Finding the Positive

It's 4:05 on Friday afternoon. The start of what should be a great weekend. I'm the new president of the Plains States Kodaly Organization, and we're ready for our first workshop Saturday morning with me at the helm. I get in my car, flip out my phone, and see that I have two missed calls. That's odd...nobody ever calls me. I check the messages to hear that our clinician and her husband are at the baggage claim in Lincoln and wondering if someone will be picking them up. I'm currently in Omaha. On a Friday afternoon...

The last I had communicated with our clinician, she mentioned that she might rent a car. I never checked back with her, and boom...now she's stranded at the airport 60 miles away. The next message had come in about 2 hours later, when she and her husband took the shuttle to the airport. But...still no car. I call her and tell her I'm on my way to meet her at the hotel and we (my family) will pick them up and take them somewhere for dinner.

I swing into daycare to get Dayna, to be reminded at first sight that it was pajama day, and my daughter has no presentable clothes on her body. So...while frantically navigating rush hour traffic, I spend an hour on the phone making contingency plans. Dan agrees to stop at Wal-Mart and buy an outfit for Dayna, then meet me at the hotel.

All's well at this point...we have a lovely steak dinner (because that's where you take people when they come to Nebraska) that I wasn't budgeting for (financially or caloric intake), and I spent the evening shuttling them for some last-minute errands. Not a problem...just not part of my original plan. I get home late, with no time to finish my own last-minute details. They'll just have to go undone.

Saturday comes...it's a lovely workshop. Things go swimmingly. Great turnout, and we actually turned a profit! After the workshop, we take our guests out to lunch. She sees Sonic and gets excited, as there are no Sonics where she lives. We dine in. Toward the end of the meal, an increasingly grumpy and tired Dayna takes the garbage to throw it away. Her hand gets pinched in the hinged part of the garbage container. I jump up to go to her rescue, only to slip on the tile floor and go down with all my weight on my wrist.

The day continues, I go home, my wrist is throbbing, I'm tired and cranky myself, but trying to keep that stiff upper lip. I flip through some papers, including the contract for our clinician and discover that we underpaid her by quite a bit. There goes our profit. So...I'm feeling like a miserable leader: leaving the clinician stranded AND underpaid. I'm ready for them to impeach me.

I finally fall asleep with many painkillers in my system to offset the throbbing wrist, only to wake up restless at 4 am. At 5, I gave up. At 6, Dayna got up to join me, complaining that she wasn't feeling well.

At 9:00, Dayna and I walked into the Quick Care clinic at a grocery store 20 miles away. Still trying to maintain a healthy outlook, I received two decisively positive pieces of news:

1. Dayna's rapid strep test
and
2. Mine

What a weekend!