I have two very distinct topics I want to share today. The first involves how I am growing more and more like my mother each and every day. My mother has many wonderful and very unique qualities. She's a stickler on ironing when you are going out into the world. She believes that a clean car exterior is a sign of good-breeding. My mother also seems to enjoy finding money so much that she continually loses it just so she can have the pleasure of finding it at some later date.
She has found hundreds of misplaced dollars, literally. This is how it happens. She has some cash, $20 or maybe $500. She puts it away in some place safe. She forgets about the cash until she wants to buy something. Then she feverishly hunts for the secret, safe hiding place which she cannot locate in the heat of the hunt. She uses instead another stash of cash to pay for what she wants at the time. A few months pass by, everything is going well, and, Voila! she opens a drawer and finds 5 crisp $100 bills. It never fails.
For myself, I live on a much tighter budget. I found 7 dollars in the glove box yesterday. That's lunch money, yippee!!! Today I got two expense checks from work. I went to my file to check on the amounts and realized that I'm missed reimbursement for a very large amount. I'm drafting an email to accounting when I have a little thought pop into my brain. Didn't you get a check last week?
I look at my online checking account, and no extra deposits have been made. I open my briefcase (actually it's a big, pink Nine West bag) and Voila! $1300 of reimbursement check. In about two days AmEx is going to want those 13-hundred smackeroos.
The second involves taking my husbands advice and looking at the world with a more optimistic perspective. At 6:00 AM today I was rehearsing in my head all the reasons I was too sick to go to work. I felt an upset-ness in my tummy. I had a migraine coming on. I was just not well. All of these sounded like plausible justification for calling in and rolling over. Then Craig woke up. I shared my anxiety about how work personalities are just too much to deal with. He suggested that I not let the turkeys (my word) down. That this was just a job and there were more important things in life. Also, I was scheduled to meet with my boss's boss in the afternoon. It's not good to be sick on a day you have a meeting scheduled with your boss's boss. I finally got motivated to get out of bed. (You really know you're having a bad day when you need to test out six outfits for casual Friday before one actually works.) And I got to work. The same awful personality issues were happening. The same less than productive emails were in my box. But I decided to just remove myself from the situation. I found a nice quiet place, outside of my office, to focus on my work. I had a lovely demo of an online training program. I had a social walk to the cafeteria for lunch. I had friendly chit-chat as I waited in that line. I had a pleasant walk back to my office. And the afternoon was looking alright.
Now as I write, I've had the meeting with my boss's boss. I've thanked Craig for his advice and coaching. I've found my expense check. I'm ready to leave and pack up for Vegas! It's a little early to leave so I might tackle a few of my million other projects on my desk as I think about how nice it is that I love my mother so much. I'll contemplate banking, I mean hoping I inherit her knack for finding money, literally and figuratively, if you get my drift. And I'll be thankful that I have my husband in my life. I'm getting teary-eyed just thinking about it. And that is called finding your glass all full!
