Being Happy Doesn't Mean Life is Perfect

Royalty free images



Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.


I’m not sure who first said this quote, but how true it is. It seems a perfect way to start this post. We can choose to be happy or sad, mad or glad – it’s all up to us in any given situation. I have to bear this in mind lately because since I got back from Oregon, it’s been one thing or another around my house. Lots of small stuff in the big scheme of things, but still optimism and patience is important.

I went out to water my patio plants because they really needed it. I had the gal looking after my cats’ water them once while I was away. Wouldn’t you know the hose would spring a leak and watering became an ordeal, getting more on me than the plants, causing me to resort to using a bucket. This took two dozen trips to finish the job, but in the end made things easier.

After I finished that and came in the house, it seemed a bit stuffy so I thought I would take advantage of the few nice days left before winter and open some windows. Well we have roll-up blinds and some of the chains decided to break. When I think about it, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before with daily use over several years. However, this caused another two-hour project while I took them down to see if I could rectify the situation. After finally getting the mechanism apart and the chain back on, I discovered it was on backwards, so had to start over again. It was just one of those days.

I finally got on the net to order new parts, knowing all my dinking around is only a temporary fix. When I tried to call the factory, I discovered the phones were out! Thank goodness for cell phones. The first call was to the landline provider to see what that problem was. Some technical difficulties, they said, and didn’t have a predicted time when that service would be back up and running again. It was widespread, encompassing several towns around us. We weren’t alone; however, this didn’t really make things any better. The next call was to the factory to order new parts for three blinds. Four hours later the phones came back on.

To top the day off my husband’s computer decided to quit. Therefore, we’ve been messing with that for several days now. He is not a happy camper and thinks I have all the answers, despite the fact he thinks I know little about anything – except computers apparently. What I’ve learned about them is by the school of hard knocks and hours of research and fooling around over the years. As I mentioned before, I’m stubborn and have great tenacity. It’s a good thing one of us is like this, since we have gotten little help from tech support concerning this problem so far. That is one thing about calling anywhere today and definitely a pet peeve of mine. You get stuck in a computer phone system and routed all over the place by robotic voices and finally end up in India or China with someone who’s English is not understandable. Very frustrating, so as I’ve said many times, Google is my best friend when left to my own devices to repair things.

Of course, all of this means I’m getting no work done and am way behind on my freelance assignments. It’s just something else to add to the stress level.

So, you can see when it rains it pours, but I guess if we didn’t have a bit of rain in our lives we wouldn’t truly appreciate all the good times as much as we should.

Besides that, getting angry and stomping my feet won’t solve anything – not really, perhaps only making me feel better for a short while. Of course, the notion of going out in the desert for a good scream has crossed my mind. However, it would be just my luck that my neighbor would call 911 thinking I was having and emergency. Walking away and taking some deep breaths works better. I can usually come back with renewed optimism and some new ideas for conquering the problem I’m facing.

How do you deal with things like this?