Tuesday, I had a big presentation to deliver for a group of engineers in Utah. Funny enough, this particular presentation has been on the books for me since I started this job in June of 2019. It was originally supposed to be an in-person presentation back in April, but that clearly changed due to this whole COVID thing.
It was first rescheduled as an in-person presentation in December, and somewhere along the way it was determined it would be virtual. It’s funny that it’s been “so far away” for so long, when I was finally coming up on it, I got a little nervous.
I spent a lot of time the night before changing out some slides to make the presentation I often give to architects a little more engineer focused. The result was I wound up with a presentation that was WAY too long. So Tuesday morning I was in a cutting frenzy, taking out slides to try to bring it down to a reasonable length.
In the end, I got that part just right and the webinar went quite well. It was a relief to have that done. I’ve been on a run of webinars lately, and I think that will have been my last one of 2020.
After that, it was back to work getting some things done the rest of the afternoon. Just before dark, I went outside to tackle a project that has been vexing me for a few weeks.
Just after Thanksgiving, I hung lights on our big pine tree in the front yard. It’s always a challenge because the tree is so tall, but I was proud of the result. And then, of course, about a week or so later, the top string of lights died.
It took me a while to find the right lights to replace them, and they finally arrived a few days ago. I decided it was finally time to bring out the ladder again, excise the old, busted lights and put in the new ones.
When standing on top of a tall later, reaching with a very long telescoping pole, nothing is easy. But I eventually got the old lights down. Here they are. I waver between considering them tired old veterans who have earned their rest, or traitors to the Schneider Christmas cause.
Then it was back up the ladder to get the new lights up. I thought it was going well, I got the top lights secured pretty quickly, but then a few minutes later the whole thing fell down, and to add insult to injury, got super tangled. I suddenly found myself spending ten minutes in the cold untangling my brand new set of lights, the same way Clark Griswold does with the lights that have been sitting in a box for a year.
That finally straightened out, I did get the new lights hung, and the result was pretty good. Maybe not as good as the original, but pretty darn good.
And that’s how life is sometimes. Things change. Sometimes things break down in ways we don’t plan, and it feels like a lot of hard work we put into something blows into the wind. It is frustrating to feel like you have to redo something, and there is always this feeling that you can’t replicate what was.
It’s happened to me a zillion times, and what I try to do now is recognize that all things are fleeting, and sometimes rebuilding something means achieving something better, and sometimes it’s just about the experience of doing it. Maybe the universe just figured I needed to get back up on that ladder, because last time I was a little reckless and fell off. Not this time. Maybe it was an exercise in safety and patience.
Or maybe it was just some cheap lights that croaked out on me. Maybe a bit of both. But I’ll take that lesson anyway.
