to change the process that was used to that point for distributing correspondence.

From that point, every time I had to print out a report, I would tell the person, “I will print it out and put it in your mailslot”, pointing out which mailslot was his/hers. When I needed to copy correspondence for everyone of distribute things like curriculum order forms, I would put them in all the mailslots and inform recipients where they were at our next executive meeting.

Occasionally, I needed to mention reminders in the executive meeting that some mail boxes needed emptying.

Eventually, however, the system became quite successful and everyone came to rely on it.

I am no longer the clerk, but the system still operates today. I often see people come into the clerk’s office to check if anything in their mailslotes.