Briefly Back in Boulder County, Part 2

I wrote this Thursday night.

Here I am, sitting on the floor in the little sink & closet alcove by the door of the hotel room, giving Andrew a relatively dark and quiet area in which to sleep. No peeps from him yet..

Weather update: The snow was so bad that I couldn't take Drew up to his daycare (45 minutes away from my hotel). But he seemed to have a blast hanging out with some of my coworkers while I presented information to our client elsewhere. I returned from the meeting to find him grinning from ear to ear, banging two empty water bottles together, and sporting a wicked, spiky hairdo courtesy of water and creative fingers.

In my previous post, I described how I first ranted about this situation, then got into so-angry-I-could-post-a-screed territory. It took me just about 24 hours to come out of that state of mind. I did so during my 45 minute trek from the airport to the DDJ. I realized that I truly could have said no to all of this insanity. I enabled this situation to become the craziness that it is by being too willing to sacrifice my family's well-being for this one issue. Thus entered the "grin and bear it" portion of my evolving emotions.

Not too long after that (and still in the rental vehicle), I realized that while I could have said no, that could have hurt both the company and my position with the company (not that they would've penalized me, but things could've disintegrated with this client if there was no one able to share the key pieces of information that I have). Translation: This was a company emergency. Sure, there were elements that, had others done their jobs or exercised better time management skills, would've made a telecom possible or a better organized trip for me. But if the company's reputation and future are on the line, I'm not the sort of person to revert to that old saying of "A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." There are times when this is wholly appropriate, and I've learned how to recognize them and how to work with upper management in ways other than jumping when they say jump in those cases.

Once I got through that train of thought, I realized just how many strangers had been kind and generous while I was traveling alone with a one-year-old. I always had help from the person behind or in front of me in security in order to manhandle all my belongings and not lost control of Drew. The TSA folks helped me out there as well. People on planes helped keep the Drew Monster entertained when he got fussy on the plane because he couldn't roam free. And no matter how much I thought Andrew fussed, several other passengers called him a cutie and said how great he was.

And as I considered those positives, I returned to my Old Reliable, my standard method of spinning a generally shitty situation: Hey, it's just that much more experience to draw from in my writing.

I still swing around through the various reactions to this brief trip back to the place I supposedly just moved from, but the majority of the time, I'm looking at the positive. It helps now that my presentation is done and everything went very well. Now all that's left is to sit in on one more meeting that impacts my remote position and hurry back to the old apartment complex to investigate the mail situation before jetting back to Arizona. (And we'll be getting to DIA at least three hours before our flight leaves instead of the usual two. A lot of flights were either delayed or cancelled this morning due to the snow--the airport could be even more of a zoo than usual.)