Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Because I Am A Glutton For Punishment

December 1, 2009 by Beth

At the end of NaBloPoMo, the NaBloPoMo people sent an email saying “Way to go and/or not, depending on if you actually did blog everyday in November” ((this may or may not be an exact quotation)) and “hey, why don’t you try blogging everyday for yet *another* month?” ((ibid))  Apparently, the theme for December ((apparently there are themes)) is “mitzvah” – which means, basically, doing good deeds.  In the words of the NaBloPoMo, this means that the challenge for December is:

to give something, to someone, every day of the month, and then blog about it. The goal is to act with kindness, obviously — I don’t want to be responsible for people giving each other black eyes. Your gifts can be as large as volunteering or donating to charity, or as small as a kind word to someone who needs it.

And when I saw that, I was all “like it wasn’t hard enough to just blog every freaking day, now you want me to do good freaking things too?”  No thanks!

But then Chris commented on my posting that she was going to do it and so I should join her and she was in the freaking hospital and managed to do all but two days in November and how could I not do December with her? ((the latter part of that sentence was all me, and not what Chris said in her comment.  She wasn’t trying to guilt trip me – that’s all my own doing!))  Because in addition to being a glutton for punishment, I’m also a sucker for peer pressure.

Anyway, in her posting today, Chris said that she’s not going to go out of her way to do things that are kind and generous, but rather just be her using kind and generous self and give “mitzvah” updates in her postings if/when they happen.  So I’m following her lead ((i.e., I may be kind to you this month. Or I may just blog about nylons))!

Which brings me to my small act of kindness for today: I gave Laurel, a colleague of mine who hates driving, a ride to a meeting today.  I hesitate to even call this an “act of kindness” ‘cuz it was really no skin off my back – I was already going to that meeting anyway, so it was nothing at all to pick her up along the way – plus, it meant I got to drive in the HOV lane with my 100% full Smart car.  But I mention it because it then allows me to tell this story about my GPS.

We were driving out to the meeting, which was in Pitts Meadows at a location that I’d not been to before, so I decided to set the GPS to guide us.  I’d explained to Laurel that the GPS was new and so I don’t fully trust it as it occasionally tells me to do odd things, so I still had a trusty hard copy of a map, just to be sure.  So we are driving along Hwy 1 in the HOV lane, still a few kilometers away from our exit when the GPS says, “In 400m – take a – sharp right.”  This is in the MIDDLE OF THE HIGHWAY.  We are in the HOV Lane.  As in THE FAR LEFT LANE!

That GPS is lucky that I generally don’t do what I’m told to.

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