Most of the time, I have more ideas for posts on the IH blog than I can actually use. Things come to me, or I read something, or I hear something, and I think, ‘That would make a great post.’ Once in awhile, though, I find myself a little stuck, asking myself, ‘What should I write about today?’ So it was this morning, the start of a new work week.
But first–remember the post last week about the 52 days until the end of this current set of challenges? Well, we’re now down to 48. I think. I get a different number every time I count it up. It’s seven weeks from this past Saturday, with the exact number of days depending on whether your count is inclusive or exclusive, a concept I always find to be totally confusing. Anyway, howe’er it is, we’ve done a ton about selling the house and got a good number of showings from our open house yesterday. One thing that did not make me happy about it, though, is that I ended up missing church in order to get everything done, the same as I did two weeks ago when we had our first one. So I think we’ll stick to Saturday open houses from now on, if indeed we need to have any more. There was one visitor who sounded very, very interested, so we’ll see.
A piece of wisdom gleaned from yesterday’s experiences: balloons are very unmanageable. Since we were hosting our own open house this time we had to provide our own on-site publicity, which included balloons to attach to the signs. I had to laugh when I thought about what I originally planned to do: go to church, leave at 11:30, swing by the King Soopers on the way home, pick up 24 balloons, get home, and get them all attached to the signs and be ready to welcome in the hordes by noon. Ha! What a joke! I had actually gone by the store the day before to check on availability and chatted with the nice young woman in the floral department. There was a huge batch of both Mylar and latex balloons already inflated, but she assured me that it would work best to get the latex ones on the day I needed them. (The picture is of the leftover balloons today, and they look perfectly fine to me. It would have saved me—and my poor son—a lot of angst if I had just gotten them then.) Okay, I thought. My plan should work just fine. But then yesterday morning the thought struck me, ‘Maybe 24 balloons are going to take up a lot of space.’ (Why 24? Well, I had four signs I wanted to put up, and I figured six per sign, three on each corner, would be sufficient.) So I got Gideon to take me to the store in his car, which is a Subaru Outback (or something like that) and has more room in the back than mine. Oh man! We got there and saw that there were exactly no balloons already done. I hadn’t thought about calling ahead and picking colors, anyway. So we had to wait for 15 minutes. Time was ticking down to 11:30, and we still needed to get home and figure out the locations of the signs as well as attaching the balloons. Did we make it on time? No. Were there hordes? No, not right at noon. Would there have been if we’d gotten the signs up earlier? Who knows. Gideon had to drive home without being able to see out the back window.
(I’m afraid we’re never going to get to Victor Frankl today, because I have to stop here and describe a scene from Dolly and the Starry Bird, a mystery novel by the late, great Dorothy Dunnett, in which there’s a chase scene, in Rome, no less, with the three main characters in a balloon seller’s vehicle, and they think that the balloons inside it are full of explosive gas and so they can’t pop them, and the driver can’t see much of anything, and then it turns out that only the red balloons are explosive, the ones tied to the front, and not the dozens of blue balloons that they’ve been carefully manhandling all through the chase. You really should read it, although there are some aspects of the plot that I’ve never really understood. Dunnett was primarily a writer of very, very high-class historical fiction, and I think her mysteries were a sort of vacation. She was also a portrait painter, and so is her recurring amateur detective character, Johnson Johnson. Dolly is a yacht, by the way. I guess while I’m at it I might as well include a link to the Dorothy Dunnett Society. I have read and re-read the books in her Crawford of Lymond series, all six of them, and the first three or four of her Niccolo books but then got completely and totally bogged down. You have to kind of persevere if you want to read her heavier stuff. She also wrote a very, very long novel about Macbeth, of which I read about a chapter. So there it is.)
Let’s see—where were we? I was going to write about a misunderstanding that Frankl had about happiness. What did he know, anyway? He was just the founder of a whole new school of psychology! But I guess he’ll have to wait for another day. I will say, since this post started out being about happiness, that I’m happy to look back on yesterday. It was actually a pretty enjoyable, successful day. And then, just as a little cherry on top, when I went out to take down the signs there was a mom with two adorable kids out taking a walk. The little boy batted at the balloons on our corner. “Hey,” I said, “would you guys like to have the balloons to take home and play with?” They were ecstatic. (I hope the mom was pleased: she seemed to be.) “Thank you!” the little boy piped in his little boy voice. And they took them off down the street. (I’m a sucker for little boys, let me tell you!)
Well, I’ve managed to write over 1,000 words about balloons. Sort of. Hope you had a good weekend, too. What funny, happy things happened with you?