Rivers of sh*t… or deep in the doodos!

Never say Life doesn’t have a sense of irony and timing.  This morning I had ear-marked as my day to make a ‘new start’; the day I was going to knuckle down and begin to get the business ramped-up after a necessarily quiet year last year (regular reasons will be familiar with the back story to this.)  I’ll be honest and admit that I was apprehensive about how best to approach this, but I had made a list and that is always a good place for me to start.  So I was just taking a little quiet ‘me’ time after a disturbed night when my eldest came back through the door only 15 minutes or so after having left for work, and before I had time to wonder why, she came in and announced she’d had had problems driving through the flooded roads and had to abandon her car. 

I sprang, gazelle-like, out of bed and donned my wet weather gear and got ready to rush to the rescue (‘cos that’s what Dads do!).  She was concerned that sorting it out in the pouring rain, on a busy, bendy road in the rush hour wasn’t smart so persuaded on me to wait.  So I waited.  She then prevailed on me to call the breakdown people, who declined to come out on a technicality.  So I stewed and waited.  Luckily, when we got there the engine had recovered from its little feinting fit and started fine so we were able to get her home safely.  I thought the best plan was for her to drive it to work, both dry it out and prove that it was fully okay now, so I drove behind her just in case to the park-and-ride and then ran her into work (‘cos that’s what Dads do too.) 

It was now mid-morning and I wasted my best part of the day which, for me, is the very beginning of the morning.  I thought that as I was fully kitted out in foul-weather gear that I might as well finish clearing the gutters as we always have issues with fallen leaves from all the tall trees round here.  Then, I thought, “Maybe I’d best check the drains are not flooded too..” (‘cos that’s what Dads have to do too.)  Here I ought to explain that we have rustic drainage which means no mains drains and they too are prone to blockage.  I opened the final trap and it looked fine, “Oh good!” I thought.  Then I was just walking back when  I saw a bit of flood round the second trap and thought “Uhh oh!” because that doesn’t auger well.  I cautiously raised the lid to discover a veritable mountain of brown, smelly stuff that we so often refer to and joke about but most of us seldom have to confront quit like this!

So I got out my drain unblocking kit and knuckled down to clearing it all, and then the gutters too and I thought that people say “When Life gives you lemons, make lemonade”  I wonder what I was supposed to make from these raw ingredients…. sh*t cakes?  I have a wise friend who believes that our Flight/Fight mechanism is so clever that it will create just this kind of day to help us avoid the challenges that we don’t truly wish to confront.  I’d hate to think that I would self sabotage to this degree but the World is a complex place…

I wonder if you have any good stories of this kind of phenomenon and how you dealt with it?  I decided to share it with all of you and as it is now lunch-time, to sort out a few more things that just need attention and to start afresh tomorrow.

“When life gives you lemons just shut up and eat your damn lemons”

“When life gives you lemons, squirt the juice in his eye”

Tags: blocked drains, break downs, Flight / Fight, floods, self sabotage

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 12:43 and is filed under Flight / Fight, Personal Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.