Monday Mishaps

My lack of sleep from the night before caught up to me, and this morning was a little hard to get moving. Fortunately, when I got up and checked, I found that Kaylee's school was on a 2-hour delay for bad roads, so I crawled back under my warm fuzzy covers and knew I had two hours extra. Not a bad way to start a Monday! Kaylee slept like a rock too. Unfortunately, once I was up and checking the website for delays, I was awake and didn't make it back to sleep until about 20 minutes before we had to get up for good. But it was a bonus time anyway.

After I picked Kaylee up from school I ended up going to the post office to pick up a package, and on our way home I pointed out a car that was all crunched up, front and back. Kaylee said "Wow. Maybe they just don't have the money to fix it, Mommy. Or they haven't had time yet because it just happened." That's different from the way she used to react to a banged-up car, which was "I'd be so embarrassed, I'd never drive a car like that!" I'm glad she's maturing and coming up with positive instinctive reactions to people and situations and not automatically negative ones. It's a minor thing, of course, but it is a small indication of her kind and accepting inner self, and I enjoy seeing that.

My frustration today came from working on a newsletter and trying to do a mail merge that is successfully evading me. I've wasted several pages of printing and several hours of figuring out what "master pages" are and why they won't work with mail merges, and why I choose two-sided printing and it still prints the pages separately and the program has crashed 6 times in the midst of my work and I Am Not Having Fun. There are really only a few things that will get my blood pressure up, and wasting my time on this stuff is definitely one of them, particularly when I know it's not hard, just unfamiliar. I've even gone through the help pages, that's how annoyed I got. Ah well, I'll take a break, take Kay to Cheer, then hit it again. :)

I also had the pleasure of getting an email today that is fortunately rather rare, from an angry ex-spouse who is angry at me because their former spouse put up a website dedicated to their child who passed away from SMA. This particular person wanted "all references to me and my child removed immediately." The sole reference to this person was their name listed in a public, online obituary. I've had a few like that, but only had one such person threaten a lawsuit. My response of how pathetic I thought it was that they would use their deceased child as a battering ram to hurt their spouse and the fact that if the spouse wanted a memorial site for their own daughter or son, there was no copyright or court order in existence that could force them to not do so, usually shuts them down. The one with the lawsuit threat, I suggested they go ahead and try it and see how far they got. They didn't get far. They left nasty messages for each other on the child's website, which I removed immediately. I then suggested they work out their issues amongst themselves and leave their child-and me-out of it. I know people in grief will do angry, irrational things, but I have a very hard time with it when they are taking something good, done out of love, in honor of an innocent child they both loved who died, and try to turn it into a weapon. It's disgusting and just very, very sad.

Anyway, I had this pretty good batch of quotes hit my inbox today, so for my search function later and your pleasure now if you wish...

----------------------------------------------------
"Those who wish to sing always find a song."
~Swedish Proverb

"We can secure other people's approval, if we do it right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it."
~Mark Twain

"To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time."
~Katharine Hepburn

"The great lesson...is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard."
~Abraham Maslow