One Day at a Time

It is Friday.  I am going to work.  I am driving so that I may get there super early.  If I leave home early enough, I can get to work in 20 to 30 minutes.  If I wait until after 7 a.m., it takes closer to 45 harried minutes.  If I take the bus from my house it takes 50 minutes.  If I drive to the Park n' Ride and take the bus from there, it takes 20 minutes - but it takes 10 minutes to drive to the PnR.  I run through this little decision flowchart every morning.  Yesterday I drove in early and it was good.

Then I met a friend for dinner at a fabulous vegetarian restaurant just a 20 minute walk away from my office.  We sat outside and watched a thunderstorm roll in.  The lightening was so close!  The restaurant lost its power and we had to wait for our check because their computer was not working.  It was lovely to see my friend.  It was lovely to sit outside and feel the first tentative drops of rain turn into a whirling, crackling storm.

Today I am hoping to wade through a bunch of data that is so disorganized and un-labeled, looks like they just took tables out of SPSS and plopped them into Excel - and somehow I will turn this into something meaningful.  At first, I thought this division was just having a harder time getting to where they needed to be.  Now I am wondering if they are being passive aggressive with their data - sending me what they know is shit because they don't like the process.  I went to a meeting of theirs last week where they spent 30 minutes out of an hour talking about how they don't have time to do this.  Really?  How 'bout you stop talking about it and just start doing it?

Yesterday when I opened the files they sent me I panicked.  My hands started perspiring and I felt like I was going to cry.  Today I will just plod through it.

I have learned to just take it one step, one second, one byte at a time in AA.  When I got to AA and heard the "one day at a time," I thought that was just a cheesy cliche.  And then I had that sweaty hands response to the idea of "never" drinking again.  Just then, the phrase "one day at a time" appeared like a thought balloon above my head and made perfectly good sense to me.

That is how I am getting through these days.  Sometimes I am doing behavior mod with myself and forcing myself to sit for an hour to work on a graph - and then I will go get a nice glass of ice water - after the allotted increment of work.  I like to think I pray a lot, but I think I am in closer touch with God in the last few months.  I pray a LOT!

One Day at a Time - I think I shall stay sober today and I hope you all do too.