And She's Off in Everyday Ramblings

Wow. I don’t think I have had as busy a week as this last one since I stopped working. Not that I am not working, teaching is working, but it doesn’t feel that way because I enjoy it. This is the week I had to present to the board of the local League the draft budget and what I received from the previous budget chair was complicated and not ideal.

It is hard isn’t it, as we get older, to do things we don’t know how to do, have never done before, and aren’t very good at. Particularly when there are expectations.

I could have fueled at least a book light for reading a large book with the energy I expended this last week on anxiety about the whole thing. Maybe even lighting up a room. Bleh.

I got through it though. I did the best I could with what I knew and this morning we had our first committee meeting on the subject and gratefully everyone is basically in agreement with me. Except for pie charts. People seem to like pie charts more than I would have guessed even though they are apparently not the best way to visualize data.

Now the meeting is over I feel a huge relief. I have so much work ahead but once I get into it and do the thing it shouldn’t be too hard. There are people involved with ideas and pet projects so we will see how that goes.

In the middle of all this I had a dental checkup and cleaning. I knew the lull was too good to be true and that proved to be the case. I need a crown and another extraction and implant. There is a problem tooth I have known about for years. Much work has been done on it but now it is time to go. And the other tooth, genetics, and poor dental work when I was younger. Mostly genetics though.

The work I have had done these last nine years or so has been excellent. It is just one has to go through it.

While I was in the dental chair my Fitbit was buzzing with texts and calls. Some of them were appointment notifications, one was my cardiologist canceling my appointment in two weeks (they rescheduled for August 29th!!!) and some of them were Walt who is going to Mexico for six weeks and wanted to talk to me about the Open Road Press before he left.

One of the guys in our group recently acquired a Newfoundland puppy named Raven and he brought her in to the coffee shop yesterday so we could meet her. He drove to Montana to get her. Her litter mates went to Mountain Rescue and places like that. Her parents weigh 140 and 160 lbs. respectively. That is a lot of dog. He’d had one before, who I met, on the small side for the breed and he fell in love. He was telling us about the joys and travails of traveling with a puppy.

That was a nice interlude in a crazy day. Our temperature is hovering just above freezing until it gets dark and then we are in for an unusually cold four days, which meant I needed to get to the grocery before I get iced out.

I have all the things to make lemon cookies and cornbread as cabin fever comfort food. I am taking the next couple of days as downtime. Well, Walt wants a poem for Monday so I will see what I can come up with.

In the meantime I am going to put on some big warm socks and curl up with Carlo and finish the book I am reading and let everything else go…