Sometimes I think it's all in the detail: grandiose schemes, exciting adventures -- they can all crumble if some seemingly small event upsets the apple cart. At the very least, it can muddle your days, as you spend too much time trying to straighten out an unexpected mess.
I had a day of messy clutter, threatening to undo the grandiose, the exciting! I fought back! But it took time.
And it began as such a placid, pretty day! I am up early, though our house guest beat me to it. Never mind, I still need to do my morning chores: feed the cats, check on the flowers, pull some weeds.
(the first day lily in my lily bed!!)
(a very lovely iris by the path to the door...)
The three of us eat breakfast on the porch. Our house guest is a terrifically interesting person with great life stories to recount and we linger for a while over the morning meal. Here's my portion of that meal -- let's give the men some photographic space.
He and Ed go off then to their machining business meetings and me -- I go to the dentist. That's a story in its own right, but I cannot possibly imagine that it would warrant a big recount here, on Ocean. I'll just throw out this question: how can one tooth pose such a terrific amount of disagreement among grown men (in the dental profession)? I have spent hours of consult time on it! Hours! Bottom line -- I think it'll have to go to the compost pile (do teeth get composted?), but I wont attend to it until July. I can put it aside for a few more weeks. (The irony is that it wasn't/isn't causing me any problems, it just looks bad on all the big screens that dentists now study in their drive to make better decisions about treatment plans.)
The rest of the morning? I spend it talking to airlines about my second summer trip (forthcoming, in August): the seating has been somehow messed up on our flights (behind our backs!). I work on trying to straighten it out. It is still a work in progress. (Had I not caught the snafu, we would have had a flight headache. Actually more than one light flight headache.)
In the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop. In the middle of a storm. No matter, it is a small storm.
[Indeed, an Ocean reader sent me a reassuring link today, where Madison is identified as a rare place with very few cataclysmic weather events (read it here). Knock on wood!]
And Snowdrop is in a delightful, story telling mood.
As I half-listen to her tell her tale (she doesn't always want an audience), my mind drifts back over the day's details and I think -- hmm, maybe I should be rechecking the details of my first summer trip -- the one that's to begin sometime next week.
The check reveals an even bigger pile of small messes. I mean, it's a seating disaster!
And so I spend the better part of the evening trying to straighten this out. Fortunately, I am connected to an agent who is good and patient and if what he says hold true, we should be in a good place right now. Maybe.
Of course, you want everything to work smoothly in life. You want no one to make mistakes. You want competent people there to attend to all your problems. But setting such expectations for yourself isn't a good way to go about your business. The reality is that mistakes are more common than we would like, fixes are often times difficult, and people cannot always find meaningful solutions for small problems. So, you cross your fingers and forge ahead. And maybe a few teeth will get unnecessarily knocked out along the way, and you'll find yourself on an airplane where you are in row 25 and your granddaughter is in row 30, but hey! In the end, we'll get there. Really, with or without teeth, we will get there for sure.
I had a day of messy clutter, threatening to undo the grandiose, the exciting! I fought back! But it took time.
And it began as such a placid, pretty day! I am up early, though our house guest beat me to it. Never mind, I still need to do my morning chores: feed the cats, check on the flowers, pull some weeds.
(the first day lily in my lily bed!!)
(a very lovely iris by the path to the door...)
The three of us eat breakfast on the porch. Our house guest is a terrifically interesting person with great life stories to recount and we linger for a while over the morning meal. Here's my portion of that meal -- let's give the men some photographic space.
He and Ed go off then to their machining business meetings and me -- I go to the dentist. That's a story in its own right, but I cannot possibly imagine that it would warrant a big recount here, on Ocean. I'll just throw out this question: how can one tooth pose such a terrific amount of disagreement among grown men (in the dental profession)? I have spent hours of consult time on it! Hours! Bottom line -- I think it'll have to go to the compost pile (do teeth get composted?), but I wont attend to it until July. I can put it aside for a few more weeks. (The irony is that it wasn't/isn't causing me any problems, it just looks bad on all the big screens that dentists now study in their drive to make better decisions about treatment plans.)
The rest of the morning? I spend it talking to airlines about my second summer trip (forthcoming, in August): the seating has been somehow messed up on our flights (behind our backs!). I work on trying to straighten it out. It is still a work in progress. (Had I not caught the snafu, we would have had a flight headache. Actually more than one light flight headache.)
In the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop. In the middle of a storm. No matter, it is a small storm.
[Indeed, an Ocean reader sent me a reassuring link today, where Madison is identified as a rare place with very few cataclysmic weather events (read it here). Knock on wood!]
And Snowdrop is in a delightful, story telling mood.
As I half-listen to her tell her tale (she doesn't always want an audience), my mind drifts back over the day's details and I think -- hmm, maybe I should be rechecking the details of my first summer trip -- the one that's to begin sometime next week.
The check reveals an even bigger pile of small messes. I mean, it's a seating disaster!
And so I spend the better part of the evening trying to straighten this out. Fortunately, I am connected to an agent who is good and patient and if what he says hold true, we should be in a good place right now. Maybe.
Of course, you want everything to work smoothly in life. You want no one to make mistakes. You want competent people there to attend to all your problems. But setting such expectations for yourself isn't a good way to go about your business. The reality is that mistakes are more common than we would like, fixes are often times difficult, and people cannot always find meaningful solutions for small problems. So, you cross your fingers and forge ahead. And maybe a few teeth will get unnecessarily knocked out along the way, and you'll find yourself on an airplane where you are in row 25 and your granddaughter is in row 30, but hey! In the end, we'll get there. Really, with or without teeth, we will get there for sure.
