This morning I woke up with all intentions of doing something in Portland all day. Instead I stayed in the T@b and threw myself a pity party. Ooooh poor me I’m on a road trip and feeling sad. What is wrong with me?
Tired of my whining, Mark slyly slipped out and went to the Store-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named (STSNBN) to exchange our propane tank for the second time in TWO WEEKS! How can propane run out so quickly? I’ll tell you how: Winter. Really, it’s coming along quite nicely this year. Although Portland has been great when it comes to weather, the 70’s! Could you imagine? And they have trees here! Real trees! All we’ve been seeing for the past two or three weeks are pine trees. I thought surely by the time we reached a state with leafy trees, all the leaves would have fallen off the branches. But I was wrong and wow they’re orange and red and yellow! So Mark’s propane exchanging trip took over an hour because he had to wait over an hour for someone to simply unlock the cage, grab a propane tank and give it to Mark - He already paid! But for some reason the store just couldn’t function correctly in that hour leaving Mark with no choice but to “yell” at them. Sometimes I laugh when Mark yells at me because I think he’s joking, but sometimes his yelling can be scarier than how my mother yelled at me when I was younger. And I have a feeling Mark scared those people because he said all the managers had a meeting and then came out to apologize to him. And at the end of the story he added “And all the customer service people looked as though they were crying, must have been a tough day.”
So while Mark was making everyone in customer service cry at the STSNBN, I was laying in the grass, recovering from a run and was approached by our neighbor who lives in the sweet Airstream (can I mention Airstream on here since we are sponsored by T@B? T@@@BBB T@B. Okay, that should make up for it.) Maybe our neighbor, Alan, knew I was having a self-inflicted bad week, because he went on and on (in a good way) talking about how everything ‘just is’ - if it’s good, that’s because you are thinking of it in a positive way. And if it’s bad, that’s because you’re thinking of it in a negative way. And you’ve got to step back and think about whether you like the way you feel because of the way you’re reacting to things, etc. etc. Everything he said I’ve thought of before, but maybe he was just supposed to remind me about these things.
Mark came home an hour later as Alan was giving me an energy cleansing……………….
And that turned into Mark and me laying in our bed for an hour, earphones connected to our computers and ears of course, playing BRAIN POWER, a CD we copied to our iTunes that Alan loaned us. Maybe it was the sun shining on my already-tired-from-running forehead for the entire hour Alan and I spoke, or perhaps the vibrations produced by the deep beat that CD made, that caused me to fall asleep right away. I woke up ten minutes before the CD ended, freaked because it was now blasting a noise that sounded like an airplane taking off next to our T@B. My ears adjusted and I fell back asleep only to be woken up by extremely loud beginning notes of Led Zeppelin’s version of You Shook Me.
Then we ate some excellent Indian food and so much ice cream that my stomach muscles hurt from being stretched too far. Good night!
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