Blog Days

My Sunday “B” day has been temporarily moved to Monday because I had an expired license renewal sticker on my car. Actually I’ve had the new sticker for over a month but never bothered to put it on the car windshield. It was one of those “I’ll do it tomorrow” types of things. After all, the current one on the car didn't expire until the end of April.

So when I agreed to drive the car pool to Midlothian, TX for a Sunday afternoon rowdy game of Mexican Train with a wild bunch of librarians, I planned my morning quite carefully: Get up early, read the Sunday paper, have breakfast, walk the dogs, fill the gas tank, and get the car its semi-annual bath and grooming for the upcoming 40 mile drive. This would still leave me plenty of time to shower and dress and write my blog. So I thought.

With the car now spit-shiny, the expired license sticker loomed menacingly on the windshield, almost like it was just waiting to flag down the first patrol car it saw so it could embarrass me in front of my friends. No problem though. It’d only take me a minute or two to retrieve the new sticker from the glove box where I’d shoved it until it was time to apply it. I hadn’t counted on two things: one, the clutter in my glove box and two, the renewal sticker not being there.

New problem. When I had the laminated flooring put in a couple of weeks ago, I had to remove all my papers from the computer room. I hadn’t moved anything back yet (another one of those “I’ll do it tomorrow” things). This meant that I now needed to search through boxes and sacks crammed with very important papers to try and find my license renewal. Papers and cuss words flying about, I was determined to find that damn sticker as if my life depended upon it. And in a sense, it did.

We baby boomers pride ourselves on our keen minds. We can accept the sags, the wrinkles, and the aches, but we cling to the façade that our minds are as sharp as ever. I knew I had put the renewal sticker in the glove box, damn it! I remembered thinking that if I did ever pulled over by the police, I could pull it out of the glove box and say, “See, I have it right here.” I had to have put it there! Where else would it be? Then I remembered. Duh, I’d put it in my purse to put into the car’s glove box. So I hadn’t lost my mind; I just hadn’t complete the process.

Lessons learned? I still need to work on that clutter, I need to stop the “I’ll do it tomorrow” mentality and I need to relax more. My first blog happened to be posted on a Sunday morning so I made a rule that it always had to be done on Sunday morning or I might never do it again. Wednesday evenings also became a “B” evening as I now write a library blog and you got it, my first posting was on a Wednesday evening. Ah, the ruts we crawl into because of fear. Hurray for the ruts we can crawl out of if we allow ourselves to do so.