It's Monday morning. For me, summer is effectively over. My vacation week ended yesterday. It's time to get back into the flow of work and life and get out there and kick some serious _____. I was up early and went for a 5K run this morning focused on speed and came in just over 8:30/mile even while pushing the jogger stroller the whole way.
I had all sorts of blog posts planned... I knew I had to run out to Staples to get a printer cartridge so that my fax/printer/scanner could fax out a document (a rant for another day!)... but I expected to be up in my home office around 8:20am pounding away on those blog posts.
Then... I made a critical mistake.
I handed my used-and-theoretically-dead inkjet printer cartridge to my 2-year-old to carry into Staples because she wanted to "help".
Other parents or those interacting with toddlers reading this undoubtedly know what is about to happen...
HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU SPELL "FAIL"???
Leave it to the 2-yr-old to discover that yes, indeed, the cartridge did have some ink in it... and to get that ink ALL over her hands... and on her clothes... and subsequently on my hands....
Oops.
So there I was at the checkout counter using some Purelle and paper towels they had to attempt to clean up the major parts of the mess. The cute little hands you see in the picture here are after most of the ink was scrubbed off... but back at home where I could use some more aggressive soap.
As it was all unfolding, I felt myself starting to get agitated and anxious because I had all these plans! I had things to do, articles to write, messages to send... I could feel my blood pressure rising even as I externally was calm and patient.
And then I breathed deeply.
And reflected that this is the reality we all live in...
life happens.
You can plan all you want... you can make incredible plans, in fact... only to have them derailed by some little action, perhaps by your own action as it was in this case, or perhaps by circumstances outside your control.
The measure of ourselves as people is how we choose to react to those changes to our plans and what we learn from those changes.
In my case, I just sighed and went about the actions of trying to clean up all the ink... (and I made a note to myself that it's probably better NOT to let the wee one hold "dead" ink cartridges ;-)
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But you did get a very sweet blog out of it...
Posted by: Ellen Muraskin | 08/22/2011 at 10:30 AM
Ellen, Indeed I *did* get a blog post out of it. Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment. Dan
Posted by: Dan York | 08/29/2011 at 09:44 AM