Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Keep Calm and...

So here's my day real quick: woke up two hours after my alarm was supposed to wake me (because I'm a beast at sleeping, not because I'm bad at waking up...), rushed to get ready and leave the house. Stepped outside to see that it snowed again and was still snowing, so I had to brush off my car and I knew traffic was going to take forever. I didn't want to be late to the school workshops today, but I still wanted to go to the gym to dismantle equipment and pack it into my car before I headed over there. The GPS was saying I'd make it... so I took the risk.

I went to the gym, dismantled all the metal rails and put them in the car. Next I picked up one of the smaller vault boxes and carried it down the stairs and was headed out the door with it. I was holding the box up with one arm and pushing the door open with the other. I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my left hand. I looked over at my hand immediately, and realized there was a BEE on my palm. It had stung me. I yelled out a nice word in pain (use your imagination for that one) and flung the bee to the ground. I had actually seen that same bee on Monday night when I dropped off this smaller vault box at the gym. When I saw it, I thought "that's weird, they should all be dead...oh well" and let it bee (har har). My mistake I guess.

So I put the box into the car, put some snow on my hand right away and continued. I got in the car, rolled the window down and started to drive with my hand hanging out the window (it was probably about 15 degrees out withOUT the windchill while I was driving on the highway). I connected my phone to the stereo to put my music on. I set it to shuffle. The first song that comes on: "We Swarm" by The Glitch Mob. I laughed out loud for a little while. You gots good jokes, life... good jokes!

I kept my hand numb out the window for most of the 35-minute drive to the school in Riverside. I arrived there without any problems, carried the equipment in, and started setting up. The classes were pretty hectic, those kids had a ton of energy and quite a few of them didn't know how to deal with it! The vast majority ended up doing really well though, and learned a handful of movements. Oddly enough, in a K-5 school, the 1st graders were the best behaved!

Lunchtime rolled around. Kids started pouring into the gym, apparently that's where some of them spend their lunch period to eat (there are benches/ledges along the walls). One of them who had asked about getting my autograph before during the class came up to me and said he had paper now (I asked him to get paper and a pen when he asked me during the class, because I didn't have any). I dug a pen out of my bag and wrote something down for him real quick. Other kids saw this go down and immediately a huge line was formed. Some of them hadn't even taken the class with me yet, but the other kids had told them who I was. I wrote each kid a personalized message with their name (which I asked each of them, and made sure the spelling was correct) and my "autograph" (weird to say that). I handed out business cards to some of them (my business cards are more like trading cards with a photo covering one entire side, and there were about 12 different photos). My 30 or so cards that I had with me all disappeared fast. So that was half of my lunch period!!

I headed to a Jimmy John's that the staff told me was nearby. When I got to it, I began to turn into their odd entrance for their parking lot - at which point I realized there was a pole I needed to avoid on the right side of my car (I was turning right into the lot). So I made sure to avoid that pole... then realized I hadn't made sure to avoid the BUILDING on the other side of the car. I smashed up the front left of the car a little bit (just cosmetic, cracks/dents in the fiberglass). I actually laughed at myself again, backed up and pulled into a spot.

From there the day didn't get any more interesting really. I had more classes after lunch and before I knew it, the day was over. I saw a lot of the kids as I was heading out of the school with equipment and they were all saying bye and thank you and telling me stories. Kids are great!

So, to recap, I woke up two hours late (which was still 6:00am), drove probably around 200 miles today, packed and unpacked equipment from the car twice, got stung by a bee in the middle of a snowy winter, and drove my car straight into a building... and all of this happened for a workshop that I was doing for free (this particular school didn't have any sort of budget for this sort of thing). My favorite part - I was able to keep a good mood throughout the day.

The point of this blog? I believe that part of one's training should be keeping a positive attitude, and to not take life too seriously! Sometimes bad things will happen. It is up to us to find a way to get through them. Keep calm and train the mind. :)

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