advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
My Daughter's Husband Keeps Kosher, and I Wanted To Cook Him a Meal He Could Actually Eat. AI-Generated.
The first dinner I got wrong I got the first one wrong, and I have never quite forgiven myself for it. My daughter married a wonderful young man named David, who keeps kosher, and I, a lifelong meat-and-potatoes prairie father from Winnipeg, did not really understand what that meant beyond a vague idea about pork. So for their first dinner at our house as a married couple, I made what I thought was a safe, generous meal. Beef, which I was proud of. Roast vegetables. And, because my wife always does, a big jug of cream for the coffee and butter on the table, right next to the beef.
By Josh Maraney7 days ago in Journal
The Workroom My Mother Started Was Invisible to Everyone Under Fifty. AI-Generated.
The regulars were getting old, and so was I I inherited a curtain and upholstery workroom from my mother, in a light industrial part of Johannesburg, the kind of place you only find if someone tells you it is there.
By Josh Maraney7 days ago in Journal
My Chutney Sold Out at Every Market, and Then a Customer Asked Me One Question I Could Not Answer. AI-Generated.
The chutney nobody could stop buying I make chutney. That is the short version of who I am. It started as my grandmother's recipe, made in a borrowed church kitchen in Johannesburg on Sunday afternoons, sold in mismatched jars at a Saturday market to pay for my son's school shoes. I did not plan a business. The business planned itself, the way it does when people keep coming back and bringing their friends and asking if you deliver.
By Josh Maraney7 days ago in Journal
We Were Twenty-Six, Terrified of the Word Mortgage, and Tired of a Landlord Who Painted Over Mould. AI-Generated.
The landlord painted over the mould again The thing that finally pushed us was a wall. We were renting a small place in a complex we could not really afford in a suburb we had chosen mostly because it sounded nice when we told people where we lived. There was a patch of black mould in the corner of the bathroom, low down near the skirting, and every few months the landlord would send a man to paint over it, and every few months it would bleed back through the fresh white paint like a bruise coming up under skin.
By Josh Maraney7 days ago in Journal
The Round Bald Patch I Hid Under a Scarf for Nine Months. AI-Generated.
My hairdresser found it before I did I did not find it myself. My hairdresser did. I was in her chair in Durban on an ordinary Thursday, half listening to her talk about her son's soccer, when her hands went still on the back of my head and her voice changed.
By Josh Maraney7 days ago in Journal
I Started Lifting Weights at Forty-Seven Because I Could Not Open a Jar. AI-Generated.
The jar of pickled onions It sounds too small to be the start of anything, but it was a jar of pickled onions. I was standing in my kitchen in Leeds on a wet Tuesday, trying to open it for a ploughman's lunch, and I could not. I ran it under hot water. I tapped the lid with a knife. I used one of those rubber grippy things. Nothing. In the end I gave up and waited for my husband to come home, and he opened it in about half a second without even putting his coat down, and I stood there feeling something I did not have a name for yet.
By Josh Maraney7 days ago in Journal
We Sold the House With the Big Garden and Nobody Cried, Which Surprised Us Both. AI-Generated.
The lawn was the last straw, honestly People assume it was something dramatic. A health scare, a burst pipe, a fight with the neighbours. It was the lawn. Specifically it was a Sunday in early spring when I was on my knees pulling a length of kikuyu out of the flowerbed, and my back went in that quiet, treacherous way it does now, and I lay on the grass looking at the sky and thought, with total clarity, I do not want to do this for the rest of my life.
By Josh Maraney7 days ago in Journal
The Storage Unit I Kept Paying For Long After Everyone Told Me To Let It Go. AI-Generated.
The debit order I never cancelled There is a debit order that has left my account on the third of every month for four years. Six hundred and something rand, going to a storage place off the R21 near Benoni. My daughter found it once when she was helping me sort out my banking on the phone, and she looked at me the way you look at a person who has left the tap running in another room.
By Josh Maraney7 days ago in Journal
I Moved for a Job and Ended Up Buying My First Home by Accident. AI-Generated.
I am a Joburg boy through and through. Born in the East Rand, schooled there, first job there, first heartbreak there. I used to be one of those people who rolled their eyes at everyone who moved to Cape Town and would not shut up about the mountain. I found them insufferable. And then, at thirty four, I became one of them, and now I am the person at the braai talking about the mountain, and I have made my peace with the hypocrisy.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
My Uncle Left Me Shares in Nine Countries and a Puzzle He Never Solved. AI-Generated.
My uncle Gerald was the sort of man who read the financial pages the way other people read the sports results. He never married, never had children, and spent fifty years quietly buying small parcels of shares in companies all over the world. When he died, he left the whole strange collection to me, his nephew, a retired music teacher who could barely tell a bond from a bassoon.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
The Passage Light I Could Finally Leave On As Long As I Wanted. AI-Generated.
For three years I shared. First with two girls I met through a friend of a friend, then with a rotating cast of strangers as people moved out and new ones moved in. I am twenty six, I work at a call centre in the middle of Johannesburg as a team leader, and for those three years I lived my whole life in one bedroom of somebody else's arrangement, tiptoeing around a house that was never quite mine.
By Josh Maraney8 days ago in Journal
