A Red Herring Round Up

It's been a hectic week, a week of euphoric highs and palpable lows, where I've been floundering around with one thing and another, until Friday when it reached fever pitch.

The week started pleasantly enough, however, the gentle schedule inked in my diary quickly evolved into an unrelenting beast of burden.  I planned fish for the British Heart Foundation, opening a shop on Etsy to sell them and starting a Raganory facebook page.  What I regarded as internet housekeeping all took surprisingly longer to achieve than expected.

 

I am 'Wood' by name, as thick as two short planks and Luddite by nature.  These are not happy bedfellows when trying to achieve and impress technologically.  I am particularly new fangled with blogging, Etsy and facebook, although very much a novice despite reassurances from ones off-spring that ...'it's child's play'.  Unfortunately, that chapter of my life is a dim and distant memory and was a great deal less sophisticated as I recall.  Agonizing over kicking a tin or holding the neighbour’s cat hostage, I have found to my cost, is not adequate preparation for ‘jamming with the consol cowboys in cyberspace’.

Further distractions where to prove inevitable.  It’s possibly a little indelicate to mention the frequency of which my daughter has sat her driving test.  However, just as a mid-week crisis loomed she arrived home with the fabulous news that she had passed.  This of course signified a night off, a night of revelry and merrymaking, celebrating until incapable on pizza, chips and ice cream not illegal in this country as yet, but it certainly felt like it.

Unsure of whether it was the emotion or the menu of the previous evening, I woke to a monumental headache nonetheless.  A brief reflective moment reminded me that with every decision in life there is always a sacrifice to be made, and although I don’t grudge a family celebration the quest to take the world by storm with my fundraising fish had, alas been delayed.

Regardless of breaking needles and what seemed like an endless catalogue of minor disasters the fish were eventually complete and ready for their photo-shoot.  Everything was going swimmingly.  With the photographs finalised transferring them to the computer is easily achievable, under normal circumstances.  Instead, many exasperating hours were spent obliging machine demands while the self imposed deadline slipped further away with the inevitable passage of time.  I retired defeated and frustrated by my lack of technical experience and education.

Fortunately for me I am particularly rich in computer literate children with an army of equally gifted friends at my disposal.  Needless to say the problems are resolved, the shop is open, the fish are for sale and I remain blissfully unaware of whys and wherefores.

I was reminded earlier that just as a violin string needs a certain amount of tension to produce music, perhaps I also need a degree of stress to achieve. 

Stress is like a violin string, no tension, no music, too tight and it breaks, but the right amount creates harmony in life. (Allen Elkin)