Ah, Irony!

Well, technically let's make that one funny and two ironies.

I watched Akeelah and the Bee yesterday. I wanted something positive, inspirational, maybe funny, light-hearted, with a good message, etc. Well, I got it. It's by no means a hard-hitting movie, but I enjoyed it for exactly what it was. One part that made me laugh (and which won't translate nearly so well into an anecdote) is when Akeelah was at the televised national finals in Washington DC for the bee, and this snotty kid just got up there and spelled some huge word super fast, and it was her turn, and she too of course got some monster word; her ganster wanna be almost friend was sitting on his couch at home watching the TV, and he yells at the TV something like "Come on, Akeelah, Kick his Butt! B-U-T-T spells BUTT!" Yep, okay, I can't explain why that cracked me up. All those big words then this 20-something gangster guy from a ghetto cheering on an 11 year old girl in a spelling bee and spelling/yelling "butt" to the Tv. Told you it wouldn't translate well into an anecdote. But it made ME laugh anyway.

Now onto the irony. Just a few days after I make a post mentioning a friend who used to be a friend but now isn't, I get a card in the mail from her! Now I haven't heard from her in probably 10 years. I have no idea how she found me. And even more ironically, she was the one I thought was the one case of a friend I had that later had animosity. Well, this letter was just as friendly as can be, so apparently there's no lingering animosity after all, at least on her part. I'll have to decide if I'm over her reading my mail and making me do all the housekeeping or not yet. ;) She was one of two people I'd ever actually yelled at in my entire life. Here she is writing me, asking how I'm doing, giving me an update on her life, and I'm sitting here totally surprised, because I hadn't even thought of her in HOW long until I tried to think back on friendships gone by the wayside--obviously about the same day she was writing me for the first time in a decade. The odds of the timing on this are pretty big, but they happened just like that. Weird.

The other irony, well, I think I'll leave that one alone for now. I changed my mind about sharing. It's a woman's perogative, after all!

Lately I've gotten several emails and read several positive posts from families in the SMA area of life, and they have no idea that hearing positive things from them means a lot to me right now. I've not sought them out or anything, of course. And they don't read this, so they don't know I'm saying it now, either. :) But it's been helpful for me to keep the big picture.

Man, I feel like the world is spinning so fast that it's throwing me off. I blink and it's the middle of September. I am back in August, thank you. It reminds me of Steve saying the first time he flew the Cheyenne, that they took off out of Kokomo and by the time he caught up to the plane, they were already in Muncie. You look back and you've traveled so much farther than you thought was possible in the time span. Well, here I am mid-September, and I'm behind on everything, which has been the usual state of affairs for months here, but now I feel almost lost, too! I look around at what needs done and I blink and 3 weeks have gone by and all my shoveling hasn't put a dent in it. I NEED A MINUTE! I need a few days for everything to stop. I want to spend one day doing NOTHING but reading a book. Then I want to spend a few days doing nothing but catching up on shipments, checks, thank you's, websites, and dispersements for SMA Support; another day doing nothing but catching up on the house, school, work stuff. And then I want another day to do nothing but relax. And THEN let the world start spinning again. Thank you!

Well, by 9 a.m. today I'd helped Kaylee finish her homework, made and packed a lunch, gotten her to school, dropped off airport bills (two weeks late) at the mailing place, went to the post office for that, dropped off Akeelah and the Bee back at the video store, shipped off three items for SMA Support at the Fed Ex place, and stopped at McDonald's for some caffeine. Now after updating here, I need to work on some tax stuff for SMA Support, and then at some point today Steve and I will be working on the multi-engine stuff again pretty hard.

And so it goes!