One Little Emotional Decision and…

The Emotional Guidance System Wins Again…Injuries involved.

Dateline: Departure Lounge for American Airlines Flight 2402 Austin to Chicago. Yes, it’s February 3, 2011. Yes, a storm predicted to be one of the three worst to ever hit the Chicago area is in play.  See below for admission of personal nuttiness.  Apparently, I don’t learn from experience. Such as the time I got up at 4 am and drove to Galveston, Texas, to give a workshop… listening to tapes on the way…only to find a roadblock and several charmless police on the bridge over to Galveston Island…

I explained to the State Trooper why I needed to cross the bridge, how everyone in the school district was waiting for me to give the keynote for the opening day of school. He explained to me that the island had been evacuated of every living soul and therefore it was doubtful that the Galveston School District was expecting me to speak in an hour. He had a funny frown clearly asking, “What? The downed trees, the blinking warning posts, the news flashes everywhere…these didn’t tip you off?”  Uh…

Set-up: Now, back to the departure lounge on the way to slog through the snow in Chicago. You are the lady sitting next to me who asked why I was poised with my left leg stuck out in front of me, and why did I had a baseball strapped to my knee under my jeans?       

I reply: It’s like this…First, let’s establish none of the following is my fault. It is not supposed to stay below freezing in Texas for three days. That’s the law. Just so we understand each other…I am the victim here.

A little catch-up on the law-breaking weather. For two days and three nights ago Texas was frozen. Dedicated to ESPN (Texas is #3, yea!) for news coverage, I was not “made sufficiently aware” of the impending storms. Thus, I had not set the interior faucets on drip before the freeze arrived. (Okay, I know you read straight through that last bit. Of course I’d heard the warnings, the advice about faucets, locking your cows in the barn, all of it. I’d just chosen to call those naysayers [the weathermen breaking into the basketball games with lame announcements] a bunch of over-reactors and paid them no mind.) Thus, the only running water we’d had for the previous three days was from one interior bath faucet. We had the hot water in the tank, but when the tank was empty…

Thus, we’d been taking French baths and filling the toilet tanks using water from our one living faucet.  Now, you’re up to the hours before leaving for the airport for the flight. Being an especially thoughtful airline passenger, I was willing to endure a full bath, no matter how in convenient so that I did not inflict myself on others…either that or as we finished packing I noticed that little Sammie Davis, Jr. (not the Sammie Davis, Jr., our 8 month old pup) was smelling a bit funky and therefore must be given a bath before we left. As is often the case when I’ve gotten it in my head that some task must be now or the Earth will split in half…my special person pointed out that, given our circumstances, Sammie’s bath could wait until we came back home.

Ha. I was immediately obsessed with a case of the “what ifs.”What if we walked in all tired from the trip and Sammie smelled even more gamey!  Oh, no!  What then?  I can’t let such a scene play out.

To be continued.  Efforts are made to return my Emotionally Driven behavior to more Thinking Based actions. Ah, but these efforts are rolled over and cast aside, mere twigs tossed in front of a steam roller. 

Warning. Some images of the bizarre fiasco that followed my decision that, above all, before skidding to the airport…THE DOG MUST BE BATHED…may not be appropriate for children… (Let them keep their dreams that the adults around them are more mature than they are.)  Those of you with a shred of emotional maturity…should probably skip the continuation. Run. Save yourself.