Testing my flexibility

This has been a weekend of false starts and changes in plans.

First it was the Friday night phone call after football practice to let me know that the game Sat am was cancelled. The fire near Palm Springs caused air quality in the northern parts of the league to be unhealthy. Therefore, the older teams who cannot delay the end of their deason due to playoffs and regional competition HAD to play so they cancelled the Mighty Mites and moved all those games in the affected areas to our stadiums to the south. Now our boys may play on into the weekend of the 17th. Crap! That means another conflict between football and baseball since we purposefully picked our Nov tournament for that weekend knowing that the MM football teams would be done! Ah well. Beyond that it was just plain disappointing since we all just love going to those games.

The good part was it meant that I could set out on my training walk much earlier. My plan was to walk North into Encinitas and then back as that would be close to a 20 mile walk. I had bathroom, water and food refreshment points plotted out and left around 8:30am. I got down into Del Mar and stopped at the bathroom at Starbucks and felt something on my left heal. I was testing out a different combination of socks/shoes and paid the price. Blister started forming! It was not bad yet, but trying to put the sock and shoe back on after checking things out, I knew it would GET bad without proper attention. No way I could continue my planned route since there were no stores along it that would have bandaids. So back up the hill I went to get to the nearest drug store. With the heal repaired, I made my way back east toward home, but made lots of side street journeys and loops to kind of reproduce the distance I needed.

I get home to find an email from the Crashing the States guys. On the spur of the moment they decided to head to San Diego to cover the CA-50 congressional race. They needed to squeeze it in before heading out to Nevada on Monday so they were driving down from northern Cal immediately and needed a place to stay. I had signed up with them when they first launched the project and offered up my house (I had met two of the guys at Ykos in Vegas so these were not *total* internet strangers to me!) I emailed them my phone number to call me and to tell them Sat night was fine. I knew they were just casually sleeping on floors on the air mattresses they were carrying with them so it’s not like I had to prepare a ton. Plus I do have usually one, sometimes 2 spare beds/bathrooms. Around 5:30 they call me to say that since they left later than they thought and would be hitting LA around 10:00pm which is where one of them lives, they would stay there Sat – could they stay here Sunday instead? No problem! Better even since I could prepare somewhat. Though, then that changes up Sunday’s plans (seeing a pattern here?)

Today the *plan* was to watch Alex’s baseball game in the morning, have walking gear with me including a better combination of socks/shoes and do at least a 5-6 mile walk. Instead I took a short walk before the game, but realized that I really needed to head straight home and clean. I needed to wash some sheets/pillow cases for sure and clean one bathroom. That needed to be done anyway and the threat of guests is always one of the best ways to get your house clean! Just as I finished the floors and had started one load of laundry, they call again. They need to head out to Nevada quicker than they thought so they are not staying in San Diego tonight. Argh. Oh well.

The nice thing is the clean house of course. And I got to catch up on the phone with Jacqueline as I picked things up and did light cleaning. And I had a wonderful early dinner out with Marcus yesterday. Soooshee!! It was so good. And since they called early enough, I decided to just flop on the sofa and watch the Charger game for once. And they are winning. Yay.

I highlight the flexibilty thing because a few years ago these kinds of things would have sent me into a tizzy. It’s not like I need to plan things weeks in advance, but I just needed to be able to count on plans coming together or I would get very cranky. It was not a good trait! However, being with Marcus taught me to relax on that one ;-> Everything usually turns out OK, and if I don’t get too wrapped up in the changes, I might even enjoy them and everything else. Which what I did do this weekend despite all the false starts. Whaddya know? You can teach old dogs new tricks!