(Me and Cash after a day of playing outside)
Have you ever had one of those days where all of your good intentions sort of go wrong? I have those days all the time so, really, it should never come as a surprise to me when it happens but sometimes I manage to surprise myself with my own ineptitude.
On Friday I made myself a mental to-do list for Saturday which included planting the rest of the flowers in our ginormous front flower bed, cleaning several rooms in our house which seem to be especially dusty, washing the dogs, and then maybe doing some laundry. Had I done all of those things I would have felt a huge sense of accomplishment and our house and the front yard would have looked fantastic! Sadly, it was not meant to be.
Let me back up a step here and explain that once a year, during SXSW, the famed week-long music festival, my husband Jonathan and Steph's husband Matt go to the all day event at The Continental Club which starts with Mojo Nixon's Jalapeno Pancake Breakfast and features a multitude of artists. This year's lineup was as follows (for you music lovers):
10:50am Sara Petite
11:40am Roger Alan Wade
12:25 pm Two Hoots and a Holler
1:15 pm The Mastersons
2:05pm Whiskey Sisters
2:55 pm Jon Dee Graham
3:45pm James McMurtry
4:35 pm The Iguanas
5:25 pm Mojo Nixon
Stephanie said she would drive Matt & Jonathan downtown in the morning and I agreed to pick them up in the evening after the last act ended so they could save a bundle of money on cab fare. The plan was for Jonathan to call or text me to come and get them when they were ready to come home. I figured that I would spend my day on my to-do list and then pop downtown and pick them up (anticipated travel time = 1 hour) and then Jonathan and I would have a relaxing evening at home.
My day started off on the wrong track when, instead of getting up and starting to do my chores, I opened up my laptop and logged into Facebook while turning on the TV and tuning in to Law & Order. Naturally with that level of distraction I managed to lie around in my PJ's for 3 hours watching TV and writing pithy comments on FB. Around 1pm I realized I needed to do something so I cleaned the master bathroom including the dusty area behind the jacuzzi (Nigel loves to play there). I felt pretty good about that but really wasn't motivated to do much else so I decided to go over to Stephanie's house and "take" her time.
I showed up at Stephanie's around 3pm and, right away, I started "taking" by giving her Great Dane, Riggs, a big crunchy dog treat which he managed to crumble up all over the couch. Score!! Then, inexplicably, Stephanie decided we should take Cash outside to play (I think she didn't want me messing up her whole house which was my plan).
The next thing I know Cash is making me play with him - we drew some great art with sidewalk chalk, kicked leaves into the sewer, and raked up dirt with some sticks - while Stephanie took pictures. Somehow that sly Stephanie turned things around so SHE was taking MY time not the other way around. Needless to say I was so dispirited by my failed "taking" event that I rushed home to cry for awhile.
Around 6pm Jonathan called me and told me that he and Matt were ready to be picked up downtown. Since I knew they had spent the day drinking adult beverages at an exhausting concert I decided to bring them some bottled water and some tacos from Taco Cabana. I grabbed the tacos and headed downtown in the LizMobile only to find that my timing calculations were completely off because I had forgotten that SXSW crowds combined with St. Patrick's Day crowds = total traffic mayhem/gridlock. It took at least an hour to get downtown and another 30 minutes, after picking up Matt & Jonathan, to get out of traffic. (and can I just say that I know were are all supposed to LOVE bicyclists because they are eco-friendly but I freaking hate their slow-moving-in-traffic-bad-attitude-cut-in-front-of-cars-attitudes)
By the time we were on MoPac headed north I was in a pretty foul and bitchy mood which I did not keep to myself. My husband was just thrilled with my continuous remarks about the traffic and how much of my time it took to go pick him up. Later I felt pretty bad about complaining so much because I realized that Jonathan probably thought I was trying to make him feel guilty but really I was just mad that what I thought would be a 1 hour excursion took more than 2 hours on a Saturday night. My fault entirely for not calculating correctly. On the bright side I was able to "take" my husband's good mood and ruin it. I didn't feel that good about that "taking" situation though.
So the long and the short of it is that sometimes "taking" doesn't go according to plan. I learned that sometimes when you try to take from a friend you get so caught up in fun with a happy little kid (Cash) that you happily give your time instead of taking someone else's. I also found that sometimes the best of intentions for giving lead to a bad kind of taking (ruining someone else's mood). But with all of that said I am still committed to taking as much as I can from the world this year.
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