Soaked. But Stronger.

One of my favorite books of all time, makes reference to being “pushed in the pool” on a daily basis. It’s the idea that tough stuff will come up everyday. And how are you going to handle it?

And the answer this week is: better than expected.

Last week our six month old refrigerator quit working. And the stench that accompanied that discovery was pretty brutal. As was the subsequent discovery that a repairman wouldn’t be out to take a look at it for a week.

Within 24 hours of the refrigerator calling it quits, one of the hard drives in my computer also gave up. The good news is, that hard drive backs up to a server. The bad news is that it wasn’t backing up properly (unbeknownst to us) in the weeks leading up to it’s demise. The other good news is that all of the images/videos/copy for projects that were due in the past week were also stored on my Surface Pro and I was able to meet deadlines as expected. The other bad news is that work on projects with future deadlines is (STILL) currently held hostage along with another 2.73 terabytes worth of information in that corpse of a hard drive.

About twelve hours after the hard drive discovery, Moxie barfed all over our living room rug. She NEVER gets sick, but I blame it on the feast of stinkbugs she partook in, on our deck. Because she’s disgusting.

This was simply the tip of the iceberg. In the five days since that fiasco, I’ve been pushed shoved in the pool no fewer than three time daily. At this point it’s comedic.

It would be entirely plausible to be on the floor, rocking in the corner, but I’m letting it roll off. And I think it has something to do with age. Or wisdom. Or something like that.

Sure, the fridge fiasco is a major inconvenience, but it’s just that … an inconvenience. We’re able to get to the store on the daily and we already had plans to be out of town for the weekend, so the empty fridge for a week was manageable.

The barf got cleaned up, accompanied by the soundtrack of Mayhem wailing and dry heaving (and she was only watching us clean up the mess) and Moxie was immediately back to her normal self.

The corpse of a hard drive is really truly the biggest punch to the gut right now. But I’m dealing with it (because I have everything I need to make work related do-over(s) happen) and learning from it (because losing access to this particular library of images/content pretty much sucks).

Through all of this, it would be tempting to say that things have been going wrong, but I’m pretty sure each and every one of these challenges is here to get me where I want to go. And make me stronger for the journey.

I had a conversation with a friend over the weekend about a project that fell through. And I confided in her how very happy I was that it did. While everything about the project seemed like an awesome opportunity, when it got down to discussing the creative, I could tell that the wrong people were handling it. People who clearly did not have their eye on the ball. People who would’ve more than likely made the project completely un-enjoyable and possibly destroyed a bit of our authenticity as well. My only regret is that I didn’t take myself out of the running for that particular project after the “all telling” conversation. Instead, I spent hours contemplating how to make it work. Justifying that not everyone has the same creative/working style, and I needed to push myself to find a way to work with all different types of people. So when the call came that we wouldn’t be working on that project, it felt a wee bit like being pushed in the pool. … Only this time, it was on a blistering hot summer day. It was a welcome plunge!

Which made me realize that every time I have to swim to the side, I’m getting stronger. Having the expectation that stuff is going to happen allows me to move on more quickly and with a whole lot less complaining.

And based on the events of the past week, I’m feeling like I could bench press a VW Beetle right about now 😉