I planned a lovely dinner for the bearded eye-roller tonight. He *loves* turkey, so I bought one a couple of days ago and planned to cook it in the roaster today. I told him to come home at 4pm so we could have dinner together before I had to leave for session 7 of the Hospice grief group. The plan was (I should know better than to plan, right?), that I'd run to the store on my lunch hour and get potatoes so I could make him home-made mashed potatoes to go along with my gravy he loves so much.

I worked from home today because I wanted the ability to work more hours on this project that is making me insane. I've been doing that a lot lately, which bodes well for my attitude since I don't have to deal with drama queen plus I don't have the four hour commute to deal with.

Well, as plans go... this one didn't.

I got the turkey in the roaster. Yahoo.

The rest of the day went down hill. In a big way.

I had these grandiose ideas for this training that I'm rolling out. While usually I am able to make my grandiose ideas work, this one went very, very wrong when I created a test file. The file ended up being 25 megabytes. That's just not gonna fly.

I played with lowering the image file size, to see if that would bring down the file size but still couldn't get it under 21 MB.

By the time BER got home, I felt that my world had come to an end (can you say DRAMA QUEEN?), so all I had to offer was a cooked turkey and a wigged out wife.

BER went into the best husband in the world mode, and offered to finish cooking dinner while I tried to figure out a way out of this work disaster. He made his own gravy, didn't blink when I said I didn't get potatoes for the gravy, and then made a salad and set the table.

I, on the other hand, was near tears; frantically trying to figure out a way to make my project work.

By the time dinner was ready, I had 10 minutes to go before I needed to leave for Hospice.

I shut down my computer and sat with him for the 10 minutes and tried to calm myself while eating. I knew that it was important that I showed up to the group, able to be fully present. I truly wasn't sure how I was going to accomplish that, since I was on the verge of tears.

I left, apologizing to BER for leaving such a mess (think Thanksgiving dinner), but the sweet man that he is said, "honey, it's my pleasure to do this."

Gah- how did I get so lucky?

I talked to myself the entire way to the Hospice group, trying to leave my work issues behind. When I got there, I was pretending to be calm and present. I truly wasn't, though.

As we got together as a larger group, Fearless Leader talked about various issues that get people bogged down in working through their grief. Wouldn't you know it- they were some of the same issues I was currently dealing with.

Within 1/2 hour, I left my worries behind and truly was present and available to my group. Suddenly, the drama from earlier in the day just didn't seem that important.

I had planned to come home and work after group, but by the end of the evening I knew that this wasn't what I was meant to do this evening.

Instead, I came home; kissed my sweet husband; and sat on the back porch with him- like we do every night.

I feel strangely calm tonight, considering the enormity of what might happen with this project. I believe that what I'm giving to Hospice is being given back to me ten-fold in lessons. Truly, there is no better way to get perspective on what's important in life.

I'm sure I'll figure out a way to make this project work. But if I don't? Well, nobody will die; I'll still be married to the best man on the planet; and I'll know without a doubt that I have so much to be grateful for.

Perspective.